The Southern Indians:  The Story of the Civilized Tribes Before Removal, by R.S. Cotterill

This dryly ironic and darkly humorous book about the cultural and political history of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians before their removal in the Trail of Tears was written in 1954, before the rise of the vocal identity movement among the American Indians.  This book may have helped spark it, at least in part, thanks to its documentation of endless frauds and violence committed against these tribes by land-hungry Southerners.  Nonetheless, the book also portrays in dry understatement the failings of the chiefs of the tribes themselves for their susceptibility to corruption and bribery as well as the lure of alcohol.

The book itself, which contains 240 or so pages of solid historical work that would hold up even today, with much more known about the activities of the tribes concerned, opens with a very intriguing paragraph:  “This book has been written in self-defense.  The writer on beginning his teaching of Southern history found that he needed a knowledge of Southern Indians and failed to find it in the books then in print.  He was forced, therefore, into an investigation of source material which, before it was completed, spread out over some twenty-five years and carried him into practically all Southern states as well as into several in the North [1].”  Let us, over 50 years after the fact, give credit to the author, who taught at Florida State University, with both excellence in his use of historical sources as well as his worthy and clear prose style.

The book takes a chronological approach, starting from the origins of the Southern Tribes and their late arrival in the South, and then examining various time periods, such as:  The Colonial Background, the American Revolution (1775-1783), Alexander McGillivray (1783-1793), A Time of Indecision (1793-1798), Bowles (1798-1803), Debts, Bribes, and Cessions (1803-1811), Tecumseh (1811), The Creek War (1813-1814), Boundaries and Removal (1815-1820), the Shadow of Georgia (1820-1825), After Half a Century, and Epilogue:  The Last Stand (1825-1830).

As a whole, the book is grim reading for anyone who is either deeply concerned with ethics in diplomatic practices (the Southern states, especially Georgia and North Carolina, look really unethical, even beyond the normal standard of the time), or who is a descendant of the tribes (like me–a part-Cherokee from the Eastern Band who resisted cession and removal until the end, and beyond).  As a whole, Northerners come off as more honorable than Southerners (probably because they were further away and therefore not blinded by self-interest), and the Indian chiefs appear as the highly corruptible agents of their own destruction, susceptible to liquor and bribery on a truly massive scale.  As a whole, tribes like the Cherokee and Creek show themselves as brave peoples, and the Cherokee development of a Constitution, newspaper, and syllabary alphabet showed themselves as taking the best of civilization and adapting it to their own culture without merely aping their neighbors.

The book as a whole looks at the whole mess of culture wars between traditionalists and progressives (where traditionalists are “communists” of a primitive kind and progressives are those interested in personal property and the acquisition of individual wealth), the insatiable lust of Southerners for exploiting the land and labor of other people along with their nearly limitless appetite for bad logic in their arguments and the free use of coercion against others.  A few heroes, such as Tecumseh and Alexander McGillvray, shine through, and even President John Quincy Adams comes off well.  The military excellence of Andrew Jackson is also deservedly taken down a few notches for his poverty in tactical intelligence, a well-done piece of revisionist history there.  Despite being somewhat of an old book, it remains a very worthwhile read for anyone seeking to understand better the Civilized tribes or their brave and prolonged but doomed struggle against the insatiable lusts of their Southern white neighbors whose sinful actions in theft, corruption and oppression doomed them to harsh divine judgment.

[1] R.S. Cotterill, The Southern Indians:  The Story of the Civilized Tribes Before Removal (Norman, OK:  The University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), ix.