New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast (review)

While violence is a frequent subject within the Early American historiography, Matthew Jennings’s New Worlds of Violence brings a fresh and ambitious perspective that moves away from previous overgeneralizations of Native American and European conflict. Jennings builds upon the growing anthropological literature on “cultures of violence.” The book also expands on the growing “Forgotten Centuries” historiography (see Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704 [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994]). Jennings examines the changing landscape of the Southeast beginning with the changes within Mississippian-period violence, through European contacts, and ending with the Stono Rebellion in 1739. Jennings introduces the “cultures of violence” of the various European groups that stumbled into the Southeast as Native Americans were adapting their own “cultures of violence” to deal with progressive waves of new peoples. Jennings carefully describes the historical circumstances of the Spanish, French, and English before unleashing them into the Southeast. His concise explanations and broad focus illuminate the complex history of violence in the Southeast by making it comprehensible.

The introductory chapter establishes a balanced and well-researched foundation of the historical and anthropological issues of violence. This is especially evident in his treatment of indigenous peoples as diverse cultures that adapt and interact when in contact with “new” peoples. Jennings sets the monumental task of describing a constantly shifting cultural and violent landscape, both indigenous and European. While the first chapter discusses many of the current archaeological debates concerning Cahokia and the social hierarchies of Mississippian towns, it almost completely ignores the archaeological work from the Atlantic coast and piedmont. The focus on Mississippian “chiefdoms” is understandable, but their expansion throughout the Southeast is somewhat overstated to the detriment of the greater diversity of the region. Despite this, the author does provide a much-needed historical context to indigenous violence that illuminates an exciting and dynamic pre-contact indigenous world.

The next three chapters introduce the Spanish and the French with their varied “cultures of violence.” Discussion of the Europeans is well researched and draws from a wide variety of primary sources. The goal of a balanced, multisided view breaks down somewhat as Jennings misses a few opportunities to analyze the responses of Native American groups when French or Spanish violence did not match indigenous expectations. This is especially apparent in the rich potential of the indigenous responses to the Spanish torture of captives at Himahi (47), the canoe warfare on the Mississippi (51), and the news of a Satapo “conspiracy” to attack Pardo at Coosa (85). In each case, the primary sources contain the reactions of the indigenous leaders and communities that continue the conversation of violence and cultural confusion between Europeans and Southeastern Indians beyond Jennings’s descriptions.

The four chapters which follow focus on the issues facing English settlement regions. Here Jennings finds a balance that is understandably difficult to strike with earlier time periods due to the increased documentary evidence of the later period. He suggests that although “they conceived of violence in different ways,” Native peoples and the English “could work together toward common goals” (135). Jennings’s treatment of indigenous torture in warfare was especially powerful but teasingly brief. Pulling from the work of Georges Sioui, Jennings rephrases Nairne’s gruesome death as a failed attempt to both honor Nairne and settle the cost of English attacks on Yamasees (151). In the conclusion, the reader is thrown into the African slave “culture of violence.” Despite the brevity of the chapter, Jennings deftly shows the effects of the Stono Rebellion on the mid-eighteenth-century Southeast.

New Worlds of Violence propels the discussion of the Southeast in promising directions. It is a carefully balanced discussion of a diverse and ever-changing fabric of indigenous “cultures of violence” interacting with comparable European “cultures of violence.” By utilizing the “new worlds” dialectic with a strong anthropological framework...