Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS361 that belie Tannenbaume mild/harsh dichotomy, but also denied that contemporary Ibero-American race relations were devoid of race prejudice . Toplin's volume of essays, a part of this revisionist scholarship, contends that race and class relations which developed during slavery and emancipation helped determine contemporary racial attitudes in the United States and Brazil. Toplin has organized seven essays into three parts. Thethree essays in Part I consider how slavery's defenders, faced with abolitionist pressures , developed arguments whose racist basis endured the institution's demise. In Part II, the two essays examine how freed slaves not only suffered racial prejudice but also were trapped in a culture of poverty as a result of racial and economic inequities. In his final two essays, Toplin's analysis of twentieth-century race relations dismisses the simplistic explanation that while class factors determine Afro-Brazilian oppression, race factors oppress the United States'Afro-American population. Race and class prejudice, Toplin contends, operate in both societies to the black populations' detriment. Although Toplin's thesis is sound, his work's format precludes a closely argued justification. Five of the seven essays first appeared in scholarly journals (four of them in 1970-72), and a sixth draws extensively on the author's 1972 monograph on Brazilian abolition. Despite an introductory overview, Toplin's revisions of the essays fail either to give them overall coherence or to excise occasional repetitions and some dated analyses. Nevertheless, Freedom and Prejudice contains much of value. A useful synthesis of comparative race relations scholarship, which a succinct bibliographic essay supplements, accompanies the timely reminder that understanding racial oppression in the Americas requires examination of two legacies of slavery, race and class prejudice. Roderick A. Mcdonald Rider College Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War. By Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Pp. xi, 286. $22.50.) In Africans and Creeks Littlefield traces the development of slavery among the Creek Indians and explores the impact of the institution on Creek domestic affairs and relations with other tribes. The Creeks did not own slaves until after the American Revolution. In the colonial period, they harbored black slaves who ran away from white plantations, or, more frequently, returned the fugitives to their masters and collected a reward. Following the Revolution, however, some Creeks used slave labor to expand their agricultural enterprises. The adoption of slavery by an economic elite helped widen the gap between them and more conservative, less affluent Creeks. Because 362CIVIL WAR HISTORY most slaveholders were Lower Creeks, slavery also contributed to the gradual estrangement of Upper and Lower Creeks. The Red SHck War, which coincided with the War of 1812, resulted in part from the tensions produced by varying degrees of acculturaHon within the tribe. Many defeated tradiHonalists took refuge in Florida and became part of the Seminole NaHon. They carried with them a number of slaves who had escaped from their Creek and white masters. The inability of Creek slaveholders to reclaim their property exacerbated Creek animosity toward the Seminóles. The removal of the Creeks and Seminóles to Indian territory produced a crisis in their intertribal relaHons. According to treaHes signed in the early 1830s, the Creeks and Seminóles were supposed to share the same tract of land. The Creeks, who outnumbered the Seminóles, anHcipated recovering their slaves while the Seminóles and their largely autonomous blacks vehemently objected to the union. Some Seminóles and blacks settled in the Cherokee Nation, thereby straining relaHons with this tribe. When the Creeks agreed to permit the Seminóles to govern their own towns, most moved into the Creek NaHon. The dominant Creeks then resorted to extralegal slave raids on Seminole towns to recover their property, and, according to the Seminóles, they seized other blacks as well. Finally in 1856, a separate Seminole Nation was established , but this political separation came too late to benefit many blacks. The Civil War divided the Creeks once again. Slaveholding Creeks united with the confederacy while nonslaveholding traditionalists fled to Kansas. After the war, the Creeks admitted their freed slaves to ciHzenship , authorized the establishment of three black towns, and accepted...