Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South by Daniel S. Dupre (review)

Going back a few decades, ethnohistorians have been arguing that a full understanding of the American South's history cannot be gained until scholars grapple with the depth and significance of the region's Indigenous histories and peoples. In Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South, Daniel S. Dupre has done just that. He posits a revision of American frontier history that stands apart from comparable works and models an alternative kind of practice that future scholars will have to confront. By situating his interpretation in a past that begins with the introduction of maize to the region around one thousand years ago, Dupre shifts the focus from Frederick Jackson Turner's westward gaze and enacts fully the promise of Daniel Richter's call for a view from the east.¹ Such a pivot entails all sorts of new perspectives, the most salient of which are that the conventional history of the Anglo American settlers who founded the state of Alabama occupy only the book's concluding chapter and that their most enduring edifice, the so-called "Old South," proves to have lasted for only a little more than a generation.

What then are we to make of the preceding centuries of the region's human occupation? Or the impact of Spanish incursions that pre-dated the invention of the cotton gin by almost two and a half centuries? Or the fact that for a little more than a century imperial powers jockeyed for pre-eminence among the region's First Nations in ways that left the nations holding both power and initiative? A different approach to the past enables a different South to emerge. Dupre eschews the linearity and progressivism of the classical frontier formulation and instead invokes Richard White's "middle ground."² Importantly, Dupre acknowledges that middle grounds existed amongst Alabama's first peoples long before the arrival of Europeans, but, he asserts, Hernando de Soto's violent entrada in the early 1540s caused an abrupt change as slave raids, the pressures of commercial hunting, and the vagaries of imperial diplomacy pulled First Peoples deeply into the emerging Atlantic world. Only when the American republic won its independence from Great Britain did this centuries-old "Older" South begin to crumble. The United States' aggressive race-based social organization backed by overwhelming military, demographic, and bureaucratic power cleansed the state of Alabama of most of its indigenous population and established in the 1830s the conditions under which race-based slavery and cotton monoculture could thrive.

If we take into account the significance of the deeper history of Alabama's frontier, Dupre argues, we will have to reconsider how historians contextualize and narrate America's past in relation to three main themes. First, exploring the long span of time going back to the arrival of the Spanish helps us understand why events in the early nineteenth century unfolded as they did. For example, the different historical origins of early Alabama's two rival centers of settler power structured the territory's subsequent history. Second, Americans' repudiation of the myriad societies, cultures, and practices that had characterized life in what became Alabama committed the United States more fully to the paths of race, enslavement, and violence that bedevil us still. Third, scholars have begun to deploy the word métis more and more in southern historiography, and Dupre uses it to such an extent that one of the clearest, though still underplayed, implications of the book is that we need to come to grips with these people in ways that get beyond the anecdotal and episodic treatment they have thus far received. The English language has no commensurate term for such people, which complicates their historical interpretation and historiographical explication, but there is a story here of people who blended families, cultural practices, and politics...