Empires of the South

Both of the books considered here fill a significant but narrowing gap in the historiography of the South during the region’s era of European colonization. It is still generally the case that the area to the south and west of Virginia attracts less attention from historians of colonial and Revolutionary America than does the Northeast or the Chesapeake region. Reasons for this neglect stem from the vital importance of New England and Virginia to the Revolutionary moment, to nineteenth-century New England history boosterism that shaped popular understandings of the colonial era through most of the twentieth century, to the insufficient integration of the Southern past with the rest of the continent’s history, and to the longstanding preoccupations by scholars of Southern history with the antebellum era, the Civil War, and Civil Rights.

Another barrier to more studies of the eighteenth-century Deep South (encompassing the area from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River) has been the perceived foreign nature of its people and past. The majority of the Southern population in that century, around 50,000 people, spoke American Indian languages and lived as Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Catawbas, and many other smaller Native groups. Catholic France played a major role along the Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley from Mobile to Natchez until relinquishing claims after the Seven Years War in 1763, with French people remaining in the area ever after. Protestant Britain added what it called East Florida and West Florida to its southern empire in the Carolinas and Georgia with the end of the Seven Years War. Catholic Spain occupied Florida from San Agustín to Pensacola from the late sixteenth century until 1763, and then New Orleans and the west bank of the Mississippi River from 1766 until 1802, picking up West and East Florida along the way by defeating British forces in the area during the American Revolution. After the Revolution, Americans of various sorts entered the Deep South from the east and north. Significant African American populations emerged in slavery-dependent regions of low-country South Carolina and Georgia, in Louisiana, and in Spanish Florida, where escaped slaves lived free in places such as Fort Mosé. Such cultural diversity, of which this brief description is merely suggestive, makes the region’s history particularly dynamic and multifaceted. But such a multiplicity of nations and actors also requires that scholars working on the area during that era familiarize themselves with languages besides English, utilize perceptive cultural understandings, and visit dispersed archives.

Both books under consideration reflect in-depth research in documentary sources and suggest that the Deep South (also called by some scholars the Gulf South) was less exotic and less exceptional than an earlier generation of historians of the South would have argued. Although both works are primarily concerned with elucidating the European side of affairs, they recognize the fundamental role of Native societies in shaping European actions. Both authors are keenly aware that the South of the late eighteenth century was only partly British and English-speaking and that multiple personal, national, and imperial agendas competed for preeminence.

Utilizing a “war and society” military history approach to reinterpret the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1759–60, Daniel J. Tortora, an assistant professor of history at Colby College, argues for the crucial role of this conflict within the greater French and Indian War and the subsequent American Revolution. Tortora first notes the paucity of studies on the South during the era of the French and Indian War. On that point he is absolutely correct. Unlike in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions, where most of the fighting between British and French troops occurred, the South saw no fighting between European...