Before the Volunteer State: New Thoughts on Early Tennessee, 1540–1800 ed. by Kristofer Ray (review)

Regionalism as a discursive tool has been entrenched in American colonial history since John Smith named New England in 1614. In this context, regionalism has offered a vantage point of European encroachment onto the continent. As settler communities expanded, new regions were added to the vernacular. Thus, the idea of regionalism in the Americas has been anchored firmly to concepts of colonialism, and ultimately conquest. However, in 1991 Richard White began to carve out indigenous regions, in his case the Great Lakes, in his groundbreaking work The Middle Ground. This regional turn in the New Indian History has produced a number of brilliant works, from Kathleen Duval’s Native Ground to Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire. Kristofer Ray’s edited volume, Before the Volunteer State, is the latest addition to this growing discourse. Ray has assembled essays from a number of eminent scholars to examine multiple aspects of the Tennessee River Valley and the people that called it home. The result is an excellent read.

Ray stakes out the Tennessee River corridor as a central hub of activity that stretched to the limits of the riverine systems of North America beginning in the sixteenth century. He opens with a discussion about a map (which is incidentally the cover art) presented by Fannie Mingo, a Chickasaw head man. The map shows representations of communities stretched across trans-Appalachia. The European presence on Mingo’s map was inconsequential and small compared to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. A sobering reminder of who controlled the power in an area where ideas and goods were exchanged, and groups vied for influence in an often shifting political landscape. As such, questions about the future of the trans-Appalachian West hinged largely on the actions, and interactions, which would make the Tennessee River a focal point well into the post-Revolutionary era.

Before the Volunteer State is divided into two parts. The first part begins with Robbie Ethridge setting the tone with a detailed study of the region as a shatter zone. Long-standing Mississippian chiefdoms were thrown into chaos as Hernando de Soto and his army made his entrada in 1540. The violence and disease that followed in his wake shook the foundations of many polities, drawing together the once disparate groups in a sort of ethnogenesis. Raiding and slaving societies further disrupted the region, as trade relationships with the colonies developed. The reverberations of this shatter zone continue to be felt in successive chapters, as questions of identity and territoriality emerge from the maelstrom.

The second part of the volume wades into the Revolutionary period, and the new challenges posed by internal struggles, and eventually the nascent United States. While many of the questions remain the same, the scope has changed. Trans-Appalachian settlement is becoming a reality, and the threat of imperial European interference in the British colonial project is tangible. The interior was violently contested from the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi River, as settlers vied for land and old alliances fell away. But the second part is not a story of declension; rather, it reveals a region fraught with new possibilities, and the ways in which people embraced them.

While this volume is a weighty contribution to the field, it is not without its problems. The centering of the Tennessee corridor as the focal point of trans-Appalachian expansion is overstated. The connectivity of the riverine systems that Ray draws on to bring focus to the region work in many ways to thwart his position. The Ohio and Mississippi rivers, due to their proximities to the Great Lakes and the Gulf Coast, were arguably more vital to the development of communities, regions, and identities. It is telling that the Iroquois, from New York, play such a significant role in the shaping of the Tennessee Valley, yet that same pressure does not flow north to a very large degree. In...