American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (review)

Daniel Usner follows a first book on the frontier exchange economy of the “colonial” Lower Mississippi Valley with a more far-reaching analysis of the function of Indian agency and informal interracial exchanges of microbes, goods, labor, language, and games in the same region from the beginning of European contact through the early twentieth century. His emphasis on Indian agency, and on the frontier as a zone of cultural interaction rather than a racial border, places this work, self-consciously and successfully, at the center of the “newest” Indian history.

Usner begins with a detailed account of the uneven course of French-Natchez relations. Carolinians had familiarized the Natchez with the slave and deerskin trade and the European manufactures it attracted. The French competitively offered them the political partisanship, ceremonial respect, and trade opportunities they had learned to cherish. But the French wanted more than the Carolinians. By 1708, eighty French backwoodsmen lived in the Natchez villages, enjoying ample food supplies and local customs that enjoined premarital sex for profit on young women building their trousseaus. The results mainly discomfited missionaries, who also had little influence in mitigating customs of human sacrifice in this still Mississippian kingdom The Natchez helped the French build Fort Rosalie (1715) and their head warrior compromised two cases of interracial murder. But when the French proposed that a Natchez village move out so they could move in yet another tobacco plantation, the Natchez plotted rebellion. The 300 slaves they captured in its course helped them continue attacks on the French and the French-allied Tunicas, but by the early 1730s, thanks to the Frenchmen’s Choctaw allies, surviving Natchez were either slaves in the West Indies or inhabitants of their own towns in the Chickasaw, Creek, or Cherokee nations. Their language and their resistance to exploitation outlasted the nineteenth century.

Usner devotes a chapter to the demographic history of the Lower Mississippi Valley, identifying five main areas and more than two dozen tribes. Epidemics, wars, and enslavement reduced their numbers from 67,000 in 1700 to 22,000 in 1750, but immigration from other tribes, notably the Wichitas in the Red River region, the end of the Chickasaw-Choctaw wars, and growing immunities raised the total to 32,200 in 1775. Even smallpox brought by European soldiers fighting American rebels failed to keep the population of 1800 below 30,000. When the U.S. organized Mississippi Territory in 1798, over 100 Indian towns owned most of the land between the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi and their populations outnumbered those of whites, slaves, and free blacks together. Meanwhile the people experienced some amalgamation of small tribes decimated by disease and war, and more migration, usually for trade advantages, into, within, and outside the area. Most of the movement reflected Indian “agency”—not until the United States government got into buying millions of acres for thousands of dollars and using most of them to pay off trade debts to Forbes and Company or government “factories,” did the notion of involuntary removal arise and arouse opposition. But only the largest tribes—most Creeks, most Choctaws, and the pragmatic Chickasaws, actively opposed and actually removed. “Disappearance” was the successful strategy of choice among the smaller peoples.

The relative slowness with which the French augmented their population and their tobacco and indigo plantations helped make tribesmen major players on this frontier longer than in New England or the Chesapeake. Only with the coming of the Acadians to Louisiana and the English to Natchez after 1763 did the black and white populations grow significantly; only after the invention of the cotton gin, combined with reduction in the market for deerskins, did the numbers become irresistible. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama became states, and their combined black and white populations overwhelmingly larger than the Indian populations. From the Natchez rebellion forward, the French had tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to prevent...