Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence Native Resistance and the Coalescence of the Old South (Indians and Southern History)

About this book

WINNER OF THE FRANCIS B. SIMKINS AWARD SOUTHERN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION WINNER OF THE 2024 BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD FROM PHI ALPHA THETA THE NATIONAL HISTORY HONOR SOCIETY A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood honor and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity. In 1823 Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a long continued course of aggression and sufferings between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe aggression and sufferings are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the Eastern Woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes confederacies and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white southerners Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South. This in turn formed a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina Florida Tennessee Georgia and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the region and examines the involved societies conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally Nooe explores how white southerners constructed propagated and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the regions Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period during western expansion and well through the twentieth century.