Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America 2020038670, 9781469662176, 9781469662183, 1469662175

The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 were the strongest temblors in the North American interior in at least the past fi

223 35 10MB

English Pages 186 [205]

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Figure Foundation
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. QUAKING
2. KNOWLEDGE
3. SPIRIT
4. POLITICS
5. TERRITORY
Epilogue: Resonances
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Recommend Papers

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America
 2020038670, 9781469662176, 9781469662183, 1469662175

  • 0 0 0
  • Like this paper and download? You can publish your own PDF file online for free in a few minutes! Sign Up
File loading please wait...
Citation preview

Convulsed States

Convulsed States Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America Jonathan Todd Hancock The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Jamison Cockerham Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Amaltea, and Rudyard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Cover illustrations: flood scenes from the front page of the Marceline Business Directory, Marceline, Mo. (Nell and Kyes, 1891); courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Manufactured in the United States of America The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data Names: Hancock, Jonathan Todd, author. Title: Convulsed states : earthquakes, prophecy, and the remaking of early America / Jonathan Todd Hancock. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020038670 | ISBN 9781469662176 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469662183 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662190 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Earthquakes—United States—History—19th century. | Indians of North America—Government relations—1789–1869. | Nation-­building—United States. | United States—History— 19th century. | United States—Religion—19th century. Classification: LCC E179 .H225 2021 | DDC 323.1197—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038670

a wave grant Figure Foundation tides of mind

This page intentionally left blank

For my family

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1 QUA K I NG 7 2 K N OW L E D G E 31 3 S P I R IT  59 4 P OL IT IC S 87 5 TE R R ITORY 109 Epilogue: Resonances 129 Notes 133 Bibliography 155 Index 181

This page intentionally left blank

Figures & Maps Figures 1. Timeline of events 5 2. Scene of the Great Earthquake in the West 11 3. Methodist Church membership by conference, 1810–1815 63 4. Baptisms by Baptist associations, 1810–1820 64 5. Lorenzo Dow broadside 76

Maps 1. Approximate geographical scope of earthquakes with selected sites 9 2. Post–­War of 1812 territorial cessions by Creek, Cherokee, and Ohio Valley Indian allies of the United States, 1814–1817 119

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments I’ve never experienced an earthquake. One shook Chapel Hill while I lived there, but it didn’t register to me from the recesses of the library, where I was scanning microfilm for earthquake references. Over the course of this effort, what I have experienced is guidance, support, and love beyond measure. Two people inspired me to take the plunge into becoming a history professor. Craig Steven Wilder showed me the transformative power of historical perspective and the critical importance of historiography and Early America. Craig D. Atwood introduced me to the practice of being a historian and the educational tradition of John Comenius. While this book’s subject matter ranges far from their work, I hope it reflects their influence. As a college student, I also was fortunate to learn from John P. Bowes, Colin G. Calloway, Clarence E. Hardy III, and Celia E. Naylor. Kathleen DuVal let me run with my strange earthquake idea, offering guidance and encouragement along the way. I’ll always be grateful for her mentorship and good cheer (and Marty Smith’s cooking). While in the Research Triangle, I learned from an incredible cast of other faculty: the late Andrew R. L. Cayton, Elizabeth A. Fenn, the late Michael D. Green, Clara Sue Kidwell, Theda Perdue, Cynthia Radding, John Wood Sweet, and Harry L. Watson. A special thanks to Theda Perdue, whose advice about organizing the book was immensely helpful in moving it along. Conevery Bolton Valencius assured me that the earthquakes were big enough for the both of us to write about, and I have learned much from her work. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues from the profession and beyond: Thomas Vasilos, Anders Larson, Alex Punger, Jack Dunlap, David Williard, Anna Krome-­Lukens, Aaron Hale-­Dorrell, Kim Kutz, Nora Doyle, Liz Lundeen, Tol Foster, Warren Milteer, Rike Brühöfener, Kathleen Conti, Liz Ellis, xiii

Brooke Bauer, Mikaëla Adams, Julie Reed, Marty Richardson, Jacob Lee, Paul Heintz, Adam Michaelson, Jason Hartwig, Stephen Macekura, Annie Depper, Catherine Conner, and Emily and Chris Kreutzer. Numerous institutions made my research and writing possible. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I am grateful to the Royster Society of Fellows, the Center for the Study of the American South, the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Graduate School, and the History Department. I also appreciate the support of the Newberry Library, the Filson Historical Society, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Bright Institute at Knox College, and Hendrix College. Spending time at the Newberry Library with Juliana Barr, the late Raymond D. Fogelson, and Scott Manning Stevens was especially formative. Joining the inaugural cohort of the Bright Institute at Knox College, directed by Catherine J. Denial, has been a rousing bookend to this book writing experience. I also thank the staffs of all of the libraries and archives cited in the book, as well as those librarians who facilitate interlibrary loan. On the road, Anders and Jess Larson and Hunter Price kindly hosted me at their homes during research trips through the Midwest, and Bo Taylor welcomed me into the 2009 Cherokee Language Immersion Course at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian on the Qualla Boundary. I appreciated the opportunities to present portions of this work and receive feedback at workshops held by the Triangle Early American History Seminar, the Carolina Seminar in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and the Newberry Library Seminar Series in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, as well as meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Early Americanists, and the Southern Historical Association. I am grateful to Hendrix College for the institutional support and flexibility to pursue my research and teaching interests. I thank my departmental colleagues, Todd Berryman, Sasha Pfau, Allison Shutt, Deb Skok, and Mike Sprunger, for their welcome and guidance. I’ve also appreciated the chance to collaborate with Hendrix faculty and staff members beyond the History Department: Jay Barth, Hope Coulter, Pete Gess, Robin Hartwick, Brett Hill, Mary Kennedy, Peter Kett, Kiril Kolev, Stacey Schwartzkopf, David Sutherland, and Leslie Templeton. Thanks also to Jasmine Zandi, Hendrix class of 2020, for creating the maps, and to Brett Hill for guiding Ms. Zandi. It has been an honor to work with the University of North CaroxivAcknowledgments

lina Press; I appreciate the work of Chuck Grench, Brandon Proia, Dylan White, Jay Mazzocchi, Elizabeth Crowder, and the rest of the staff. Readers Cynthia Kierner and Christina Snyder lent their expertise and keen insight to strengthen the manuscript. The book is better for their feedback, though errors of fact or interpretation belong to me. In 2017, Devin and I found out just how fortunate we are to live in downtown Little Rock. We express our heartfelt gratitude to Anita Davis, Caroline Stevenson, and Kelly Fleming, and to the doctors, nurses, and staff at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, especially Drs. Daniela A. Ochoa, Angela Pennisi, Allen C. Sherman, and Keith G. Wolter. Outside of academia, thanks also to the members of Kasvot Växt for creative inspiration, and to Roger Bennett and Michael Davies, Football Weekly, and my teammates on Baklava and The Magnificent Seven for soccer-­related diversions. I dedicate this book to my family. I honor the memory of my grandparents, Chick and Millie Blake and Jimmy and Marty Hancock, and I cherish all the time I got to spend with them. My parents, Kelley and Drew, have been a constant source of love and guidance, and my sisters, Tess and Emma, enliven (and tolerate) their idiosyncratic older brother. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and their kids ring our orbit, and we’ve been lucky to have Arjun, Meera, Som, Latha, Nacho, Harry, Susan, Megan, Chris, Hatton, and Rowe join us. Devin makes my life whole.

Acknowledgments

xv

Convulsed States

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Nearly four years before the earthquakes, Tenskwatawa predicted them. In relating a visit with the Great Spirit, the Shawnee Prophet threatened very specific consequences for Native people who spurned his growing movement to unite and repel U.S. expansion. Awful spirits in the air and great snakes under the earth awaited those who did not abide by the teachings of the Great Spirit, who, Tenskwatawa said, “has power to change the course of nature.” Other prophets also carried the message, which had been circulating across and beyond the Ohio Valley for decades, for a unified Native front to drive out invaders. But Tenskwatawa claimed ultimate authority among the prophets, direct access to the Great Spirit, and unique insight into forces of natural destruction. In the winter of 1807–8, his warning contained a precise prediction: in four years a day of judgment would come, and “all the unbelievers shall be utterly destroyed.”1 When earthquakes arrived on a December night in 1811, their magnitude, frequency, and uncommonness made them impossible to ignore. Three major temblors and dozens of aftershocks emanated for months from the Missouri Bootheel. Estimated to approach magnitudes of 7.0 on the Richter scale, they alarmed communities from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. While only a faint oddity on the edges of the earthquakes’ vast footprint, the shaking assaulted the senses of those closer to the epicenters. “All was confusion and terror,” remembered an American doctor who was traveling down the Mississippi River. “The sky became darker each moment, the stars grew dim till they were invisible; and from out the solid, almost intangible blackness of the night, issued those fearful sounds, as though the whole order of things and all the laws of nature were being broken up, and matter returning to its original chaos.” Tenskwa1

tawa had foretold what are still largely unpredictable to modern seismologists: the strongest earthquakes in the North American interior in at least the last five centuries.2 The earthquakes shook land and people without regard for territorial boundaries and social stations. Women and men, enslaved and free, Native and non-­Native, leaders and commoners, skeptics of cosmological disruption and prophets of doom, they all experienced the shaking and interpreted its meaning. People grounded their interpretations in the systems of knowledge, ritual, and politics that their territories hosted—Creek, Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, Quapaw, Otoe, and the United States, among many others. The convulsions coincided with contentious experiments in state building. Whether for territorial defense or expansion, Native Americans and Euro Americans alike sought to consolidate political authority and establish their standing among other nation-­states with territorial boundaries, national laws, diplomatic agreements, and militaries to enforce their respective sovereignties. With a booming population and an expansionist platform to secure landowning opportunities for its citizens, the United States loomed over its immediate Indigenous neighbors, who confronted the differentials in population, territorial size, and firepower with state-­building efforts of their own. Advocates of intertribal unity in the Ohio Valley and nationalization among Creek and Cherokee people in the Southeast sought to stand nation to nation with the United States.3 These efforts provoked common questions about the place of religious authority in nation-­states. Often arising from societal margins to seize on the revivalism that gripped communities in the Appalachian borderlands, prophets and other charismatic figures warned that nations unmoored from religious authority risked divine punishment. Along with an impending war and a host of other anomalies that appeared in the natural environment in 1811, the earthquakes bolstered such claims and stoked disputes about the relationship between religious and political authority within these sites of state building. While these disputes assumed various forms across Indian country and the United States, the earthquakes roused widespread alarm and contention, sometimes years after the first temblor. Both in an array of historical records and in the land itself, the tremors created a constellation of common reference points, an eclectic guide through which to ask new questions of this pivotal era and to narrate it in a new way. Those new questions about revivalism, religious and political authority, and nation remaking are comparative, not only between Native nations and the United States, but among 2Introduction

Native polities. And that new way of narration narrows the chronological scope, widens the geographical lens, and deepens attention to all people who registered their earthquake interpretations, no matter their location, culture, or social standing.4 Emerging from those calibrations is a sprawling landscape of world views and ideas about natural phenomena in early nineteenth-­century North America. A broad cast of thinkers inhabited this landscape, many far from the formal libraries and laboratories to which scholars typically turn to write histories of ideas, intellectuals, and science. These thinkers drew from long-­standing lineages of knowledge, combining their communities’ intellectual inheritances with their own firsthand observations of interrelated disorder in the natural environment, human affairs, and spiritual matters. In experiencing, interpreting, and debating about the earthquakes, people ascribed various and overlapping intellectual, spiritual, political, and diplomatic meanings to land.5 Convulsed States probes those meanings to provide a continental, cross-­ cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies in the early nineteenth century. Doing so demands traversing not only a massive geographical expanse, but also a range of historical fields and topics: environmental, religious, and intellectual history; ethnohistory; the history of science; disaster studies and the expansion of U.S. state power through disaster relief; and colonialism. Historians often have employed a continental approach to analyses of cross-­ cultural interactions in pre-­1800 North America. However, in many studies of relations between the United States and Native Americans in the War of 1812 era, the hallmarks of a continental approach—a diversity of people and perspectives, wide geographical scopes, and attention to dynamics within and among Native polities—often give way to a narrower lens of focus on U.S. expansion and flash points where collective Indigenous resistance confronted it. Historians commonly narrate these confrontations as clashes between Native spirit and U.S. greed, or as one historian has put it, a “holy war for the American frontier.” Anchoring the story in the North American interior—following the tremors out from their epicenters—widens that analytical lens to capture the tangled alliances of the War of 1812 era, domestic struggles over differentiation in religious and political authority, and the connections that all people across eastern North America—not just Native people—drew among human, spiritual, and environmental matters. These tensions and entanglements registered in earthquake interpretations and Introduction

3

debates. In the early nineteenth century, people in the United States were as attuned to environmental disturbances and their spiritual significance as people in Indian country were to political reinvention.6 Despite its analytical limits, historians’ emphasis on the spiritual dimension of Native militancy in this era has served the worthy purpose of countering the argument that epidemic diseases eliminated Indigenous peoples’ preexisting spiritual traditions and epistemologies. This study shares in the effort to emphasize historical continuity, as well as adaptability, in Indigenous ways of knowing. Native thinkers often associated the earthquakes with impurity and illness, and they employed the language of health in their various designs for restoring cosmological order. These figures belong in a new, broadening wave of historical study that foregrounds the intellectual lineages of Native American and African Americans, investigating them on their own terms, not just in regard to their interfaces with Euro Americans.7 Still, the academic study of Indigenous knowledge must respect boundaries. Medicine, as contemporary tribal communities refer to secret practices that are fundamental to spirituality, is a deeply sensitive topic that belongs to families and lineages of special practitioners, not curious outsiders. When missionaries and government-­sanctioned anthropologists consulted with practitioners to record and publish medicinal information, they continued a colonialist tradition of binding academic study with Indigenous subjugation and dispossession. For all of the promise in ethnohistory’s bid to unbind scholarship from the legacy of colonialism, suspicion and resentment rightfully persist. Those currently trusted with medicine often find the very existence of published manuals and manuscripts on the subject deeply unsettling. For example, James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, a foundational text in Cherokee history cited in this book for its oral histories, contains information that a tribal storyteller recently has described as “scary.” This sacred knowledge is powerful and meant to be kept secret, because it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. “I mean, there’s things in that book that even I wouldn’t read. I look at it, part of it, and I’ll just put it back,” the storyteller explained. Discussions of Native world views, rituals, and oral histories that follow seek to foreground Indigenous peoples’ ideas and debates about the earthquakes while acknowledging these sensitivities.8 Amid histories of the early republic focused on rapid change, the earthquakes invite the challenge to slow down, reframe early nineteenth-­century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions, and explore what else we can know about these people. 4Introduction

Tenskwatawa’s Earthquake Prophecy

Battle of Horseshoe Bend

Battle of Tippecanoe

Major Earthquake 1

Comet of 1811 Appears Richmond Theatre Fire 1808

1809

1810

1811

1812

1813

1814

Treaty of Fort Jackson

1815

1816

Destruction of Fort Mims

Publication of Nimrod Hughes’s A Solemn Warning

War of 1812 Begins

Major Earthquake 2

Major Earthquake 3

Treaty of the Maumee Rapids

Treaty of Turkeytown

1817

1818

Treaty of the Cherokee Agency

Figure 1. Timeline of events.

Convulsed States begins with individuals’ experiences of the earthquakes within the context of early nineteenth-­century nation remaking in the Native South, Ohio Valley, and United States. Reaching back further in time to consider the lineages of knowledge that framed understandings of the shaking, it then returns to Tenskwatawa’s prophecy and the ways in which the earthquakes figured into broader waves of revivalism across communities in the southern Appalachians and Ohio Valley. The leaders of new communities forged through common spiritual concerns sought to bring their surging religious authority and urgent earthquake insights to bear on the remaking of Native nations and the early formation of the United States. These political disputes about differentiation and territorial transformations, some of which stemmed directly from the earthquakes with the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815, and others that derived partly from U.S. blame cast on Native prophets, close the book. In a letter to a colleague written two years after the strongest shaking, British trader and Indian agent Robert Dickson surveyed the geopolitics of eastern North America and western Europe. From his post along the upper Mississippi River, the far western theater of the War of 1812, Dickson assumed a broad angle of vision and a foreboding tone. “Never did War rage as it does at present, the World seems convulsed, thank providence Our Country is still preheminent & will I trust continue so,” he wrote. Whether or not he intended to refer directly to the earthquakes, Dickson’s use of the term “convulsed” captured the way in which people across cultures and a Introduction

5

vast swath of the continent connected signs of human and natural disorder. His letter also dealt with a broad range of historical actors, many of whom left evidence of their understandings of the earthquakes and their debates about the shaking’s significance for intertwined matters of spirit, politics, and territory: a host of Native peoples, European militaries, and the “Scoundrel American Democrats.” With his choice of the word “convulsed” and expansive perspective from the middle of continent, Dickson created a useful reference point through which to return to that December night on the Mississippi River in 1811.9

6Introduction

1

Quaking Dawn revealed that Mississippi River navigation manuals were useless. Islands were missing, submerged logs rose to the water’s surface to block channels, and riverbanks had disintegrated. The New Orleans, one of the first steamboats ever to ply the river, was north of New Madrid during the first shock. Like many Euro Americans west of the Appalachians awakened by the shaking, the crew first supposed that the din was an Indian attack. As the boat passed through New Madrid, crowds from the bank begged to be taken aboard. People and houses already had been swallowed, and those seeking refuge hoped it would be safer to ride out the shocks while traveling downstream. “Painful as it was, there was no choice but to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the terrified inhabitants of the doomed town,” related the voyage’s chronicler. Even when the shaking subsided, trees and broken chunks of islands scratched at the boat’s hull, making it difficult to sleep onboard. What was supposed to be a crowning achievement of technological innovation, a celebration of a new era in the integration of markets and people in the growing nation, instead turned into a solemn passage full of “anxiety and terror.”1 Others corroborated the astonishing riverside sights and sounds. Despite his crew’s desire to flee the boat and climb to land, Scottish naturalist John Bradbury decided to ride out the earthquakes in open water. He calmed each crew member with liquor and continued down the river. The next morning, Bradbury captured the sights and sounds of disorder during an aftershock. “The trees on both sides of the river were most violently agitated, and the banks in several places fell in, within our view carrying with them innumerable trees, the crash of which falling into the river, mixed with 7

the terrible sound attending the shock, and the screaming of geese and other wild fowl, produced an idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution,” he wrote. A French boat pilot offered another description of the terrifying sound, which “was in the ground, sometimes muffled and groaning; sometimes it cracked and crashed, not like thunder, but as though a great sheet of ice had broken.” Passing through a village south of New Madrid, a another boat pilot surveyed the morose scene of a Catholic graveyard partially sunken into the river with a split wooden cross marking exposed graves. “All nature appeared in ruins, and seemed to mourn in solitude over her melancholy fate,” he wrote to his aunt in Pennsylvania.”2 One recurring element of popular lore about the earthquakes was true: the Mississippi River temporarily flowed backward. The shaking combined with major cracks in the riverbed to disrupt the river’s flow, creating massive upstream waves. The French pilot described an immense swell traveling north: “So great a wave came up the river that I never seen one like it at sea. It carried us back north, up-­stream, for more than a mile, and the water spread out upon the banks, even covering maybe three or four miles inland. It was the current going backward. Then this wave stopped and slowly the river went right again.” A different pilot reported being carried upstream for ten to twelve miles. In St. Louis, the river did not reverse course, but the water churned and bubbled like it was boiling.3 Another long-­held piece of trivia about the earthquakes—that they rang church bells in Boston—is less likely. The shaking tolled mistimed bells, awaking the inhabitants of St. Louis, central Ohio, and locations as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. While people in mid-­Atlantic states felt faint tremors, they were not strong enough to ring bells in Boston. In a recent study that has downgraded the estimated severity of the three major temblors of 1811 and 1812, seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey have suggested that the apocryphal report from Boston stems from people who mistook an account from Charleston, South Carolina, for a report of events in Charlestown, Boston’s oldest neighborhood.4 The earthquakes were nonetheless alarming and unprecedented for people across eastern North America. In small lakes northwest of Detroit, turbulent waters led turtles to surface and reveal themselves as easy food. Weak shaking in New Orleans and Baltimore marked the earthquakes’ outer boundaries along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf South. And though maps that reconstruct the tremors’ severity in the West often stop at St. Louis, betraying a bias for accounts from the United States, people well west of the Mississippi River felt the shaking. In Osage territory, ice cracked at the Ar8Quaking

!

Otoe Town !

!

Prophetstown

Philadelphia!

New Madrid !

Springplace

! !

0 87.5 175

Natchez

350

525

Tuckabatchee

700 Miles

²

Map 1. Approximate geographical scope of earthquakes with selected sites. (Map by Jasmine Zandi.)

kansas River’s edge, and in what is today Nebraska, Otoes and Euro American traders had a lively discussion about the reason for the disturbance.5 Disorientation and nausea were abiding physical reactions to the quaking. “It seemed as if my bedstand was on a rough sea, and the waves were rolling under it, so sensible were the undulations,” wrote a preacher in Kentucky. Another settler in Kentucky claimed to “reel about like a drunken man.” From northwest Tennessee, a correspondent with a naturalist in New York reflected on the earthquakes’ effect on “both the body and the mind of human beings.” If people “had been deprived of their usual sleep, through fear of being engulfed in the earth, their stomachs were troubled with nausea and sometimes even with vomiting. Others complained of debility, tremor, and pain in the knees and legs,” he related. An eerie array of sounds and smells complemented rifts in the ground, sandblows, and toppled chimneys. “The awful darkness of the atmosphere which, as formerly, was saturated with sulphurous vapor, and the violence of the tempestuous thundering noise that accompanied it . . . formed a scene, the description of which would require the most sublimely fanciful imagination,” wrote a woman in New Madrid.6 At the time of first earthquakes, New Madrid was a bustling and diverse Quaking

9

site of trade and transportation. The town that came to bear the earthquakes’ name resulted from the Spanish Empire’s encouraging settlers to establish a regional buffer in the Missouri Bootheel between Osage and British territory. After the French ceded Louisiana following the Seven Years’ War, the Spanish began awarding land grants to willing settlers in 1763. Aided by Delaware and Shawnee trade networks, Euro American traders established posts for selling furs and other goods. Beginning in the 1790s, eastern Indian and U.S. migrants complemented their efforts by cutting timber, hunting game, and piloting boats down the Mississippi River. By 1808, there were about one hundred houses in New Madrid and twenty-­four cabins in nearby Little Prairie.7 In those communities closest to the epicenters, a difficult choice accompanied the destruction: remain in houses in various states of collapsing, sinking, burning down, and floating away, or ride out the shocks in open air, where trees were regularly falling and the ground was “opening in dark, yawning chasms, or fissures, and belching forth muddy water, large lumps of blue clay, coal, and sand.” These chasms made fleeing to higher ground especially treacherous. But the estimated 2,000 residents of New Madrid and its vicinity had no other option, as the town sunk twelve feet by one estimate, and gushing water submerged the newly sunken land. Fleeing to a hill thirty miles north became a wading expedition through four or five miles of hot, knee-­deep water. Others who remained in shattered settlements benefited from boat wrecks on the Mississippi River. Provisions washed ashore, and pilots who did manage to hold on to their cargo sold it at reduced prices rather than risk losing it all in another tremor. “This accident to the boats was the salvation of the homeless villages,” wrote a nineteenth-­century chronicler of Missouri.8 The earthquakes left indelible marks on the land and reshaped settlement patterns west of the Mississippi River. A woman fleeing the Missouri Bootheel for Kentucky reported that the earthquake had “sunk, Bursted, and destroyed a great part of that Country.” From Cincinnati, a settler wrote back to his brother in Massachusetts about the twin effects of earthquake damage and the threat of violence with Indians. After describing half-­mile-­long cracks in the ground out of which water and sand spouted, he noted, “People are moving out of this country faster than they ever moved into it.” Large holes where sand blew out of the ground are still present in Missouri and Arkansas farmlands today. Other changes in the land were more dramatic. The seismic activity created Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee, a shallow body of water with partially submerged tree roots that now makes for good recre10Quaking

Figure 2. Scene of the Great Earthquake in the West. A nineteenth-­ century woodcut depicts a tumultuous scene on the Mississippi River during one of the major earthquakes in 1811–1812. (From Devens, Our First Century, 220; Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.)

ational fishing. South of the epicenter, on a tributary of the Mississippi River, a family discovered that their nearby well and smokehouse were located on the opposite side of the river after the first earthquake rerouted the tributary. The St. Francis River basin in present-­day Arkansas devolved into swampland, prompting late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­century Cherokee migrants there to relocate west. Nearby, the earth swallowed up a mill and destroyed a ten-­acre apple orchard. Two decades later, a travel writer captured the demise of the St. Francis River, its “clear waters . . . obstructed, the ancient channel destroyed, and the river spread over a vast tract of swamp.”9 Those who fled broken and flooded farmland and river trading posts did not soon return, and neither did future settlers replace them. More than a decade after the shaking subsided, a passerby found New Madrid in a “wretched & decayed” state. Matters had not improved by 1839, when another traveler called the town “dilapidated” and exaggerated that there was “but one comfortable residence in the place.” Only trappers found the new landscapes promising, as the fallen trees and new cracks in the terrain created prime habitat for fur-­bearing creatures. Future western migrants largely passed over the damaged region where current-­day Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri meet.10 Quaking

11

Despite these hazards, there were remarkably few casualties. Only a handful of firsthand narratives mention individuals who disappeared in the desperate hours following the major temblors. The largest number of lost people recorded in a single account was a group of seven Native Americans. According to a single survivor quoted in a widely reprinted newspaper report, they fell into a chasm. In a region with low population densities in the 1810s, deaths were more likely in the dozens than in the hundreds or thousands. While these earthquakes were every bit as powerful as those that devastated Lisbon, Lima, and Caracas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their epicenters’ considerable distance from large urban areas limited their death toll.11 The earthquakes’ scope facilitates a continental historical lens. Across eastern North America, people struggled to explain the tremors and their larger significance for human order in the early nineteenth century. From Indian councils and church meetings to congressional halls and plantation desks, people situated the earthquakes alongside other human and environmental anomalies in 1811 and 1812. Claiming direct revelation from increasingly proximate divine forces, charismatic leaders articulated new visions of order that challenged established political authorities in the United States and in Native American polities. But these figures were not the only people who intertwined issues of land, spirit, and politics to find the tremors portentous. Mounting signs of disorder and imbalance captivated and concerned everyone. “I hope these things are not ominous of national calamity,” wrote Congressman Abijah Bigelow to his wife, Allison. The Federalist legislator from Massachusetts had just listened to a sermon in which a Washington City preacher “spoke of the Richmond fire and intimated that the comet, the indian battle, the shock of Earthquakes were warnings to the nation, that the almighty had even caused the alarm bells to be rung, alluding to the earth quake in several places causing the bells to ring.” Former First Lady Abigail Adams shared her alarm with her son John Quincy. “The Natural World is in a turmoil as well as the political,” she wrote. Across territorial and epistemological boundaries, people interpreted the earthquakes in light of human and environmental anomalies that began in 1811 and carried over into 1812.12 Flooding during the spring of 1811 initiated what one 1830s chronicler called the “Annus Mirabilis of the West.” Latin for “year of miracles,” the term “Annus Mirabilis” came from England in 1666, when the Great Fire 12Quaking

of London, a bubonic plague, the English defeat of the Dutch navy, and Isaac Newton’s discoveries, along with the year’s demonic numerals, made English people speculate about the events’ collective significance. The U.S. Annus Mirabilis continued inauspiciously enough with an odd sight: squirrels “seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South.” Not the last time in 1811 that animals would strangely march in unison, many squirrels also drowned in the Ohio River. A summer heat wave and stagnating pools of water spread disease and yielded a “pestilential vapour” along the Mississippi River. Then a September hurricane hit Charleston, and inland tornados capped off a series of alarming, though not altogether unusual, weather patterns.13 When the Great Comet of 1811 appeared in skies that fall, the Annus Mirabilis began in earnest. Paired with a solar eclipse in September, the comet was among the most widely visible in recorded history. Across the world, people gazed at its two-­pronged tail with wonder, curiosity, and confusion. Journals became lively forums for study and debate. A contributor to Baltimore’s Weekly Register captured the range of responses to the comet: “A thousand conjectures are formed as to its immediate object and ultimate effects. . . . Sinners tremble at the dreaded termination of their career, while the philosopher calmly prepares to search into the hidden secret.” Mathematical calculations stood comfortably beside esoteric ruminations on the mysteriousness of God’s “Infinite Mind” and more focused devotional statements on human depravity and sin. These ranging discussions demonstrated the fusion and porousness of Enlightenment rationalism and Christian enthusiasm in Euro American world views in the early nineteenth century. In this intellectual climate, commentators were more likely to disagree about the immediacy of divine influence and the limitations of human reason than to question the existence of a divine role in nature. But given the literal distance between the comet and its observers, debates about divine intentionality and the connections among spiritual, environmental, and human orders were less pressing than they became when the earth began shaking.14 The comet’s disappearance coincided with the first temblor on December 16, 1812, leading some observers to suspect that these curiosities were directly related. In Kentucky and Ohio, people discussed the possibility that the comet had struck the earth, causing it to quake. The Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser of New Orleans supposed that the point of impact was in the California mountains, while people aboard that steamboat thought it landed in the Ohio River.15 Whether or not they made direct connections between the comet and Quaking

13

the earthquakes, people remained preoccupied with the sky. Accounts of strange sights and abnormal atmospheric conditions filled letters and newspapers. Numerous observers expected earthquakes during “lowering weather,” a nineteenth-­century term for low atmospheric pressure. Those familiar with the nascent study of electricity suspected links between winter thunderstorms and the shaking, and published studies contained countless measurements of thermometer and barometer readings, wind direction, and the extent of cloud cover. Other conditions could not be quantified. A correspondent with naturalist and American Philosophical Society officer Benjamin Smith Barton struggled to explain the sky’s appearance during his trip from Frankfort to Bardstown, Kentucky, during the first temblor. During the foggy and cloudy night, “a meterous exhalation or electricity or something else illuminated our road,” he wrote. “It resembled a dim moon-­ shine, or (if I may use an excentric comparison) it appeared as if a hoghead of moonshine had been emptied upon us & diffused itself equally throughout the surrounding gloom.” North Carolina’s skies were alight with other oddities. An army captain reported to a preacher the sight of “three extraordinary fires,” which were “as large as a house on fire,” streaking across the sky in different directions. The preacher himself saw a meteor accompanied by a “whitish substance, resembling a duck in size and shape” that tailed off in a cloud of smoke.16 Like the marching squirrels earlier that year, animals behaved strangely before and during the earthquakes. Famed naturalist John James Audubon was riding his horse in Kentucky when, moments before the shaking, his mount slowed and braced itself. Nearly all firsthand accounts of the tremors mentioned the howling and screeching of animals that accompanied the creaking of houses, trees, and rocks. One couple that spent the evening “watching for the Coming of Death” found that at dawn, there “were great bears, panthers, wolves, foxes etc. side by side with a number of wild deer, with their red tongues hanging out of their mouths.” That afternoon brought “a regular migration of wild things fleeing towards the hills. Great rattle snakes, black snakes and innumerable rats, coons, groundhogs, etc. etc.” Near Vincennes, Indiana, a man reported seeing black cats out on a river.17 Imaginations ran wild with possible connections and future dangers. U.S. newspapers fed those imaginations with accounts both authentic and fabricated. Of many people who speculated that a volcanic eruption was the source of the earthquakes, only western North Carolina’s John Edwards actually reported seeing one. “The quantity of lava discharged at the begin14Quaking

ning of the eruption was immense; it ran down the mountain in a stream of liquid fire for more than three quarters of a mile and has formed a dam across the French Broad River,” he wrote to the Star in Raleigh. Other newspapers across the Atlantic coast ran the story in January and early February until the Raleigh postmaster reported that a “John Edwards” did not exist in Asheville, and the Virginia Argus pronounced the “terrible account” a “HOAX.”18 The possibility of fabricated accounts presented a problem also at the root of the U.S. experiment in republican governance: Who could be trusted as a member of the body politic? National territorial growth, economic prosperity, and effective federal governance relied on effective and truthful communication networks, and elite northeastern naturalists welcomed the observations of their less formally educated counterparts in the West. In theory, empiricism was a republican virtue because it enabled all citizens to contribute. But in practice, as in national political culture, the study of the earthquakes reflected the entangled nature of geography, authority, and social status in the early U.S. republic. As New Yorker Samuel Mitchill described in his published compilation of earthquake accounts, “Much exaggeration was interwoven with some of the narratives. Some, indeed, were tinctured with fable and burlesque.” The shocks nonetheless induced a level of natural fury that most people would have considered unbelievable if the scenes of destruction had not been corroborated by multiple eyewitnesses and left an indelible impact on the land. If many people saw the Mississippi run backward, why not entertain the possibility of a volcano in Asheville?19 Published earthquake studies staked their findings on their correspondents’ reputations. To counter “fable and burlesque,” Mitchill referred to his western sources as “correct and respectable” or “ingenious.” Winthrop Sargent, first governor of Mississippi Territory and author of a letter about the earthquakes later published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, tagged informants as “a gentleman of respectability” and “an intelligent traveller.” He also verified his confidence in “an old servant” who was “very wakeful.” Despite their preoccupations with social status, these published accounts often mirrored those of less educated observers. Missionary and naturalist Timothy Flint understood this, finding it “remarkable how ingeniously, and conclusively they [eyewitnesses] reasoned from apprehension sharpened from fear.” He based a number of published works on Mississippi River valley travel and geology on the observations of those “unlettered backwoodsmen.” Still, the prolonged terror of the experience clouded many memories. Coping with a broken arm from a fallen tree, one riverboat crewman could not estimate how long the initial shaking lasted. “I do not Quaking

15

know how long this went on, for we were all in great terror, expecting death,” he replied. When his interview ended, he added, “I hope this is what you require, and I am sorry I can tell you so little. When a man expects nothing but instant death it is hard for him to think or notice anything but his danger.”20 As writers, readers, and thinkers, women in the United States were important brokers of information about the earthquakes. Their influence spanned a range of networks, from those of elite scientific observers and national evangelical figures to local private exchanges. Judith Sargent Murray, sister of Winthrop Sargent and an advocate of women’s education, facilitated the publication of her brother’s findings by passing his work along to former president John Adams, who forwarded it to the secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. New Madrid resident Eliza Bryan wrote a lyrical eyewitness account of the earthquakes to evangelist Lorenzo Dow, who reprinted the 1816 letter in many of his publications. Countless other women wrote personal earthquake accounts in letters and diaries, read from the Bible to reassure uneasy crowds, and shared memories of the shaking. Their literacy legitimized their standing as information brokers, even as religious and political institutions excluded them from formal positions of authority. And despite their political marginalization across the United States, and increasingly across Native American societies in the early nineteenth century, women combined their observations with their communities’ traditions of inquiry into the natural world to construct earthquake interpretations that held deep significance in their local communities, reflecting their status as thinkers and trusted knowledge keepers.21 Concerns about the accuracy of reporting on the earthquakes boiled over into a dispute between two newspapers based in Cincinnati. In February 1812, the editors of Western Spy addressed a charge from their counterparts at Liberty Hall that they had exaggerated the number of shocks felt in the city. Western Spy journalists appealed to the city’s citizens, “respectable for their number and intelligence, their diligence and accuracy of observations,” to confirm that three times as many shocks occurred than had been reported previously. The paper then cited a previous yellow fever outbreak in the mid-­Atlantic to warn its readership about the dangers of underestimating the scope of disasters. Officials in New York and Philadelphia had denied the disease’s pervasiveness in order to protect the reputations of their cities. In covering up the extent of the epidemic, city leaders, the Western Spy claimed, “wantonly sacrificed hundreds of lives, which might have been saved by a timely flight from the seat of pestilence—and thus narrow preju-

16Quaking

dice, fortified by avarice and self-­interest, warred against humanity.” While the inhabitants of Cincinnati might not have been in “imminent danger,” the newspaper cautioned that underestimating the number of tremors could have deadly consequences. Western Spy’s editors also accused Liberty Hall of its own exaggerations. In an account that East Coast newspapers reprinted, a late January issue of Liberty Hall contained a letter describing how “millions of trees that were embedded in the mud” resurfaced on the Mississippi River. But in the original letter, the Western Spy claimed, “the word millions is not to be found throughout the whole of it.”22 As East Coast readers sifted through these early reports from closer to the epicenter, a man-­made disaster struck Virginia’s capital city. On the evening of December 26, 1811, flames engulfed the Richmond Theater, killing the state’s governor and seventy-­one other people. Virginians had felt the earthquake ten days prior, but this local tragedy gripped the public more than the faint shaking. Evangelicals seized on the fire’s location to argue for moral reform. They viewed theatergoing as a frivolous activity, like drinking alcohol and dancing, that God had punished with fire. Pamphlets and newspaper columns argued back and forth about divine intentionality with accusations of “sanctified bigotry” and minds “cramped by stupidity,” prompting readers to call for more civil debate.23 While people in the immediate area were understandably more concerned about the theater fire’s singular significance, observers nationwide situated the inferno into the larger sequence of events in the fearful Annus Mirabilis. “Whether these things are ominous or not, one thing is certain, this is a time of extraordinaries,” wrote a preacher in North Carolina. From New Orleans, Governor William C. C. Claiborne could not help but notice his attendance at a theater during the second major temblor on February 7. “The train of reflection to which this subject naturally leads, presents anew to my view the heart-­rending Scene which took place at Richmond in Virginia,” he wrote. And in the trans-­Appalachian West, it was not unusual for U.S. settlers’ letters to shift seamlessly between the threats posed by disasters and Native Americans. One writer found the earthquakes “much more terible than the Indians.” Another followed a detailed description of shattered chimneys with an ominous prediction: “We expect to hear of some great calamity some where as it respects Indian affairs.” From his post in St. Louis, territorial official Frederick Bates complained that a woman did not visit him there because she was “frightened by Indians, Earthquakes & Epidemics like all the rest of the world.” He dreaded Missouri becoming “noth-

Quaking

17

ing but a place of exile for Robbers & Outlaws in a few years.” Illinois territorial governor Ninian Edwards added, “It is impossible for me to give you a just conception of the terror that pervades this country.”24 Rumors of rebellion, inclement weather, and disruptions to trade compounded the fears of slave owners in plantation zones during the earthquakes. “Blood and Fury why dont I hear from you,” wrote Mississippi plantation owner Frederick Kimball to a correspondent in North Carolina in early February 1812. “I think you must write sometimes to Let me know whither you are dead or not. . . . We know nor Fear Nothing but earthquakes in this Country,” he continued. In fact, Kimball had much more to fear. Situated in the southwestern corner of Mississippi Territory, threats from humans and the environment alike surrounded him. Only a year prior, as many as 500 enslaved people had conspired to march on New Orleans from the German Coast plantations where they lived along the Mississippi River. While the uprising—one of the largest in U.S. history—was quickly and violently put down, it left plantation owners across the lower Mississippi River valley and beyond uneasy. Territorial officials worried about their militia’s ability to protect the region by land and sea. From New Orleans, there were rumors of another slave revolt on Christmas Eve 1811, and a U.S. Navy officer described the Gulf coast as “infested with privateers, pirates, and smugglers.” Kimball’s Mississippi plantation was only about one hundred miles upriver. His letter captured his consternation at the array of problems confronting him during the winter of 1812. Living on the outer edge of U.S. settlement with his fortunes embedded in people living and working against their wills, he surveyed a disquieting scene outside his window. It had recently snowed fifteen inches, and the enslaved people around him, particularly the elderly, were sick from the unusually wintery weather. The earthquakes made it nearly impossible to descend the Mississippi River to deliver plantation goods to New Orleans. Another plantation owner, Tennessean Andrew Jackson, corroborated the earthquake’s disruptions to the slave economy. He sought to send enslaved people from his plantation to his in-­laws in Natchez, but “the convulsed state of the Earth and water from the frequent shocks of Earthquake” led him to suppose that there would be very little traffic on the Mississippi River during the spring of 1812. The shaking in Kimball’s neighborhood also threatened to split two houses in half. Living on the forefront of the U.S. plantation complex already made his position precarious.25 The earthquakes and impending war revealed the unsteady origins of the sprawling U.S. plantation system that became entrenched in the Deep South over the decades to follow. A similar scenario of mounting fear applied 18Quaking

to the northwestern corner of the plantation complex, where a gathering of enslaved people raised slave owners’ alarms around Louisville. In mid-­ February 1812, around the time of the last major earthquake, jailers held between fifteen and twenty enslaved people for questioning before releasing them on the promise that they would not congregate together again.26 These mutually reinforcing U.S. fears of Indian attacks, slave revolts, and land damage stemmed from related transformations in the early nineteenth century: rapid territorial and population growth. Through a combination of treaties, military conquest, and squatting, U.S. territory had nearly doubled by the onset of the War of 1812. Tremendous population growth followed suit, from 3.9 million people in 1790 to 7.3 million people two decades later. While Jeffersonian Republicans hailed the new opportunities for yeomen farmers west of the Appalachian Mountains, this expansion left Federalists fearful of national overextension and the dilution of national political power to states in the nation’s South and West. Kentuckian and Federalist Joseph Ficklin hoped that the earthquakes would quell this western migration. In a letter to his fellow Federalist Mitchill, Ficklin assailed the American “spirit of wandering.” He wished that the earthquake would bury it and hurt the sale of public lands west of the Mississippi River. “For my own part, I am pleased in viewing the benefits which my country will derive from this great shock,” he wrote.27 If only temporarily, Ficklin got his wish, as the War of 1812 briefly forestalled western migration. Working in tandem with Native American allies in the Old Northwest, the British threatened western U.S. settlement. With impressment, a policy of removing American sailors from their ships and forcing them to serve in the British navy, the British also impeded U.S. overseas shipping and naval operations in the Atlantic. The Republican presidential administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison responded to impressment with a full embargo on U.S. trade overseas, a move that crippled ports and enraged Federalists. In his annual message to Congress in early November 1811, President Madison decried “several murders and depredations committed by Indians,” as well as coastal “scenes, not less derogatory to the dearest of our national rights, than vexatious to the regular course of our trade.” Over the next seven months, the U.S. Congress debated going to war. Republican “War Hawks” hailed the merits of defending the new nation’s territorial integrity and maritime activity and possibly even seizing Canada from the British.28 As national politicians wrangled over the embargo and renewing military action against Great Britain, new communities with alternative visions Quaking

19

of authority and order were constituting themselves on the nation’s western fringes. Filling a void where violence, itinerancy, and generally hardscrabble living had led to weak social bonds, evangelical congregations anchored U.S. community formation in the trans-­Appalachian West. Alienated from eastern political and economic clout, communities of believers turned to often-­ marginal figures who claimed direct access to the divine authority that determined the fates of their souls. These leaders and their followers eschewed the book learning and high birth that had previously constituted qualifications for church leadership. Evangelicals favored ecstatic expression and improvisational oratory over staid decorum and composed speaking, conversion experiences and crowds of spiritual equals over liturgies and hierarchy. The earthquakes accelerated rapid congregational growth, particularly among Baptists and Methodists, who kept detailed records of church membership. Baptist and Methodist methods of record keeping reflected the denominations’ histories and institutional structures. Founded in the seventeenth century by opponents of both the English state church and the practice of infant baptism, the Baptist Church urged congregational autonomy. Its record keeping in the early nineteenth century was intensely local and focused on congregant behavior. Alongside surging church attendance figures, Baptists noted church members who missed services, drank alcohol, and engaged in other wayward behaviors. By contrast, the Methodists had a more hierarchical institutional structure dating back to their denomination’s mid-­eighteenth-­century founding by the charismatic and widely traveled preacher John Wesley. Methodist congregations reported their membership figures to a national body, which published those figures in annual reports.29 Baptists and Methodists joined Presbyterians and Congregationalists as denominations anchoring the growth of Protestant Christianity in the early United States. By the time of the earthquakes, Presbyterians had more of an institutional presence in the trans-­Appalachian West than the Congregationalists, whose church grew out of Puritan New England. Though they rejected the Baptist and Methodist emphasis on individual conversion experiences and revivalism, Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers nonetheless pointed to the earthquakes as signs of divine judgment and the need for piety. In sum, despite their many theological flash points and institutional differences, leaders in each of these Protestant denominations, as well as unaffiliated itinerant ministers and those in smaller, tight-­knit communities like the Shakers and Moravians, read great national spiritual significance into the earthquakes. Forged in the backcountries of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, upstate New 20Quaking

York, and other geographical margins in the early U.S. republic, a “Second Great Awakening” of Protestantism eventually expanded into cities, assuming social and political prominence as the bedrock of later antebellum social reform movements. But before debates about slavery and temperance became central national issues, what were the larger social and political consequences of early trans-­Appalachian evangelicalism? In the absence of strong political institutions and amid the threat of war with Britain and substate violence between pockets of U.S. settlers and American Indians, settlers looked to preachers as the primary guides for social and moral order in the U.S. territorial periphery. Concerned with individual salvation and sin on individual, communal, and national levels, evangelical preachers sought to link their objectives to a nation-­state founded without a state church. Although Presbyterians and Congregationalists disagreed with many hallmarks of evangelical theology and practice, they largely shared in evangelical alarm at the earthquakes’ national spiritual significance. The earthquakes magnified the urgency of their messages about sin and redemption and bolstered their claims to authority, revealing a vision of nationhood grounded in Protestant Christianity. This concept of Christian nationhood provoked tensions within and among religious and political institutions in the early republic. Being subsumed at the national level while remaining foundational to local order also fed an evangelical self-­narrative of political marginalization that would reverberate through centuries.30 Along with a series of other natural phenomena, the earthquakes heightened anxieties in the early U.S. republic about territorial expansion, warfare, the power of the nation-­state, and the role of religion in it. A merchant in Philadelphia found cause for alarm in “this period of great events,” listing examples of geopolitical and environmental instability together: “the sanguinary war in Europe,” “the paralyzed state of the commerce of [his] country,” “the recent appearance of a strange comet,” and “the frequency & great extent of the earthquakes.” A correspondent with John Adams located the earthquakes among “numerous events out of the ordinary course of things.” And in The Year: A Poem in Three Cantoes, aspiring poet William Leigh Pierce captured these intertwined fears in verse: O’er eighteen hundred twelve what tears shall flow, What crowds of orphans wail that year of wo! Nature convulsed!—with terrors shook the earth, And omens usher in the monstrous birth!— Along the blue expanse with flaming locks [the comet of 1811] Quaking

21

. . . Lo! in the south what fearful terrors spread [earthquakes] Lo! in the south he builds a dismal pyre [the Richmond fire] Lo! in the south he rolls the tide of war [the War of 1812] Alas! what next? what greater evils wait? What heavier griefs? what darker doom of fate?31 Abijah Bigelow’s concern that the earthquakes and other upheaval might be “ominous of national calamity” could well have applied to Cherokees, Creeks, Shawnees, and other Native Americans. Just as the United States was experimenting in a new form of governance and adjusting to major religious and geopolitical changes, American Indian polities were charting new, and often conflicting, courses for responding to aggressive U.S. expansion in the early nineteenth century. Though Native communities faced a common external threat in the expansionist United States, their structures of governance and strategies for dealing with that threat set them on different courses through the War of 1812. The ways in which Creek, Cherokee, and Shawnee leaders, among others, situated the earthquakes into their various platforms for responding to U.S. encroachment offer insights into a host of tensions confronting those living in Indian country between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. While intertribal militants argued for a religiously inspired, collective military effort, established tribal leaders often urged restraint. Among Creeks, Cherokees, and Ohio Valley Indian communities, advocates of nationalization clashed with town authorities who governed on more local levels. The women farmers who anchored their matrilineal societies saw the possibility of more war threaten their crops and their social standing. Young men for whom land loss constrained opportunities to prove themselves in warfare and hunting often opposed the caution of older generations. And everyone argued about tradition—the loss of cultural customs and lifeways and the best ways to recover them. These tensions all played out amid the threat of war between the United States and Britain, as well as the comet, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena that captivated all North Americans. In their ritual lives and varied forms of social and political organization, Native people across the Southeast and Ohio Valley sought balance and reciprocity, ideals that Euro American diseases and demand for trade goods and land often undermined. To adapt to population loss from disease and violence and to optimize trade and their diplomatic standing, Native Americans readily incorporated other Native and Euro American 22Quaking

people into their kinship networks as trading partners, diplomatic allies, and family members. The melding of various Indigenous and European worlds was more extensive in the Ohio Valley and larger Great Lakes region, where many different Indigenous groups gathered to live in agrarian villages that hosted Euro American fur traders and missionaries. Ohio Valley Indian governance was local and town based, but ritual and social life reflected this regional cosmopolitanism. Trade, diplomacy, and kinship networks anchored by women linked villages in an extensive regional web of social relations in which political and religious authority was diverse and diffuse. In the Southeast, Cherokees were by no means isolated from broader trade networks and outside Native and European influences, but over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their diplomatic and political consolidation had resulted in less localism, more ceremonial uniformity, and a broad national system of kinship. Having overthrown an ancient theocracy, Cherokees also were wary of the fusion of political and religious leadership. The Creeks underwent a similar though less extensive consolidation. Their politics remained more town based, their kinship systems and ceremonial orders varied by town, and tribal members’ political and religious roles were often intertwined. Across these regions, prophets who accumulated spiritual authority and sought alternative forms of governance constituted major threats to established Native leaders already contending with U.S. pressure. Variations in culture, kinship, and politics among Cherokees, Creeks, and Shawnees help to explain how powerful their threats ultimately became.32 The American pressure that Native polities faced in these regions was not only territorial, but also social and economic. Beginning in the 1790s, the United States sponsored missionaries and military officers to establish themselves as agents of “civilization” among Native communities in the Southeast and the Ohio Valley. Designed to mitigate the financial costs of military conflict and to open up land for U.S. settlers, the plan encouraged agricultural reforms, Christian education, and household restructuring. Advocates of the scheme hoped to remake Indian country in the image of yeoman farming communities in the United States: small landholding households headed by men whose nuclear families attended Protestant churches. Land that these hypothetical transformed societies no longer needed would be turned over peaceably to U.S. settlers. Certain Native leaders agreed to host missionaries and American agents, and they accepted aspects of the program’s social and economic reforms. English language literacy, for instance, was a valuable skill for projecting Native Americans’ “civilized” status, and thereby their legitimacy, as sovereign peoples. Given its aims, the plan also fed interQuaking

23

nal divisions within Native societies, as opponents rightfully questioned the underlying imperial designs of what U.S. officials pitched as benevolence. Among Indigenous communities and between missionaries and tribal contacts, debates about the earthquakes’ meaning reflected these divisions.33 The earthquakes’ toll on Cherokee land had not been as dramatic as their impact farther west. Still, the shaking jostled large trees and made it difficult to walk. Sinkholes twenty feet deep and forty yards around had formed in one Cherokee town. Recent flooding threatened livestock, and temperatures had been fluctuating drastically.34 Human affairs seemed equally unbalanced. After allying with the British in the American Revolution, Cherokees faced reprisals from encroaching U.S. militias well into the 1790s. They employed different strategies to confront settlers’ violence and desire for land. While the majority of Cherokees concluded a series of land cession treaties and agreed to expand U.S. trading access to their remaining territory, Chickamauga Cherokees formed breakaway towns to continue fighting. In the wake of lost hunting ground and the rapid decline of the deerskin trade in the late eighteenth century, certain wealthy Cherokee men adopted large-­scale agriculture and racial slavery. This economic restructuring departed from the traditional balance between male hunting and female farming that had defined Cherokee gender roles and land use for centuries.35 In the early nineteenth century, Cherokee advocates of nationalization accelerated their efforts, stoking political tensions that carried over into legal and cultural matters. In 1807, a band of prominent Cherokees killed Doublehead, a chief who had accepted bribes from the United States and ceded territory. The killing signaled the lengths to which Cherokees would go to secure a new order of collectivity and consistency in diplomacy with the United States. In the ensuing years, Cherokees formalized a national police force, shifted certain legal and political matters away from matrilineal kin groups to male-­dominated national jurisdiction, and brought the Chickamauga towns back into national affairs. But just as the Chickamauga rift officially ended, another opened, as about 1,200 Cherokee people, one-­tenth of the total population, agreed to a U.S. offer to relocate to present-­day Arkansas. Their stay was short-­lived, however, as the earthquakes turned their lands into swamps and forced them to move again.36 Amid this consolidation of authority, fractious council meetings reflected some Cherokees’ abiding concern with cultural devolution and the need for maintaining traditional lifeways and rituals. Before an audience of women adorned with turtle shells filled with pebbles and men chanting an 24Quaking

ancient song, a man named Charles rose to relate a message from the “Great Spirit” at one such council. “The Great Spirit was angry, and had withdrawn his protection” of the Cherokee people for their adoption of white modes of dress, communication, labor, and housing. “They must kill their cats, cut short their frocks . . . discard all the fashions of whites, abandon the use of any communication with each other except by word of mouth, and give up their mills, their houses, and all the arts learned by the white people,” Charles explained. After purging these trappings of Euro American culture, game would return, white people would vanish, and “the Great Spirit would whisper in their [Cherokees’] dreams.” Those who did not obey risked being “cut off from the living.” The Ridge, a prominent Cherokee leader who was one of Doublehead’s executioners, sought to temper the enthusiastic response to Charles’s declaration by questioning the authenticity of the message and asserting that such radicalism would lead to war with the United States. The frenzied crowd then attacked The Ridge, exemplifying the charged nature of cultural questions among early nineteenth-­century Cherokees. The earthquakes intensified this debate.37 The Creeks lived in a more diffuse confederation of towns to the south and west of their Cherokee rivals. In the prior century, they had used the geographical division between Upper and Lower Creek towns to their diplomatic advantage, but dwindling opportunities for play-­off diplomacy among European empires increased calls for centralized authority to confront the United States. As it was for the Cherokees, Creek collectivization was fitful. Creek towns were accustomed to autonomy in matters of governance and justice, and kinship did not extend across the confederation. Growing divides in affluence also threatened to erode a communal system of wealth redistribution in favor of individual accumulation. Like their Cherokee counterparts, certain Creek elites adopted racial slavery and large-­scale agriculture. Creek cultural cleavages also widened as the United States encouraged its “civilization” program. Divisions over governance, wealth, and culture became the axes of disunion in the Red Stick War of 1813–14, a Creek civil conflict related to the War of 1812.38 The earthquakes began in Creek country only months after the controversial establishment of a U.S. road that bisected Creek land and the visit of Tecumseh, who sought support for his intertribal movement in the Ohio Valley. The federal road was a visible manifestation of territorial impurity. Creek leaders complained that it encouraged illicit trade in liquor, and U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins admitted that the thoroughfare facilitated the flow of “loose worthless characters” through his agency on their way west. In a diQuaking

25

rect appeal to President Madison in May 1811, a Creek leader explained that he could not control the “young people” who were illegally charging tolls, harassing foreign travelers, and killing livestock that strayed from traveling parties. “What land we have left is but large enough to live and walk on,” he added. This was also the fourth year of a major drought in which the Creek corn supply was severely depleted. When rains did arrive during the winter of 1812, flooding washed out the U.S. road and destroyed Hawkins’s mill. Some Creeks began to read greater significance into these combined natural portents and rumors of war between the British–­Ohio Indian alliance and the Americans. With the exception of a couple Creeks who traveled north to visit Tecumseh and his followers, however, they largely rejected the intertribal leader’s overtures. But violence later erupted into full-­fledged war by the summer of 1813, as a contingent of Creek militants known as Red Sticks began to attack Creeks and U.S. settlers alike in a conflict better understood as a civil war than a round of postrevolutionary violence between Native Americans and U.S. settlers. Prophets claiming the ability to manipulate natural phenomena like earthquakes galvanized their Red Stick followers. Despite the Creeks’ communication with intertribal militants in the Ohio Valley, this was a homegrown uprising staged on Creek terms.39 While Ohio Valley Indians shared concerns with southeastern Indians about territorial infiltration and cultural loss, the geopolitical context and ideological foundations framing the communities’ responses to U.S. encroachment were markedly different. They lived in multiethnic towns that comprised groups indigenous to the region and relative newcomers displaced by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and Anglo American settler encroachment from the mid-­Atlantic. The region was rich ground for intertribal confederacies and their new forms of social and political organization, because polities there were accustomed to living with or near other groups. These communities also had long been in contact with Christian missionaries. While few Ohio Valley Indians wholly renounced their traditional spiritual customs for Christianity, intertribal prophets in the region often incorporated Christian concepts such as sin and Hell into their messages of unity and renewal. By contrast, the Native South contained much larger and more discrete communities that held territory, language, governance, and ritual life in common, and their prophets’ ideas reflected less Christian influence. The Creek and Cherokee Nations that emerged in the early nineteenth century had their own obstacles to unity, but intertribal confederacies made more strategic sense farther north in the Ohio Valley, where daily life itself was more intertribal. 26Quaking

Shawnee strategies for navigating colonialism fluctuated between dispersal and coalescence. As some Ohio Valley Indian leaders urged unity to confront settler encroachment between the Seven Years’ War and the War of 1812, others insisted on decentralization and migration. Following clashes with the colony of Virginia over hunting grounds in Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774, several divisions of Shawnees crossed the Mississippi River to settle in the Missouri Bootheel. Those who remained in the Ohio Valley were critical to extending the “long war” in the region, which spanned more than six decades and eroded any useful distinction between “colonial” and “national” periodization in the region’s history. But Indian military resistance in this long war was neither constant nor unanimous. Following the Revolutionary War, a confederacy composed of Shawnees, Miamis, and others launched a military campaign against encroaching U.S. settlers, and the army dispatched to secure U.S. presence in the Native homelands that Congress had renamed the “Northwest Territory.” After being humiliated in 1790 and 1791, American soldiers destroyed crops and villages and defeated the confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, resulting in major land cessions with the following year’s Treaty of Greenville. Opposition to the Treaty of Greenville, and land cessions extended farther west by the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, galvanized a new generation of Indian resistance to American settlement in most of present-­day Ohio and west into Indiana. The treaties also stoked tension between younger men like Tecumseh and veterans of the prior confederacy. Urging a more conciliatory approach to U.S. intrusions into the Ohio Country, leaders like the Shawnee Black Hoof and his generation of prominent former militants, including Miami leader Little Turtle, consolidated their power and enhanced their claims to being “civilized” in U.S. eyes by welcoming Protestant missionaries, agricultural reforms, and the U.S. annuities that came with compliance. In enhancing their status and urging men to take up the plow, these elder statesmen foreclosed hunting and war-­making opportunities for younger men and overturned the agricultural traditions cultivated by women.40 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Brothers, drew on this generational tension and related concerns about land and culture loss, alcohol abuse, and witchcraft in their bid to dissolve traditional structures of authority and to renew military conflict. Formerly a doctor and a “very wicked man” prone to bouts of drunkenness, Tecumseh’s brother fell into a trance in which he had a vision depicting the paths of righteous and sinful people. Renaming himself Tenskwatawa, or “the Open Door,” the Shawnee Prophet became a spiritual medium who could “dream to God.” As with other Ohio Quaking

27

Valley intertribal leaders dating back to at least the mid-­eighteenth century, the Christian concept of sin figured prominently in Tenskwatawa’s vision and teaching, a fact that initially endeared him to the Shaker missionaries who interviewed him in 1807. He sought renewal through reforms in masculine conduct. Among the worst sins that Indian men could commit were “witchcraft, poisoning people, fighting, murdering, drinking whiskey, and beating their wives.”41 As much as the movement urged a return to tradition, it also sought to revolutionize Indigenous rituals and political organization. The Shawnee Brothers banned the use of traditional medicine bags and songs passed down through generations, and they separated followers from their families and original communities. Tenskwatawa established a new settlement at Prophetstown, a site at the confluence of the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers, where he and Tecumseh demanded absolute loyalty from followers of different backgrounds. As a U.S. official described, Tenskwatawa was “always reserving Supreme authority to himself, viz, that he might be considered the head of the whole of the different Nations of Indians, as he only, could see and converse with the Great Spirit.” He hoped to amass enough followers to force noncommittal Indians to live at Prophetstown also. By consolidating power and insisting that followers inhabit a single settlement, Tenskwatawa sought to mute tribal differences. He also risked alienating those who refused to subscribe to his strict lifestyle codes or remain at Prophetstown. In the case of the Potawatomis, whose own prophet later fell out with Tenskwatawa, the movement’s austerity eventually compromised its military might.42 At the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, Tenskwatawa initiated the conflict that he had foretold. The battle’s circumstances and outcome have been widely chronicled yet consistently revised. While Tecumseh was on his southern recruiting trip, Tenskwatawa ordered his followers to attack General William Henry Harrison’s nearby army encampment in the early hours of November 7. Harrison’s force took major casualties, and he later drew criticism for falling prey to the surprise attack, but the U.S. soldiers destroyed Prophetstown and dispersed its inhabitants. Having instructed his forces not to fight the Americans while he was traveling, Tecumseh claimed to Harrison that the battle would not have occurred if he had been present, and he admitted that he was “much exasperated against his brother for his precipitancy.”43 The consequences of the Battle of Tippecanoe for Tenskwatawa’s ability to recruit and organize followers were less decisive than those for Prophetstown. At least in the early days of 1812, the prevailing opinion among other 28Quaking

U.S. observers and their Native informants was that the Shawnee Prophet was lucky to be alive. One American official in Ohio wrote that Tenskwatawa was “in a disconsolate situation.” Days after the battle, Winnebagos at Prophetstown questioned the Prophet’s spiritual power. They called him a “liar” and “bound him with cords” for claiming the night before the battle that he could kill half Harrison’s army and render the other half “bewildered” with the “power of his art.” Harrison’s informant believed that the Shawnee leader would be killed. Tenskwatawa was contrite, though he deflected criticism by blaming his wife for compromising the power of his “incantations before the battle.” Estimates of the number of Prophetstown’s remaining followers ranged from a handful to hundreds, though these assessments almost certainly underestimated those who were loyal but scattered across the region. Miami chief Little Turtle reported that Tenskwatawa’s group had been reduced to as few as eight. But by the spring of 1812, the movement had gathered momentum again, and U.S. officials were concerned anew. Indeed, Tenskwatawa’s earthquake prophecy may help explain why the intertribal movement had reconstituted itself.44 Even in the months before the earth began shaking, a combination of human and natural phenomena alarmed people within and beyond Cherokee, Creek, Ohio Valley Indian, and U.S. settler communities. As the Great Comet of 1811 illuminated fall skies and reports of the Battle of Tippecanoe circulated alongside rumors of war between the United States and Great Britain, North Americans were already drawing connections between environmental and geopolitical matters during the Annus Mirabilis. The earthquakes and months of aftershocks strengthened those connections and magnified their fears. In bids to remake the courses of their respective nations, earthquake commentators capitalized on territorial, political, and social anxieties in the early nineteenth century. U.S. territorial expansion resulted in new opportunities for small landholders, but encroachment into Native territory led to violence and domestic concerns about social dislocation, gaps in governance, and the rapid pace of expansion. Earthquake-­damaged land and the impending War of 1812 introduced new variables for calculating the costs of growth. In Indian country, the loss of territory was foundational to a matrix of concerns about culture, spirit, and governance. The quivering land exhibited just how pressing and unresolved these issues were. And firsthand accounts near the epicenter capture just how terrified Quaking

29

and confused those who experienced the furor were. In seeking to understand the broader collective significance of people’s earthquake interpretations—how they used the natural disorder to advance contrasting visions of human order in the early nineteenth century—the visceral experiences of these massive disturbances cannot be overstated. When post–­Civil War historians in Tennessee interviewed elderly people about the state’s earliest days, respondents listed the earthquakes among the most noteworthy events of their lifetimes. In the 1960s, Quapaw elder Maude Supernaw, also known by her given name, Mi-­koi-­she, and her baptismal name, Mary Maude Angel, sat for oral history interviews with her family members. Among major topics in Quapaw history and culture, Supernaw described Quapaw responses to the earthquakes.45 Their magnitude obviously varied by location, but the way that the shaking bound people together in a common and alarming experience was unprecedented. While observers read different meanings into the tumult, they did not deny its significance. To explain this disorienting array of portents, people surveyed the immediate human issues that surrounded them; they also summoned their communities’ long-­standing systems of knowledge about the operation of the natural world and its relationship with human order.

30Quaking

2

Knowledge Understanding early nineteenth-­century ideas about the earthquakes’ causes and larger significance demands reaching across cultures and through time to consider various lineages of knowledge about the operation of the natural world. These lineages had their roots in the ancient stories that people told to explain their relationships with nature and the reasons why phenomena like tremors, storms, comets, and eclipses occurred. Over time, people adapted earthquake stories to suit their particular historical circumstances. But a common unresolved tension remained: To what extent were humans responsible for the earthquakes, and if so, what actions could they take to make the shaking subside? American Indians had long pointed to tremors as signs of disease and impurity. While foundational elements of Indigenous cosmologies—often, snakes separating the underworld from the earthly layer—were directly responsible for the shaking, it was incumbent on humans to undertake rituals in order to answer for the imbalance. When encounters with Europeans accelerated outbreaks of disease, Native Americans advanced their preexisting understanding of the links between tremors and illness in order to critique colonialism. They directed their criticisms both at colonizers for their greed and at their own communities for ceding land and adopting Euro American lifeways. Early modern European thinkers merged biblical examples of earthquakes as divine punishment or signs of revelation with ancient Greco-­ Roman theories about the natural mechanisms responsible for earthquakes and an Enlightenment proclivity for testing theories with individual experi31

ence and observation. This fusion of sacred and empirical thinking was not limited to formally educated natural philosophers. In the accounts of backcountry Anglo Americans, concerns about sin and judgment often joined detailed observations about air pressure, cloud cover, and the timing and direction of shaking. African-­descended peoples’ ideas about earthquakes reflected the influence of Christianity and the slave plantation contexts in which many people found themselves interpreting the shaking ground. Indigenous African ideas about the consequences of neglecting rituals mirrored those of Native North America, but determining the extent to which those notions informed interpretations of an isolated event like an earthquake, much less African American ritual and culture over centuries, involves more speculation than even the most flexible interdisciplinary methods might allow. In addition to investigating eighteenth-­century Black thought about natural phenomena, it is also necessary to leap forward in the nineteenth century and project back in order to characterize this intellectual lineage more fully. Among all people in early nineteenth-­century North America, then, the question of divine influence on earthquakes was about proximity rather than existence. God, or divine power more generally, had set the earth in motion; it was up to humans decode the sacred message and determine its gravity and urgency. Across lines of race, class, and creed, people claiming direct access to the divine emerged from their societies’ margins to argue that the earthquakes were signs of the imminent need for the reordering of politics, territory, and culture. But before these emergent figures sought to rally others around their earthquake-­inflected visions of order, people shared in the common exercise of summoning their ancestral knowledge to understand the shaking. Given the confines of slavery, the contours of early modern Black thinking about natural phenomena in North America are difficult to trace but important to recognize. In her memoir, abolitionist Mary Prince wrote about an earthquake during her time in bondage in Bermuda at the turn of nineteenth century. Prince captured common features in Black accounts of earthquakes on slave plantations: divine judgment and shared fear among enslaved people and slaveholders alike. On the day of the shaking, her owners believed that she had intentionally broken an old clay jar. Prince had already suffered two rounds of flogging, and her owner was resting to deliver more lashes when tremors rattled the house, collapsing part of the roof and forcing 32Knowledge

her to drag her sore, bloodied body to the house’s front steps. “Oh I thought the end of all things near at hand,” she remembered. “It was an awful day for us all.” Prince’s retelling did not explicitly link the shaking to divine judgment about the unjust nature of her beating, but given the general tenor of her memoir, she likely intended for readers to draw that conclusion implicitly. And the fact of sometimes devastating seismological activity in the Caribbean Islands and Bermuda—notably an earthquake in Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1693; those in Haiti in 1751, 1770, and 1784; and one in Bermuda in 1817—suggests that in Black thought under slavery, natural phenomena registered as evidence of the institution’s injustice and the divine punishment of enslavers.1 Though he died in 1806, the earthquakes would not have surprised Black intellectual Benjamin Banneker. The self-­taught polymath—and direct challenger of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about Black inferiority—was also a keen observer of natural phenomena. He published almanacs containing astronomical calculations and kept detailed personal notes about his observations. On a December night in 1790, he awoke to what he thought was thunder. Seeing a cloudless sky, Banneker concluded that a slight tremor was responsible for the shaking and sound. Banneker became a foundational figure for later nineteenth-­century Black intellectuals. By studying and contributing to American arts and sciences, they continued his legacy of debunking racist assumptions about formal educational achievement.2 Reactions to a major meteor shower in 1833 and a devastating 1886 earthquake in Charleston show how later nineteenth-­century Black thinkers focused on divine judgment. In interviews with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, formerly enslaved people discussed both natural phenomena. Like the elderly Tennesseans who counted the earthquakes among the most significant events in their lives, these events were engrained in community memories at least half a century later, sometimes by people who were not yet born when the tremors occurred. As in the case of Prince’s experience in Bermuda and plantation-­based accounts of the New Madrid earthquakes, enslaved people and their owners shared in a common experience of fear and wonder about the meteors. African American memories of the phenomena also reflected Christian influences. People fell on their knees in prayer, concerned that the world would end or that the meteor shower betokened some other calamity.3 Because WPA interviewees in South Carolina had lived through the Charleston earthquake of 1886, their memories of the quake and its religious impact were much more detailed. Charley Barber had just sat down for an Knowledge

33

evening revival when the church began shaking. A congregant exclaimed that the devil was under the church and attempting to pry the building off its foundations to take it to Hell. People absconded to a railroad track, where they rode out the last tremors until dawn. The revival continued the following night, and as Barber remembered, there was an unprecedented outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Julia Woodbury related a debate about whether the source of the shaking was the devil or God. Believing the devil “had no such power,” Woodbury argued that it was only from God’s power that the earth could shake. Another woman remembered that the earthquake was necessary “to shake religion” in her husband. Reading religious significance into the tremors transcended levels of formal education. Thomas Dixon, a recent graduate of Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, converted to Christianity and resolved to become a Baptist preacher during the earthquake.4 Projecting these earthquake and meteor shower responses back to 1811 and 1812 to make up for the dearth of African American commentary on the New Madrid convulsions poses opportunities and obstacles. Christianity, particularly the evangelical emphasis on a conversion experience, oriented a range of people’s reactions to the tremors. The number of African Americans in evangelical congregations in the areas most affected by the earthquakes grew substantially during the shaking. Also, at least two individual accounts of African American evangelical conversion in 1811 and 1812 parallel accounts of the 1886 earthquakes. But there were also significant differences in social and historical context that hamper drawing conclusions about early nineteenth-­century African American earthquake responses based on memories in the 1930s, or even on those community memories of the “Night the Stars Fell” in 1833. The confines of bondage and slavery’s limited spread into the Deep South before the War of 1812 meant that fewer African-­descended people felt the most severe shaking. Those who did were not a part of the free, autonomous congregations that anchored post–­Civil War southern Black religious life in places like Charleston. Nonetheless, the growth of trans-­Appalachian evangelicalism in late 1811 and 1812 shows that for African Americans and Euro Americans alike, natural disasters intensified evangelical concerns about sin, conversion, and salvation. With U.S. expansion into the more seismologically active Pacific coast, that trend continued into the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5

34Knowledge

A telling story about illness, transgression, and ritual renewal circulated through Cherokee country during the earthquakes. This narrative addressed what was wrong with tribal land and culture in the early nineteenth century. It also expressed long-­standing Indigenous ideas about the causes and consequences of natural imbalance, revealing a system of knowledge in which beliefs about land, ritual, disease, and disorder were bound together. For its Cherokee audience, the message was grounded in distinctly Cherokee cultural terms, but these conceptual links can be found across time and place in Native North America. American Indians had connected earthquakes and other natural phenomena with illness and imbalance long before the arrival of Europeans. Some shaking was unrelated to human affairs. Cosmological features like massive turtles and snakes, which held up the earth from the underworld, periodically needed to reposition themselves, so occasional tremors were not cause for alarm. But in light of territorial loss, rumors of war, and prophetic movements, months of persistent trembling were another matter. Native earthquake interpreters thus adapted long-­held ideas to suit the pressing circumstances of the early nineteenth century. The Cherokee story began in a cabin with a man sitting pensively with his sick children when the first shocks commenced. Another man clothed in tree leaves entered the cabin with two children of his own. In his arms, the visitor carried one child, whom he called “God.” “I cannot tell you now if God will soon destroy the earth or not. God is, however, not satisfied that the Indians have sold so much land to the white people,” he proclaimed. The garlanded figure cited the sale of the former council town of Tugaloo as especially egregious, and he chastised the Cherokees for neglecting proper rituals before partaking in “the first fruits of the land.” He then pointed to the father’s sick children, explaining, “You are sad because you believe your children are ill; they are really not ill, but have just gotten a little dust inside them.” After instructing the father to boil pieces of bark and serve the elixir to his children, as well as enumerating “other means of curing illnesses,” the visitor departed.6 This prophet’s emphasis on illness and impurity was especially significant considering the central role of health in the Cherokee language. Two fundamental Cherokee concepts are tõhi and osi. As linguists have discussed in work linking the language with Cherokee notions about health, tõhi is the idea that “nature is flowing at its appropriate pace and everything is as it

Knowledge

35

should be,” which can be used in discussions about health. Osi refers to balance. The two terms are used as greetings in the same way that an English speaker might ask, “How are you doing?” Unhealthiness, on a communal or individual level, ensues when flow and balance are interrupted. The linguists have argued that Cherokee speakers view history as “a series of events that relate to the attainment, maintenance, or loss of the states of tõhi and osi.” Consequently, some present-­day Cherokees believe that eighteenth-­ century smallpox epidemics resulted from a loss of natural balance due to overhunting for the deerskin trade. Given Native Americans’ long association of earthquakes with illness and the importance of the concepts of tõhi and osi in the Cherokee language, it follows that Cherokees would have associated the tremors with the community’s declining health.7 Oral histories and stories like this one, relayed by Cherokees to missionaries during the winter of 1812, often employed metaphors that make Native understandings of the natural world seem more mythic than scientific. However, anthropologists and other specialists of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) have shown that Indigenous systems of knowledge are not remnants of a bygone era, but sophisticated and adaptable ways of understanding how the natural world operates and what the human place should be in it. An insistence on the interconnectedness of human and natural orders drives intricate attention to patterns of order and moments of disruption.8 This mode of inquiry has ancient roots. While scholars of archaeoastronomy have established how assiduously Mesoamericans documented their ancient skies, exploring how Native North Americans recorded and understood changes in the earth and sky without more physical evidence is more challenging. Though knowledge may not have been hewn into massive blocks of stone, as in parts of Mesoamerica, this material circumstance must not bolster assumptions that these communities were less concerned with documenting cyclical and sudden change in the natural world, or that there is no way to study these cultures of inquiry. Native North Americans used oral histories to transmit ways of understanding natural phenomena. They also recorded instances of natural phenomena with rock carvings and in less durable materials like dirt, wood, and animal skins. From the Great Plains, winter counts documented major events with individual drawings arranged in a circular pattern on buffalo hides. Some winter counts documented years with earthquakes and meteor showers. In California, where many sacred sites were located near areas of high seismic activity, uneven lines in petroglyph drawings likely signified earthquakes.9 36Knowledge

American Indian interpretations of the New Madrid earthquakes also demonstrated the persistence of Indigenous ways of knowing amid the incursions of Europeans and their microbes. Historians who uncovered European colonialism’s staggering epidemiological toll on Native American populations also argued that mass hysteria and confusion were the prevailing Indigenous responses to these profound disruptions. These scholars cited examples of suicides because of facial disfigurations from smallpox, spiritual leaders powerless to explain the cosmological chaos, and supposed “holy wars” against fur-­bearing creatures for spreading disease. However, historians have since provided a useful corrective to assumptions about cultural loss and societal anomie by arguing for cultural and intellectual continuity without discounting the impact of colonialism. Instead of forsaking the holders of sacred knowledge and abandoning ancient ideas and rituals, people adapted their traditions to confront new obstacles to community balance, order, and health. Explaining phenomena like disease, drought, or earthquakes demanded attention to both traditional ways of knowing and contemporary context. Native interpretations of the earthquakes of 1811–12 and their actions to restore cosmological balance demonstrated this interplay between continuity and adaptation.10 While the infrequency of major earthquakes in the Mississippi River valley complicates the task of considering how ancient Middle Americans understood them, people nonetheless endowed the isolated temblors that did rock the region with great significance. About 3,000 years ago, a community built a mound atop an earthquake-­induced fissure in the Missouri Bootheel. By commemorating physical evidence of this phenomenon with ceremonial architecture, they ascribed importance to the tremors, though their reasoning for covering the fissure with a mound is unclear. Archeologists have suggested that this action could be linked to origin stories in which the first people emerged from the ground or caves, and the mound memorialized their emergence. Furthermore, in many Native North American cosmologies, the universe is composed of three layers: a watery underworld, an island that constitutes this world, and the sky. Covering this portal to the Lower World could have been a way to acknowledge its importance while maintaining separation between strata of the universe, as only powerful but potentially dangerous beings crossed between these divisions. In any case, the region’s people also commemorated ancient earthquakes at other anomalous sites in their landscape. In present-­day Arkansas, cave rock art long predating the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 includes wavy lines similar to those signifying seismicity in rock art along the Pacific coast.11 Knowledge

37

Moving beyond the midcontinent, a fuller picture of Indigenous earthquake inquiry emerges from oral histories and colonial-­era accounts from other regions. Some earthquakes were simply part of natural cycles. The Penobscots of present-­day Maine and eastern Canada attributed the shaking to an underworld being that periodically readjusted its position in an underground lair. Capable of living on land and in the water, massive reptiles like turtles and snakes often held up the island that constitutes the universe’s middle layer, separating it from the watery world beneath it. Among people descended from medieval Mississippians, large snakes supported the earth at its four cardinal corners. Flat necklace beads found in these medieval archeological sites depicted the snakes’ cosmological responsibility. Because they shouldered great weight, these reptiles periodically shifted positions and made the ground shake. The Delawares and Wyandots, many of whom relocated to the Ohio Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offered similar accounts of a great turtle who held up the continent on its back. According to the Wyandots, “Sometimes he becomes weary of remaining so long in one position. Then he shifts his weight, and moves his feet. And the Great Island trembles.” The Yuchis, a group affiliated with the Creek Confederacy, attributed earthquakes to an underground being that shook the ground to check how much water the Middle Layer contained. Earthquakes were thus regular consequences of the occasional rebalancing of the universe’s layers. In this capacity, the tremors were unrelated to human affairs.12 But as the Cherokee story shows, some earthquakes were punishments or warnings for humans failing to carry out rituals or misbehaving in other ways. The scale and frequency of these temblors set them apart from those caused by the earth-­bearing reptiles’ occasional repositioning. Ritual and illness were at the heart of the Cherokee story. The prophetic visitor to the sick children’s cabin chastised his people for failing to undertake the Green Corn Ceremony, an annual event that anchors many southeastern Indian ritual calendars. Through days of successive feasting, fasting, and purging before the “first fruits” of the corn harvest, the community cleanses itself of impurities and ill will. Green Corn then climaxes with the extinguishing of the previous year’s flame and the lighting of a new one, a tradition that made selling the site of the first Cherokee fire at Tugaloo even more egregious.13 Across North America, earthquakes were warnings against neglecting rituals and behaving improperly. They are especially prominent in Hopi oral histories, beginning with one of many “tales of destruction” capturing a common thread in the tribal historical consciousness: regeneration through 38Knowledge

total annihilation, often by earthquakes. After years of infighting and sexual licentiousness in one community, the earth cracked open and swallowed it whole. For Hopis in the arid Southwest, ensuring a constant supply of water through ritual was critical. They did so by honoring water serpents that lived in springs and provided the water. Failing to make proper arrangements for the snakes could have devastating consequences. According to a Hopi account, “If the ceremonies are not carried out properly, the fate of the village will be sealed when it is swallowed by the earth to the accompaniment of new cataclysmic earthquakes.” Furthermore, California Indians interviewed in the early twentieth century believed that “the tilting of the earth” caused earthquakes when “deerskin and jumping dances” did not bring the earth back into balance. Two earthquakes in a year constituted a grave warning, since the Middle Layer could slide off its support from below. In addition, the Delawares first created their elaborate Big House Ceremony as a ritual response to the earth’s trembling. And in the Pacific Northwest, where the Cascadia subduction zone has created some of the largest earthquakes in the continent’s history, a Kwakwaka’wakw account held that the human mistreatment of dogs caused temblors.14 American Indians used earthquakes to indict European colonialism, the pressures of which amplified ancient concerns about ritual adherence, disease, and purity. Linking tremors and disease, as in the story of the sick Cherokee children, was common across early modern North America. In addition to correlating tremors with illness, Native Americans associated quaking with other impurities and social imbalances related to European colonialism: alcohol abuse, Christian conversion, territorial loss, and other signs of change. Competing European and North American traditions of inquiry into the natural world often elevated the stakes of earthquake interpretation. Europeans and Native Americans adapted their systems of knowledge to incorporate and influence one another. Catholic and Protestant missionaries hoped to use tremors and other natural phenomena as instruments for religious conversion. Like Europeans, American Indians distinguished their systems of knowledge from others and usually preferred their own. Yet despite increasing insistence on their differences, Europeans and American Indians across North America continued to find human significance in natural occurrences, a fact of early modern thought across cultures that bound them together.15 Across zones of colonial interaction, debates about the meaning of earthquakes were also reckonings with European colonialism. Hopis and Knowledge

39

Apaches adapted their understandings of tremors as signs of ritual neglect in order to indict Catholic rituals and Spanish mining. Some Hopis claimed that baptism was a ritual meant only for the Spanish; if Native Americans were to engage in this foreign ceremony, a large horned dragon would register his displeasure from under the earth. Another version of the story instructed the Hopis to “behead these bad people,” presumably priests, or face a series of upheavals that would flip over the earth and force people to live in the watery underworld. The Apaches applied their earthquake understandings to Spanish mining, as they explained that “grubbing into Mother Earth” led to earthquakes. Mountain spirits caused the shaking, which was intended “to avenge the desecration of the mountains.” These critiques of the foundations of Spanish colonialism—mining and mission work—­demonstrate both the durability and adaptability of Indigenous forms of knowledge. Colonialism may have heralded a cosmological crisis, but rather than abandoning their traditions as inadequate, Native people applied old concepts to new concerns.16 Those concerns included disease, alcohol abuse, and other social imbalances wrought by colonialism. In 1638, a Narragansett elder explained to Roger Williams of Rhode Island that when an earthquake occurred, “either plague or pox or some other epidemical disease followed.” The Narragansetts kept a detailed accounting of earthquakes in the region, and Williams’s informant told him that there had been five in the last eighty years. Native people nearby pointed to a related natural phenomenon to criticize the English. They told of a place near East Haddam, Connecticut, called “Machemoodus,” or “the place of the noises.” Machemoodus was famous for rumbling and mysterious “Moodus noises” that scientists today attribute to microquakes whose underground sounds are abnormally magnified. An early town history explained that Indians there believed the sounds were “the voice of their god,” which had been particularly active in the seventeenth century. Local Native people, who found the site sacred, related the noises’ frequency to English incursions. As an elder explained, “The Indian’s God was very angry because the Englishman’s God came there.”17 While the common experiences of natural phenomena gave American Indians and Europeans opportunities to articulate their differences, their explanations for these occurrences remained remarkably similar. Colonial French reactions to the 1663 earthquake exhibited a feature common to both European and Indigenous thought: the tension between seeking a strictly natural explanation of tremors and correlating them with deviant human behavior. Like many earthquake observers, Jesuit priests looked to the sky, 40Knowledge

where they saw fiery lights and other “disturbances.” After learning that “it rained ashes in such quantity that they lay an inch thick on the ground,” a nun attributed the earthquake to a subterranean fire that “touched off a mine” and released ashes “like burned sugar.” Yet these accounts also emphasized human roles in the shaking. The earthquakes occurred during the Christian Carnival season before Lent, and people believed they were being punished for their transgressions. This interpretation applied to individual and collective behavior. A soldier known for stealing cried out, “Don’t search for any other cause of what you see. This is God wishing to punish my crimes.” Multiple sources noted that the tremors muted the Carnival celebrations. Seeking baptism or engaging in confessions, fasts, and processions, people “abandoned their wicked lives” and fled to churches in hopes of dying in “more sacred places.” A priest noted, “The days of the Carnival were turned into days of piety, mourning, contrition, and tears.” But as in the case of western U.S. towns like Louisville after the earthquakes in 1811 and 1812, collective piety in New France was short-­lived. A priest complained that what began as a “wonderful commotion of minds” devolved into “conversions so transitory.”18 Hurons and some French colonists related the shaking to alcohol abuse, an interpretation that persisted into the early nineteenth century. While in prayer, a Frenchman had a vision in which he saw a “confused throng of victims devoted to hell.” Among them were “the wine-­Dealers and retailers of Brandy, basely ministering to the lusts of drunkards for the sake of gain.” Though some Native Americans hailed alcohol’s otherworldly effects and incorporated it into rituals, the beverage symbolized a powerful foreign impurity for those indicting European colonialism. Hurons claimed that trees inhabited by demons had beaten them “because of the excesses they had committed while drinking the brandy that the wicked French had given them.” Tribal members also described the woods as “drunken.” For the Hurons, the consumption of alcohol had upset natural order. Only ritual purification, particularly abstinence from a foreign pollutant like ardent spirits, could rebalance the earth.19 As a misinformation strategy, Hurons also claimed to see extraordinary damage farther inland that made “drunken” trees seem mild. A Jesuit priest noted “persons who certify that they saw very lofty hills striking together with brows opposed, like headstrong rams, then suddenly and instantaneously swallowed up on the yawning of the earth.” The sight of tall hills crashing together like rams was surely an exaggeration. But Indians likely related the scene to discourage further French incursions into Huron terriKnowledge

41

tory. Exaggerating the extent of damage from natural disasters farther inland constituted an Indigenous strategy of misinformation. As much as Native Americans contributed to Euro American natural history and geography as informants and specimen gatherers, they also misled unwelcome outsiders by overstating the danger of the continent’s interior. In the case of the 1663 earthquake, no French colonists set off to the collapsed hills to corroborate the Huron account.20 Despite some cross-­cultural agreement about the 1663 earthquake’s causes, Jesuit missionaries sought the interpretive upper hand by preaching to Hurons about the necessity of Catholic conversion. An order of missionary priests who embedded themselves in Native communities in the Great Lakes region, Jesuits documented the lifeways and beliefs of their hosts as they sought conversions. They succeeded in two cases, as pious female Huron converts to Catholicism claimed to use their newfound spiritual access to foretell the tremors. Recently recovered from illness by “extraordinary trust in the Cross of the Son of God,” a young girl predicted each temblor. Because of her new spiritual status, an older woman also received a “very special manifestation” to predict the earthquake. Her piety had been influential among members of her family, inspiring in her husband, “who used to be very remiss in prayer, a fervor which is quite extraordinary.” Her young son followed suit and requested to attend a seminary. Jesuits wrote their Relations to emphasize these kinds of missionary successes in French colonies.21 The alleged clairvoyance of these Huron converts does, however, point to another important facet of Indigenous thought: a willingness to seek outside forms of spiritual power and insight. This openness to experimentation with other rituals and religious symbols helps to explain the child called “God,” likely Jesus as a baby, in the Cherokee visitor’s arms. It may seem odd that a story so grounded in Native ideas about ritual, disease, and territoriality would include Christian imagery, particularly when its main point was to decry Cherokee territorial and cultural loss at the hands of Euro Americans. But this inclusivist approach to spiritual power and insight was common in Native North America before and after the arrival of Europeans. For example, the arrival of Franciscan missionaries in the Southwest and the subsequent adoption of Catholic symbols and rituals among Pueblo people was one movement among many “cycles of evangelism” over a millennium in the region. In other cases, Native people gravitated to images of the Virgin Mary as a sign of feminine spiritual power, raised crosses in their communities, and drew parallels between Jesus’s suffering on the cross and the 42Knowledge

stoic manner with which captives were supposed to confront torture. Missionaries often interpreted these engagements with Christianity as signs that their religion—framed in exclusive, dogmatic terms—had triumphed over Indigenous superstition and paganism. Native interest in Christianity instead stemmed from a willingness to incorporate outside symbols, rituals, and ideas deemed useful into their own ways of knowing. This approach constituted its own kind of spiritual empiricism in which practices that helped crops grow or ward off disease, for example, joined an accumulation of knowledge that was both grounded in ancient wisdom and attuned to present realities. The same applied to Native earthquake inquiry.22 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa inherited a tradition of intertribal prophecy and militancy that also incorporated Christian themes and imagery. They spoke of a Great Spirit who punished Indians for the sins of drinking alcohol, ceding land, and adopting Euro American lifeways. They required these sins to be confessed, a practice that Wyandot followers brought with them from Catholic Detroit. Divine vengeance sounded like the Christian Hell. Tenskwatawa had a vision in which a whiskey drinker’s “bowels seized with exquisite burning,” and he predicted that a fire would consume the world and “destroy the whites.” Whereas most Native Americans viewed the large serpents under the earth as powerful but neither inherently good nor evil, the Shawnee Brothers likened Euro Americans to evil snakes, probably appropriating the biblical story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.23 The directness and urgency with which the Shawnee Brothers warned of divine vengeance in Christian terms distinguished them from the Cherokee prophet with the child in his arms. The cabin visitor’s reasons for the tremors came with a qualification: “I cannot tell you now if God will soon destroy the earth or not.” This uncertainty was absent from the Shawnee Brothers’ pronouncements. Instead, they claimed a level of proximity and access to the Great Spirit that sought to eliminate any doubts that their movement was the only way to restore Native territory and culture in the Ohio Valley and beyond. This charismatic certainty made them divisive and powerful figures; it also offers insights into transformations in prophecy and intellectual authority that had a bearing on how Native Americans interpreted the earthquakes and addressed the mounting signs of disorder. Tribal responses to disruptions of natural order like disease, drought, and earthquakes traditionally fell to particular lineages of people who were trained in specialized knowledge and ritual practices over their lifetimes. These individuals occupied a special status in their communities because outside their hands, the spiritual power and insight with which they dealt could be deKnowledge

43

structive. Tenskwa­tawa and the militant intertribal prophets who preceded him rebuked these traditional spiritual leaders as ineffective. Often emerging from societal margins or bouts of misbehavior like drunkenness, rather than a privileged status, their spiritual directives came quickly from trances and dreams, rather than years of training. Dream interpretation was critical to any spiritual leader’s education, but rarely were visions in those dreams so certain, much less a mandate for leadership and the basis for immediate and dramatic reform. Militant prophets situated the earthquakes into their urgent calls for remaking Indian country and repelling U.S. expansion. The political and territorial consequences of their challenges to existing leadership, enabled by transformations in prophecy and intellectual authority that in some important ways mirrored those in British North America and later the United States, would be immense.24 Over the first half of the nineteenth century, physician Ira Ellis Cornelius transcribed hymns, drafted biblical commentaries, and practiced his signature in a diary that contained more religious doctrine than personal detail. A newcomer to Mississippi Territory from South Carolina, Cornelius was near present-­day Huntsville, Alabama, when the earthquakes began. In a journal usually reserved for grappling with matters of eternity, the doctor almost never recorded daily observations. But the shaking prompted him to scrawl a flurry of notes that stand out from his generally tidy spelling and penmanship. Tallying the total number of tremors at 105, he also wrote, A grate nois + an Awfull Grumbling [.] it Shook the Fowls of[f ] their Rust [roost] [.] Every Thing appear’d to be Sensable of Aproching Danger [.] the Cry of A bird was not to be heard the whole Day. . . . As I recllect it continued for Twenty Three Day + Some Say Longer [.] People was much Alarmed—many Different Ideas about it. Cornelius’s earthquake commentary also ranged well beyond earthly details. Following his tremor tally, he hurriedly scribbled, “Not In your hous [.] Trample it undre you feet stick [it] o[u]t of the Door & Send it to hell Where it come From,” referring to sinful behavior that he was struggling to control. “We are Sollemnly Warned against Apostacy,” he added.25 In the spring of 1815, when matters had calmed considerably for U.S. settlers in the region, Cornelius offered more insight into what he wished to cast “to hell Where it come From.” With more distance from the turbulence of the earthquakes and the war, he made three resolutions: “never to use 44Knowledge

ardent spirits,” “to avoid unholy + unbecomeing Discourse,” and “to Resist Fleshly Lust.” He revisited the sobriety pledge in January 1816.26 A personal view into broader patterns of Euro American thought, Cornelius’s scribbling exhibited the strong influences of evangelicalism and empiricism, two important and overlapping trends not often considered together in studies of early national religious and intellectual culture. As an empiricist, Cornelius tallied tremors and recorded detailed observations about the sights and sounds related to the tumult alongside his evangelical meditations on sin and wayward personal behavior. Equally reliant on the experience and authority of the individual, evangelicalism and empiricism mutually framed settler earthquake interpretations and stoked debates about who could claim interpretive authority and what sources of experiential and written knowledge could inform their interpretations.27 Like Cornelius’s diary, Euro American settlers’ earthquake interpretations and subsequent print discussions about the tremors’ religious meanings show that it would be misguided to project later antagonism between “evangelical” and “scientific” understandings of the natural world back into the first decades of the early republic. In early nineteenth-­century U.S. Christianity, debates about divine intentionality, the authenticity of religious experience, and the parameters of access to knowledge about the divine were more contentious intellectual issues than the compatibility of faith and reason. Evangelicals readily acknowledged that unusual natural circumstances produced earthquakes, and they believed that seeking to understand those circumstances was a worthy endeavor. People’s otherworldly concerns did not preclude them from making detailed observations about the natural world that corroborated those of learned naturalists. But they also seized on naturalists’ uncertainties about the earthquakes’ exact causes to argue for the limits of human comprehension. For evangelicals, students of the natural world were preoccupied with empirical observations that obscured the earthquakes’ true importance: they were signs of God’s power and of the need for Christian conversion. The real matter for debate was whether God intended for the earthquakes to deliver an immediate message. And for growing evangelical communities across the United States, but especially in the regions most affected by the trembling, there were clear messages that they sought to extend beyond the shaking walls of churches and homes. Euro Americans who experienced the earthquakes joined their forebears in looking to the sky, wondering about unseen underground mechanisms, and supposing connections between natural phenomena and human upheaval. The Bible and ancient Greco-­Roman philosophy were the intelKnowledge

45

lectual foundations of western European earthquake inquiry. Just as Indigenous traditions associated shaking with human activity but left interpretive space for earthquakes in natural cycles unrelated to humans, Europeans also negotiated the tension between natural and human causes. Medieval and early modern Europeans consulted the great works of antiquity to explain earthquakes as the result of water or air moving underground. In his multivolume opus Meteorologica, Aristotle addressed the theories of his pre-­Socratic predecessors, most of whom pointed to water as the primary cause of earthquakes. Supposing a watery underworld similar to Indigenous cosmologies, Democritus believed that when the underground pores were full, the earth shook to release the excess water. The onrush of water into empty caverns also created earthquakes. Accordingly, periods of extreme moisture or drought were prime occasions for convulsions. Anaximenes, another pre-­Socratic natural philosopher, supposed that slabs of earth collapsed when the ground became excessively wet or dry, leading to tremors. Aristotle understood why Democritus and Anaximenes attributed earthquakes to dryness or too much moisture in the ground, but he questioned why the shaking also took place in areas that were neither excessively wet nor dry. Instead, he believed that water was a secondary effect of underground winds that built up and shook the ground when they escaped from it. A mid-­fourteenth-­century German treatise updated Aristotle’s idea about air buildup to propose that earthquakes in 1347 released deadly fumes that led to an outbreak of the bubonic plague. The work argued that just as rotting fruit or fetid water gave off unhealthy vapors, so too did the earth release poisonous gas, an explanation linking illness and earthquakes that would have been familiar to Native Americans.28 First-­century Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder joined Aristotle in pointing to underground wind as the primary cause of earthquakes, and he discussed possible connections between human and natural disorder, as well as the earth and the sky. Pliny devoted a chapter of the first volume of his major work Natural History to explaining earthquakes, beginning by discussing Greek leaders who predicted that tremors would destroy their cities. “And if these things be true, how nearly do these individuals approach to the Deity, even during their lifetime! But I leave every one to judge of these matters as he pleases,” he added. Pliny also considered conditions in the air and among humans that were related to the ground shaking. He noted that earthquakes were more frequent at night, as well as during lunar and solar eclipses. Another “sign in the heavens” was a cloud “stretched out in the clear sky, like a long thin line.” Furthermore, an earthquake was “a forerunner of 46Knowledge

some great calamity,” as reports of tremors were frequent during the Punic Wars.29 In casting their ultimate meanings as divine punishments or moments of revelation, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament more directly implicated humanity in earthquakes. In dozens of references in the Hebrew Bible, prophets warned that God used earthquakes to punish humans. Shaking was therefore evidence of divine power and displeasure with human order. The Book of Isaiah typified biblical statements about divine wrath: “Therefore is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people, and he hath stretched for his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets.” Earthquakes were both punishments and warnings about divine power. As a psalmist urged readers, “Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.” In a book in which God was often a punisher, earthquakes were often the weapons.30 As signs of Jesus’s divinity following the Crucifixion and signals of stages in the End Times, earthquakes assumed even more consequential roles in the New Testament’s Gospels and book of Revelation. In the book of Matthew, an earthquake opened graves around the temple in Jerusalem after Jesus’s death. As the “bodies of saints” escaped their graves and arose, Roman centurions and other onlookers exclaimed, “Truly this was the Son of God.” In the next chapter, “a great earthquake” coincided with the visit of an angel who descended from Heaven to tell Mary Magdalene and Mary that Jesus was no longer in his tomb. Earthquakes also were crucial elements of the New Testament’s second major concern: the end of the world. Many of the detailed stages in the book of Revelation included earthquakes among an array of natural catastrophes. The eleventh chapter of Revelation predicted that one would kill 7,000 men, and after the Ark of the Covenant was opened, there would be “lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”31 Grounded in these biblical and Greco-­Roman understandings of earthquakes, Euro American colonists in North America sought to impress their European counterparts by becoming specialists in the firsthand study of nature in the Americas. Skeptical of theories that could not be substantiated with personal observation and evidence, they shared with Enlightenment-­ era Europeans a commitment to the empirical study of their surrounding natural environments. Euro American colonists’ empiricism did not preclude them from religious persuasions. Among colonists in British North America, preachers were the most prominent part-­time naturalists. While Knowledge

47

Protestants sought to eliminate the varied forms of spiritual power found in Catholic saints and their miracles, biblical instances of prophecy and natural phenomena facilitated pervasive Protestant belief in the religious significance of natural disorder. Providence replaced saints and their miracles as the vehicle for delivering natural curiosities.32 Cotton Mather’s case demonstrates Protestants’ long-­standing fusion of sacred and empirical understandings of nature in British North America. Despite his strict adherence to Calvinism, which stressed humanity’s total inability to comprehend God’s plan, the Puritan polymath deemed the natural sciences a legitimate object of study because they offered small insights into how God ordered and governed the universe. Mather also yearned for acceptance in the highest circles of European learning. Between 1712 and 1724, he penned a series of letters to the Royal Society of London. Entitled Curiosa Americana, the missives featured Mather’s thoughts on a number of topics related to nature, most notably the discovery of giant bones in New England. At once theological, scientific, and occult, these musings contained subtle appeals for European recognition of both their author’s intellect and the Americas as a legitimate arena of study. Mather considered earthquakes in his 1721 work The Christian Philosopher. His discussion borrowed heavily from Athanius Kircher, a seventeenth-­century German Jesuit whose study of the subterranean world yielded elaborate illustrations and schema for understanding “the Divine Structure of the under-­ground World, and the wondorous distribution of the Work-­houses of Nature, and her Majesty and Riches therein.” In his empirical quest to explore and comprehend the processes guiding the natural world, Kircher went as far as lowering himself into Mount Vesuvius’s active volcano with a rope. Mather incorporated Kircher’s theories about the combustible combination of minerals within the earth’s underground networks, but he concluded that earthquakes offered a stern admonition against materialism and the foolhardy assumption that one could defend against tremors of the earth. He warned, “Fear, lest the Pit and the Snare be upon you! Against all other Strokes there may be some Defence or other be thought on: There is none against an Earthquake!” For Mather, earthquakes functioned simultaneously as divine warnings and as topics of study. It was useful to seek to understand why these upheavals occurred, but their unpredictability still made people reliant on divine protection.33 Mid-­eighteenth-­century earthquakes across the North Atlantic world gave people numerous opportunities to apply the principles of firsthand observation and empiricism, as well as to argue about God’s role in the destruction. First were tremors in London and New England in 1750, followed by 48Knowledge

the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Not surprisingly, experts in astronomy, electricity, and other specialized disciplines attributed earthquakes to their objects of study. The question of an electrical cause for tremors became a topic of lively debate among New England intellectuals. In his 1755 pamphlet Earthquakes the Works of God, Boston preacher Thomas Prince explained that God had used electricity to shake New England, which drew criticism from Harvard mathematician and astronomer John Winthrop IV, who dismissed electricity as a fashionable but ultimately unsatisfying mechanism for explaining earthquakes.34 The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 unleashed unimagined disorder and suffering, tempering Enlightenment optimism about humanity’s capacity for infinite understanding. With estimates at 30,000 killed, the port city destroyed, and rumors of craters swallowing surrounding villages whole, the disaster in Lisbon was a sensational news item that demanded the attention of prominent European thinkers. Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide, or Optimism famously critiqued the age’s hopefulness and preoccupation with categories of natural order. For Voltaire, the earthquake in Lisbon defied the laws of nature and reason, repudiating the related sense of natural order that the Linnaean system of classification sought to construct. The disaster fractured nature and the categories constructed for its study.35 John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, seized on prevailing unease about the limits of human reason to argue that faith in God was the only true means of understanding nature. In a 1756 pamphlet entitled Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Earthquake in Lisbon and sermons and hymns printed soon thereafter, Wesley sought to disprove the ideas that fire, water, and air were the responsible agents by questioning why each element did not leave behind more evidence of its impact. He reserved most of his disdain for the “airquake” theory, declaring “the fashionable Opinion, that the exterior Air is the grand agent in Earthquakes,” to be “so senseless, unmechanical, unphilosophical a Dream, as deserves not be named, but to be exploded.” Wesley then launched into a jeremiad against worldly means of seeking control. When “the Earth threatens to swallow you up,” he argued, no amount of money, honor, intelligence, strength, or speed offered protection. “Wealthy Fool, where is now thy Golden God?” he taunted, adding, “[Even if you could escape,] there is another grim Enemy at the Door: and you cannot drive him away. It is death.” Terrible earthquakes delivered a message that evangelicals believed they already knew: humanity lacked control. But whereas the Puritan Mather emphasized fear and judgment, Wesley closed his message by encouraging readers to embrace a God of love and salKnowledge

49

vation. He argued that God would respond favorably to people who opened themselves up to the possibility of Christian conversion.36 Despite his insistence on human helplessness to escape earthquakes, much less identify their natural cause, Wesley remained interested in studying nature. After reading Benjamin Franklin’s work, he published his own treatise on electricity and purchased four “electricity machines” to treat illnesses among his London congregants. For Wesley, humans should study and harness nature for their own ends, but human reason was incapable of understanding natural disasters and their devastation. Arguing against a rational means of comprehending the natural order that his Enlightenment contemporaries craved, Wesley urged readers to embrace their earthly limitations by pursuing faith in divine control. This position exaggerated his differences with thinkers who were not evangelical Christians, but to stoke his religious movement, Wesley typically avoided nuance.37 The theological differences between Cotton Mather and John Wesley illustrated a shift in Protestant earthquake inquiry over the eighteenth century. In the earth’s shaking, they found God’s power and a poignant call for Christian fidelity. But Mather’s Calvinism and Wesley’s Arminianism offered two different theological frameworks for interpreting earthquakes that mirrored a larger shift during the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the Calvinist view of election by predestination versus the Arminian belief in the individual’s ability to attain salvation through conversion. As his writings about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 showed, Wesley did not argue for human agency in the sense that he believed that humans could control the forces responsible for earthquakes. People did, however, have more control over the direction of their own religious lives, as well as the location of their afterlives, by undergoing individual conversion experiences. Conversion was a hallmark of Wesleyan Arminianism. By contrast, Mather’s Calvinism, which influenced Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, left little room for individuals to control their spiritual life course. Although individuals were encouraged to undergo a conversion experience, a more distant God already had predestined whether it would occur. For Mather, God had determined the state of individual souls long before any natural phenomena; earthquakes were instead calls for the community to fear God and reform their behavior. For Wesley, earthquakes offered people a reminder about the opportunity for individual salvation that a Calvinist God had long foreclosed.38 People of lower social standing found the promise of individual spiritual salvation especially appealing because it allowed them to transcend their 50Knowledge

station in life. Evangelicalism first flourished on the social and geographical margins of North America, where people were not part of the colonial religious and political establishment. It therefore should come as no surprise that this evangelical line of interpretation about earthquakes continued among Euro American settlers in the early U.S. republic’s western borderlands. Whereas Mather sought recognition from Europe’s highest intellectual circles, Wesley criticized elite inquiry for lacking a foundation in faith and a belief in the necessity of conversion. Although evangelical people made observations about the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 that were similar to those of learned naturalists, their ultimate concerns differed. Wesley’s example shows that the interpretive aims of the evangelical community had diverged from those of scientific elites over the course of the eighteenth century. Like contemporary Native prophets, evangelicals found more immediate religious meaning in these disruptions of day-­to-­day life. The messages encoded in natural phenomena were too urgent for scientific patience. Evangelicalism and empiricism were nonetheless linked in their mutual reliance on the experience and authority of the individual. Just as evangelicals stressed the importance of an individual’s connection with the divine, empiricists collected evidence and observed the natural world firsthand. People who were evangelical or empirical often eschewed the theoretical orientations of learned elites, whose dense theories about God and nature required intermediate authorities themselves to translate complex ideas for popular audiences. In privileging the individual as the primary interpretive authority, empiricism and evangelicalism pushed back against established hierarchies of knowledge about the natural world and God’s more distant role in it. Despite the steady diffusion of authority to individuals in the intellectual enterprises of eighteenth-­century British North America, people of higher social standing in the centers of colonial governance continued to have broader intellectual influence. In short, Cotton Mather in Boston or Isaac Newton in London circulated ideas more easily than itinerant preachers. But the eighteenth-­century growth in literacy rates and popular print widened the colonial British North American public sphere, providing space for new ideas. Disruptions in the natural environment, which anyone could observe and experience, became ideal topics through which to discuss the central intellectual questions of the eighteenth century: Did the world operate according to universal laws? How much did God intervene, and did humans have agency in the world’s day-­to-­day operation? Were there divine messages in natural phenomena, and who could interpret them? Knowledge

51

Rapid territorial expansion gave the United States new opportunities to link imperial and scholarly enterprises and to seek to create a new republican form of inquiry into the natural world. The scientific and diplomatic impulses underlying Lewis and Clark’s mission exemplified the connection between the study of nature and the extension of U.S. empire. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery was the most famous outfit, but Thomas Jefferson dispatched others to study the trans-­Mississippi West. These travelers included John Bradbury, the Scottish naturalist who found himself riding out the first major earthquake on the Mississippi River. After sailing to the United States to collect cotton specimens around New Orleans, Bradbury traveled first to Jefferson’s home at Monticello, where the former president encouraged him to gather plants around St. Louis instead. Bradbury obliged and ventured up the Missouri River to a northern Mandan village before returning to St. Louis, where he finally set out for his original destination in time to meet the earthquakes at their epicenter.39 The circumstances that led to Bradbury’s fateful position on the river were telling, and not only for his intrepid pursuit of plants and terrible luck. Bradbury’s case demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century, the Euro American study of nature in North America became increasingly transcontinental, but it remained transatlantic. Thirteen colonies may have broken political ties with Britain, but the postcolonial exchange that followed reflected their continued dependence on European centers of learning, which supplied the former colonies with books, scientific instruments, and professional scientists like Bradbury. For American-­born elite men at the turn of the century, the study of nature was still largely a leisure activity. It was also a marker of social distinction reserved for physicians, politicians, and lawyers. Though they could not support themselves through scientific study alone, they could afford the equipment and the time away from their regular occupation. Professional naturalists still resided in Europe because patrons there could afford to pay them. Of course, reactions to the earthquakes show that people in the U.S. backcountry had their own ways of studying and understanding the natural world. They did so without concern for the transatlantic dynamics of status and legitimacy that gripped East Coast politics and culture after U.S. independence.40 An American cast of part-­time naturalists still sought a different way to do science. The study of earthquakes in the first decades of the early republic reflected American desires to construct a distinct intellectual landscape 52Knowledge

in which observation and empiricism trumped theory. Though there were only faint tremors in the early national era before 1811, seismic activity during the late eighteenth century gave Americans the opportunity to carve out their own brand of inquiry by investigating previous earthquakes with fresh republican eyes. In the spring and summer of 1788, Harvard professor and Congregationalist minister Samuel Williams published “Observations and remarks on the earthquakes of New-­England,” a lengthy article that spanned multiple issues of the American Museum, a short-­lived monthly publication from Philadelphia that had many prominent subscribers. Williams built on the work of John Winthrop IV, his advisor at Harvard, in cautioning against theories that supposed without evidence that electricity or other unseen mechanisms were the causes of earthquakes. He was instead a committed empiricist. “In all philosophical hypotheses, a writer is in danger of making more of his subject than will bear a strict examination,” Williams wrote. “The cause of truth and science is of infinitely more importance, than any of our schemes and conjectures: and this is what I wish may prevail, in all countries, and in all ages.”41 If Americans were uneasy about theory, which they criticized as a European preoccupation, their proven knowledge about earthquakes was sure to be scant. Williams surveyed more than a century of New England earthquake study committed more to questioning theories and “conjectures” than to seeking the precise causes of earthquakes. He began with “ancient and modern” accounts linking tremors with disease. In considering various other theories that attributed earthquakes to weather, electricity, underground fire, and the “grand fermentation” of vapor, Williams pointed out instances where conditions were not right for these mechanisms to act, and the ground shook nevertheless. The article thus captured the uncertainty of American earthquake study in the two decades before 1811. These circumstances left Williams to deduce only basic facts: the earth was a “cavernous structure”; earthquakes were the result of something moving underneath the earth; and because the causes of tremors were “beyond the reach of observation,” there was no way to develop a fuller understanding of them. This pervasive uncertainty about the natural causes of earthquakes and general unwillingness to entertain theories also meant that Americans could not easily dismiss alternative ways of thinking about nature.42 Williams’s study reflected the influence of deism, a nebulous religious movement popular among some U.S. founders that hailed reason and scientific study without questioning Providence and the existence of God. For deists, God was more of a detached watchmaker than an interventionist in Knowledge

53

day-­to-­day affairs. They found claims of direct revelation and miracles to be inconsistent with reason. Williams argued that earthquakes were evidence of “the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator,” rather than signs of divine judgment or revelation, because the shaking created the topographical diversity that allowed certain regions to be fertile grounds for farming. He agreed with Wesley that these powerful and unexpected natural phenomena fostered piety, but more out of awe than fear. Disruptions in the natural world evoked a sense of people’s dependence on the divine, rather than the immediate necessity of conversion that evangelicals like Wesley advocated. “Amidst such convulsions of nature,” Williams concluded, “strong impressions of the power and majesty of God, will naturally take possession of the human mind. Mankind will see and feel their dependence upon the Creator—with the wisdom, benefit, and advantage of such a steady course of virtue, as leaders to an habitual trust in his providence and protection.” In Williams’s conception, God remained strong and all knowing. But God was a much more distant and less punitive being than Mather or Wesley would have allowed. While some U.S. religious commenters during the earthquakes of 1811–12 held Mather’s line that the tremors were direct divine punishments or echoed Wesley’s insistence that they were displays of the need for conversion experiences, others displayed Williams’s deist leanings by critiquing alarmism without denying a divine role in the operation of the natural world.43 To the chagrin of U.S. naturalists seeking acclaim on the Atlantic stage by carving out a unique form of American scientific inquiry, a Frenchman wrote the most influential survey of U.S. geology in the early nineteenth century. Constantin-­François Volney’s 1804 book, View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America, gained a wider readership across the North Atlantic world. Volney cited Williams’s work in the American Museum, but his survey ranged beyond New England. He suggested that underground combustion created earthquakes, as a “stratum of schist” that he found near Niagara Falls was combustible and regionally pervasive. Volney also tied North American earthquakes to volcanic activity, suggesting that Lake Ontario was unusually deep because of a volcanic crater below it. Evidence of ancient volcanoes and earthquakes explained the “confusion of all the strata of earth and stone” in American states along the Atlantic coast. West of New York State, Volney found no evidence of earthquakes. He supported his claim by arguing that Native Americans in the Great Lakes region lacked a word for tremors, and they were “equally ignorant of volcanoes.” Perhaps citing Native reports of catastrophic western damage in seventeenth-­century Jesuit 54Knowledge

accounts, he mentioned the possibility of an interior volcano in northern Canada, though he remained resolute about the absence of western earthquakes. The dramatic temblors on the Mississippi River proved him wrong less than a decade later, though Indigenous knowledge of seismic activity would have done so even earlier. Volney also pointed to the inadequacy of homegrown research in the United States. With a hint of condescension, particularly considering learned organizations like the American Philosophical Society, which predated the American Revolution, he appealed to Americans to start their own societies: “It is to be wished, and we have reason to hope, that in course of time learned societies, formed in the United States, will apply to geological researches of this kind both attention and funds beyond the abilities of foreign travelers.”44 In a revealing demonstration of their nationalist insecurity, American reviewers took offense at Volney’s criticisms of their people and land. Samuel Mitchill, the prominent New York commentator on the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, wanted his review of Volney’s work to be part of the early republic’s “laudable and just purpose of correcting the blunders, exposing the misrepresentations, and repelling the calumnies, which certain vain and superficial scribblers in Europe delight[ed]” in spreading about the new nation. He wished Volney had focused only on the natural environment, rather than interjecting “angry and disrespectful remarks” about the American government, people, and climate. But why was Volney so critical? Mitchill speculated that his negativity stemmed from having to flee France and being frequently sick during his trip across the United States. A reviewer in Boston’s Monthly Anthology added that Volney’s preoccupation with complaining about bugs and roads in the United States detracted from the work.45 Final U.S. assessments of the Frenchman’s View were mixed, reflecting the early republic’s postcolonial ambivalence about being simultaneously an object of study and its own site of knowledge production. The Monthly Anthology found Volney’s work too reliant on his “love of theory.” The reviewer stated, “We do not think, upon the whole, that Mr. Volney’s reputation will be raised by the present work. His love of system and of generalizing lead him frequently into the grossest errours.” Mitchill was more compromising, offering a “favourable opinion” despite “the national reflections, personal irritations, and snarling cavils, which disgrace.” On North American earthquakes, U.S. reviewers agreed that Volney too easily dismissed the possibility of western tremors. Writer and U.S. Army officer Amos Stoddard had experienced earthquakes himself in Louisiana Territory, and his French informants told him that shaking was frequent. As for Volney’s claim that western NaKnowledge

55

tive Americans did not have the words to describe earthquakes or volcanoes, Mitchill argued, “[The claim] only shows the Indians to be bad observers, and their language to be very scanty.” The Illinois Country had been the site of an earthquake in 1795, and perhaps due to the recurring Native strategy of misinformation highlighting the frequency of far western natural disasters, Mitchill explained that an illusory volcano existed “far up the Missouri.” According to the Monthly Anthology, Volney too often used earthquakes to explain “any irregularities in his system.” The New Madrid earthquakes would give American naturalists the opportunity to study major seismic activity firsthand, but as they soon discovered, a flurry of real and fabricated accounts of the tremors challenged their commitment to empiricism.46 What Volney dismissed as amateur scientific practice in the United States, Americans hailed as a republican brand of science in which experience and observation trumped theory. Newspapers and journals regularly carried scientific discussions, and in line with Jefferson’s celebration of the yeomanry, this more inclusive intellectual culture encouraged contributions from Euro American men across social stations. As in U.S. governance, the early republic’s citizens emphasized uniqueness and possibility in the nation’s natural environment. They were reticent to dismiss accounts of natural phenomena or remarkable species that defied the laws of nature. It was therefore common for periodicals to print practical agricultural advice alongside commentaries on rattlesnakes’ ability to mesmerize their prey or birds hibernating underneath the muddy floors of ponds for the winter. Of course, widening people’s access and input to arenas of natural inquiry through newspapers and journals came with risks. Just as mobs threatened republican political order, the possibility of fabrication or wild, baseless claims about nature threatened this republican science experiment. The process of determining who could contribute to the nation, and what sources of knowledge were acceptable, took place across political, religious, and scientific forums in the early republic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the public lost its hands-­on engagement with science as it became the exclusive province of professionals. But in the early nineteenth century, the earthquakes exposed this wider grappling for interpretive authority in print culture. Elite thinkers in the early republic were insecure in their position as inhabitants of a former colony that was more of an object of study for Europeans than its own intellectual center. They sought to foster an empirical republican intellectual culture that was skeptical of European tendencies to theorize. But as popular presses widened public access to information and evangelical leaders questioned elite religious and aca56Knowledge

demic institutions, intellectual authority became increasingly contested. The study of nature embodied this tension between popular and elite impulses. While classification established a sense of stability and order in a language that held currency only for educated elites, empiricism scattered authority by encouraging wider participation. Meanwhile, popular print and the renewed Protestant revivalism of the early nineteenth century blurred the distinction between formal and vernacular knowledge.47 Fear and confusion were the universal first responses to the shaking. After recovering from the unprecedented shocks, people summoned a range of traditions of inquiry into the natural world to explain their predicaments. Across cultures, ancient knowledge was rooted in stories. In these stories, natural disasters were typically punishments for human misbehavior like the abandonment of ritual, licentiousness, or disregard for divine power. Tempering arguments for human fault in tremors, however, were examples of earthquakes that were part of natural cycles and thus unrelated to human affairs. Whether it was massive underground reptiles repositioning the earth on their backs or the earth releasing excessive underground water, not every tremor had a distinct human cause. But in their frequency and scale, the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 were not just any tremors. Natural phenomena like earthquakes, comets, and outbreaks of disease in colonial North America created common experiences and revealed lineages of thought stretching back to precolonial North America, West Africa, and Europe. While these episodes became opportunities for people to articulate their differences, the links that they drew among human, natural, and spiritual order bound them together as early modern thinkers. Europeans merged Greco-­Roman theories with biblical examples and a newer Enlightenment commitment to empiricism to argue that earthquakes were both worthy of study and signs of the need for Christian conversion. American Indians correlated shaking with disease and other forms of impurity related to European colonialism. African Americans adopted Christian views of earthquakes as calls for fidelity and cast tremors as divine disfavor with the institution of slavery. In explaining phenomena, all people balanced sustained attention to the natural world with a commitment to decoding spiritual meaning beyond the grasp of human senses. They also adapted long-­ held concepts to suit contemporary circumstances. Across communities where the earthquakes were the strongest, the perceived distance between human and divine worlds had narrowed by the Knowledge

57

early nineteenth century. This narrowing began in the previous century with awakenings, prophetic movements, migrations, and dislocations that upset established orders of knowledge and authority. For inhabitants of the trans-­Mississippi West, the establishment and rapid expansion of the United States amplified the stakes of this diffusion of interpretive authority. Matters traditionally reserved for elite guardians of specialized knowledge assumed new meaning for those who were unlettered, lowborn, or morally adrift. In 1811 and 1812, revivalists and prophets seized on the earthquakes not only as signs of cosmological imbalance, but also as dire warnings for immediate reform of the existing order. Of course, rightful order assumed different meanings for various groups in the region. Concerns within and among nations about what problems the earthquakes betokened, and how to respond to them, often began as matters of spirit.

58Knowledge

3

Spirit In the months before the earthquakes, two charismatic religious figures laid out visions of destruction that alarmed audiences across the United States and Indian Country. One was Tenskwatawa. Though unknown today, the second person rivaled Tenskwatawa for attention in late 1811. Newly released from jail in southwest Virginia, Nimrod Hughes published A Solemn Warning to All the Dwellers upon the Earth, a pamphlet that merged his personal visions of catastrophe with creative biblical calculations to foretell the “Certain destruction of one third of mankind” on June 4, 1812. While incarcerated—wrongly, he claimed—he saw a tempest with wind that leveled entire forests and hail “like the roaring of thousands of guns continually firing and bursting without intermission.” People “were destroyed, torn to pieces and mangled amongst the ruins of the earth.” In another vision, he was carried away from jail and placed at the precipice of a “deep and dismal dark pit” in which people of “every rank and station” tumbled. One-­third of humanity was doomed for a host of reasons: denominational divisions fed “unbelief,” the earth was “full of iniquity and violence, fraud and blasphemy, with every species of pollution and uncleanness,” and while people read the scriptures, they “were totally blind to their most important meanings.” To devise his doomsday date, he employed a complicated series of calculations related to the book of Daniel and discussions about numerology and kabbalism. First published in 1810, A Solemn Warning capitalized on the early U.S. republic’s burgeoning print culture and tested the limits of its eclectic intellectual landscape.1

59

Surprisingly, Hughes never updated editions of A Solemn Warning to include the disturbing series of events in late 1811 and 1812, but there was ample evidence to promote his depiction of God as Old Testament punisher. A November 1811 correspondent in western Pennsylvania noted that the work had been “a matter of Great alarm and astonishment,” as newspapers claimed that some of Hughes’s predictions already had come true. During the same month, an African American man in New Orleans decreed, “Two thirds of the inhabitants will be destroyed by the Comet; on the 18th March next, in honour of the birth day of the young King of Rome [Caligula],” a proportion likely adapted from A Solemn Warning. When the earthquakes began, Moravian missionaries in Ohio complained that “the prognostications of a so called prophet among the whites in Virginia,” among other factors, led people to believe that the world would soon end. And after the second major earthquake in January 1812, distributors of the pamphlet announced in the New-­Jersey Journal that a new shipment had been received, and copies were available for purchase. A backlash against Hughes’s alarmism eventually emerged, but earthquake observers could not help but to consider his predictions.2 Widespread speculation about the power and insight of Tenskwatawa and Hughes reached the desks of former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Having only renewed their correspondence in the previous month after years of bitter partisan silence, Adams wrote to Jefferson in February 1812 to inquire about the two prophets. He grouped them with Christopher McPherson, another Virginian, who had visions of Jesus fighting a “great red dragon” and one-­half of the world in a “gulph of blazing fire.” McPherson published an autobiography containing his visions, which also endorsed those of Hughes, and he mailed copies of their work with a letter of introduction to world leaders, including Adams. Finding both works well written, Adams wanted to know more about their authors and Tenskwatawa. He worried that the men’s prophecies were “unphilosophical and inconsistent with the political Safety of States and Nations.” “The Crusades were commenced by the Prophets and every Age Since, whenever any great Turmoil happens in the World, has produced fresh Prophets. The Continual Refutation of all their Prognostications by Time and Experiences has no effect in extinguishing or damping their Ardor,” Adams added. Jefferson responded by describing Tenskwatawa’s teachings as he understood them and recounting his contact with McPherson, the son of an enslaved woman and a white storekeeper who had worked with a number of prominent politicians as a congressional clerk in Virginia and Washington City. Jefferson was un60Spirit

familiar with Hughes, and he dismissed the lot’s work as part of “the mass of correspondencies of that crazy class, of whose complaints, and terrors, and mysticisms, the several presidents have been regular depositories.” Still, Adams admitted that loaning the works of Hughes and McPherson to neighbors had “spread a great deal of terror and a Serious Apprehension.” These were not months in which expectations of dismal, dark pits, mass death, and extreme weather could be easily dismissed.3 Coupled with observations about the extent of the earthquakes’ damage and the anomalous sights, sounds, and rumors that accompanied them, the claims and prognostications of figures like Tenskwatawa, Hughes, and McPherson provide a useful context for considering people’s religious responses to the tremors. The earthquakes were some of the best evidence yet of the narrowing of human and divine worlds. Many people believed the end of the world was at hand, or at the very least, the earthquakes demanded immediate spiritual responses to address their causes. Equipped with lineages of knowledge that linked major earthquakes to human affairs, they turned to established rituals and entertained new ideas from marginal figures claiming to predict or control natural forces. Among Euro Americans and African Americans living closer to the epicenters, Methodist and Baptist conversions were common spiritual responses. 1812 was a watershed year for the growth of evangelicalism in the trans-­Appalachian West. Both a deeply personal transformation and a collective exercise in acknowledging wrongdoing and committing to piety, evangelical conversion constituted a type of ritual response to address the divine anger encoded in the earthquakes. Even as they bemoaned Catholic ceremonialism and their gatherings sought to foster spontaneity and improvisation not typically associated with ceremonial behavior, evangelical Protestants engaged in ritualized conversions. Widespread conversions also provoked new questions about the direction of U.S. evangelicalism. “Earthquake religion” became a common phrase for condemning backsliding after the tremors. Hoping to bind this outpouring of piety with rising patriotism in the United States, established preachers sensed opportunity. They also worried about the sincerity of new religious commitments and the pronouncements of figures like Nimrod Hughes, who had taken individual biblical interpretation and alarmism about the contemporary state of affairs very far. Native American rituals focused on the impurities and wrongdoing that the earthquakes betokened. While most rituals were tribally specific, they reflected widely shared concerns about Euro American influences on their bodies, territories, and cultures. Looming large over their gatherings Spirit

61

to reckon with cosmological disorder were the messages of prophets like Tenskwatawa and the Red Stick Creeks. They argued that traditional authorities, with their long-­standing rituals, structures of kin-­based religious and political leadership, and strategies for limiting borderland violence, were inadequate to confront the early nineteenth century’s literal and figurative tremors. Baptist and Methodist conversions spiked in 1812. With few exceptions, the tremors’ role in the growth of trans-­Appalachian evangelicalism has been understated in U.S. religious history. Of the almost 19,000 Americans who joined the Methodist Church in 1812, more than 15,000 of them were from the Ohio and Tennessee Conferences, which included the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, and the territories of Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Put another way, an area containing about 15 percent of the population of the United States accounted for 80 percent of the growth in U.S. Methodism in 1812. In the year after this rapid growth, national Methodist membership declined. Only in 1815 did the Methodist Church return to 1812 levels (see figure 3).4 This single year of massive western growth transformed the geography and organizational structure of U.S. Methodism. Previously, seven conferences managed denser populations along the Eastern Seaboard, leaving the Western Conference to oversee trans-­Appalachian Methodists in the thousands of square miles from the Indiana to Mississippi Territories. In 1812, the national church body divided the Western Conference and its eight subordinate districts into the Ohio and Tennessee Conferences. Responsible for Methodists in Ohio and Kentucky, the Ohio Conference assumed leadership over five districts. The Tennessee Conference managed six additional districts in the states and territories to the west and south of the Ohio Conference. Split evenly between nearly 46,000 western Methodists, one-­third of whom joined the church in 1812, both of the new conferences were larger than each of the three Methodist conferences in the northeastern United States. The reshuffling of districts within the new Ohio and Tennessee Conferences that year makes it difficult to determine precise rates of Methodist growth in particular regions of the trans-­Appalachian West. Congregational growth in the Miami District of southwest Ohio (48 percent), the Mississippi District along the eastern banks of the Mississippi River (67 percent), and the new Nashville District in central Tennessee (118 percent) nonetheless stand out as sites of tremendous Methodist expansion in 1812. On the 62Spirit

50,000

40,000

Western (Ohio and Tennessee Conferences)

30,000

Philadelphia Baltimore Virginia

20,000

New-York Genese New-England

10,000 1810

1811

1812

1813

1814

1815

Figure 3. Methodist Church membership by conference, 1810–1815.

other hand, Methodist populations in the cities of Lexington and Cincinnati did not rise as sharply as the rest of the Ohio and Tennessee Conferences. African American Methodist populations also grew significantly in 1812, though most of the increase came from the South Carolina Conference, which also included areas of North Carolina. Of the 42,859 African American Methodists whom the church tallied in 1812, nearly one-­third lived in the South Carolina Conference. Still, the 2,627 Black Methodists living in the Ohio and Tennessee Conferences in 1812 represented a nearly 60 percent increase from the previous year. Most of these church members lived as enslaved people in Kentucky and Tennessee, since the cotton boom and postwar land grab that fueled forced slave migrations to the Deep South did not take full effect in Mississippi and Alabama until after the War of 1812. Though miniscule when compared to Black Methodist hubs in Charleston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, conversions in 1812 significantly expanded, or in some cases created, Black Methodist communities in the West. In the Red River region spanning south-­central Kentucky and north-­central Tennessee, the African American Methodist population nearly doubled to 172. Whereas no African Americans in New Madrid were members of the Methodist Church before the earthquakes, twenty-­five people joined in 1812. Due to institutional differences with Methodists, evidence of Baptist congregational growth in 1812 is more fragmentary but equally compelling. Compared to the Methodists’ centralized reports, Baptist churches and regional associations left handwritten tallies of new members and notes about Spirit

63

2,000

Licking, KY Salem, KY Separate Baptists, KY South District, KY Concord, TN

1,500

1,000

500

0 1810

1811

1812

1813

1814

1815

1816

1817

1818

1819

1820

Figure 4. Baptisms by Baptist associations, 1810–1820.

disciplinary issues in books kept by church members. These scattered records nonetheless suggest that 1812 was a monumental year for Baptist church growth. In a Baptist church book from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, two sentences stand out from routine lists of membership counts and disciplinary matters concerning church attendance and drinking alcohol: “A great and tremendous earthquake commenced which broke many places of the earth at New Madrid County. It continued shaking very hard all winter.” In the two years before the earthquakes, the church secured one convert; in 1812, there were forty-­nine new members, thirteen of whom joined in February and March. For the next three years, the church’s membership declined.5 Farther from the epicenters, increases in Baptist church membership in Kentucky and Tennessee that year also were significant (see figure 4). In the Concord Baptist Association of central Tennessee, 45 percent of the baptisms from 1812 to 1820 took place in 1812. Of 763 people baptized between 1806 and 1830 in Tennessee’s Stockton Valley Baptist Association, 112 people joined in 1812. Among the South Kentucky Association of Separate Baptists, a Baptist offshoot that refused to subscribe to confessions or creeds not made explicit in the Bible, 44 percent of new members in the seven years between 1811 and 1817 joined in 1812. In Kentucky’s Baptist associations near Lexington and Louisville, the growth was notable but less dramatic, as baptism rates in 1810, 1817, and 1818 exceeded those in 1812. This distinction be64Spirit

tween rural and urbanizing areas suggests, as a previous study has shown, that Kentucky Baptist revivalism was more pronounced in the backcountry than in the state’s growing centers of commerce and population.6 Among many Baptist churches that reported the number of people “received by experience” on a monthly basis, a disproportionately high number of baptisms occurred during the peak of seismic activity. In southeastern Kentucky, thirteen people joined a church between February and April 1812; nine more people joined between May 1812 and 1820. Outside Lexington, there were fifteen baptisms between Christmas Day 1811 and April 1812, and another twelve for the next thirty-­two months.7 Firsthand observations from across western U.S. states and territories attributed backcountry revivalism of 1812 directly to the earthquakes. In Indiana Territory, a woman described an evocative scene of “the darkness that pervades this frontier,” as people prayed for the imminent end of the world to relieve their fears. “A number of them I heard shouting and praising god for shaking the earth and wishing he would do it again for the sooner that nature would undergo her last convulsive shock the sooner thier souls would be at rest,” she wrote to her brother in Cincinnati. A U.S. settler in Ohio noted in May 1812 that earthquake damage in his neighborhood was minimal, but he added, “About the height of them [the tremors] we had a revival of religion and several got religion.” Future Baptist preacher Jacob Bower, who converted during the earthquakes in 1812, described a Kentucky community united in otherworldly concerns: “The people relinquished all kinds of labour for a time, except feeding stock, and eat only enough to support nature a fiew days. Visiting from house to house, going to meeting Singing—praying, ex[h]o[r]ting, and once in a while ketch a sermon from a travelling Minister. Men, Women and children, everywhere were heard enquiering what they must do to be saved. . . . Deiists & Universalist[s] in those days were scarce.” Just north of Nashville, preacher Reuben Ross marveled at his congregation’s unity, as “all seemed serious and thoughtful, and very much disposed to huddle together,” and “many knees bent in prayer that had, perhaps, never bent in that way before.”8 Though communal piety often dissipated, individual spiritual crises could linger for years. In 1823 an enslaved woman named Dinah joined a church founded by Congregational missionaries to the Choctaw Nation. The earthquakes had prompted Dinah to become “greatly concerned about her future fate.” After joining the church, she learned to read, interpreted between Choctaw and English for the missionaries, and eventually purchased freedom for herself and her husband. An obituary for a New Madrid man in Spirit

65

1830 mentioned that the earthquakes occasioned “the necessity of a change of heart, which he never lost until he tasted the pardoning love of God about four years later.”9 Even among Protestant denominations that placed less emphasis on conversion experiences, the earthquakes’ strength and frequency provoked profound spiritual unease. Moravian missionaries in Cherokee country first dismissed Cherokee fears about the shaking. They explained to their Cherokee visitors that “such natural causes as thunder, lightning, etc.” caused earthquakes, which also served as God’s warning “to stop serving sin and to obey His voice.” According to the Moravians, God had foreordained a judgment day on which He would reward the faithful and “then burn the earth with fire,” but it was unlikely that the earthquakes were signs of such a day. As months of tremors and Cherokee prophetic agitation wore on, however, the missionaries masked profound uncertainty in private with public calls for calm and denunciations of Cherokee prophecies. Though they disparaged “dreamers and lying prophets” who peddled “foolish fables” to “poor blind heathens,” they speculated in a private letter after the third major temblor in February 1812 that there was more significance to the shaking. “Perhaps the Savior is coming soon since so many of the signs which are supposed to happen before His coming again, are being fulfilled now,” they wrote. “One doesn’t hear anything but wars and rumors of war, and earthquakes are happening now and again, etc., so that one sees clearly and notices that the savior is making preparations for his coming. Oh, may He find us so that we may be able to stand before Him and that we may appear dressed in his blood and righteousness.” Foreclosing the possibility of a substantive cross-­cultural discussion about the causes of these earthquakes, the missionaries never disclosed their growing concern to Cherokee visitors. Once the tremors subsided, it was easier for the lead missionary to dismiss tribal prophecies as “lies” that “were already partly forgotten.” But beneath his front of Christian triumphalism had been genuine worry about the recurring shaking’s spiritual meaning.10 The growth of communities of people who claimed spiritual salvation through personal conversion experiences created challenges in defining the boundaries of individual spiritual insight, rightful Christian community, and evangelical authority. In an era of revivalism, denominational rivalry, and expanded access to print, determining who could lead and what special sources of knowledge from which those leaders could draw became even more contested processes. Examining how people sifted through these various sources 66Spirit

of knowledge during and immediately following the earthquakes shows that trans-­Appalachian settler communities were not revivalistic release valves opposing the rationalism and empiricism embraced by early national elites along the East Coast. Settlers employed empirical methods and reasoned discussion to probe the earthquakes’ relationship to the divine. Personal recollections and print discussions of the earthquakes also revealed evangelical concerns about the authenticity of conversion experiences, denominational tensions, the pitfalls of “backsliding,” and whether the earthquakes betokened some greater calamity. During the tremors, evangelical Americans did not simply close their eyes and pray to be taken away to Heaven. While the earthquakes provoked questions about divine agency, prayer, and the apocalypse, settlers rigorously and empirically investigated the natural world. Though far removed from cosmopolitan nodes of the Enlightenment, they drew from a variety of sources of knowledge at hand—personal observations of the environment during earthquakes, memories of other natural phenomena, the Bible, and theories about airborne or underground causes—to construct earthquake interpretations. After riding out the first shocks in open water on the Mississippi River, John Bradbury docked his boat and visited a small community near the Lower Chickasaw Bluffs. Observing an open Bible in a log cabin packed with anxious people, Bradbury spoke with a man who explained that the earthquakes were the result of the earth trying to dislodge itself from its position between “two horns” of the Great Comet. If the earth were successful in its endeavor to free itself from the horns of the comet, “all would be well, if otherwise, inevitable destruction to the world would follow.” “Finding the man confident in his hypothesis” and “unable to refute it,” Bradbury continued down the river. On the surface, this European naturalist’s encounter with the riverside preacher appears to symbolize the distinction between scientific rationalism and religious enthusiasm. However, the preacher employed a form of backcountry empiricism that led settlers to draw different conclusions from the amalgamation of biblical stories and personal observations that formed the basis of their earthquake interpretations. In this preacher’s case, a vivid memory of the Great Comet, which indeed appeared to have two horns, fueled his eschatological concern, as did a Bible and the first major temblor.11 Others did not assume that the apocalypse was imminent. They might have considered the earthquakes divinely sanctioned, but the tremors remained natural events that could be observed and studied without diminSpirit

67

ishing their otherworldly significance. Kentucky schoolmaster John Allan ultimately became a Baptist during the tremors. When the shaking began, Allan rose out of bed to see whether his sister “had either got up in her sleep and was dancing or had fallen into a fit.” He then realized the “real cause of the commotion,” informed his wife that they would “probably have another shock in a few minutes,” and, having “satisfied” himself as to the cause of the disturbance, “slept soundly till daylight.” Perhaps wondering whether he had only dreamed about the earthquake, Allan awoke the next morning “expressing a strong desire to witness another shock.” The earth granted his wish, and he “was then quite satisfied and had no desire to see any more shocks.” Allan would later convert, although he emphasized that he had “been more or less serious for several years” about becoming a Baptist and found “the reproach of having merely an earthquake religion” terrifying. Between sleeping soundly after the first tremor and hoping for another earthquake to confirm the cause of the previous night’s shaking, Allan’s understanding of the earthquake was never apocalyptic.12 As his Tennessee community struggled to interpret a range of foreboding natural phenomena, Baptist preacher Reuben Ross walked a fine line between stoking revivalism and assuaging fear. The community’s unease predated the shaking. When a stranger in town died, Ross took to organizing a burial that had not ended by dusk. As the final shovels of dirt filled the grave, people noticed the Great Comet. Ross noticed “a deep sensation in a crowd, all of whom had been taught to look upon comets as harbingers of impending calamity.” Dark red northern lights compounded fears, and “many thought that the movements of armies and bloodshed were portended, and lost heart altogether.” Like the horned comet theorist, Ross’s community reached beyond the Bible for sources of knowledge to interpret the evening’s eerie combination of the comet of 1811, the northern lights, and a stranger’s burial. Coupled with local intrigue and rumors of impending hostility with the British, these astronomical oddities stretched settlers’ interpretations beyond the boundaries of biblical explanation.13 A few months later, the earthquakes amplified anxiety in Ross’s community about the broader consequences of instability in the natural world. Concerned that the shaking would collapse their houses, people huddled around nighttime fires to hear Ross’s explanation of this more pervasive sign of danger. He capitalized on the opportunity to preach about God’s capacity to punish humans for sinful behavior, as well the human ability to avert disaster, by relating the Old Testament story of Nineveh, a major city in the ancient Assyrian empire. He told his community that God had spared this ancient 68Spirit

civilization from destruction because all Ninevites “repented of their sins.” Ross encouraged his audience to do the same, suggesting that they had the ability to mediate the divine through prayer and repentance. Accordingly, a crowd knelt in prayer. Ross’s selection of the Ninevite story was curious, because two books later in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Nahum foretold Nineveh’s destruction. In a vivid description of divine wrath visited on the city for the Assyrian empire’s oppression of neighboring polities, Nahum referenced earthquakes and wartime bloodshed, two realities that Ross’s congregation also faced in the winter of 1812. The Assyrian city indeed fell in the seventh century b.c.e. Ross’s selective narration of the Ninevites’ plight epitomized the way in which all early nineteenth-­century earthquake authorities sifted through a variety of sources of information at hand to construct interpretations that advanced particular objectives. In this case, Ross appropriated the earthquakes for evangelism and grounded his interpretation in a biblical story about the importance of piety, but he privileged one Ninevite story over another in order to maintain community order.14 Ross also calmed people’s otherworldly fears with sources of knowledge beyond the Bible. He explained that earthquakes resulted from “great fires raging in the bowels of the earth,” a natural cause worthy of study. When people neglected their crops out of despondence, he encouraged them to continue farming, as “there were many instances on record” where no further calamity followed earthquakes. For Ross, the long-­term threat of starvation outweighed the need for immediate congregational piety. Like many thinkers in this age of empiricism and widened access to information, he drew from disparate sources of written and experiential knowledge to try to restore a sense of order and understanding to his frightened and confused congregation. From biblical references, theories about the natural causes of earthquakes, and his own observations regarding the impact of tremors and the importance of agriculture, this literate but hardly classically educated preacher constructed an empirical response to the disaster.15 While Ross believed that underground fires were the natural mechanisms responsible for the shaking, other U.S. settlers looked to the sky to develop earthquake interpretations that merged empirical observation with evangelical concerns about sin and conversion. Perhaps because they were located farther from the epicenters, these individuals’ readings were less panicked than the horned comet theorist’s. In Kentucky, teenager Abraham Snethen, who later became an independent itinerant preacher, believed the comet had induced the earthquakes by striking the earth. As his community gathered around its only literate person to listen to her read the Bible, a furSpirit

69

ther example of educated women as trusted information brokers, Snethen focused on the sky. Instead of discrete airborne objects like comets and meteors, other Christian observers linked the earthquakes to more general conditions in the nighttime air. Amid their detailed observations, their accounts also associated the feeling of low air pressure and darkness with central evangelical concerns: guilt about sin, the need for belief and behavioral reform, and divine judgment through destruction. Lydia Bacon, who accompanied her husband on military campaigns through the Old Northwest in 1811 and 1812, sent a number of letters detailing her earthquake experiences back to her family in New England. She first believed the tremors were Native Americans breaking into her house in Vincennes. After describing the damage, Bacon identified the quaking as one of many divine judgments that “shew[ed] us the fallibility, of earthly enjoyments, & the necessity of religion, to make us happy, & enable us to view these judgments, as we ought, how mild are they compared with what our sins deserve.” She then addressed her younger sister directly, urging, “Youth is time for preparation, Piety in youth is delightful.” In the letter that followed, Bacon explained that she tried to use the weather to predict the next tremors: “I often rise in the night & go to the door to examine the Weather, for the most severe ones have been felt in calm lowering weather,” she wrote. Describing the array of strange lights in the nighttime sky that accompanied the earthquakes, the Moravian missionaries at Springplace “had a very strange feeling . . . that perhaps the Day of the Lord had come.” As he contemplated Baptist conversion, Jacob Bower merged evangelical concerns and detailed meteorological observations that mirrored those of Bacon and the missionaries: The Lord have mercy upon us, we shall all be sunk & lost, and I am not prepared. O God have mercy upon us all. I expected immediate destruction, had no hope of seeing the dawn of another day. Eternity, oh Eternity was just at hand, and all of us unprepared; just about the time the sun arose, as I supposed, for it was a thick, dark and foggy morning there was another verry hard shock—lasted several minutes terrible indeed. To see everything touching the earth, shakeing—quivering trembling; and mens hearts quaking for fear of the approaching judgment. . . . All nature appeared to be dressed in mourning, and the god of nature frowning, oh what a time of melancholy.16 When John Allan worried that he had experienced “earthquake religion,” he expressed a common concern about the inauthenticity of conversion ex70Spirit

periences during the earthquakes. Just as newspapers and elite experts in natural history distinguished between true and fabricated observations before publishing reports of the shaking, preachers and converts questioned the sincerity of evangelical commitments, particularly when church attendance dropped after the tremors ended. In this case, they monitored behavior after the convulsions in order to gauge the authenticity of conversion experiences. The term “Earthquake Christians” became a popular way to describe people who filled the pews and refrained from ungodly behavior like drinking and dancing during the tremors, yet abandoned these commitments when the shaking stopped. Concerning “Earthquake Christians,” Ross explained that “as the earth became more and more steady, their faith became more and more unsteady,” and they soon stopped their “pious walk and godly conversation.” Church membership rolls lent statistical credence to these laments. After growing by more than 15,000 people in 1812, the two western Methodist conferences lost nearly 2,000 members in 1813. Baptisms among Baptist congregations also declined substantially in 1813 (see figures 3 and 4).17 Doubts about the legitimacy of conversion experiences and the durability of religious commitments lingered in the minds of believers and skeptics alike. Allan regretted that a majority of people “threw off their concerns as soon as the earth ceased to shake” and wondered whether his experience was any different. He came to trust the legitimacy of his conversion. Like many commentators who complained about backsliding, he tried to validate the widespread but short-­lived revivalism by pointing to people who maintained sturdier commitments. Bower responded to doubts about the long-­term impact of earthquake revivalism in similar terms. Arguing that some backsliding was inevitable, he claimed to have met a number of ministers who converted during the earthquakes. Even some people who did not participate in the revivals recognized their social function amid danger and uncertainty. Polly Wilson McGee in Indiana Territory appreciated the solace that those engaged in a nearby revival found in the experience: “All that I could say was this if it was a delusion it was a glorious one for I soon saw they were much happier than I while I was affraid at every convulsive pang of nature that the earth would open her mouth and Swallow me up alive.”18 Despite believers’ efforts to justify the earthquakes’ punctuated effect on the behavior of newly converted people as a predictable outcome of mass conversions, skeptics seized on earthquake revivalism to argue that evangelical warnings and behavior were alarmist and excessive. They particularly criticized people whose bodies shook like the earth. “It was frequently Spirit

71

said by the enimies of religion, the Baptists are all shakers, that when the earth is don[e] shaking, they will all turn back, and be as they were before,” wrote Bower. The “jerks” were prominent in elder Tennessean Mary Morriss Smith’s memories of the earthquakes. Although the practice had “measurably subsided” since the great revivals at the turn of nineteenth century, Smith remembered a vigorous debate in her community about the causes and remedies for the jerks during the earthquakes, as well a cautionary tale about doubting people’s capacity to jerk involuntarily. She wrote, “There were skepticks in those days who thought this a voluntary exercise. They could keep from jerking if they wished. If anyone spoke reproachfully of it they were sure to have the jerks and their whole bodies jerk till they would fall prostrate to the earth.” One young skeptic “took the jerks and fell prostrate with his nice clothes” into a hog wallow.19 While the jerks were difficult to explain, young law student Joseph Underwood believed that he understood the source of people’s unnecessary fright in Lexington, Kentucky. Watchmen told their neighbors that while on patrol, they heard “aerial songs” warning of “awful desolation.” The song was a verse from an early eighteenth-­century hymn urging repentance: “While the lamp holds out to burn / The vilest sinner may return.” In a letter to his uncle, Underwood was doubtful about the “aerial songs,” which sprung from “the imaginations of the watchmen influenced by fear in the hour of midnight.” Either their imaginations had deceived them, or they had conspired to frighten people who, because of the earthquakes, were “now ready to believe in and wonder at miracles.” In Underwood’s estimation, the earthquakes did not betoken “very serious consequences.” If other strange events were to occur, however, it was prudent “to await the calamity with courage and not anticipate horrors which may never result.”20 As a law student in Lexington, Underwood and his skepticism were representative of Kentucky’s class and geographical divides. Lexington’s Methodist population grew in 1812, but not nearly at the rates in less urbanizing areas of Kentucky. Underwood’s dismissal of people “now ready to believe in and wonder at miracles” extended a pattern that began in mid-­eighteenth-­ century New England, where the formally educated increasingly dismissed less-­educated evangelical people’ claims about the pressing religious significance of natural phenomena. The geographical distribution of shaking, in which magnitude depended on proximity to the epicenters, makes it more difficult to assess whether this social divide held in other areas of the United States and its territories. People along the East Coast gathering accounts dismissed some reports from farther inland as exaggerated and fantastic. But 72Spirit

had they witnessed people disappear in cracks, or the Mississippi River flow backward, they might have reserved judgment.21 Though evangelical settlers’ personal memories and community discussions about the earthquakes left questions open to interpretation, evangelical claims in print culture were often more prescriptive. Citing the Hebrew Bible, they depicted God as a punisher who used the earthquakes, among a sequence of other foreboding signs like the Richmond Theater fire, to deliver a direct, urgent message about the need to convert for protection from further destruction. As in the case of print debates about the Richmond Theater fire, these rigid stances attracted opposition. Just as people questioned the authenticity and durability of “earthquake religion,” so too did writers urge reason and calm to temper the menacing and definitive conclusions of evangelicals. Perhaps not coincidentally, these advocates of more sober analysis lived farther from the shaking. In religious periodicals and local periodicals alike, writers urged Christian faith and repentance to cope with the upheaval gripping the nation. “We have had an uncommon year: and the moral as well as political world, appear to be undergoing some extraordinary change!” noted a letter writer in a February 1812 edition of a Savannah, Georgia, newspaper. “Let us unite in adoring him, ‘who causeth the earth to tremble, and the waves of the sea to be still.’” Other writers echoed this emphasis on divine power and connections among signs of disorder. “What power short of omnipotence, could raise and shake such a vast portion of the globe?” asked one person in Hartford’s Connecticut Mirror, later quoting a verse from the book of Matthew about discerning “the signs of the times.” A man in Charleston, South Carolina, found it “vain and presumptuous” that one would attribute disasters to chance, and he was glad that God spared his city “through his Divine Mercy.” The Massachusetts Baptists Missionary Magazine used poetry to cast the earthquakes as a poignant display of divine power: “How dread the Earthquake’s awful roll, / That shakes the earth from pole to pole! / What power can thus convulse the whole? Can it be less than Deity?”22 Though religious commentators broadly agreed that the earthquakes were displays of divine power, they disagreed about the extent to which human reason could inform understandings of the convulsions. Arguments in two periodicals founded in 1812 epitomized the debate about reason. Echoing Samuel Williams’s 1788 earthquake study, the first issue of the New York publication the Halcyon Luminary, and Theological Repository explained, “Natural and Scientific truths, so far from being incompatible with genuine theology, are absolutely necessary to constitute a well-­informed mind.” AcSpirit

73

cordingly, the journal contained an article about how God used volcanoes and earthquakes to relieve the heat and pressure built up from subterranean fires. The writer argued that small volcanoes were not always bad for humans, as volcano-­prone areas had fertile soil. Furthermore, earthquakes would be more devastating if volcanoes did not exist to relieve underground heat and pressure. To the author, these phenomena were divinely ordained, though God’s intention was to prevent more major cataclysms, rather than to punish humans. Subsequent topics in the first issue—“Wonderful Construction of the Eye,” “Repentance and Conversion,” and “Solomon’s Temple”—blended Enlightenment reasoning with religious devotion, reflecting the influence of deism.23 Like John Wesley, the Evangelical Record, and Western Review of Lexington, Kentucky, argued that the drive to uncover the earthquakes’ natural mechanisms obscured their primary importance as displays of divine will and power. First published in January 1812, the periodical classified three types of earthquake interpretation, only one of which was acceptable. Some people were “only brutes in human shape,” as they were too panic stricken to consider the earthquakes’ meaning during the shaking and soon forgot about them. Others “carr[ied] their inquiries no farther than the natural causes which are supposed to have produced them.” The Evangelical Record judged these observers harshly for not reading religious meaning into the tremors; they were “devils, in employing their intellectual faculty wholly in contriving how the world was made and is governed without a God.” Finally, there were those who employed a “useful philosophy” to recognize divine intention in the earthquakes and link them to “the moral government of the world.”24 With this last perspective, the Evangelical Record emphasized the limits of human reason alone in explaining the earthquakes. This argument was popular among other writers who cast strict empiricists as aimless, conceited, and ultimately powerless before divine authority. To demonstrate the point, the Evangelical Record compared mining operations and the “few sparks of electricity” that humans could generate with “the power which shakes the continent” and lightning that flashed across the sky. In letters to newspapers, one writer in Georgia explained that “the wandering mazes of scientific reason” would not lead people to the “true source” of the tremors, and another person in South Carolina added that they “present a awful lesson of man’s dependence on his maker.” From the differences in the earthquake commentary in the Halcyon Luminary and the Evangelical Record, among other southern publications, it is tempting to extrapolate a significant regional dimension to the interpretive divide between deists and evangelicals. But writers 74Spirit

in New York and Kentucky also experienced very different magnitudes of shaking, which undoubtedly informed their commentary. As Jacob Bower remembered, deists were predictably “scarce” as the ground trembled under his panicked Kentucky community.25 With proclamations less detailed but equally as foreboding as Nimrod Hughes’s warning, some writers found it futile to argue about human reason. To them, these were the End Times. In a broadside, prominent itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow was characteristically direct: “*wars— pestilence—earthquakes and famine are the sword and scourge of god—the spirit of Missionary is prevalent—the times are eventful— and the signs are ominous; but it shall be well with those whose god is the lord!!” (see figure 5). Dow also wrote a sprawling theological treatise in 1812 that identified ten such signs, including papal power, the “clash of Nations,” worldwide famines and plagues, and, finally, “the remarkable and extensive shocks of the Earthquakes.” Even many of his fellow itinerant preachers identified Dow as an extreme, roguish figure, but he was not alone in highlighting the gravity of the era. In the first issue of the Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer, published in June 1812, the editors announced that they had created the paper because not since the days of Jesus had an age been “more evidently marked with the stately steppings of an Almighty God.” They explained that it seemed “as if the great Drama of the world was drawing to a close,” observing, “All nations have, in a greater or less degree, tasted of the cup of trembling.” These concerns lingered well after the natural phenomena and the declaration of war. In a May 1813 issue, their interpretation was less speculative and more focused on the United States than a general global warning: “Unless political reformation prevents, national sins will produce national ruins and judgments. . . . The day of vengeance is near. Five swords of the Almighty are visible: destructive insects, pestilence, earthquakes, wars, and famines.”26 Prophecies gripped and divided Indian country. As people enacted tribally specific rituals for addressing the cosmological imbalance, some Native Americans in the Deep South and Old Northwest gravitated to prophets who situated the earthquakes prominently in their designs to remake Indigenous societies and structures of governance in the face of U.S. expansionism. Tenskwatawa’s earthquake prediction became a critical recruiting tool after his defeat at Tippecanoe, and these long-­standing signs of impurity bolstered the Red Sticks’ bid to purify Creek territory and culture. Others Spirit

75

Figure 5. Itinerant evangelist Lorenzo Dow situated the earthquakes among other “ominous” signs in this 1815 broadside. (Broadside from 2 Nov. 1815 by Methodist Evangelist Lorenzo Dow, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.)

eschewed these radical responses in favor of more moderate interpretations grounded in traditional knowledge and practice. In addition to hearing about the prophetic visitor to the cabin, Cherokees engaged in rituals and entertained other revelatory visions that linked the earthquakes with unhealthiness and impurity. Skaquaw, the leader of Cherokee migrants living in present-­day Arkansas in the early nineteenth century, had his own vision between early tremors. As he peered out at the Great Comet, lightning from the four cardinal directions converged at his 76Spirit

feet. Two children emerged from the lightning and sent Skaquaw into a trance with perfume. He awoke in one of the children’s hands and was told that he had been “purified in this celestial fire,” which was presumably the comet, so that he could properly hear the words of the “Ever-­Great Spirit.” The children told him that the Ever-­Great Spirit was “determined to put an end to mankind, their mortal enemy, and save his children alone.” They proclaimed that “the fire of war [was] burning already in all four corners of the earth,” and this Cherokee band needed to leave their location on the St. Francis River. As a sign to escape, they explained, the earth would again shake “like a horse who shakes the dust from his back.” Skaquaw’s band was then to travel west until it found peaceful hunting ground to await the “end to mankind.” When the earth shook further, this group of Cherokees fled west to find dry land and to avoid being caught up in the coming war.27 Elements of this vision point to its cosmological significance and the way that it reflected contemporary concerns about the pollution of Cherokee land and bodies. The children who came from the sky to greet Skaquaw were likely the famous Thunder Boys from Cherokee creation stories. Although they were initially responsible for the scarcity of crops and game, the brothers learned the proper rituals for ensuring that corn would grow each year. They later retreated to the sky, and Cherokees occasionally called them back to attract game. The presence of these foundational figures in Skaquaw’s vision conveyed the gravity of the message. Like the early nineteenth-­century Cherokees who had ceded territory, adopted Euro American lifeways, and failed to conduct proper rituals, the Thunder Boys had once behaved improperly, but they had reformed their ways to become fixtures in the operation of the natural world. Furthermore, the references to comet and earthquakes as purifying agents demonstrate the centrality of the concept of purity in Cherokee understandings of the earthquakes and the coinciding comet. Like the dust inside the sick children, the dust on the horse’s back signified greater problems in Cherokee affairs.28 Back east in their ancestral homeland, Cherokees gathered around mountain streams and fires to purify themselves. In March 1812, a U.S. agent remarked that some Cherokees were “in a remarkable manner endeavouring to appease the Anger of the great spirit, which they conceive [was] manifested by the late shocks of the earth,” by reviving “religious dances of ancient origin” and riverside rituals. Cherokee waterways were always important sites for purification. During special occasions, Cherokees invoked the “Long Man” flowing down from the mountains. They also conducted a range of rituals at river bends: visiting streams for morning contemplation, Spirit

77

fasting and plunging for new moons, and washing for grief or impending peril. While the U.S. agent worried that some of the participants in washing ceremonies were “fanatics” who claimed “the great spirit [was] angry with them [the Cherokees] for adopting the manners, customs, and habits of the white people,” these riverside gatherings were regular features of Cherokee life that had assumed renewed importance amid the shaking.29 Homing in on material goods as tangible reminders of the colonial infiltration of their culture, some Cherokees did urge one another to cast off Euro American clothing and other products during the earthquakes. In March 1812, a man foretold a “great darkness” during which time “all the white people and those Indians who had clothing or household items in the style of white people would also be carried away.” To ensure “that God would not mistake them in the darkness,” the prophet directed Cherokees to “put aside everything which was similar to the white people and what they had learned from them.” If Cherokees refused to discard their “white” goods, they and their livestock would immediately die. One man had allegedly perished already for not heeding the warning, but the threat did not frighten the Cherokee visitor who related the prophecy to the Moravian missionaries. Instead, she offered to buy her neighbors’ “household items and clothing” to show them “that she didn’t pay any attention to the lies.” In another case, a man burned his hat and encouraged a young leader to do the same, to which the latter replied, “It is no matter what clothes I wear while my heart is straight.” Like the U.S. settlers who were skeptical of “shakers” and other temporary displays of religiosity during the earthquakes, some Cherokees questioned those in their communities who demonstrated great alarm.30 Complementing these Cherokee visions and rituals were ancient stories that helped to explain the earthquakes. One story led Cherokees to expect other dangerous natural forces accompanying the tremors. According to the story, “At another time God sent a storm of hail to destroy their enemies. The hailstones were as large as hominy mortar, and destroyed every thing in their way.” After the first tremors, Cherokees heeded the story by anticipating epic hail. A missionary reported, “Recently the residents of a town in the mountain fled and tried to creep in to caves in the cliffs to be out of danger from the hail which was supposed to be as big as a half-­bushel measure.” Those who could not flee to the caves dug deep holes in which to take cover. As the tremors continued, so did expectations of hail. One woman wondered whether hailstones as large as “hominy blocks” would fall. Later that spring, a major hailstorm surely renewed Cherokee concern.31 When some Cherokees attributed the earthquakes to “a great snake 78Spirit

who must have crawled under their house,” they offered an ancient explanation that had implications for Mississippian-­descended societies across the Southeast. Snakes were ubiquitous and fundamental to order. Giant water serpents hoisted up the earth from the watery layer below it, and no matter their size or location, they were to be feared and venerated. Their ability to pass between the Lower and Middle Worlds of the universe—by living underground, on the ground, and in trees—made them spiritually powerful and potentially menacing. Giant horned rattlesnakes known to Cherokees as uktena, or “tie-­snakes” among Southeastern Indians more broadly, were the most revered. Spiritual leaders used large crystals from the heads of tie-­snakes in powerful medicine bundles. In dreams or in wakefulness, uktena appearances were rare and foreboding. To suggest that large snakes were responsible for the earthquakes thus signaled the depth of cosmological disorder.32 People with access to these large snakes and their spiritual power were equally as imposing and spiritually potent. Captain Isaacs, a Creek prophet and early leader of the Red Sticks, told of diving to the bottom of a river and “for many days and nights receiving instruction and information from an enormous and friendly serpent that dwel[t] there and was acquainted with future events and all other things necessary for a man to know in his life.” In the earliest months of the Red Stick movement, Captain Isaacs’s access to the snake enhanced his credibility as a powerful mediator between Lower and Middle Worlds. After his break with the Red Sticks, however, his opponent used the story to argue that he was an evil witch who could not be trusted. In either scenario, his visit to the river bottom was evidence of the snake’s cosmological significance and his special power in accessing it.33 In the limited documentary record on the Red Sticks, the movement’s members never directly attributed the earthquakes to tie-­snakes. But coupled with Creek oral histories that associated tie-­snakes with impurity and human error, as well as Red Stick claims to manipulate destructive natural forces in their favor, Captain Isaacs’s story suggests that the Red Sticks situated the earthquakes prominently in their campaign to purify Creek land and people. In Creek oral histories, tie-­snakes were created when humans violated food taboos. Various versions of the story exist, but each begins with two hungry hunters. One told his companion that he could become a snake by mixing and then eating the brains of a black snake, a black squirrel, and a wild turkey. After devouring the concoction, the man indeed transformed into a snake and retired into a deep pool. His fellow hunter returned home, where townspeople accused him of murder. The surviving man led his huntSpirit

79

ing partner’s parents to the pool, where the snake “laid its head against its mother’s jaw. It shed tears but could not speak.” In other iterations of the story, the hunter-­turned-­tie-­snake ate strange fish or a bad egg, but the message in each case remained the same: eating impure foods had dangerous consequences.34 Although the tie-­snake was a potential menace that pulled people into ponds, his tears and inability to speak in the story made him a dangerous but sympathetic figure. He was not the malevolent serpent from the Garden of Evil that Tenskwatawa likely appropriated to refer to white people, nor was he entirely the “friendly serpent” with whom Captain Isaacs described communing. But Creeks and Cherokees alike probably implicated snakes like him in the shaking, which demanded rituals to purify and rebalance the earth.35 From earthquakes to a new U.S. road cut through Creek country, mounting evidence of impurity surrounded the Red Sticks. Their movement became an extended and increasingly violent purge of impure bodies and land. Red Sticks initially fostered solidarity by gathering to imbibe the “black drink.” In accepting this traditional tea, which induced vomiting and thereby purified the body, Creeks publicly pledged their allegiance to the insurgent cause. When prominent Creeks William Weatherford and Samuel Moniac encountered Red Sticks gathered to take the black drink, they were instructed to “join or be put to death.” Weatherford, a redheaded Creek warrior from a prominent family, reluctantly accepted the drink and his place in the revolt. The Creek brother-­in-­law of a prominent prophet, Moniac refused to participate, barely escaped the gathering with his life, and later gave one of the few firsthand accounts of the Red Sticks after they burned his house and property.36 After fostering solidarity with the black drink, Red Sticks sought to rid Creek country of impurities with other public demonstrations. When prophets shook hands with those who opposed them, they claimed to sense the salt in their diets and jerked their bodies uncontrollably to cleanse themselves of this Euro American product used to preserve and flavor meat. A British trader described a prophet “who trembled, grinned horribly, & made the most convulsive movements so as to endeavour to inspire terror.” He also noted that Red Sticks did not “taste a single drop of liquor, or any thing else but water.” When the earth shook and unusually heavy rains washed out the federal road and destroyed the U.S. agent’s mill during the winter of 1812, Red Sticks likely found that nature was working in tandem with their drive to purify Creek bodies and lands. Over time, their displays became more hos80Spirit

tile. In a chance encounter with a postrider passing along the federal road in the early summer of 1813, they shot off his hat, killed his horse, stole his mail, and allowed him to escape on foot. During that summer, Red Sticks also began attacking owners and their property, slaughtering livestock and leaving carcasses to rot, even though they would soon begin to go hungry. “The destruction of every American is the song of the day,” an anti–­Red Stick Creek chief reported. Their campaign had become increasingly violent.37 As their revolt escalated, Red Stick prophets emboldened their followers by claiming that they could manipulate natural forces in their favor. In the months before their attack on Fort Mims, they issued a range of threats involving natural phenomena, particularly earthquakes. Creeks and non-­ Creeks alike faced punishment. Of white settlers, Creek informant Alexander Cornells told Hawkins that Red Sticks claimed “power to destroy them by an earthquake, or rendering the ground soft and miry, and thunder.” Cornells explained that dissenting Creeks like himself faced similar threats: “If any Indian towns refused their aid to the prophets, they should be sunk with earthquakes, or hills should be turned over them. They had also the aid of lightning whenever they wanted.” These claims of spiritual prowess ranged beyond Creek country. A Scottish trader living among the Choctaws wrote to Creek chiefs, “Some of your people is a going to make the ground shake.” In fact, earthquake damage already had worked in the Red Sticks’ favor. Sand and fissures from the earthquakes made travel difficult for the nearly 300 U.S. troops dispatched to track Red Sticks who killed U.S. settlers in Tennessee on their spring 1812 trip back from the Ohio Valley. The earthquakes did not bring about the Red Stick uprising; the revolutionaries’ grievances were deeper and their approach more methodical. The tremors did, however, powerfully signify impurity in Creek country and bolster Red Stick claims to spiritual power and insight.38 The Red Sticks’ ritual drive for purity reached its violent apogee with their assault on Fort Mims in late August 1813. Though variously cast as a “punishment” or “massacre” of people huddled inside a new, hastily constructed fort, the attack was certainly a purge, the extreme culmination of an extended rite that began with the public sharing of the black drink. The carnage was unprecedented; casualty estimates were imprecise, but more than 250 men, women, and children of Indian, European, and African descent died at the hands of about 700 Red Sticks. Details of the raid show that it was more than a military venture. The Red Sticks burned and mutilated human remains and property and left more livestock carcasses to waste. After an enslaved captive showed them where residents of Fort Mims had buried furniSpirit

81

ture, the movement’s adherents took the time to dig it up and burn it. They also melted silver money and streaked it across the ground.39 Tenskwatawa’s winter 1807–8 pronouncement looms large over an uncertain six months in the Shawnee Brothers’ movement. Defeated and dispersed, the militants looked finished after defeat at Tippecanoe. Tenskwatawa’s spiritual authority had been compromised. Some say it never recovered. Nevertheless, the movement had regrouped by the spring of 1812, and U.S. officials were concerned anew. The Louisiana Gazette of St. Louis reported, “A general combination is ripening fast,” as red wampum signifying war had circulated among Indians as far north and west as the Sioux. Tecumseh insisted that his and Tenskwatawa’s followers meant no harm. “We defy a living creature to say we ever advised any one, directly or indirectly, to make war on our white brothers,” he responded to Potawatomi claims that their youth had been incited to violence. Nevertheless, Harrison believed the Shawnee Brothers had adopted a new strategy: rather than launch full-­scale military engagements, he said, they would scatter killings across the Ohio Country “to distract and divide our attention to prevent the Militia from embodying” in a single location. Intertribal gatherings also grew. The Prophet was spotted with 500 people near the former site of Prophetstown in May. By July, the settlement was rebuilt, and Tecumseh had declared war on the United States. In October, 2,000 militants attacked Fort Wayne.40 This dramatic reinvigoration of intertribal militancy has puzzled historians. One scholar has claimed that Tenskwatawa’s November 1811 attack marked the pinnacle of his influence, and that after the debacle, he ceded authority to his brother. Another has questioned whether the Battle of Tippecanoe was actually a rout, pointing to the famously self-­promotional Harrison, and to nineteenth-­century historians eager to paint Tenskwatawa as a villain and Tecumseh as a tragic hero for propagating the Tippecanoe “myth.” The attack certainly undermined the Prophet’s claims to be able to use nature to incapacitate U.S. troops, and he blamed his wife for weakening his spiritual power. Then and now, skeptics of the Prophet’s ability to control and predict natural forces could cite his prediction of a “day of judgment to come” in four years as one of the reasons why he attacked the U.S. Army at the end of 1811. The strike offered an opportunity to fulfill his promise. But during the earthquakes, it would be difficult to imagine that years of talk about destroying “all the white people” with the “power to change the course of nature” and “great snakes under the earth,” complete with the four-­ 82Spirit

year prediction, did not give pause to Tenskwatawa’s followers and foes alike. Given his 1808 claim, the earthquakes must have helped to renew the Shawnee Brothers’ movement.41 The winter 1807–8 claim also lends credence to various iterations of a newspaper story implicating Tenskwatawa in the earthquakes. In the account, a single survivor reported that all seven of his companions were swallowed up in a chasm. In Richmond’s Virginia Argus version, the survivor said, “The Shawanoe Prophet has caused the Earthquake, to destroy the whites.” In New York City’s Columbian, “This calamity was foretold by the Shawnanoe Prophet for the destruction of the whites!” Newspapers across the United States reprinted these stories of Tenskwatawa as foreteller or creator of the earthquakes.42 Moravian missionaries worried that the Shawnee Prophet had used the earthquakes to incite American Indians in and beyond the Ohio Valley. “Even the lies of the Shawanee prophets are being circulated this far,” wrote an increasingly anxious evangelist in Cherokee country. Nearly thirty Indians left a Moravian mission in Goshen, Ohio, at the end of 1811. As one missionary understood their departure, they had been “overpowered in principle by the presence here of many confused, discontented or evil-­minded Indians.” After the second major earthquake a few weeks later, a visiting chief linked the shaking to territorial concerns and the outcome at Tippecanoe. “The late earthquakes took place because the Great Spirit was not pleased that the white people had taken possession of so much of the Indian country, and had lately killed so many Indians on the Wabash,” he explained. The mission visitor’s reading of the earthquakes showed that, while not expressly allied with Tenskwatawa, Native people remained receptive to the Prophet’s claims despite the destruction of Prophetstown.43 A June 1812 letter in a U.S. religious periodical reported that Tenskwatawa had predicted the earthquakes at the Creek town of Tuckabatchee in August 1811. According to the writer’s firsthand sources, the prophet said that “shortly a lamp would appear in the west to aid him in his hostile attack upon the whites, and if they would not be influenced by his persuasion, the earth would, ere long, tremble to its centre.” Of course, more evidence of Tenskwatawa’s predictions after the earthquakes and comet suggested to his critics that he was desperately grasping for ways to regain legitimacy after attacking Tippecanoe. And a letter writer from Georgia seeking to discredit the report of Tenskwatawa’s foresight denied that the Shawnee Prophet had led the delegation to Tuckabatchee and questioned the Ohio Valley militants’ influence on the Creeks. Both criticisms were valid. Tecumseh, not TenskwaSpirit

83

tawa, had traveled to the Creek town, and he found few commitments there. The report of the Prophet’s prescience did have problems, and its timing after the earthquakes likely bolstered accusations of his fraud. But alongside the 1808 letter, newspaper stories, and missionary accounts, the report supports mounting evidence that Tenskwatawa actually made claims about the tremors before they began in December 1811. After the Battle of Tippecanoe, he likely used that remarkable claim to renew intertribal militancy in 1812.44 Still, a small fraction of Native Americans in the region joined the Shawnee Brothers after the earthquakes. They confronted the tremors and accompanying geopolitical tumult with established rituals rather than radical reform. In one case, Shawnees gathered to “excite the pity of the great spirit” by fasting and sacrificing deer. They passed three nights lying on the fresh skins, “turning their thoughts exclusively upon the happy prospect of immediate protection; that they may conceive dreams to that effect, the only vehicle of intercourse between them and the great spirit.” Men and women separated and spent their days fasting in hopes that the Great Spirit would protect them and provide plentiful game. When the three days had passed, they related their dreams and feasted on the deer. Shawnees held sacrificial deer hunts like this one in conjunction with monumental events like large councils or diplomatic gatherings with U.S. officials. In hunting and fasting, tribal members addressed the tremors in an established way without committing to the urgent, often violent prescriptions of prophets like Tenskwatawa and the Red Sticks.45 Earthquakes held special ritual significance for the Delawares, who carried out their first Big House Ceremony after an ancient earthquake struck their homelands on the mid-­Atlantic coast. After the shaking, a menacing black fluid and smoke emanated from huge gaps in the earth. The scene produced a “great disturbance of mind,” as animals and humans believed the smoke to be the “breath of the Evil Spirit.” All creatures convened to consider how to respond. They decided that the earthquake was a sign that “the Great Spirit was very seriously angry with them,” and many humans reported a common dream in which they were told to construct a building and conduct an annual rite of purification and thanksgiving. The result became known as the Big House Ceremony, an elaborate, twelve-­day process that was the highlight of the Delaware ritual calendar. Despite their constant dislocations west from the mid-­Atlantic, the ceremony gave the Delawares a steady sense of place inside the Big House. They also shared with Cherokees a reverence for giant, menacing snakes. After the Delawares’ displacement, oral tradition still held that a “remarkably large Snake” lived in a pond out84Spirit

side Philadelphia, and there were prohibitions against killing rattlesnakes, which tribal members described to a missionary in 1792 as “their Grandfather.”46 The Delawares’ avowed neutrality in the War of 1812 suggests that they attended to matters inside the Big House. At a council in May 1812, they described Tenskwatawa’s teachings as destructive for Indians and Americans alike. Though mid-­eighteenth-­century intertribal prophet Neolin was Delaware, Tenskwatawa had targeted Delaware political rivals and Christian converts as witches and ordered their executions, giving them reason for suspicion. Nonetheless mindful of the Delawares’ special status as “grandfathers” themselves among American Indians in the Ohio Valley, Tenskwatawa later told an interviewer that Shawnees never fought them. The Delawares still kept their distance. They attributed the scattered killings of American settlers in the spring of 1812 to the “bad effect” of the Prophet’s influence and wished instead to “proclaim peace through the land of the red people.” Although rumors implicated the Delawares in conflict, Harrison praised their “uncommon faithfulness” and urged “every proper forbearance” in U.S. dealings with them. The tribally specific key to restoring order lay in the Big House, not at Prophetstown.47 Concern about cosmological disorder and divine judgment extended well west of the Mississippi River. In 1962, Quapaw elder Mary Maude Angel related her people’s own riverside ritual response to the tremors in the Arkansas River valley. Amid falling trees and collapsing hills, scared older people gathered to pray, sing, talk, and smoke through the night. In the morning, they put cloth, tobacco, and other important items in a large brass kettle and took the kettle along with a horse down to the riverbank. The kettle and horse were critical to Quapaw sustenance, trade, and defense, but the earthquakes were a more immediate threat. After drowning these prestige objects in a show of sacrifice, the earthquakes stopped. Northwest of the Quapaws, Otoes directly attributed the earthquakes to an act of American violence. A “son of the Master of Life” riding a white horse through the forest was shot and killed by Americans “of a sanguinary disposition.” Otoes explained that earthquakes were “the effect of supernatural agency, connected, like thunder, with the immediate operations of the Master of Life.” For killing a divine messenger, the American assailants enraged the Master of Life, and “it was certainly owing to this act that the earth was now trembling before the anger of the Great Wahconda [Master of Life].” Whether the “son of the Master of Life” was an emissary from Prophetstown or a local leader, the Otoes joined Tenskwatawa in casting the earthquakes as divine vengeance.48 Spirit

85

The earthquakes amplified waves of religious revivalism across Native and Euro American societies in the Ohio Valley and southern Appalachians. In U.S. territory, church rolls spiked as new members flocked to Methodist and Baptist congregations. Individual accounts of evangelical conversion coupled eschatological concerns with detailed observations about the natural world and doubts about the insincerity of “earthquake religion.” Christian periodicals emphasized the limitations of human reason for comprehending the earthquakes’ ultimate meaning, and while Nimrod Hughes’ pen went strangely silent, other writers followed in his footsteps. In Indian country, Tenskwatawa’s prediction helped the Shawnee Brothers to renew their following after the Battle of Tippecanoe, and the Red Sticks intensified their claims to control nature in their bid to purify Creek territory. Because of the military threats that they posed to U.S. settlers, these iconoclastic movements attracted the most attention from U.S. officials then and historians now. In turning to more established leaders and rituals in hopes of restoring cosmological balance, however, Delaware, Quapaw, and Cherokee people also demonstrated the persistence of long-­ standing systems of Indigenous thought, ritual, and social organization. Masses of people grappled with the earthquakes’ spiritual significance in a variety of forums, from church meetings and council fires to print. Their concerns often outlasted the shaking, prompting not only personal transformations, but collective reckonings that had political and territorial ­consequences.

86Spirit

4

Politics When John Adams worried that the prophecies of Tenskwatawa, Hughes, and McPherson were “unphilosophical and inconsistent with the political Safety of States and Nations,” he captured a broad concern among U.S. and Native American leaders alike. The shaking occurred during their experiments in nation remaking in eastern North America. At the cusp of the War of 1812, territorial expansion, Atlantic trade disputes, and diplomatic insecurity tested the U.S. republic from within and without. Political concerns about territory, trade, and the relationship between national and local interests extended to governments beyond the United States. Among the Creeks and Cherokees, prominent leaders pushed for centralized governance. In establishing nation-­states, they sought to strengthen preexisting bonds of kinship, culture, and territory, urging national collectivity at the expense of local autonomy. North of the Ohio River, the Shawnee Brothers’ political experiment was more radical: subsume and in some cases violently eliminate tribal interests with a new intertribal community bound by strict commitments to new rituals, lifeways free of Euro American influence, and the ultimate authority of the two leaders. Amid these experiments in new forms of governance, the earthquakes magnified tensions between religious and political authority and stoked questions about the degree to which matters of spirit should anchor these emerging nation-­states. Prophets and other revivalistic leaders pointed to the earthquakes as signs of the urgent need to lend their authority and incorporate their interests into these nationalizing projects. For Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the shaking bolstered their cause to bind religious and politi87

cal authority together tightly. In the Native South and in the United States, where religious and political leadership were more differentiated, debates about the meaning and significance of the earthquakes became larger reckonings with the role of prophecy and revivalism in national politics. Pervasive uncertainty and fear enabled claims that might otherwise have seemed alarmist and preposterous. Seizing on these foreboding times, religious figures sought to carve out more prominent places in their nations’ politics with earthquake interpretations urging profound transformations. They warned their nations to heed their special insights and prescriptions, and in some cases, they directly challenged the foundations and directions of their respective nationalizing political orders. Undifferentiated authority was central to the Shawnee Brothers’ bid for intertribal nationhood in the Ohio Valley. The Red Sticks similarly situated the earthquakes prominently in their designs to bind political and religious power, though rather than pursuing undifferentiated authority to promote state building, their insurgency opposed the form that Creek nationhood had assumed in the early nineteenth century. Prophets and other earthquake interpreters among Cherokee people related the tremors to the loss of territory and lifeways. However, their role in Cherokee society and politics was more similar to that of revivalists in the United States, who voiced concerns without seeking to fundamentally upend the differentiated national order through violence. Compared to their U.S. counterparts, established Native political leaders were more alarmed about their societies’ prophets and revivalism. Leaders’ military campaigns against followers of the Red Sticks and the Shawnee Brothers reflected their assessments of the threats that these movements posed to polities already struggling with U.S. pressure. By the War of 1812, rivals of the Native establishments had consolidated authority in ways that would have been impossible in the early United States. There were numerous obstacles to a U.S. movement of undifferentiated religious and political power matching the fervor and militancy of those in Indian country. Religious authorities and institutions in the geographically sprawling nation were composite and often more decentralized. National political partisanship also assumed religious dimensions. Federalists denounced Republicans, namely Thomas Jefferson, as atheist radicals, yet revivalism flourished in the western United States, where settlers enacted the Jeffersonian ideals of landownership, agrarianism, and national expansion. These layers of complexity and division made the early U.S. republic less susceptible to bids for undifferentiated authority. And while Adams and Jefferson grouped them together in their correspondence, comparisons of Nimrod Hughes and 88Politics

Tenskwatawa could only go so far. Tenskwatawa and other militant prophets resonated with Native audiences facing threats more urgent and realistic than those that Hughes imagined for his readers. Still, the earthquakes and related upheaval of fire and war prompted soul-­searching on a national level, as American earthquake commentators grappled with the place of religion in a republic without a state church. Denouncing Hughes and his ilk, more established U.S. religious leaders across the political and denominational spectrum ultimately settled on a less alarmist national piety to guard against the sins of irreligiosity and outright atheism.1 The Red Sticks did not foretell natural phenomena; they claimed to control them. The destruction at Fort Mims showed that their claims to shaking the ground and trapping white people in quagmires could no longer be dismissed as fanciful bluster. What began with the sharing of black drink and communing with tie-­snakes had escalated into full-­fledged civil war, as Red Sticks sought to reorder Creek affairs by merging religious and political authority and rejecting nationalization. Like the Ohio Valley intertribal militants, their alternative mode of governance demanded separation from Euro American people and their lifeways. Building on their designs to protect themselves through sacred means, the Red Sticks consecrated a new town named “Holy Ground” in the winter of 1814. Holy Ground was intended to be a safe haven for retreating militants, because it was supposedly impermeable to white people. Extending their claims to controlling natural forces, Red Stick prophets said the ground surrounding the town would sink when enemies approached, protecting its inhabitants as well as the food and plunder that they buried within its walls. The ground had shaken and sunk before. Red Sticks said they could make it do so again on command, and after the fury they unleashed at Fort Mims, it became more reasonable to believe them.2 To their Native opponents, the Red Sticks threatened not only Creek national authority, but the standing of all Southeastern Indian nations with the United States. Having rejected Tecumseh’s overtures, Creeks still faced both the Red Sticks and the perils of negotiating another round of imperial warfare in which the United States accused Great Britain of orchestrating Native violence against U.S. settlers. The Red Stick insurgents thus forced their Creek opponents and other Southeastern Indians to devise political and diplomatic countermeasures to bolster their nations’ authority and to distance themselves from Indian militants who opposed the United States. Politics

89

While they undoubtedly shared concerns with the Red Sticks about the cosmological disruptions and attendant pressures on their territories and societies, Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw national councils allied with the United States to put down the Red Sticks. With fury comparable to the violence meted out at Fort Mims, Southeastern Indian participation in the routing of Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, was less a betrayal of Native solidarity than a diplomatic calculation intended to project the power and legitimacy of their nations—both to the United States and to the Red Sticks. Southeastern Indians also signaled the subordinate role that radical prophets would occupy in their nationalizing polities, especially as differentials in population and military might made their standing increasingly tenuous. As militaries mustered to subdue the Red Sticks, their Creek opponents also sought to distance themselves from the uprising by undercutting the claims and authority of their prophets and by blaming devious, manipulative outsiders. In talks with U.S. representatives, several prominent Creek chiefs cautioned them not to “think that we lean[ed] to the Shawanee tribes, because you saw Tecumseh and his party dance in our square, around our fire, and some of our foolish people believed their foolish talks.” The chiefs depicted Red Stick radicalism as “a sort of madness and amusement for idle people” that had “bursted forth into acts of murder,” adding, “We mean to kill all of our red people that spill the blood of our white friends.” Benjamin Hawkins, U.S. agent to the Creeks, echoed their concerns and offered a stark warning. “You may frighten one another with the power of your prophets to make thunder, earthquakes, and to sink the earth. These things cannot frighten the American soldiers,” he cautioned a gathering of Creeks, including “Fanatical Chiefs,” the month before the attack on Fort Mims. “The thunder of their cannon, their rifles and their swords will be more terrible than the works of your prophets.”3 Despite concerns about the Red Sticks’ drive to fuse religious and political leadership and to counter Creek nationalization, anti–­Red Stick Creeks did not banish spiritual matters from governance and warfare. In fact, people at Tuckabatchee sought the assistance of tie-­snakes when they faced a Red Stick siege. According to oral history, the son of a Tuckabatchee chief was dispatched to seek military aid from a nearby town. The boy carried a “sacred vessel” with him to exchange as a token of friendship. Growing tired of travel, he stopped to skip rocks across a river, and when he attempted to skip the vessel, it sank to the river bottom. When the boy dove in to retrieve it, he

90Politics

was captured and bound by snakes, who delivered him to the tie-­snake king. After carrying out a number of tasks, the tie-­snake offered his assistance. “I am aware of your father’s trouble and know of the hostile bands that are trying to drive him into war. Your father is my friend and is acting in the right and I, the king of Tie-­Snakes, will help him,” he explained. When the Tuckabatchee chief could not hold out any longer, he was directed to come to the river, bow three times, and appeal for help. The snakes released the boy, and he returned home to find Tuckabatchee resistance wavering. His father did as he was told and secured the snakes’ support. Eerie silence replaced the din of another round of attacks, as the Red Sticks had been bound hand and foot by the snakes.4 This story shows that Creeks confronted the Red Sticks not just on the worldly plane of diplomacy, but with competing claims to spiritual power. Captain Isaacs, the Red Stick prophet who told of coordinating with tie-­ snakes, had been condemned as a witch and expelled from the movement when he led a police force to capture and execute Red Sticks who killed U.S. settlers. That Creeks later told of summoning powerful cosmological forces to subdue the Red Stick attackers at Tuckabatchee demonstrates that Red Sticks did not have a monopoly on claims to spiritual power in Creek country. And as much as prophets threatened to destabilize the Creeks’ national political project, the rituals and concepts that people held in common also could bolster collective national identities. For Creeks as well as other political leaders in nationalizing polities, the challenge lay in promoting aspects of spiritual belief and practice that bound people together—Creek reverence for tie-­snakes, for example—but limiting the ability of charismatic figures to appropriate those sacred concepts to undo or radically redirect Creek state formation. In Cherokee country, these dynamics played out less discordantly. Hawkins’s warning to Red Sticks about U.S. firepower echoed that of Cherokee chief Sower Mush, who cautioned against using the earthquakes as an excuse to steal horses. “Recently the earth has sometimes moved a little. This brought you great fear and you were afraid that you would sink into it, but when you go among the white people to break into their stalls and steal horses . . . there is much greater danger because if they catch you in such a deed they would certainly shoot you down, and then you have would to be lowered into the earth indeed,” he admonished. Cherokee horse thieves were a far cry from Red Stick militants, but Sower Mush’s call for restraint captured a common chorus of moderating voices across Indian polities and

Politics

91

the United States: while unusual and unprecedented, the earthquakes were neither excuses nor directives to upend the daily rhythms of ritual, trade, politics, and diplomacy.5 Countering Sower Mush’s wry skepticism were Cherokees who clearly read more significance into the shaking. They gathered to burn Euro American clothing, dig pits in anticipation of hailstorms, and purify themselves in streams. And like their Creek counterparts, Cherokee prophets spoke of profound cosmological disruptions, pervasive illness, and the urgent need for purity. Yet despite their shared concerns, Cherokee prophets did not intervene in national politics to ignite a civil war, nor did they align themselves with the Shawnee Brothers’ intertribal militancy. If Creeks and Cherokees faced common challenges and engaged in similar debates about territory and culture in the early nineteenth century, and the earthquakes stoked the messages of Cherokee and Creek prophets alike, how, then, do we account for the variation in these prophets’ effects on their national politics? Structural differences in kinship and governance help to explain the sharp divergence in Creek and Cherokee paths through the War of 1812. According to sociologist Duane Champagne, the religious and political roles of leaders in Cherokee society were more differentiated than those of their Creek counterparts. This differentiation of social and political order, combined with a nationalized system of kinship and ceremonial organization, gave the Cherokees a structural advantage in their development of a national constitutional government. In Creek society, on the other hand, kinship and governance were more diffuse and less differentiated. Kinship patterns varied by region, and political leaders often had major ceremonial or religious roles.6 Institutional gaps in the more diffuse structure of Creek governance and kinship thus facilitated the Red Sticks’ rise to power. While the Cherokees could summon people from across the country to bring their relatives into line, no Creeks could claim such broad, kin-­based authority. Cherokee prophets called for radical cultural renewal, but they stopped well short of advocating violence or political upheaval, perhaps because they did not have the political or economic clout to effect such changes. Conversely, the Red Sticks were often wealthy, well-­connected men who drew from kin ties to British traders and Shawnees. At least one prophet owned slaves, and another boasted of a common great-­grandmother with Tecumseh. Before broad Creek opposition to the Red Sticks materialized, a movement that began with audacious public displays like convulsing on the ground after a handshake or claiming to control earthquakes had developed into a mili92Politics

tary and political threat to Creek national authority. By contrast, Cherokee prophets who urged audiences to burn Euro American goods faced immediate pushback from skeptics who questioned their exuberance. Recall the woman who offered to buy her neighbors’ goods before they burned them, and the young chief who claimed, “It is no matter what clothes I wear while my heart is straight.” Only when the Red Stick movement escalated into violence did Creek leaders move to undermine their displays of spiritual power and foresight.7 Perhaps because of their diffuse institutions, Creeks were also more receptive than Cherokees to the prophetic calls for intertribal militancy that emanated from the Ohio Valley. When Tecumseh visited the Creek town of Tuckabatchee in the fall of 1811, he spoke before an audience of Creek chiefs as well as Cherokee and Choctaw delegates. Although Tuckabatchee was the hometown of Tecumseh’s mother, his reception was tepid. Southeastern Indian leaders concurred with his grievances, but they spurned his overtures to join his movement. Even Big Warrior, the Tuckabatchee headman who had previously visited Prophetstown, declined the bid for alliance. Nonetheless, in late 1812 or early 1813, a group of Red Sticks ventured north to consult with the Shawnee Brothers and to learn the “Dance of the Lakes,” which they used as a recruitment tool. The Illinois territorial governor suggested that after their visit, they carried wampum belts across the Mississippi River to rally Kickapoos, Potawatomis, and others in Illinois Country. On their way back from the Ohio Valley and perhaps points west, the Red Stick delegation killed seven U.S. settler families at the mouth of the Ohio River. The Creek national council dispatched their own police to execute those responsible for the killings. Like the wider military campaign to quell the Red Sticks, this move demonstrated emerging national authority over the indiscretions of kinsmen who jeopardized Creek diplomatic standing at this tenuous time. While the Red Sticks sought to purify Creek land and people from the inside out, primarily on tribal rather than intertribal terms, there were clear diplomatic and ideological links between their movement and the intertribal militants in the Ohio Valley.8 Cherokees also heard the Shawnee Brothers’ appeals, and Cherokee prophets’ concerns with purification mirrored those of the Red Sticks. Yet due in part to long-­standing Cherokee suspicion about concentrated spiritual authority and prophetic deception, they eschewed both. Americans living in Cherokee territory were concerned about the scope of the Shawnee Brothers’ influence. Moravian missionaries had heard talk of their teachings. But Cherokee oral histories made them cautious about predicPolitics

93

tive claims and concessions that prophets demanded from their followers. Stories of the destruction of the Aní-­Kutánî, a priestly class or clan whose members elevated themselves above others, warned against excessive hierarchy and accumulated spiritual power. According to Native opponents of the Shawnee Brothers, both features were on display at Prophetstown. Those who claimed to derive special powers from beyond Cherokee country also were cause for skepticism. In the colonial era, a warrior traveled to a faraway European settlement, where he first saw a peacock. He purchased peacock feathers and secretly fashioned a headdress. At the next dance, he donned the exotic headdress, claimed that the peacock feathers were “star feathers” received on a journey to the sky, and delivered a message from the “star spirits.” The self-­styled prophet then retreated to a beaver lodge to live in seclusion, returning only to dances to relate the details of his latest sky journeys. His renown grew with each dance until a Cherokee man saw another peacock at a European settlement and suspected fraudulence. After the next dance, people followed the supposed visionary back to his beaver lodge, discovering that he had been in hiding rather than traveling to the sky. These stories of caution and rooting out prophetic deception complemented structural barriers, namely the Cherokees’ national kinship system and differentiated forms of political and religious leadership, in limiting tribal prophets’ political power.9 If the earthquakes helped the Shawnee Brothers renew their intertribal political project in the Ohio Valley, the ensuing war brought the regional complexity of Native politics and diplomacy into full relief, revealing just how far that project still had to go. In Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s case, forging a single Indigenous nation in the Ohio Valley entailed not only centralizing political authority, but dissolving the kinds of tribal bonds that made nationalization possible in the Native South. The reconstitution of Prophetstown from a fixed settlement in the fall of 1811 to a mobile military force during the War of 1812 also compromised its political viability. The Shawnee Brothers found young men willing to join them, but as in the Southeast, established Native leaders undercut their fusion of religious and political authority by questioning their prophecies, seeking neutrality in the war, and in some cases, fighting or spying for the United States. Rather than centralizing political power, dispersing into smaller political units and decrying the Shawnee Prophet became the most viable strategies for Ohio Valley Indian leaders navigating this latest round of imperial war.10 94Politics

The movement to counter the Shawnee Brothers’ bid for intertribal nationhood took place on battlefields and in diplomatic discussions about the movement’s reach and consequences. In years of wartime councils, Native and U.S. leaders engaged in a broad effort to delegitimize Tenskwatawa by questioning his spiritual insights. Coupled with newspaper stories linking him to the earthquakes and his own prediction in 1807, these constant denunciations were further evidence that the Shawnee Prophet had regained a following after the debacle at Tippecanoe—and that the earthquakes likely had bolstered his cause. A week before the United States declared war, the governor of Ohio denounced Tenskwatawa at a gathering of Wyandot, Shawnee, and Mingo chiefs. “The pretended prophet has cheated some of the different tribes. He does not communicate with the Great Spirit; his counsels are foolish, and have stained the land with blood,” he cautioned. Three months after the last major temblor, the earthquakes remained a touchstone for conveying the gravity of the governor’s message. “The Great Spirit who shakes the earth wills that I tell you nothing but the truth. If you hold fast to the treaties you have made; the United States will hold them fast on their part,” he promised.11 Native leaders joined the governor in regularly dismissing Tenskwatawa as a “pretended prophet” who held sway only over impulsive young men. Territorial cessions and agricultural reforms in the Old Northwest limited traditional hunting and war-­making opportunities for young men. The Shawnee Brothers promised the young men the chance to fight and the return of wild game to increasingly deforested grids of farmland. Older tribal leaders recognized both the allure and the futility of the latest intertribal political project. Many of them had joined in such a venture in the 1780s and 1790s until the United States overwhelmed a dwindling force of militants and demanded drastic cessions at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. “They say their Chiefs would sell all their land and ruin them. This destroyed the influence of the Chiefs: Since then the young men have refused to obey us. It was now the young Shawanoe began to preach, and by this he gained influence, and this has produced the Mishief,” explained Potawatomi chief Five Medals in 1812. Later that year, a group of Potawatomi chiefs disavowed the Shawnee Prophet and his young Potawatomi followers in starker terms. Responding to a report that Potawatomis had killed a group of U.S. settlers, the chiefs said, “They [the accused killers] were encouraged in this mischief by this pretended prophet, who, we know, has taken great pains to detach them from their own chiefs and attach them to himself. We have no control over these few vagabonds, and consider them not belonging to our nation; and Politics

95

will be thankful to any people that will put them to death, wherever they are found.”12 In the northwestern theater of the War of 1812, Native Americans rejected the Shawnee Brothers’ overtures for a range of reasons, the particularities of which are not easily reduced to “accommodation” to the United States. The centrality of earthquakes in their Big House Ceremony suggests a spiritual dimension to the Delawares’ wartime neutrality, as they avoided military conflict to attend to cosmological disruptions inside the Big House. Like the Shawnee Prophet, the Otoes directly attributed the earthquakes to U.S. violence. But when Tenskwatawa sent wampum to invite them to join his renewed alliance, the Otoes refused, explaining “they could make more by trapping beaver than making war against the Americans.” The Potawatomis, a sprawling and sizeable force from the Illinois plains, were largely hostile to the United States, yet not altogether loyal to the Shawnee Brothers. They had a spiritual and military leader of their own named Main Poc, who spread Tenskwatawa’s message through Illinois Country in 1808, but he ultimately broke his alliance because he refused to accede to the Shawnee Brothers’ strict demands for centralized political authority and intertribal unity. In March 1812, the Louisiana Gazette reported that Main Poc was preparing for war against the Osages, whom Tecumseh had recruited in the prior year. Osage territorial expansion had created many Indigenous enemies, and news that Tecumseh sought an alliance with the Osages likely hurt his standing with Main Poc. Furthermore, a U.S. official suggested that Potawatomis living with the intertribal militants “in the course of one season got tired of this strict way of living, and declared off and joined the Main Poque.” By banning traditional tribal objects and rituals, as well as Euro American items and customs, the Shawnee Brothers risked alienating followers who wanted to maintain their own tribal ways and benefit from living with Euro American goods. In this case, Potawatomis opted to break away from the intertribal militants to join a militant spiritual leader from among their own people. They remained a potent western force that confounded the Americans and British alike. While Main Poc remained avowedly opposed to the United States, other Potawatomi leaders supplied U.S. officials with wartime intelligence. Explaining that they always had been “villains to both parties [the United States and Great Britain],” a British trader and Indian agent drafted a list of thirty-­four reasons why the British should not trust the Potawatomis. The U.S. governor of Illinois territory was equally dubious. These varied approaches to the war show that American Indians across the region were hardly the unified menace that U.S. adversaries imagined them to be.13 96Politics

The Shawnees’ divided paths through the War of 1812 demonstrate the spectrum of Native strategies at play. Notably, a sizeable contingent of Shawnees had avoided the conflict altogether by migrating to southeastern Missouri in the second half of the eighteenth century. The long-­standing Shawnee strategy of migration and dispersal as a means of preserving local autonomy continued during the war, as by 1815, more Shawnees lived west of the Mississippi River than in the Ohio Country. On the other hand, the Shawnee Brothers’ intertribal force had great military successes early in the conflict when they seized Detroit in August 1812 and overran the U.S. military at River Raisin in early 1813. These surprising developments bolstered their cause. As an American official put it, the victories “raised the spirits of the Indians to such a pitch that they really thought that nothing could conquer them.”14 But of the Shawnees that actively participated in the War of 1812, most fought or spied for the Americans. Pro-­American Shawnee chief Logan died during a December 1812 attack on Miami villages ordered by Harrison, who called him “a Victim to his Zeal for [the U.S.] cause.” In the winter of 1813, Shawnee chiefs offered intelligence about Tecumseh to U.S. officials gathering a force for a spring offensive. While the chiefs were reluctant to offer warriors, an American official “informed them the service already rendered had been acceptable.” One month later, Harrison ordered an agent to hire twenty-­four Shawnee spies. Of their spying, Harrison reported that Shawnees had “given a Strikeing proof of their fidelity.” Like other Native polities, the Shawnees nonetheless contended with the fallout from younger men who joined in military action against the United States. When chiefs discovered that a young man had killed a U.S. soldier in July 1813, they explained to Harrison that they were “all very much hurt at [their] hearts” and promised to deliver the guilty party in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. While they acknowledged that his fate was the United States’ prerogative, Shawnee leaders also sought the American nation’s mercy, explaining that the killing was an act of revenge, and “the devil had taken possession of his [the young man’s] mind at that moment.” Furthermore, the young man expressed deep sorrow, and if pardoned, he promised to fight for the United States.15 Shawnee tribal bonds withstood these divided courses through the war. During an unsuccessful siege of the United States’ Fort Meigs in May 1813, intertribal militants captured four Shawnee chiefs. These pro-­American leaders expected to be executed until Tecumseh intervened to spare them. They shook hands, and Tecumseh warned them that he had “all Nation[s] from the North standing at his word,” perhaps a reference to the Sioux that Politics

97

he had recruited. The Shawnee captives warned U.S. military officials about these northern reinforcements, but they never materialized. Disease and famine wracked the northern plains in the early 1810s, and the failed siege of Fort Meigs became a turning point in the decline of the intertribal militancy during the summer of 1813. Between 1,600 and 2,000 Indians withdrew as the Shawnee Brothers led their remaining force north into British territory. Tenskwatawa faced horse thefts from former allies, and Tecumseh berated the British for their declining support, likening their conduct to a “fat Animal” that ran away with its tail between its legs when threatened. Tecumseh’s death at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, effectively ended the Shawnee Brothers’ goal of forging an intertribal nation in the Ohio Valley.16 As the Shawnee Brothers and the Red Sticks sought to construct Native nations that bound together religious and political leadership, they took advantage of structural factors and more immediate contingencies like the earthquakes. Mounting signs of cosmological imbalance magnified the urgency and stakes of both movements’ prophetic calls for radical separatism, and as they garnered followings in the Ohio Valley and the Deep South, the diffuse and decentralized political institutions in those regions could do little to counter them until they had already developed into full-­fledged militancy. Meanwhile, with their differentiated system of religious and political authority, broad kinship connections, and skepticism of foreign and hierarchical spiritual power, Cherokees avoided civil war. Instead, war further consolidated Cherokee national political authority. While political centralization was the preferred strategy for countering prophetic militancy in the Native South, dispersal and decentralization were the means by which American Indians distanced themselves from prophetic intertribal nationhood in the Ohio Valley. “The change of Governments and convulsions of States and Kingdoms which are now taking place are figurative earthquakes which are doubtless principally intended by the Spirit of Prophecy,” wrote Presbyterian minister Robert G. Wilson in Ohio to his brother in North Carolina. Combining his commentary on earthquakes in the book of Revelation with detailed descriptions of the timing and magnitude of tremors, Wilson saw no distinctions among upheavals in nature, politics, and religion. Like many other observers, Wilson interpreted the earthquakes through the lens of nationhood. The Bible demonstrated that national warnings and possible judgments were

98Politics

encoded in the tremors, and ignoring the “Spirit of Prophecy” could be disastrous for the new nation.17 For a much larger nation without any preexisting bonds of kinship and ritual, religious institutions had the potential to contribute to an emerging sense of U.S. nationhood. Particularly following a common and troubling experience like an earthquake, collective displays of piety promoted a sense of belonging that transcended local congregations and communities. Amid the shaking and attendant geopolitical tumult, as people in the United States gathered to fast, pray, and listen to sermons, their religious and political concerns often merged. Absent a state church, Americans wondered whether the tremors weren’t signs of divine disfavor with a lack of national piety. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly differentiated religious and political leadership, but politicians, preachers, and laypeople alike worried that the earthquakes were a warning against relegating the role of religion in national politics. Worse yet for some commentators, atheism might have infiltrated national governance, clouding assessments of the earthquakes’ true significance. But the cacophony of prophetic warnings and denominational differences made linking religious piety and patriotism a delicate task, especially in a republic. Just as people sifted through accurate and fabricated eyewitness accounts of the damage, and individuals weighed the authenticity of their conversion experiences, Americans were receptive but measured as they weighed the fantastic claims of prophets like Nimrod Hughes and Lorenzo Dow. Though thin on specific policy prescriptions when compared to Native American prophets, figures like Hughes and Dow challenged existing religious and political authorities in the United States. Demanding that readers acknowledge their individual authority and ability to decode the religious meaning behind an amalgamation of troubling signs, these insurgent religious figures eschewed the collective consensus that guided the nation’s established religious and political institutions. In response, pamphlets and sermons attacked the character and clairvoyance of these individuals, but they could not dismiss the message at the heart of their warnings: the earthquakes were a cause for national religious concern. Despite the formal differentiation of religious and political leadership in the United States, when established religious and political authorities grappled with how to address the tremors, they also grappled with defining national piety. They settled on supporting public displays of fasting and prayer, particularly those stripped of denominational rivalry and allegiances to exuberant individual prophets.

Politics

99

These collective demonstrations sought to allay broad concerns about divine judgment and to bind the nation together in the face of spiritual and geopolitical crises. Backlash against Hughes was forceful and wide-­ranging. Beginning with a letter from a resident of his southwest Virginia hometown, writers attacked his character. Hughes claimed to have received his visions while falsely imprisoned. His acquaintance argued otherwise: “He is one of the greatest villains I ever knew. . . . He was in jail here 6 or 9 months, for stealing bacon and burning a barn; and notwithstanding he was acquitted, it is generally believed he is guilty. There is no man who is acquainted with him who would believe a word he says; much less have confidence in his prophecy, and I was never more astonished than to hear that his pamphlet excited a single enquiry. But people of superstitious minds are always ready to catch at shadows.” In a widely reprinted editorial, another writer added that Hughes’s visions were those “of a bigot, just let loose from prison.”18 Though caricatured as an attention-­seeking fool, Hughes was not quite the marginal outcast that his critics made him out to be. Likely college-­ educated, he regularly sold land and livestock, and he maintained a horse herd that landed him in his Virginia county’s middle tax bracket. In this age of revivalism and burgeoning popular print, and in an intellectual climate in which readers did not easily dismiss fantastic claims without evidence to the contrary, especially amid unprecedented natural disorder, Hughes clearly knew his audience. And just as Lorenzo Dow combined prophecy with lucrative land trading, Hughes reaped the financial rewards of publishing a pamphlet that coincided with the echoes of biblical destruction.19 As Hughes’s foretold June 1812 day of destruction approached, criticism intensified from presses and pulpits. The months between the publication of Hughes’s Solemn Warning and June 4, 1812, had been momentous. In that time, the fall 1811 comet, the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Richmond Theater fire, the earthquakes, and, by early summer, news of the reconstitution of Tecumseh’s intertribal force and an imminent declaration of war with Great Britain had all occurred. On June 3, the Georgia Journal excoriated Hughes and any readers who believed him. Hoping that the United States had advanced beyond the “superstitious folly of New England brethren” and their “implicit faith in the existence of witchcraft and sorcery,” editors warned that belief in Hughes’s prophecy threatened to return the nation to the “mists of superstition.” Echoing moderate Native American leaders in the Old Northwest and the Southeast, the editorial urged readers not to be “dupes of his villainy.” It concluded, “Away then with this nonsense, and let us hear no 100Politics

more of Hughes or his prophecy.” Ministers also joined the fray. James Jones Wilmer, Episcopal clergyman and former chaplain of the U.S. Senate, published an address delivered on the appointed day that one-­third of humanity was to disappear. While the lack of destruction was evidence enough to discredit Hughes, Wilmer remained compelled to address the “extraordinary changes and commotions” that gripped the nation in the first half of 1812. With “great sufferings, nationally and individually; wars and rumours of wars; pestilence, famine, and earthquakes; nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” these were undeniably “eventful days.” But the proper response to the tumult was a “uniform, daily principle in the practice of religion,” not wild swings between sparse church attendance and rapt attention to the “false prophet.” Wilmer also offered insights into the causes of natural disasters, which were “indispensably necessary” to warn humanity about divine power and punishments for sin. Nonetheless, he argued that natural order and disorder stemmed from divine plans that were incomprehensible to all of humanity, much less Hughes’ individual revelations. In the days after June 4, Wilmer sent his address to President Madison.20 Coupled with Adams’s and Jefferson’s private concerns about prophets and “political safety,” these denunciations showed that established political and religious authorities took Hughes and prophets like him seriously. In the absence of a state church, Americans were free to associate with a range of religious denominations. Allegiance to those denominations was an especially meaningful collective enterprise, particularly west of the Appalachians, where political institutions in newer states and territories were even less established. These voluntary religious associations could anchor or threaten this composite system of U.S. governance. While Baptist and Methodist denominations grew in a mutually beneficial way with the territorial expansion of the nation-­state—at least until the issue of slavery split them along sectional lines—prophetic movements threatened the construction and maintenance of boundaries of religious and political authority in the early United States. Hughes did not wade into specific national political matters like his prophetic counterparts in Indian country, but he joined them in seeking to incorporate special spiritual insights into national politics. While his efforts drew strong rebukes, the broader political debate about the earthquakes’ spiritual significance for the United States proved inescapable. That debate emerged on the floor of Congress. Virginia representative John Randolph pointed to the intertwined nature of environmental and geopolitical instability, not only in the United States but across the hemisphere. In Caracas, Venezuela, an earthquake had killed between 15,000 and 20,000 Politics

101

people during the Catholic Holy Week of March 1812. Naturalists supposed a link between the seismic activity in the Mississippi River valley and Latin America, and in the first instance of U.S. foreign aid ever granted, Congress allocated $50,000 in aid for provisions to send to republican rebels in their fight for independence against loyalists of the Spanish Empire. Randolph invoked the destruction in Caracas as well as other “signs of the times” to wonder whether some worse fate awaited the United States: “I know that we are on the brink of some dreadful scourge—some great desolation—some awful visitation from that Power, whom, I am afraid, we have as yet, in our national capacity, taken no means to conciliate. If other civilized people, if the other nations of Christendom have not escaped, what reason have we to suppose that we shall be preserved from the calamities which Providence has thought fit to inflict on those nations which have ventured to intermingle in the conflicts now going on in Europe?” Randolph was an outspoken critic of the ensuing war with Great Britain. By suggesting that the United States take “means to conciliate” the prospect of divine judgment “in [its] national capacity,” he echoed Cherokee and Delaware leaders who argued that their nations should look inward to address cosmological disruptions, rather than blaming foreign enemies for their problems.21 John C. Calhoun rose to counter Randolph’s warning. “I did hope, that the age of superstition was past, and that no attempt would be made to influence the measures of government, which ought to be founded in wisdom and policy, by the vague, I may say, superstitious feelings of any man,” retorted the War Hawk from South Carolina. Calhoun ridiculed those who read too deeply into natural phenomena, lest they lose sight of the pressing and worldly issues that surrounded them. He found a nation “so sunk in avarice,” “so corrupted by faction,” and “lost to its independence” to be “more portentous than comets, earthquakes, eclipses, or the whole catalogue of omens.” As a vociferous proponent of war, Calhoun likely exaggerated his philosophical opposition to Randolph for rhetorical effect, because in private correspondence, the earthquakes interested him greatly. He wrote to a friend, “How unusual our earthquakes. . . . No doubt you keep your attention directed on this unusual Phenomenon[.] If you have made any observations do communicate them.”22 This exchange was not just rhetorical exuberance on the House floor. John Adams and fellow revolutionary Benjamin Rush entertained Randolph’s fears in their private correspondence. In the summer of 1812, Rush complained to Adams about a litany of his issues with national governance, including national debt, an glut of whiskey distilleries and banks, and the 102Politics

“idolatrous worship” of the late George Washington. Rush’s criticism culminated in his concern that Canada would become “the future slaughterhouse of generations of [U.S.] citizens” were the U.S. to invade. Adams acknowledged that times indeed looked bleak with “Storms, Earthquakes, Famines, Pestilences, Georges, [and] Napoleons” threatening the nation, but he urged Rush to remember that an “infinitely blacker cloud hung over” the colonies-­ turned-­states in the 1770s and the late 1790s. Betraying elite skepticism about some of the most fantastical earthquake accounts, Adams also suggested to Rush that the American Philosophical Society conduct its own inquiry into their veracity. “I suspect something very wicked at the bottom of most of these stories that falsis terroribus implent [falsely alarm] our good Ladies and innocent Children,” he wrote.23 If Americans interpreted the earthquakes’ religious and political significance in national terms, and they entertained but ultimately rejected the radicalism of prophets like Hughes, they still had to formulate an appropriate response that would bind the nation together without overly alarming it. That task fell largely to established preachers, who debated the proper measures in periodicals and published sermons. While there was broad agreement to promote a shared national piety in order to counter atheism, commentators debated more concrete reforms. They also argued about the degrees of alarm and urgency with which the nation should confront the upheaval. Their opposition to the complete differentiation of political and religious authority in the United States became a sturdy feature of national political culture, particularly in times of crisis. Of all national spiritual problems, irreligiosity and atheism loomed largest. “To sever men from religious principle, is to cut loose the vessel of state from her moorings, and send her adrift in a tempest; it is to prostrate the very basis of patriotism and public spirit, and in the dissolution of conscience and religious restraints, to open the way for treasons, factions, and other evils terminating in political slavery,” wrote Presbyterian minister John Campbell in a lecture published to commemorate the opening of a new Presbyterian synod in Kentucky. He was particularly concerned that rather than being agnostic, people were “positively infidel” and “would countenance the projected regeneration of society in the matrix of sceptical philosophy.” For Campbell as well as others, revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the French naturalist Volney drew particular ire for their supposed promotion of atheism. “Deistical societies have been formed, and the most scurrilous of all the libels on the scripture has been printed and sold, and printed again; its blasphemies have been fashioned among the young and its dreary Politics

103

Atheism the refuge of grey hairs,” wrote upstate New York itinerant preacher Arthur Stansbury in a reprinted sermon titled God Pleading with America. Jonathan Plummer, a traveling poet, preacher, and publisher in New England, directly blamed the earthquakes and an outbreak of spotted fever in New Hampshire on the reading of Paine’s tract The Age of Reason. “These, as the book of the vile drunkard has been printed but a few years, are it is likely but the beginning of the sweeping curses that God will send to Americans,” Plummer warned. Amid extensive commentary on the earthquakes and accompanying divine warnings, the Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer used a lighter tone to poke fun at Volney. This French student of earthquakes who was, according to the periodical, “celebrated or rather notorious for his atheistical principles, which he so often avowed,” was sailing in a vast American lake when a large storm threatened his ship. He grew increasingly anxious and resolved to swim ashore before other passengers discouraged his plan. “Oh! my God, my God, what shall I do? What shall I do?” the Frenchman exclaimed, to which a companion replied, “Well Mr. Volney, what: you have a God now.”24 The New York preacher Stansbury also targeted specific behaviors at the core of the nation’s moral decay. The cry for more liquor “drowns the voice of abused wives and naked children that rise with it to heaven,” he said. The post office delivered mail on Sundays. “Need I call upon our race-­grounds, our theaters, our lottery-­offices, our brothels? or has enough been said to bring the blush upon our cheek and to humble this day before God?” he continued. Likening the Richmond Theater fire to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Stansbury took solace in the fact that after the earthquakes, “the most inconsiderate and hardened began to pause and to tremble.” But the war was punishment for the nation not heeding these mounting warnings. Here Stansbury identified himself as an antiwar Federalist clergyman. “The war has been little else than a series of disasters,” he wrote, referring not only to early military defeats, but to the social and economic costs of rising debt and taxes, disease, and the dislocation and moral corruption of young men serving in combat. “The flower of our youth have fallen; two armies are gone into captivity; a territory is lost; our coast is ravaged; we have spent fifty millions of dollars; and what is gained? We are a divided people and our divisions grow daily more alarming. What is in reserve for us time alone can reveal,” Stansbury warned in closing.25 Despite the widespread merging of political and religious issues, Stansbury was unique among published earthquake commentators in mentioning one issue that would grow to consume pulpits and politics in the United 104Politics

States: slavery. Of all of the human concerns that white interpreters hitched to the tremors in their written accounts, slavery was a glaring—and telling—omission. Stansbury nonetheless situated the institution among the nation’s sins. “We are free people. But there is no slavery in the land? Yes, there is slavery: grinding, merciless, wicked slavery; and, strange to tell, where the cry for liberty is loudest it is mingled with the clank of fetters and the sounding lash of the overseer. Cargoes of human flesh and bones leave the wretched coasts of the old world, and find a ready market here,” he wrote, including the transatlantic slave trade in his criticism despite its outlawing in 1808. However, Stansbury’s printed sermon noted that he had not discussed slavery in his actual public remarks. This was a telling admission. For him— and, indeed, for most of the nation’s leading politicians and preachers at the time—the institution was at most a subsidiary religious and political concern. The tide of white abolitionism that rose in the decades before the Civil War barely registered after the earthquakes.26 In framing the earthquakes as a divine punishment for the nation, commentators used the phenomena to build a case for religious nationalism. “The man is a fool, or worse, who would shut our God from the government of his own world,” Stansbury explained. “Clouds and thick darkness hover over both the Christian and political horizon: The storm has discharged some of its fury on every portion of the globe; all nations have, in a greater or less degree, tasted the cup of trembling,” warned the inaugural issue of the Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer in its explanation for why the publication had been created. “The Almighty has borne long with the nations of the earth; and unless a political reformation prevents, national sins will produce national ruins and judgment,” the periodical added a year later. The Evangelical Record, and Western Review of Kentucky also merged religious and political language in encouraging earthquake interpreters who recognized the “laws of matter” as well as the underlying religious causes of disruption to those laws. “They recognize the direct agency in these convulsions, and they consider them as intimately connected with the moral government of the world,” the publication declared. The ensuing military conflict with Great Britain showed that although the shaking had ended by the spring, divine retribution remained ongoing. “Nations are sinful as well as individuals,” explained Presbyterian pastor Joshua Wilson before U.S. troops gathered in Cincinnati a month before war was declared. “God, who is the only giver of life, has alone the right of disposing life. And if he determines to destroy a sinful nation, shall any dictate to him the means of causes of destruction? Famine, pestilence, earthquake, fire and sword, become, in turn, Politics

105

the ministers of his vengeance,” he continued. That Wilson addressed troops was notable, because when war was declared in June 1812, it capped the list of mounting signs of divine wrath and became the most compelling reason to bind religion with politics.27 Either directly or through innuendo, sermons printed to mark the war’s beginning and a series of national fast days counted the earthquakes as signs of America’s spiritual crisis. On a national fast day in August 1812, New England Congregationalist preacher Moses Dow tied the war to sin on all levels: personal, institutional, and national. “The sins of professing churches have often provoked the anger of Heaven to remove their candlestick out of its place;—nations tremble for the same cause; yea, the whole earth, and creation itself, groan under the load of man’s guilt,” he explained. Prominent New York Presbyterian Alexander McLeod urged Christians to be steady during the “tumults and the changes of political empire . . . to prevent being tossed off, and buried in the earthquake.” Others directly referenced the actual earthquakes of 1811–12 among other recent disasters. From New Hampshire, Revolutionary War veteran and Unitarian preacher Noah Worcester connected human and natural disorder: Thus, in a variety of ways, sudden and unavoidable destruction has come on mankind by the anger of God. How often has the earth suddenly quaked, opened and swallowed up men and beasts by thousands or by myriads! How many have been suddenly destroyed by inundations of water! And what awful havoc has the plague often made in short time! All the means and sources of calamity are in the hand of the Lord; and any of them he can cause to operate in a sudden and destructive manner.28 While discussions of national sins were often nebulous, Yale College president and Congregationalist theologian Timothy Dwight was much more direct in his diagnosis of national ills. For Dwight, Americans were living through no less than the apocalyptic events foretold in the book of Revelation. With less numerological figuring, but no less conviction, than Nimrod Hughes, Dwight laid out his case for why humanity was experiencing either the sixth or seventh vial of the seven vials of Revelation. “At no time, since the deluge, has the situation of the human race been so extraordinary; the world so shaken; or its changes so numerous, sudden, extensive, and ominous,” he explained.29 Earthquakes were central to Dwight’s analysis, as he, too, connected upheaval in the natural and human worlds and highlighted earthquakes in bib106Politics

lical prophecies. And each time that he mentioned earthquakes or shaking in general, he italicized the words for emphasis. When the seventh vial of Revelation was poured out, temblors would level cities around the globe. Dwight explained that this was the stage in which humanity found itself, both literally and symbolically. There was “a convulsion among the empires of this world, resembling in its violence the terrible agitation of the elements.” Betraying anti-­Catholic sentiment, he added that Catholic countries in particular “drank deep of this cup of divine vengeance,” citing the earthquake in Caracas and drought in Ireland. Geopolitical convulsions were symbolically related to the apocalyptic signs in the book of Revelation, and in citing destruction among Catholic countries, Dwight also interpreted the book quite literally. “This is the very language of the predictions contained in the account of the vials. They are all poured out upon the beast, and his empire [presumably the Catholic world],” he insisted. Whereas Nimrod Hughes could be decried as a thief and a fool by the nation’s religious establishment, Dwight was part of that establishment. As early nineteenth-­century political and religious winds shifted in favor of Republicans and evangelical denominations, he was increasingly an outlier. But the basic premise guiding the coalition of New England Federalists and Congregationalists—deep unease at the differentiation of religious and political authority in the United States—proved to be a lingering voice in national governance, particularly in times of crisis and long after the early Federalist-­Congregationalist hold on national politics faded.30 In their warnings about the earthquakes, Protestant commentators across the denominational spectrum sought to merge piety and patriotism. By casting the shaking in national spiritual terms, they argued against the political and religious differentiation embedded in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Writers of varied reputations, ranging from Yale College president Timothy Dwight to obscure rural Virginia pamphleteer Nimrod Hughes, warned of further dangers in relegating the role of religion in national politics. Though Dwight and other established authorities considered them, Hughes’s prophecies extended the boundaries of rightful authority too far for most Americans. The urgings of preachers ultimately gained more purchase. In the conclusion to his lecture enumerating social ills in the trans-­Mississippi West, Kentucky Presbyterian John Campbell captured this union of religious and political causes with a more hopeful—and illustrative—note. “O! When the word of God be trusted, and our Christian Israel go forward. The patriotism of our country has received noble proofs in the generous activity of our citizens generally, to secure the accommodation of Politics

107

the western army,” he wrote. For Campbell, supporting the state in wartime was both a religious and patriotic duty.31 For prophets and revivalists, the earthquakes bolstered alternative visions of nationhood. In these visions, religious and political authority were often bound more tightly together, and nations were to be remade according to the strict protocols of figures claiming direct access to the same divine forces responsible for the shaking. Dismissing these previously marginal figures as fanatical opportunists, their opponents rejected extending the boundaries of legitimate political authority. In Indian country, this contest often took place on battlefields. The Shawnee Brothers advanced a vision of intertribal nationhood that dissolved tribal bonds and traditional power in the Ohio Valley. The Red Sticks rejected the shape that Creek nationhood and culture had assumed by the early nineteenth century. Cherokee prophets shared similar concerns about the direction of Cherokee nationhood, but due in part to the differentiation of religious and political authority in Cherokee society, their national political influence was more muted. Compared to their American Indian counterparts, Anglo American prophets did not get far in effecting the major changes that they believed the earthquakes demanded. Sermons bemoaned the lack of national piety and church rolls swelled, but so, too, did backlash against figures like Hughes. This backlash took the form of denunciations from pulpits and pamphlets, rather than military opposition, because the platforms of Anglo American prophets did not pose specific existential threats to the standing political and diplomatic orders that their counterparts leveled in Indian country. Shorn of precise eschatological visions and direct threats to political authority, a revivalistic brand of patriotism nonetheless took shape as an underlying—and unifying—­ideological force in the making of national politics in the United States. As the calendar moved beyond Nimrod Hughes’s foretold June day of destruction, his national status undoubtedly declined. However, the wide publication, reception, and ultimate denunciation of his pamphlet, along with sermons and congressional arguments framing the War of 1812 and related upheaval as divine judgments on the nation, revealed that Hughes was more attuned to national trends in U.S. print culture, religion, and politics than his critics made him out to be.

108Politics

5

Territory In the spring of 1822, Connecticut-­born missionary Daniel Chapman Banks set off from his home in Louisville to sell bibles in New Orleans. Like many river travelers, Banks kept a copy of The Navigator, an indispensable river navigation guide published in Pittsburgh. Since the earthquakes, editions of The Navigator had been revised substantially to include commentary about former landmarks. On the Ohio River, Banks approached what was once Crow’s Nest Island, a site that once alarmed passersby. Also known as the “Rogue’s Nest,” this river island was a base for thieves and counterfeiters who stalked boats to extract tribute. But as Banks triumphantly put it, “The island as if to express God’s abhorrence of the crimes committed on it, was sunk by an earthquake in December 1811.”1 Banks captured transformations in the land that were both material and symbolic. Swamped, cracked, and pocked by sandblows, land near the epicenters was altered irrevocably. In response, the U.S. government offered landowners in New Madrid County the opportunity to cede their damaged holdings and claim land in 160-­acre plots elsewhere. Passed three years after the United States sent provisions to the independence movement in Venezuela following a major earthquake there in 1812, this legislation was one of the first instances of federal social welfare in U.S. history. Taken together, these international and domestic earthquake relief packages marked a major departure from previous federal responses to disaster. Those previous efforts, if they existed at all, were typically local and nongovernmental and never involved foreign aid. For instance, the Richmond Theater fire of 1811 occasioned major commemorations and debates about public safety and the 109

wholesomeness of theatergoing, but little in the way of direct aid to victims. If governments were involved in disaster aid, they assisted on the local and state levels. Federal responses to these tremors in 1812 set a new precedent of intervention in limited cases when disaster aid promoted U.S. territorial expansion and specific foreign policy objectives. But in expanding the early nation-­state’s geographical and administrative scope through earthquake relief in New Madrid County, Congress also opened up opportunities for rampant fraud and speculation that would linger through the rest of the century.2 Meanwhile, as the U.S. government extended its territorial and administrative reach following the earthquakes, Creek territory contracted with massive land cessions. Debate between General Jackson and his Creek allies about blame for the Creek civil war centered on the influence of Red Stick prophets. In a flagrant betrayal, Jackson forced his allies into ceding their territory. By the late 1810s, the American officials had pressured their Cherokee and Ohio Valley Indian allies into major territorial cessions as well. U.S. advocates of land cessions and removal cast Indigenous people as uniformly threatening to the United States. Stoked by U.S. military officers who became politicians, this fiction relied on a selective interpretation of the War of 1812, neglecting the waves of Native armies that mustered to oppose the Red Sticks in the Deep South and the Shawnee Brothers in the Ohio Valley.3 On a symbolic front, Americans also extended their territorial claims through religious experiences on western lands that were formerly alien to them. As Banks’s impressions of the Rogue’s Nest show, it was not only people, but territory itself that underwent a moral transformation during the earthquakes. Like the piety of “earthquake Christians,” this transformation was short-­lived for some areas when godlessness and debauchery returned. Nevertheless, shifts like those experienced in expanding church congregations during the earthquakes and the sinking of Rogue’s Nest revealed an emerging “moral geography” for Protestant conceptions of western U.S. territory. In this “moral geography,” as religious studies scholar Amy DeRogatis has termed it, people and territory in the trans-­Appalachian West gradually transformed from suspicious and depraved to sympathetic and sanctified. Some Native Americans countered this shift with a campaign of misinformation. In an effort to stem western settlement, they fueled rumors and conjecture that the shaking resulted from volcanoes. An alternative to military resistance, this strategy propagated widespread U.S. concern that trans-­ Mississippi land remained dangerous and unpredictable.4

110Territory

In 1814, Missouri Territory governor William Clark took the plight of New Madrid County landholders to the U.S. Congress. In a resolution passed by the Missouri Territorial Assembly, he emphasized the extent of the damage, noting, “Whole districts have been depopulated and many valuable farms utterly destroyed.” Residents were “now wandering without a home to go to or a roof to Shelter them from the pitiless Storms.”5 Clark’s appeal cited U.S. aid delivered to Caracas following an earthquake in 1812. Despite a standing embargo that forbade trade in and out of U.S. ports, Congress had authorized the president to send $50,000 worth of provisions to support Venezuela’s independence movement against the Spanish Empire. The original bill also sought to extend $30,000 in total aid to Caracas as well as the Canary Islands, where locusts had created an alleged famine. Perhaps because of unreliable reporting on the contemporaneous New Madrid earthquakes, legislators wondered about the veracity of accounts from the Canary Islands compared to confirmed reports from Caracas. Ultimately, they dropped the islands, which had not rebelled against the Spanish Empire, from the bill. Following partisan wrangling over the standing U.S. embargo, representatives heeded John C. Calhoun’s suggestion to add $20,000 to the sum for provisions and authorized the expenditure. The delivery of this unprecedented foreign aid led Clark and the Missouri Territorial Assembly to ask whether the “enlightened humane government of the United States” was “equally ready to extend relief to a portion of its own Citizens, under Similar Circumstances.”6 Instead of provisions, Missouri legislators proposed granting public land to landholders affected by the New Madrid earthquakes. Congress obliged the next year, enacting “An Act for the Relief of the Inhabitants of the Late County of New Madrid, in the Missouri Territory, Who Suffered by Earthquakes.” Those “whose lands have been materially injured by the earthquakes,” the measure stated, were to file claims and then receive certificates that entitled them to up to 160 acres of public land for relocation elsewhere.7 U.S. landholders rushed to take advantage of this well-­intentioned legislation, and in the decades of speculation, fraud, and legal wrangling that followed, they created a bureaucratic mess. “The speculators went instantly to work, and procured these poor ignorant peoples claims for a mere song. Sections have been known to be sold for a few yards of calico; and the whole of their claims are now in the hands of speculators,” reported President Madison’s former secretary just months after the law passed. “We will now see Territory

111

how the keen speculators fatten upon its most charitable and the praiseworthy liberality,” he warned about the law. Problems then ensued in determining who was entitled to new land. “The details of the law seem to me to be clouded in ambiguities,” wrote attorney and politician Frederick Bates in 1823. Federal government agents were surprised at how much land settlers claimed was damaged, and they grew concerned that people with fewer than 160 acres in New Madrid County were boosting their holdings with certificates for 160 acres of public land elsewhere. Certificates were also forged or mistakenly assigned to the wrong person. “I will venture to say that the New Madrid law, as it is termed, has given rise to more fraud and more downright villainy than any law every passed by the Congress of the United States, and if the claims are not immediately decided upon, will involve the citizens of Missouri in endless litigation and trouble,” warned one U.S. government official. In numerous instances, people “who had not a shadow of a claim to the land surrendered” received land certificates, “while the real owner continued in quiet possession of his property,” and there seemed to be no limits to the number of certificates an individual could compile.8 Federal agents in the Public Land Office sought clarification for the implementation of the law and warned that land certificates that could not be traced back to the original owner of earthquake-­damaged property would not be honored. Missouri politicians defended their constituents’ propriety and pleaded with federal officials to honor all certificates. Politicians claimed the certificates had “passed through the hands of many individuals of the most worthy and respectable class” with the understanding that they were legitimate, but skeptical federal officials still sought documentation to certify the authenticity of records. By 1826, only about half of the 180,000 acres’ worth of land certificates had actually been converted into land patents. In an 1828 deposition, the guardian of children allegedly orphaned by the earthquakes appealed for land certificates on their behalf. No resolution to the case accompanied the deposition, but given the thirteen years that had passed since the relief act, the small number of reported earthquake casualties, and the rampant fraud and speculation that accompanied the issuance of documentation, one wonders whether claiming to have adopted earthquake orphans was one strategy for amassing land certificates. In an 1864 memoir published after his death, Baptist missionary John Mason Peck characterized the original legislation as “one of those political frauds common to political maneuvering.” He suspected that five times more people claimed ownership of damaged land in court than owned land around New Madrid in 1811.9 112Territory

In the end, the federal government addressed claims at least into the 1870s. Of 516 claims made, 382 were granted and converted to land patents. Only twenty original property owners in New Madrid County resettled on new tracts of land. As late nineteenth-­century Missouri historian and novelist John Roy Musick described the process, settlers in earthquake-­damaged areas “were mostly ignorant backwoodsmen, and shrewd and unscrupulous speculators cheated them out of their claims, so that they never received any substantial benefit from the law.”10 Many speculators took their land certificates to central Arkansas, where the documents changed hands constantly. As territorial pressure on the Quapaws increased, so too did the value of certificates and legal controversy about their validity. In 1818, the Quapaws ceded 30 million acres south and west of the Arkansas River in exchange for annuities and a reservation of 1 million acres. A consortium of prominent attorneys, politicians, and businessmen in St. Louis that had been accumulating New Madrid land certificates then began seeking titles to the ceded land that bordered the new Quapaw reservation along the Arkansas River, a location that is today downtown Little Rock. Certificates previously sold for $400 soon skyrocketed in value, going for as much as $4,000. In one case, a man paid $1,000 for one-­ third of the land promised in a certificate.11 But this was risky business. While the Quapaw cession opened up land for speculation and settlement, a buffalo hunter had built a cabin where members of the St. Louis consortium sought to exchange their certificates for land titles. Because he had sufficiently improved the land with his cabin, the hunter used the 1814 Preemption Act to claim that the property belonged to him. He then sold the land to a competing speculator, and the opposing parties lobbied the territorial courts and legislature, both to recognize their land claims and to establish their respective claims as Arkansas’s territorial capital. After some territorial legislators accepted offers to co-­own the original hunter’s property, they—not coincidentally—designated that land, known as Little Rock, as the territorial capital. Courts then ruled that the St. Louis consortium’s New Madrid relief certificates could not supersede the preemption claims established by the original hunter. In 1821, both groups of speculators eventually compromised to divide the new territorial capital among them for development.12 Their efforts consequently increased territorial pressure on the Quapaws and their border with Little Rock. In another treaty in 1824, the Quapaws ceded their reservation in exchange for land along the Red River in northwestern Louisiana. Facing starvation due to flooded crops, groups of QuaTerritory

113

paws briefly returned to pockets of their homelands in the early 1830s. They appealed to the U.S. federal government for the right to remain on these small tracts of Arkansas land, but they ultimately faced a second removal, this time to Indian Territory in 1834. The establishment of Little Rock was a prominent factor in Quapaw territorial dispossession. Accumulating New Madrid land certificates, applying them to newly ceded land, and lobbying to designate that land as the territorial capital abetted Quapaw dispossession. This combination of federal legislation, land speculation and fraud, and Native dispossession foreshadowed the Allotment Era at the end of the nineteenth century. These legal and financial engines of dispossession operated alongside land cession treaties after wars of conquest. Relying less on militaries than on subtler machinations in legislatures, courtrooms, and contracts, their outcomes for Native landholding were nonetheless profound.13 The damaged land that many settlers left behind remained valuable for fur trapping and cattle ranching. On his tours through the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, famed Scottish geologist Charles Lyell spent time studying the land closest to the earthquake epicenters. He observed effects on the landscape that the powerful plows of industrial agriculture later buried. The tremors had made farming in the “sunk country” more difficult in Lyell’s time, but he noted that trappers celebrated the new habitat for fur-­bearing creatures. A trapper explained to him that the earthquakes were “a blessing to the country” because of the lakes and marshes that the shaking created. The man had taken thousands of raccoon, muskrat, mink, bear, otter, and wildcat skins, and a large herd of buffalo had appeared in northeastern Arkansas. Other settlers took advantage of the mass exodus to consolidate their landholdings. John Hardeman Walker, the person credited with insisting that the Bootheel should be part of Missouri rather than Arkansas, bought up vacated lands to become a wealthy cattle baron.14 The Red Stick War decimated Creek territorial holdings. Red Stick survivors of Horseshoe Bend fled south to regroup in Florida, but by the spring of 1814, their campaign to purify Creek territory was effectively over. In a flagrant betrayal of his anti–­Red Stick Creek allies, General Jackson held all Creeks responsible for the Red Sticks. Unlike the territorial pressure on Quapaws that stemmed from New Madrid land certificate holders’ financial speculation, political lobbying, and legal wrangling, Creek dispossession was direct and immediate. Jackson was convinced that his Creek allies were actually his enemies. 114Territory

He and his southern U.S. political and military colleagues also decided that their Creek allies should pay with land for the actions of their opponents in a civil war. “I do believe that what is called the friendly creeks are spies,” he wrote to his wife, Rachel, in the fall of 1813. While the Red Stick insurgency was still a threat, Jackson and other government officials discussed the conflict’s ultimate aim. Tennessee governor Willie Blount explained to him that it was in the “best interest” of U.S. southerners for an “important good to be effected” from the war: “The Creek country & the Floridas added to ours would do it exactly.” At the end of 1813, a fellow U.S. military officer wrote to Jackson with implicit language about the “ulterior intention of [the U.S.] Government in this expedition,” which was undoubtedly the seizure of Creek territory. But Jackson feared that U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins would stand in his way. Hawkins told a U.S. official that he had delayed his retirement in 1814 “to assist [the Creeks] in winding up their affairs advantageously for the nation,” and he ultimately died in office in 1816. Jackson’s suspicions and intentions overruled Hawkins’s read on the conflict. “For let Col. Hawkins say what he will[,] the truth is the great body of the creeks are for war,” he wrote to Blount.15 When Jackson met with his Creek and Cherokee allies to extract land cessions following the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, his address to them focused on the influence and deception of “lying Prophets” among the Creeks. Rather than following their “wise chiefs and good men” to become a “rich, powerful and happy people,” tribal members had “listened to Prophets and bad men,” resulting in villages burned, warriors slain, and people starving. Subduing the Red Sticks had cost the United States “a large sum.” Jackson insisted to the Creeks that this sum be paid with land: “It must be taken from your whole nation, in a manner as to destroy the communication with our enemies every where.” The Creek Nation also had to agree to allow U.S. roads and forts in Creek territory and to deliver Red Sticks to the United States. Seeking to tie all Creeks to the Red Sticks in order to justify land cessions, Jackson concluded by continuing his refrain on the prophets’ destructive influence: “As long as they live, your councils will be corrupted by their words—they will try to bring you into war, and destroy the remnant of your people.” Presumably, his audience agreed with him—that’s why they had allied with the United States.16 Jackson’s Creek allies offered their own interpretation of the conflict that focused on diplomatic protocol and their differences with the Red Stick prophets. They referred to the 1790 Treaty of New York, which was in part a mutual assistance pact in which the United States was obligated to defend Territory

115

Creeks in exchange for the Creeks delivering their own people who had committed crimes against U.S. citizens. Big Warrior, the Creek chief who had rejected Tecumseh’s overtures, argued that the provisions of the Treaty of New York bound the United States to assist the Creeks in putting down the Red Sticks without demanding further land cessions. He also pointed to his people’s deference to President Washington and agent Benjamin Hawkins, who had sustained the treaty relationship for many years and carried out the U.S. “civilization” plan in Creek country. Then came the Red Sticks, who threatened both the Creeks and U.S. settlers and had to be put down in accordance with the Treaty of New York. “The red sticks have no sense. . . . But we a rational people are not going to Join in it, like those hostile people, who have no sense,” explained Big Warrior. While Jackson wanted to defeat the Red Sticks to take Creek territory, Big Warrior’s primary concern was defeating the Red Sticks to preserve it. “It was the land I wanted to save—You say you fought for it, I wanted to save that land—Friends and brothers—White Brothers—you have fought for us—our warriors were with you, you fought and spilled your blood together—It is not yet settled and you asked for the land,” he implored.17 Jackson remained incorrigible and threatening. If Creeks were so bound by the obligations of the Treaty of New York, he asked, why had they not reported Tecumseh’s visit to their U.S. allies? Jackson’s answer was telling for the deep sense of national insecurity that it captured. “The truth is, the great body of the creek chiefs & warriors did not respect the power of the United States—they thought we were an insignificant Nation—that we would be overpowered by the British,” he explained. This remark suggested that Southeastern Indians sought to hedge their bets on the outcome of conflict between the United States and the British, with their Native allies, by leaning toward the British cause. (Of course, this accusation ignored the Southeastern Indian alliance against the Red Sticks.) Jackson also furthered the consensus with his audience that the madness of Red Stick prophets was a core problem: “They were mad—they had a fever—we bleed our enemies in such cases to give them senses.” He then gave his Creek allies two options: sign the treaty, or join the Red Sticks and British in Pensacola. “He told me by the time I got to Pensacola he would be on our tracks and whip me and the British into the sea,” recounted Big Warrior.18 Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson under threat in August 1814, but the Treaty of Ghent, continuing Creek complaints, and unmet U.S. treaty obligations complicated matters. Concluded at the end of 1814, the armistice between the United States and Great Britain restored territorial 116Territory

boundaries to their prewar positions. This provision was a victory for American Indians, whose interests often had been abandoned at the negotiating tables of previous imperial conflicts in North America, and it had the potential to overturn the cessions that Jackson forced from the Creeks. In frequent correspondence with Hawkins, British officials sought to assist the Creeks in restoring ceded territory. Hawkins argued that the Britons’ request was invalid because it did not come from official representatives of the Creek Nation. When U.S. officials arrived to survey Creek lands, those Creek representatives appealed to Hawkins about the manner in which Jackson dictated their treaty, rather than honoring the territorial terms of the Treaty of Ghent. Big Warrior acknowledged that the Creeks asked for American assistance with the Red Sticks, but the United States sent more troops—and therefore spent more money—than needed, and the process by which the Creeks would compensate their allies did not match Hawkins’s original proposal. “You told us soon as the war was over perhaps in a year or two the Government would send [a] good man to settle. . . . You did not tell me I should settle our affairs with one of the Commanders who commanded the troops,” Big Warrior explained. “I told him to wait that is General Jackson, and to give us time, He would not, he threatened us and made us comply with his talks. . . . The first thing he talked about was the land.”19 Hawkins held the U.S. government line, though he did appeal for Creek annuities and privately questioned the justice of Jackson’s land seizure. “It certainly could never be expected by the Creeks that their white friends were to fight for them[,] furnish them ammunition[,] compel their enemies to fly the county and then to feed the Creeks for nothing,” he explained to the Creek complainants, adding that both parties had signed the treaty and that he was powerless to stop the land surveying. Despite his intransigence about the treaty, Hawkins began to appeal to U.S. officials for food and supplies for the tribal nation once the winter of 1814–15 arrived. Per the Treaty of Fort Jackson and previous treaties with the United States, Creeks were entitled to these annuities, and people had died of hunger after nothing had been delivered. For months, Hawkins appealed on their behalf to a range of powerful correspondents: army quartermasters, secretaries of state and war, even Jackson. Shortly before his death, Hawkins struck an increasingly disillusioned tone. He explained to the secretary of war that the United States was powerless to stem the flood of settlers into former Creek territory, noting, “The inroad of people moving from the southern states is much greater that I have ever known or heard of.” In correspondence with another War Department official, Hawkins also questioned Jackson’s seizure of Creek terriTerritory

117

tory. “It struck me forcibly at the time that the general, who was authorized only to retain lands conquered from the hostiles to indemnify the United States for the expenses of the war, should take nearly eight millions from the friendly Indians,” he wrote.20 Hawkins’s death in the summer of 1816 symbolized a broader shift in U.S. policy toward Native Americans. The days of the architects of the U.S. “civilization” plan were over. Jackson’s aggressive land grabs accelerated calls for outright Indian Removal, and figures like Jackson, Harrison, and Richard Mentor Johnson, the reputed killer of Tecumseh, launched their national political careers from their military successes against Indian militants in the Deep South and Ohio Valley. They did not mention their reliance on Native allies and informants in those campaigns; bolstering the movement for Indian Removal was an increasingly powerful ideology of racial difference that left no room for nuance. Like anti–­Red Stick Creeks, Cherokee and Shawnee leaders allied with the United States to counter prophets and to bolster their claims to territory. Removal advocates like Jackson sought to erode these claims and banish the memory of these alliances. About 600 Cherokee men mustered in the fall of 1813, many of them current and former members of the Cherokee national police force. They included Path Killer, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, and John Ross, the twenty-­three-­year-­old future principal chief. Like his Shawnee counterparts in the Ohio Country, Path Killer dispatched spies to infiltrate militant groups, and he cautioned U.S. officials about the growing influence of militant prophets. His emissaries warned U.S. agent Return J. Meigs Sr. of the “false prophets who seduced those deluded Creeks,” explaining, “We hope the white people will not think that we have suffered those Indians to come amongst us.” In a letter to Jackson, Path Killer also made sure to emphasize that his own son was among the spies.21 While Cherokee soldiers reveled in their successes, their alliance still did not insulate them from U.S. challenges to their territory and property during and immediately following the war. American newspapers recognized Cherokee contributions to the war effort, yet some soldiers returned home to find starving people and missing property. The fighting had disrupted Cherokee farming efforts, and Tennessee soldiers had stolen from homes and demanded food as they passed through Cherokee territory. At the end of 1813, Path Killer wrote to Jackson about one incident in which foreign troops seized more than twenty horses and a number of enslaved people. After Horseshoe Bend, Cherokees pressed U.S. officials further for recompense. As with Hawkins and Creek annuities, Meigs grew frustrated at 118Territory

Ohio Country

Cherokee

Creek

0

87.5 175

350

525

700 Miles

²

Map 2. Post–­War of 1812 territorial cessions by Creek, Cherokee, and Ohio Valley Indian allies of the United States, 1814–17. Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814): Creeks ceded 23 million acres. Treaties of Turkeytown (1816) and the Cherokee Agency (1817): Cherokees ceded 4 million acres. Treaty of Fort Meigs (1817): Ohio Valley Indians ceded 4.6 million acres. (Map by Jasmine Zandi. Sources: Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 146; Royce, Map of the Territorial Limits of the Cherokee “Nation of ” Indians; Powell, Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2, map 49.)

his nation’s failure to meet its obligations and appealed directly to the secretary of war. In seeking “indemnity for losses suffered by the wanton maraudings & depredations” of Tennessee soldiers, Meigs emphasized Cherokee sacrifices. “The Cherokee warriors have faught and bled freely and according to their numbers have lost more men than any part of the army. They know that they have rendered great service in this Creek war and have no dout their services are properly appreciated by the Government,” he explained in May 1814.22 Some money for military service came at the end of 1815, and pressure for pensions for the families of wounded and killed Cherokee soldiers continued with some success. But the size of the Treaty of Fort Jackson land cessions stoked new concerns when surveyors arrived at the blurry borderlands between Creek and Cherokee territory. Cherokees worried that their land Territory

119

would slip into the massive Creek cession. Facing continuing theft and pressure from U.S. settlers, some poorer tribal members along the mountainous borders of the Cherokee Nation accepted U.S. offers to emigrate. Jackson capitalized on these fears to exact cessions totaling 4 million acres in 1816 and 1817. Over the next two decades leading up to Indian Removal, Cherokee leaders cited their participation in the Red Stick War as evidence of their sovereignty—and their betrayal.23 Most Shawnees favored dispersal and decentralization, rather than nationalization, as their strategy for politically navigating the War of 1812. Having rejected the Shawnee Brothers’ bid to create an intertribal nation in the Ohio Valley, Shawnees also did not forge a centralized polity during the war. This approach made sense in a region where battle lines and allegiances were constantly shifting, though Shawnee towns risked being swept up in the violence if misidentified or targeted by the United States for hosting militants. After Tecumseh died, Tenskwatawa fled to Canada, where he remained for more than a decade before returning to the United States on the condition that he encourage other Shawnees to relocate to Indian Territory. After some Indian combatants agreed to peace with the United States in late 1813 and the summer of 1814, the locus of Indian militancy shifted northwest, where the Potawatomis and Sauks continued to threaten the U.S. military.24 U.S. officials first promised to restore Native territorial holdings in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes to their prewar states, but as in the Southeast, the imperial nation ultimately rewarded its Native allies with demands for more of their land. Following the ratification of Treaty of Ghent, President Madison dispatched territorial governors William Clark and Ninian Edwards to settle with the remaining Native militants. They met with Shawnees, Potawatomis, Delawares, Sauks, and others at Portage de Sioux, where between 1,500 and 2,000 Native Americans set up temporary camps for the negotiations. In all, parties concluded sixteen treaties without land cessions, though Native signees agreed to allow the U.S. military to reoccupy existing forts and to build new ones. Clark and Edwards also insisted that the Sauks and Osages honor prewar land cessions. As in the Cherokee case, the region’s Native allies of the United States avoided the immediate betrayal that Jackson imposed on the Creeks. But facing floods of new American settlers in the fall of 1817, Native leaders at one of the U.S. forts near the base of Lake Erie ceded 4.6 million acres in exchange for small land grants and annuities.25

120Territory

Alongside the expropriation of American Indian land was a transformation in how U.S. settlers perceived that land. For many U.S. earthquake commentators, it was no coincidence that the tremors were strongest where Christianity’s influence was weakest. The Presbyterian minister John Campbell complained especially of the situation in the South and West: “The Lord’s day is converted into a season of casual business, of amusement, of frolic, and even riot and dissipation.” He singled out the “Western Country” for its “odious profanity,” land speculation, “lewdness and drunkenness, the lying and perjury, the litigiousness, malice and uncharitable, the gaming, swindling, and knavery.” Given this “aggregate of guilt,” Campbell found it unsurprising to see “the signals of God’s wrath hung out in the heavens” and “that the earth has trembled with strong convulsion under our feet.” From New Orleans, the Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser wondered whether “the shake which the Natchezians have felt [was] a mysterious visitation from the Author of all nature, on them for their sins—wickedness and the want of good faith have long prevailed in that territory.” A missionary periodical called the West a “vast moral waste.”26 In the area most affected by the earthquakes, the lack of Christian institutions stoked concerns about the region’s godlessness and sin. After the Louisiana Purchase, U.S. Catholics were responsible for providing their own clergy, and the Bishop of Baltimore presided over the Mississippi valley. The results were predictable. The region was understaffed and its churches often vacant, as the few priests residing in the territory circulated through distant communities to deliver the sacraments sporadically. With a population of nearly 6,000 people, St. Louis did not have a regular priest between 1808 and 1818. During the first earthquake, one of these traveling clergymen left a boat near New Madrid to offer confession to a frightened riverside crowd. The only other western Catholic official to document the earthquakes was Bishop Joseph Flaget of Bardstown, Kentucky, who took note of the tremors in his diary and also offered confession after the February 1812 temblor. Signs of Protestantism were equally thin. Missionaries bemoaned the lack of Protestant churches in St. Louis, and New Orleans’s Episcopal congregation met twice between 1811 and 1813 to discuss holding a lottery to finance the construction of a church building.27 Like the sinking of the Rogue’s Nest, the land and its people seemed to undergo a moral transformation during the shaking. When residents of New Madrid found higher ground, an eyewitness described the crowd of Territory

121

nearly 2,000 appealing for divine mercy. “It was proposed that all should kneel, and engage in supplicating God’s mercy, and simultaneously, Catholics and Protestants, knelt and offered solemn prayer to their Creator,” he related, adding that it “was a most heart-­rending scene, and had the effect to constrain the most wicked and profane, earnestly to plead to God for mercy.” Congregationalist missionary Timothy Flint, who spent a decade in the Mississippi River valley following the War of 1812, also heard about this ecumenical gathering, though he put the crowd at 200. “The people of the village had been noted for their profligacy and impiety. In the midst of these scenes of terror, all, Catholics and Protestants, praying and profane, became of one religion, and partook of one feeling,” Flint wrote. Church books and other missionary accounts corroborated the changes in and beyond New Madrid. The Methodist congregation there grew by a factor of six in 1812. From Cherokee country, Moravian missionaries at Springplace heard that people in Nashville were “very much terrified” and “had omitted completely the usual Christmas frolics and had passed the holidays quite soberly and quietly.” Land and communities previously renowned for backwardness and depravity were being broken down. Missionaries hoped they could be remade.28 Of course, the ubiquity of “earthquake Christians” meant progress in this religious transformation was more like the ground shaking than the Rogue’s Nest sinking—punctuated, rather than steady and uniform. New Madrid became a particular target for moral criticism because of backsliding. According to the eyewitness, people there “became so accustomed to the recurring vibrations, that they paid little or no regard to them, not even interrupting or checking their dances, frolics and vices.” A river trader living there complained of counterfeiters and horse thieves, and a chaplain in Jackson’s army who passed through in the winter of 1813 found the town largely vacant, with its remaining inhabitants fearful of continuing aftershocks. Flint believed that the earthquakes had disrupted the “slow but certain progress of every thing that fe[lt] the influence of American laws and habits.” Two decades later, a visitor echoed Flint in remarking that the earthquakes “militated very much against its [New Madrid’s] physical, and, consequently, moral improvement.” Though the population and shipping and farming industries had recovered, people were unreceptive to Christian evangelism. Accounts from other growing western towns mirrored recurring moral concerns. A plantation owner from Pennsylvania described a spring 1813 night in Natchitoches: “Instead of a Church, one passed near the entrance of Little River, a Tavern + Billiard Table, heard the balls rattling and the Frenchmen 122Territory

gambling.” A nineteenth-­century historian of early Louisville granted that “unlike the great calamities of other times, this one [the earthquake] had a good effect upon the public morals.” Residents dropped their card games and began donating money to build a church, but when the shaking subsided, they decided to build a theater instead. Flint became so frustrated in St. Louis that he left town. “The view of the wickedness of the place threw a continual gloom over my mind,” he wrote to a family member, expressing a particular distaste for dueling. He explained in his memoir, “It is a common proverb of the people, that when we cross the Mississippi, ‘we travel beyond the Sabbath.’”29 Still, when later nineteenth-­century church historians looked back to the expanding church rolls and accounts of an outpouring of piety during the earthquakes, they saw a founding golden age. By making conversion experiences during the shaking an important part of their trans-­Appalachian church origin stories, these historians suggested the centrality of evangelicalism in settlers claiming and connecting to territory new to the United States. According to Robert Paine, a later nineteenth-­century biographer of an early Methodist circuit rider, the earthquakes’ effects on the land and people were related and transformative. “In many instances this excitement assumed a religious aspect, and a wide-­spread and glorious revival extended through the greater part of the Western work . . . so that the Lord had not only ‘shaken the earth, but had also mercifully shaken the hearts of the people,’” Paine wrote. A Methodist historian in Kentucky wrote in 1869 that “the elements were combining to alarm the fears of the guilty and to excite Christians to earnest prayer and holy lives.” A Baptist history of Kentucky and a Methodist history of Arkansas echoed similar insights.30 In a romantic and telling characterization of Methodism’s spread through the trans-­Appalachian West, Paine bound together territorial and social transformations in a single metaphor. The earliest circuit riders were “a forlorn hope, cut off from the rest of the work by an extensive wilderness, full of warlike and cruel savages.” But “the cause of God was advancing and gaining firm footing throughout the vast Valley of the Mississippi. The Methodism planted by the heroic and holy pioneer preachers in this region was truly Wesleyan. . . . Its fruit was healing the chronic ulcers of the nations. It introduced order, social and moral, it subdued the vices, restrained the passions and vitiated appetites, refined the taste, enlightened the minds of men, and spread peace and happiness through society.” From this perspective, the earthquakes created the conditions for redeeming the land and its people. Mass conversions and backsliding mutually reinforced evangelical Territory

123

resolve to anchor trans-­Appalachian U.S. social order in growing church congregations. And conversion experiences sanctified settlers’ attachments to previously unfamiliar territory.31 Native people had long cultivated their own sacred connections to that land. As Creek, Cherokee, Shawnee, and other Native allies of the United States in the War of 1812 had recognized, protecting territory through military resistance was increasingly untenable. But the United States’ efforts to seize Native allies’ land and later remove those allies could not dismantle their sovereignties or the significance of Indigenous sacred places. Neither did the end of military resistance in the region signal the end of all Native strategies to repel U.S. incursions. American Indians still dictated what U.S. settlers knew about lands farther west. During the earthquakes, Native Americans used that knowledge differential to their advantage to spread reports that dangerous western volcanoes accompanied the shaking. In the second half of the eighteenth century, word of major volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest likely traveled across Great Plains trading networks, but these alleged volcanoes were located much farther inland. They were invented in a misinformation campaign intended to exacerbate intertwined environmental and geopolitical fears in the United States and to discourage interest in territory farther west. The spread of volcano accounts through newspapers and letters in the United States suggests that American Indians at least raised fears. In his survey of the nation’s geography, the French naturalist Volney had claimed that Native people were equally “ignorant” of earthquakes and volcanoes in the continent’s interior. He cited Philadelphian and American Philosophical Society officer Benjamin Smith Barton for confirmation. Yet in the months following the earthquakes, Barton received multiple accounts to the contrary. A correspondent in Kentucky told of speculation that the epicenter was located somewhere between the Arkansas and Red Rivers, where “reports derived from the Indians” claimed “immense Volcanic eruptions” accompanied the shaking. While he awaited confirmation of the Native claim, the Kentucky correspondent intended to send to Philadelphia for further investigation “a substance somewhat similar to pumice Stone” that had been recovered floating down the Kentucky River. Based on the time it was discovered and the speed of the river current, he estimated that the pumice-­like stone came from a volcanic eruption 300 to 400 miles north of Kentucky. Later that spring, Barton received another letter speculating about volcanoes from a different correspondent in Kentucky. This writer first believed that a volcanic eruption in the Cumberland Mountains was responsible for the “roar124Territory

ing” and light amid the shaking, but he had since attributed the anomalous sights and sounds to an electrical phenomenon.32 Unlike North Carolina’s John Edwards, who had clearly fabricated his volcano tale for newspapers, members of the most esteemed naturalists’ circles in the nation took volcano reports seriously. Those volcano accounts likely originated with American Indians. Newspapers began printing them shortly after the first earthquake in December 1811. On December 21, the editor of the Louisiana Gazette first mentioned a volcano near the “great Osage village,” which previously had been dormant for three years. In an early January letter to the New-­York Evening Post, William Leigh Pierce wrote from New Orleans that “the Burning Mountain, up the Washita River, had been rent to its base.” Pierce heard the report from a settler “through the medium of some Indians.” Dispelling any concerns about the account’s veracity, he explained that the settler’s appearance “was such as to attach credit to his information.”33 Indian stories about burning and disintegrating western mountains soon appeared in newspapers in Tennessee, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and New York, and many more periodicals cited volcanoes without mentioning Indians as sources for the information. “No doubt volcanoes in the mountains of the west, which have been extinguished for ages, are now opened,” explained the Louisiana Gazette. Volcano descriptions in Tennessee’s Carthage Gazette and New York’s Columbian were especially graphic. In the Carthage Gazette, Native Americans depicted mountains that “appeared to be tumbling to pieces,” further stating, “Rocks as large as houses were thrown into the vallies from the tops of mountains; and in many places the earth appeared to be much heated, and in every direction there were seen to be evident signs of volcanic eruptions.” According to a letter from Kentucky in the Columbian, “Some Indians who were in search of some other Indians that were lost, had returned, and stated that they had discovered a volcano at the head of the Arkansas, by the light of which they traveled three days and nights!”34 One reader in Ohio took the reports from American Indians more seriously than Edwards’s account. Writing to family in the North Carolina foothills, the Presbyterian minister Robert Wilson mentioned the story of a volcano erupting in the mountains of his home state. But reports of the strength of the shaking in New Madrid “rather leads to the belief of a report derived from the Indians,” he explained. That Native American report was that “a tremendous Volcano [had] opened in the great Northern or White mountains near the head of the Missouri.”35 Territory

125

The earthquakes wrought dramatic and permanent changes in the land: sunk river islands, sandblows, and swamps. They also prompted changes in how U.S. commentators perceived the most shaken territory and its settlers, and in how settlers themselves perceived the territory surrounding them. Reports of growing Methodist and Baptist congregations and reformed behavior in burgeoning towns, no matter how fleeting, promoted the promise of the moral transformation of new American territory. Settlers’ evangelical conversion experiences also deepened their connections to lands that were unfamiliar to them. As the domestic missions movement grew after the War of 1812, reports of mass conversions and backsliding during the earthquakes demonstrated to mission advocates both the potential of widespread religious awakening in the region and what remained to be accomplished. For Americans, this process of moral transformation first required the territorial dispossession of Native people. The earthquakes figured into justifications for their dispossession in both subtle and more direct ways. Land speculators hoarded New Madrid Relief Act land certificates and lobbied the Arkansas territorial legislature to declare their holdings near the Quapaws the eventual state capital of Little Rock. Responding to mounting territorial pressure, the Quapaws soon ceded millions of acres of land and relocated to Louisiana. They briefly returned to central Arkansas in the 1830s before their removal to Indian Territory. Andrew Jackson turned on his allies in the Native South to extract massive land cessions from the Creeks. He argued that Red Stick prophets had deluded not only their followers, but the entire Creek Nation, which had to pay collectively for their militancy. Those visionaries situated the earthquakes among a range of natural phenomena that they claimed to control or foretell. Creeks and Cherokees, among other Southeastern Indian nations, viewed the Red Sticks’ prophetic militancy as a danger to their own nationalizing projects and their standing with the United States. But as with other Native efforts to project sovereignty and civilization in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Jackson and Indian Removal advocates moved the bar for meeting U.S. standards of “civilization.” He and his colleagues simply wanted Native land. Even if U.S. Indian agents like Benjamin Hawkins and Return J. Meigs Sr. sought to lead them to believe otherwise in the early years of the nineteenth century, Creeks and Cherokees knew this by 1815. A provision of the Treaty of Ghent protected the prewar territory of Shawnees and other Native groups in the Ohio Valley, although a postwar flood of U.S. settlers renewed land cession pressures. 126Territory

Largely rejecting Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s movement for centralized intertribal nationhood, the Shawnees chose dispersal and decentralization. Complementing the full range of Native strategies for defending territory in this era was the volcano misinformation campaign, an admittedly small but telling example of how those most familiar with land in the middle of the continent could manipulate the fears and expectations of those U.S. settlers who sought it but knew nothing about it.

Territory

127

This page intentionally left blank

Epilogue

Resonances Twelve years after their occurrence, the earthquakes registered in an unusual and telling place. While the physical scars that they left on the landscape were plain to see, the historical record captured only traces of the ways that the shaking lingered in the memories of those who experienced it. The case of Isabel, an enslaved woman in Kentucky, was one such trace. In 1824, she refused to work. Arguing that she “labored under a serious mental affliction” and “was so far deranged that for several months she did no work,” Isabel’s owner wanted to rescind his purchase of her and return her to her previous owner. That previous owner agreed to her return, remembering that “about the time of the earthquakes,” she had a “religious foolishness” that was “occasioned by them & a religious Feeling.” This glimpse into Isabel’s life raises more questions than it answers. Like thousands of other people in the trans-­Mississippi West, had she undergone a religious transformation during the earthquakes? Did she use the literal instability to avoid forced labor? More than a decade later, did she then use the tremors again to push for a return to her previous owner—and perhaps her family? For all of the commonalities of experience and similarities in concerns about spirit, politics, and territory that the earthquakes occasioned, Isabel’s case reminds us of how different those experiences and concerns could still be for people. The stakes, urgency, and uses of people’s earthquake interpretations differed based on the circumstances of their individual lives.1 Memories and meanings of the earthquakes morphed and lingered in more public ways. Lore that Tecumseh caused or predicted the convulsions took hold over the nineteenth century. On his plans to attack U.S. forts 129

in the fall of 1812, Tecumseh told Miamis “to step on one side, for his feet were verry large, and required much room. If they did not he might step upon them.” His historical footprint has since loomed large in Native and U.S. societies alike. To this day, versions of a similar story persist: in Tuckabatchee, Tecumseh told his audience that he would stomp his foot when he returned home, either to express his anger that Southeastern Indians rejected his bid for intertribal alliance or to prove his power to control the forces of nature. Perhaps a conflation of Tenskwatawa’s foretelling of the shaking with Tecumseh’s prominence in life and death, the earliest mentions of Tecumseh speaking about earthquakes and foot stomping appeared in the 1820s. In a captivity narrative, the veracity of which was long questioned but more recently rehabilitated, John D. Hunter shared his recollection of Tecumseh’s speech to the Osages. “The Great Spirit is angry with our enemies; he speaks in thunder, and the earth swallows up villages, and drinks up the Mississippi,” Hunter remembered Tecumseh saying.2 Later nineteenth-­century accounts collected from Creeks more directly attributed the earthquakes to the Shawnee leader. According to George Stiggins, a wealthy Creek man whose plantation-­based community had been targeted by the Red Sticks, Tecumseh claimed the power to summon earthquakes. He promised to “whoop three unbounded loud whoops[,] slap his hands together three times and raise up his foot and stamp it on the earth three times and by these actions call forth his power and thereby make the whole earth tremble[,] which would be ominous of his success in the undertaking.” Various forms of this story circulated through and beyond Creek country.3 In the United States, Tecumseh’s renown grew with the national political prominence of figures like William Henry Harrison, who destroyed Prophetstown while he was away, and Richard Mentor Johnson, who claimed to have killed him. With time and the influence of romantic nationalism, people in the United States came to admire Tecumseh as a brave, tragic hero. His name appeared on naval ships and midwestern town names, and outdoor dramas and the U.S. Capitol Rotunda memorialized his demise. Among Native Americans, Tecumseh’s historical legacy became much more reflective of his actual life. His vision of intertribal nationhood in the Ohio Valley inspired future generations committed to pan-­Indian political organizing and activism.4 On the one-­hundredth anniversary of the December 1811 earthquake, Congressman Joseph James Russell of Missouri commemorated the occasion on the U.S. House floor. His remarks promoted agricultural innovation, 130Epilogue

decried land speculation, and paid tribute to the region’s evangelical heritage. “Sunk lands” were “the hunters’ and fisherman’s paradise.” Some land had recently been reclaimed for agriculture to “become a part of the most valuable lands in that fertile region.” While celebrating his area’s recovery, Russell also drew attention to the shortcomings of the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815. Land certificates “were purchased by unscrupulous speculators before the actual sufferers were advised of their rights, so that the result of that well-­intentioned act was much litigation, with but little benefit to those for whose relief it was enacted,” he wrote. He concluded his remarks by reading into the U.S. Congressional Record the letter from earthquake eyewitness Eliza Bryan to the itinerant evangelist Lorenzo Dow “in order to preserve it for future generations and in the interest of correct history.” From this “awful visitation of Providence,” Bryan described the earth as “in a continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea.” Dow published Bryan’s letter in one of his many works that warned Americans about signs of the End Times.5 Like other prophetic voices within and beyond the United States, Dow sought to bind together religious and political authority in his emerging nation, and he capitalized on the earthquakes to amplify and lend urgency to his message. That Bryan’s letter to Dow was the single eyewitness account offered “in the interest of correct history” during the tremors’ centennial speaks to the centrality of evangelicalism in structuring trans-­Appalachian U.S. settler societies. As evocative and instructive as the letter and its pathway to prominence are, it also reflects what could be missed if historians allow published accounts from U.S. settlers to stand in for the multivocality summoned by this or any other broadly experienced event in the North American past. In 1935, the Delaware chief War Eagle answered questions about earthquakes from an anthropologist who was interested in the primordial tremors that prompted the Delawares to carry out the first Big House Ceremony. Suspecting they could have been the 1638 earthquakes that Narragansetts understood as a sign of an impending epidemic, the anthropologist wanted to know specifically where War Eagle thought the shaking occurred. The chief replied that the location was “undoubtedly the Jersey coast, when the Delawares lived there at the edge of the big water.” Separated by centuries and half a continent from his nation’s ancestral homeland, War Eagle demonstrated that Delaware community memory of earthquakes still resonated.6 In the Delaware Nation, where War Eagle lived, and across eastern Oklahoma, the earth has been rumbling again. And like the chief’s Delaware ancestors and the wide range of New Madrid earthquake interpreters, people Epilogue

131

are again wondering what to do about it. This time, there is more agreement: particular human activities and impurities are directly related to the quaking. Scientists have argued that increased seismicity in Oklahoma is linked to the injection of wastewater by-­products from oil and gas drilling into large, underground wells. The shaking has been neither sporadic nor weak. Between 1980 and 2000, an average of two earthquakes reached a magnitude of 2.7 or higher in the state each year. In 2015, that annual number climbed to 4,000. Scientists have begun to link larger magnitude earthquakes to the stress induced by larger injection wells. The shaking and attendant damage has taken place within the new borders of the same nations that were remaking themselves in the days of the New Madrid earthquakes: the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Shawnees, the United States, and many others. In this and countless other ways, the natural world is speaking back to humans and their nations.7

132Epilogue

Notes Abbreviations ADAH APS FHS HSWC OHS KHS LBH MDAH MHSA MSMC PAJ

PJM-­PS PJM-­RS

RCAET



SBHLA SPMC

TSLA WHH

Alabama Division of Archives and History, Montgomery American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa. Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky. Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia, Abingdon Ohio Historical Society, Columbus Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins, vol. 2, 1802–1806, ed. C. L. Grant Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, vol. 1, 1805–1813, ed. Rowena McClinton The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 2, 1804–1813, ed. Harold D. Moser, Sharon MacPherson, and Charles F. Bryan; and vol. 3, 1814–1815, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, Sharon MacPherson, and John H. Reinbold The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 3, 3 Nov. 1810– 4 Nov. 1811, ed. J. C. A. Stagg, Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan Holbrook Perdue; and vol. 4, 5 Nov. 1811–9 July 1812, ed. J. C. A. Stagg et al. The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, vol. 10, 13 Oct. 1815–30 April 1816, ed. Angela Kreider et al. Records of the Cherokee Agency of East Tennessee, Microfilm Reel 6, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tenn. Springplace Mission Correspondence, trans. Elizabeth Marx, Moravian Archives, Southern Province, Winston-­Salem, N.C. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville William Henry Harrison Papers (microfilm), ed. Douglas Clanin and Ruth Dorrel

133



WMC Western Manuscripts Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri—Columbia Research Center, Columbia WKU Western Kentucky University Special Collections Library, Bowling Green

Introduction 1. John Sergeant to Reverend Dr. Marsh, 25 Mar. 1808, John Sergeant Letters, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America Records, MSS 48, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. John Sergeant’s informant was Hendrick Apaumut, a Mohican leader who opposed Tenskwatawa’s movement. On Apaumut, see Wheeler, “Hendrick Apaumut”; Brooks, Common Pot, 106–62. 2. Ruter, Reminiscences, 20. For historical studies of the earthquakes of 1811–12, see Valencius, Lost History; Valencius, “Accounts of the New Madrid Earthquakes”; Feldman, When the Mississippi Ran Backwards; Page and Officer, Big One; Bagnall, On Shaky Ground; Mueller, Lost in the Annals; Penick, New Madrid Earthquakes. Seismologist Myron L. Fuller led the modern geological study of the earthquakes. See Fuller, “New Madrid Earthquake.” Seismologists Susan Hough and Morgan Page have revised previous magnitude estimates of 8.0 or higher for the earthquakes of 1811–12, arguing instead that they were closer to 7.0. See Hough and Page, “Toward a Consistent Model.” Paleoseismologist Martitia P. Tuttle has studied sandblows and earthquake-­induced soil liquefaction indicating major seismicity in the region prior to 1811, including earthquakes with estimated dates of 2350 C.E., 1050 B.C.E., 0 C.E., 300 C.E., and between 1400 and 1670 C.E. On the major seismicity most immediately preceding the earthquakes of 1811–12, see Tuttle et al., “New Evidence.” Tuttle also has coauthored a guide for visiting geological transformations related to the earthquakes of 1811–12. See Van Arsdale, DeShon, and Tuttle, “New Madrid Seismic Zone.” Paleoseismologists Will Levandowski and Christine A. Powell have suggested more recently that a major earthquake occurred about 500 years ago, east of the New Madrid Seismic Zone in the Cherokee homelands of the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone. This seismicity in the southern Appalachian Mountains would help explain Cherokee familiarity with earthquakes. See Levandowski and Powell, “Evidence for Strain Accrual.” Several scientific institutions maintain helpful online databases of maps, eyewitness accounts, and scientific studies of the 1811–12 earthquakes and the New Madrid Seismic Zone in general. See United States Geological Survey, “The New Madrid Seismic Zone,” https://www.usgs.gov/natural-­hazards/earthquake-­hazards /science/new-­madrid-­seismic-­zone?qt-­science_center_objects=0#qt-­science_center _objects; Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis, “New Madrid Compendium,” https://www.memphis.edu/ceri/compendium; Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, “New Madrid Earthquake: A River Runs Backward,” https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/animation/new_ madrid_earth quake_a _ river_ runs_backward. 3. The words “states” and “remaking” in the title have multiple meanings, one of which is that during the early nineteenth century, numerous polities within range of the shaking were undergoing major governmental change. The sovereignties of Native American nations predated the establishment of the United States. Following the American Revolution, some Native American leaders sought to remake their polities into consolidated nation-­states to fortify their nation-­to-­nation standing with the United 134

Notes to Pages 1–2

States. On law-­of-­nations arguments that Native Americans constructed to legitimize their status as sovereigns after the founding of the United States, see Ablavsky, “Species of Sovereignty.” On Native state building in the early nineteenth-­century Southeast, see Persico, “Early Nineteenth-­Century Cherokee Political Organization”; Green, Politics of Indian Removal; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence; Champagne, Social Order and Political Change; Perdue, “Clan and Court”; Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation, 15–52; Reed, Serving the Nation, 23–59; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and One Government. On Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s efforts at intertribal state building in and beyond the Ohio Valley, see Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet; Edmunds, Tecumseh; Sugden, Tecumseh’s Last Stand; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 123–47; White, Middle Ground, 502–17; Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life; Warren, Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 19–31; Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 86–105; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 143–65; Warren, World the Shawnees Made, 16–18; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 143–52. On various dimensions of early U.S. state building and imperial expansion in the trans-­Appalachian West, see Rohrbough, Land Office Business; Cayton, Frontier Republic; Onuf, Statehood and Union; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 187– 270; Griffin, American Leviathan, 183–271; Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages; Bergmann, American National State; Edling, Hercules in the Cradle; Sachs, Home Rule; Saler, Settlers’ Empire; Frymer, Building an American Empire, 32–127; Harper, Unsettling the West. On religion in early U.S. nationalism, see Watts, Republic Reborn, esp. 109–60 and 275–321; Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; Guyatt, Providence, esp. 137–72; Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism”; Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt; Schlereth, Age of Infidels; Haselby, Origins of American Religious Nationalism; Grasso, “Religious and the Secular”; Park, American Nationalisms. 4. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change. “Differentiation” is a term that social scientists have used to predict the establishment of stable constitutional governments. The theory of differentiation holds that among other factors, societies with more distinguishable political and religious orders are more likely to build stable constitutional governments. Sociologist Duane C. Champagne has applied this theory to the Native Southeast, where Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek people established constitutional governments at different times and with varying levels of stability over the nineteenth century. In the context of the prophecies and revivalism that circulated through the southern Appalachians and Ohio Valley around the time of the War of 1812, Champagne’s framework is instructive for considering not only Cherokee and Creek efforts at state remaking in the Native Southeast, but also the efforts of advocates of intertribal nationhood in the Ohio Valley and of U.S. newcomers to the trans-­Appalachian West. Historical work on parallels between Native and U.S. prophets and revivalism across the Ohio Valley and southern Appalachians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been suggestive but scant. Nathaniel J. Sheidley has provided the most sustained cross-­cultural consideration in “Unruly Men,” 270–88. See also White, Middle Ground, 504; Juster, Doomsayers, 207–15; Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 185–86; Haselby, Origins of American Religious Nationalism, 181–92. 5. Convulsed States does not focus on natural science in the early U.S. republic and the ways in which the empirical study of nature reflected broader national political tensions between elite and popular impulses in the United States. Recent historians of early national science have recognized this important trend, and debates about the earthquakes’ causes in the 1810s support these larger findings. On an international scale, elite U.S. naturalists’ earliest studies of the earthquakes also revealed their own insecurities about Notes to Page 3

135

remaining legitimate in European eyes, while still seeking to set their brand of inquiry apart from that of Europeans. On science in the early U.S. republic, see Valencius et al., “Science in Early America”; Valencius, Lost History, 175–215; Yokota, Unbecoming British, 153–225; Lewis, Democracy of Facts; Pandora, “Popular Science”; Gronim, Everyday Nature; Lewis, “Democracy of Facts”; Yokota, “‘To Pursue the Stream’”; Dierks, “Letter Writing”; Greene, American Science. 6. Many book titles reflect historians’ focus on the spiritual dimensions of Native militancy: Dowd, Spirited Resistance; Martin, Sacred Revolt; Waselkov, Conquering Spirit; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown. Dowd’s pathbreaking work has established prophetic intertribal militancy as a major Native strategy for reckoning with colonial British and later U.S. expansion. See also Dowd, “Thinking and Believing.” Pitting American Indian “nativists” against “accommodationists,” Dowd’s interpretive model importantly recognizes the prophetic roots and ideological continuity of intertribal resistance movements from the mid-­eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Recent studies have looked beyond the Shawnee Brothers’ movement to consider how Native strategies during the War of 1812 did not fit as neatly into the nativist-­accommodationist framework. See Edmunds, “‘Watchful Safeguard to Our Habitations’”; Edmunds, “Forgotten Allies”; Bowes, “Transformation and Transition”; Bottiger, “Prophetstown for Their Own Purposes”; Tiro, “View from Piqua Agency”; Bottiger, Borderland of Fear; Sleeper-­Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, 317–18. The geographical reorientation in Convulsed States also seeks to address the broader problem of making the United States the primary referent for analyzing Indigenous polities bordering the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Binary interpretive frameworks that portray Native people as obstacles or enablers of U.S. expansion miss the greater variety of strategies that they employed for coexistence with the United States. In addition to militancy against the United States, these strategies included state building, decentralization, dispersal, and situational diplomatic alliances with other sovereigns: Native nations, European empires, and the United States. For works that guide the continental, cross-­cultural approach of Convulsed States and its attention to environmental history and state formations, see Carson, “Ethnogeography”; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness; Fenn, “Whither the Rest of the Continent?”; Valencius, “Mudslides Make Good History”; Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land; Rice, “Into the Gap”; Rice, “Early American Environmental Histories”; Brooke and Strauss, “Introduction: Approaches to State Formations.” On historical scholarship in disaster studies that examines imperial and national responses to natural disasters in the early modern and modern Americas, see Steinberg, Acts of God; Biel, American Disasters; Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society; Rozario, Culture of Calamity; Walker, Shaky Colonialism; Dauber, Sympathetic State; Davies, “Dealing with Disaster”; Kierner, Inventing Disaster. 7. On studies that have emphasized how Native ideas and practices were ineffective against, or even exacerbated, the spread of new diseases accompanying European arrivals, see Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics”; Martin, Keepers of the Game. Crosby’s pathbreaking point about the scale of Native population losses from epidemic diseases remains critical in the study of colonial North America, but as Paul Kelton, David S. Jones, and others have noted, it can support assumptions about biological weakness and cultural loss if employed uncritically. Kelton has argued that Cherokees effectively confronted smallpox outbreaks with traditional approaches to health and healing, noting that when faced with epidemic diseases, Indigenous practitioners of medicine were hardly the inept figures that historical

136

Notes to Page 4

studies by Crosby and Martin make them out to be. See Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs, esp. 59–62. For other critiques of Crosby and Martin, see Krech, Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 1–21; Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited”; Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics; Kelton, “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits.” On the persistence and contemporary importance of Indigenous systems of knowledge about the natural world, see Kidwell, “Native Knowledge”; Kidwell, “Systems of Knowledge”; Thrush with Ludwin, “Finding Fault”; Wildcat, Red Alert!; Marchand et al., River of Life; Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Gordon and Krech, Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment; Nelson and Shilling, Traditional Ecological Knowledge; Deloria et al., “Unfolding Futures.” On works that broaden early North American intellectual history by foregrounding African American and Native American thought, see Robinson, Black Marxism; Wilder, In the Company of Black Men; Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin; Wisecup, Medical Encounters; Snyder, “Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations”; Strang, Frontiers of Science. Founded in 2014, the African American Intellectual History Society maintains Black Perspectives, a blog focused on Black intellectual history. 8. Teuton et al., Cherokee Stories, 232; Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas. On research ethics in Native American Studies, see Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Mihesuah, Natives and Academics. 9. Robert Dickson to John Lawe, 14 Feb. 1814, in Thwaites, “Dickson and Grignon Papers,” 290–94.

Chapter 1 1. LaTrobe, First Steamboat Voyage, 26–31. Revised editions of Pittsburgh publisher Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator reflected the changes in river navigation and topography after the earthquakes. On the historical importance of the voyage of the New Orleans and the beginning of steamboat commerce in the Mississippi River valley, see Gudmestad, Steamboats, 1–7; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 73–75. 2. Bradbury, Travels in the Interior, 204–9; La Roche, “Sailor’s Record,” 268–70; James McBride to Mary Roberts, “Brief Accounts of Journeys in Western Country, 1809–1812.” 3. La Roche, “Sailor’s Record,” 269; Meteorological Record of John E. Younglove, WKU; Samuel Hammond to Samuel L. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 291. For other accounts that the Mississippi River ran backward, see Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 290–91, 300; Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, 182; Daniel Chapman Banks Diary, 25 Nov. 1815, FHS; Ruter, Reminiscences, 2. Charles LaTrobe and James Ross related the memories of inhabitants who experienced the earthquakes and claimed the river ran backward in LaTrobe, Rambler in North America, 1:111; Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 207. For an explanation of how an earthquake can make a river run backward, see Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, “New Madrid Earthquake.” 4. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 285, 291; Account of the Earthquakes, 58; Hough and Page, “Toward a Consistent Model.” 5. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 290–95; Hunter, Memoirs of a Captivity, 39; James, James’s Account, 57. 6. Finley, Autobiography, 238; Pusey, “New Madrid Earthquake,” 286; Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 304; Eliza Bryan to Lorenzo Dow, 22 Mar. 1816, in Douglass, History of Southeast Missouri, 304.

Notes to Pages 4–9

137

7. Morrow, “New Madrid and Its Hinterland.” 8. Dudley, “Earthquake of 1811,” 421; “New Madrid Earthquake Account of Col. John Shaw”; Musick, Stories of Missouri, 148. 9. John Geter Letter, 29 Sept. 1812, WKU; C. A. Dillingham to Isaac Jones, 9 Apr. 1812, C. A. Dillingham Papers, OHS. On nineteenth-­century memories of the creation of Reelfoot Lake, see “Observations on Horseback,” American Monthly, Mar. 1865; Jane Thomas Memoir, TSLA; “Historical Sketch of Pemiscot County,” WMC; LaTrobe, Rambler in North America, 1:110. On the Cherokees in the St. Francis River basin, see “Speech of the Cherokee Skaquaw” in Bringier, “Notices of the Geology”; Myers, “Cherokee Pioneers in Arkansas”; Dudley, “Earthquake of 1811 at New Madrid, Missouri,” 422. Valencius discusses the earthquake’s destruction of the New Madrid “hinterland” and its consequences of settlement, warfare, and agriculture in the region in Lost History, 58–105. 10. Daniel Chapman Banks Diary, 25 May 1822, FHS; Journal of E. M. B Taliaferro, Apr. 1839, WKU; Lyell, Second Visit, 2:179. 11. For variations on the same newspaper story about the deaths of seven American Indians, see Virginia Argus, 24 Dec. 1811; Columbian (New York City), 14 Feb. 1812. For the handful of other accounts that mention earthquake deaths, see Dudley, “Earthquake of 1811 at New Madrid, Missouri,” 422; Lyell, Second Visit, 2:174–76; La Roche, “Sailor’s Record,” 268–69; Pierce, Account of the Great Earthquakes, 10. 12. Abijah Bigelow to Hannah Bigelow, 1 Jan. and 5 Jan. 1812, in Brigham, “Letters of Abijah Bigelow,” 323–24; Abigail Smith Adams to John Quincy Adams, 12 Mar. 1812, Adams Family Papers, reel 413, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 13. LaTrobe, Rambler in North America, 1:102; “Retrospect of the Year 1811,” Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, May 1812, 29–33. 14. “Astronomical History of the Comet,” Weekly Register, 7 Mar. 1812; “The Comet,” Weekly Register, 19 Oct. 1811; “Comets,” Weekly Register, 21 Mar. 1812. On the Great Comet of 1811, see Evangelical Tract Society, The Comet; Kronk, Cometography, 19–28; Olson and Pasachoff, Fire in the Sky, 100 and 120–31. Astronomer William Herschel and landscape artist John Linnell sketched the Great Comet’s long two-­pronged tail from England. 15. Helen Massie to Henry Massie, 18 Dec. 1811, Bullitt Family Papers–­Oxmoor Collection, FHS; Woehrmann, “Autobiography of Abraham Snethen,” 319–20; Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser (New Orleans), 21 Dec. 1811; LaTrobe, First Steamboat Voyage, 16–17. 16. M. Harvey to Benjamin Smith Barton, 28 May 1812, Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, APS; Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 299. For descriptions of “lowering weather,” see Crawford, “Mrs. Lydia B. Bacon’s Journal,” 385; “Autobiography of Jacob Bower,” in Sweet, Baptists, 191. For various measurements taken during the earthquakes, see Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 281–308; Drake, Natural and Statistical View, 241–43; McMurtrie, Sketches of Louisville, 233–55. 17. Audubon, Audubon and His Journals, 234–35; Samuel M. McDaniel Reminiscences, MHSA; James McGready to Jane McGready, 18 Feb. 1812, McGready-­Ingram Collection, KHS. 18. First published in the 10 Jan. 1812 edition of the Star of Raleigh, North Carolina, newspapers in at least Connecticut, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia cited Edwards’s account in the month after it appeared in the Star. See Star (Raleigh, N.C.), 10 Jan. 1812; New-­York Herald 25 Jan. 1812, 1; Connecticut 138

Notes to Pages 10–15

Mirror, 2 Feb. 1812; Georgia Journal, 5 Feb. 1812; Virginia Argus, 6 Feb. 1812; New-­Jersey Journal, 4 Feb. 1812; Charleston (S.C.) Courier, 15 Feb. 1812. For debates about the account’s authenticity and its ultimate discrediting, see Virginia Argus, 13 Feb. 1812; Charleston (S.C.) Courier, 15 Feb. 1812; New-­York Evening Post, 25 Feb. 1812; Virginia Argus, 13 Feb. 1812; National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), 15 Feb. 1812; Star (Raleigh, N.C.), 10 July 1812. 19. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 292. 20. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 283–85 and 292; Sargent, “Account of Several Shocks,” 350–55; La Roche, “Sailor’s Record,” 269–70. 21. John Adams to Judith Sargent Murray, 11 Sept. 1812, Judith Sargent Murray Papers, MDAH. Bryan’s letter to Dow, dated 22 Mar. 1816, appeared in many editions of collections of Dow’s published journals and writings, titled History of Cosmopolite and The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil. For other examples of women’s writings about the earthquakes, see Polly Wilson McGee to Joshua Lacy Wilson, 24 Feb. 1812, Joshua Lacy Wilson Papers, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago; Abigail Smith Adams to John Quincy Adams, 12 Mar. 1812, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Sarah McConnell Letter, 9 Jan. 1814, KHS; Mary Morriss Smith and Jane Thomas Memoirs, TSLA; Woehrmann, “Autobiography of Abraham Snethen,” 319; Crawford, “Mrs. Lydia B. Bacon’s Journal,” 385. On women’s literacy and education in the early U.S. republic, see Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak. On Cherokee women’s roles, and early nineteenth-­century challenges to those roles, see Perdue, Cherokee Women; Perdue, “Clan and Court.” 22. Liberty Hall (Cincinnati, Ohio), 12 Feb. 1812; Western Spy (Cincinnati, Ohio), 8 Feb. 1812. 23. For newspaper debates about the fire, see National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), 1 Feb., 8 Feb., 13 Feb., 15 Feb., 22 Feb., 29 Feb., and 12 Mar. 1812. On the theater fire, see Baker, Richmond Theater Fire; Kierner, Inventing Disaster, 152–65. 24. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 299; William C. C. Claiborne to “A Lady,” 9 Feb. 1812, in Dunbar, Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 6:52; C. A. Dillingham to Isaac Jones, 9 Apr. 1812, C. A. Dillingham Papers, OHS; James Miller to Catherine Miller, 25 Dec. 1811 (photostat), James Miller Papers, OHS; Frederick Bates to William C. Carr, 31 July 1812, in Marshall, Life and Times of Frederick Bates, 2:232; Columbian (New York City), 26 Mar. 1812. 25. Frederick Kimball to Andrew Wade, 10 Feb. 1812, Frederick Kimball Letters, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; William C. C. Claiborne to Manuel Andry, 24 Dec. 1811, in Dunbar, Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 6:18; John Shaw Letter, 1 Feb. 1812, John Shaw Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Andrew Jackson to Mary Caffery, 8 Feb. 1812, PAJ, 2:282. On the German Coast uprising, see Rasmussen, American Uprising; Rodriguez, “Always ‘En Garde’”; Dormon, “Persistent Specter.” On U.S. citizens’ fears about Native American, Spanish, and enslaved people’s alliances in the Gulf South years before and during the War of 1812, see Owens, Red Dreams, White Nightmares, 191–234; Herschthal, “Persistent Fears.” On the widespread growth of Deep South plantations in later decades, see Rothman, Slave Country. 26. Francis Preston to William Preston, 16 Feb. 1812, Preston Family Papers, FHS. 27. Mitchill, “Detailed Narrative,” 294. On population and territorial figures, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, A8. 28. James Madison, “Annual Message to Congress, November 5, 1811,” PJM-­PS, 4:1–6. Given the War of 1812’s bicentennial, recent historical scholarship on the subject is vast. Notes to Pages 15–19

139

See Taylor, Civil War of 1812; Bickham, Weight of Vengeance; Eustace, 1812; Hickey, War of 1812. 29. For the purposes of definition, “evangelical” traditionally refers to the Baptists and Methodists, as well as unaffiliated Protestant itinerants and independent congregations that emphasized the importance of conversion experiences and an individual’s relationship with God. Most of the earthquake interpreters considered here fall within this definition, though denominational affiliations and definitional questions are not crucial for considering American Protestant perspectives on the earthquakes and related intellectual concerns in the War of 1812 era. As Donald Mathews has argued, the Second Great Awakening was more important for its social function than as a theological or denominational contest. The movement created a “common world of experience” for postrevolutionary U.S. Protestants. Mathews, “Second Great Awakening.” Historical scholarship on evangelicalism in the early U.S. republic is vast. See Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millennium; McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, 98–140; Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 170–91; Boles, Great Revival; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 118–208; Heyrman, Southern Cross; Eslinger, Citizens of Zion; Sheidley, “Unruly Men”; Noll, America’s God, 161–366; Spangler, Virginians Reborn, 195–230; Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 78–208; Haselby, Origins of American Religious Nationalism, 117–316. 30. Amanda Porterfield notes that despite Baptist wariness of government intrusion into religion, Baptist churches functioned “almost like independent states of their own.” See Conceived in Doubt, 9. 31. Harrison, Philadelphia Merchant, 268; Samuel Allyne Otis to John Adams, 8 Feb. 1812, reel 413, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Pierce, Year, 22–23 and 32. 32. Hudson, “Cherokee Concept of Natural Balance”; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 1–22; White, Middle Ground, 1–49; Sleeper-­Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, 9–11; Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 13–49; Fogelson, “Who Were the Aní-­ Kutánî?”; Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 184–96 and 336–51. 33. On missionaries, U.S. agents, the “civilization” plan, and its reception in the Southeast and the Ohio Valley, see Perdue, Cherokee Women, 160–84; Ethridge, Creek Country, 7–21; Hancock, “Shaken Spirits”; Daggar, “Mission Complex.” 34. John Gambold to the Salem Helfer Conferenz, 18 Jan. 1812, SPMC. 35. On the territorial and diplomatic pressures and internal divisions that Cherokees faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 21–57. On persistence and change in Cherokee gender roles during this period, see Perdue, Cherokee Women, 115–58. On southeastern Indians’ adoption of racial slavery, see Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 182–212. 36. McLoughlin, Cherokee Ghost Dance, 59–117; Perdue, “Clan and Court.” 37. McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes, 94. Cherokee leader Major Ridge related the council speech to Thomas McKenney, a U.S. official who included the prophecy in his biography of Major Ridge. The date of the council is unclear, but it occurred between 1807 and 1811. 38. On early nineteenth-­century Creek society, politics, and diplomacy preceding and during the Red Stick War, see Green, Politics of Indian Removal, 36–43; Martin, Sacred Revolt; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 177–88; Davis, “‘Remember Fort Mims’”; Saunt, New

140

Notes to Pages 20–25

Order of Things, 139–229 and 249–72; Frank, Creeks and Southerners; Waselkov, Conquering Spirit; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 67–120; Nooe, “Common Justice”; Kokomoor, Of One Mind and One Government, 293–368. 39. Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 86–87; Benjamin Hawkins to William Eustis, 3 Feb., 26 Feb., and 9 June 1812, LBH, 601–2 and 609; Hobohoilthe Mico to James Madison, 15 May 1811, PJM-­PS, 3:305–7; Mauelshagen and Davis, Partners in the Lord’s Work, 67. Tecumseh biographer John Sugden exhaustively evaluates sources related to Tecumseh’s travels, a subject of great speculation, in “Early Pan-­Indianism,” and “Tecumseh’s Travels Revisited.” 40. On long-­standing Shawnee strategies of dispersal and migration, see Warren, Shawnees and Their Neighbors; Warren, World the Shawnees Made; Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers, 19–52; Lakomäki, Gathering Together. On the “Long War for the West,” see Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-­Appalachian Frontier.” On U.S.-­Indian relations in the 1790s, see Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages. On generational tensions among Native men in the Ohio Country, see Hartwig, “‘Old Men and Chiefs.’” On the agricultural practices of Native women in the Ohio Valley, see Sleeper-­Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, esp. 13–66. 41. MacLean, “Shaker Mission to the Shawnee Indians”; Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 28–41; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 123–47. Jeffrey Ostler has shown that massacres led some Native Americans in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes to believe that Anglo American settlers had genocidal intentions, resulting in an “indigenous consciousness of genocide” that galvanized intertribal organizing and militancy. See Ostler, “‘To Extirpate the Indians.’” 42. Thomas Forsyth to William Clark, 23 Dec. 1812, Tesson Family Papers, MHSA. 43. “Speeches of Indians at Massassinway, May 15, 1812,” in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 2:50; William Henry Harrison to William Eustis, 4 Mar. 1812, reel 5, WHH; Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 110–16. 44. Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 117; Cave, “Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe,” 651–61; Return J. Meigs Jr. to Sophia Meigs, 18 Dec. 1811, Meigs Manuscripts, Eli Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; Josiah Snelling to William Henry Harrison, 20 Nov. 1811, reel 5, WHH; James Miller to Ruth Miller, 15 Dec. 1811, James Miller Papers, OHS; Little Turtle to William Henry Harrison, 25 Jan. 1812, reel 5, WHH. 45. Mary Morriss Smith, Jane Thomas, and Nathan Vaught Memoirs, TSLA; Supernaw, interview.

Chapter 2 1. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 8. 2. Settle, “Real Benjamin Banneker.” 3. On accounts of the 1833 meteor shower in the Federal Writers’ Project interviews of formerly enslaved people, see “Sylvester Brooks,” in Texas Narratives, vol. 1 of Slave Narratives, 150; “Abraham Jones,” in Alabama Narratives, vol. 1 of Slave Narratives, 189. 4. Interviews from Rawick, South Carolina, vol. 2 of American Slave: Charley Barber, part 1, 32–33; Julia Woodbury, part 4, 232–33; Mary Smith, part 4, 115; Thomas Dixon, part 1, 324–25. 5. In addition to the Charleston earthquake’s impact on Christian congregations in 1886,

Notes to Pages 26–34

141

a major earthquake in Los Angeles in 1906 was central to the Asuza Street Revival and the attendant growth of the Pentecostal movement. See Robeck, Asuza Street Mission Revival; Wacker, Heaven Below; Synan, Holiness-­Pentecostal Tradition. 6. McClinton, 17 Feb. 1812, MSMC, 474. 7. Altman and Belt, “Reading History.” See also Altman and Belt, “Tõhi”; Hudson, “Cherokee Concept of Natural Balance”; Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs, 81–87. 8. Masse et al., “Exploring the Nature of Myth”; Bird-­David, “‘Animism’ Revisited.” 9. Howard, “Yanktonai Ethnohistory,” 33; Hough, “Writing on the Walls.” For a survey of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, see Aveni, “Archaeoastronomy in the Ancient Americas.” On Native North American inquiry into the natural world, see Kidwell, “Ethnoastronomy as the Key”; Kidwell, “Systems of Knowledge.” 10. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics”; Martin, Keepers of the Game; Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited”; Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics; Kelton, “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits”; Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs. 11. Thomas, Campbell, and Morehead, “Burkett Site (23MI20).” Rock art at Petit Jean State Park in central Arkansas contains wavy lines similar to those at seismologically active petroglyph sites on the Pacific coast. On rock art in Arkansas, see Fritz and Ray, “Rock Art Sites.” 12. Speck, “Penobscot Tales,” 21; Miller, “Why the World Is On the Turtle’s Back,” 306–8; Lankford, “World on a String”; Connelley, “Folk-­Lore of the Wyandots,” 122; Heckewelder, Account, 307; Speck, “Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians,” 110. 13. This summary of the Green Corn Ceremony is based on James Adair’s eighteenth-­ century account in History of the American Indians, 140–57. 14. Wallis, “Folk Tales from Shumopovi,” 17–18; Malotki, Hopi Tales of Destruction, 4–16; Kroeber, “Earthquakes”; Speck, Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony; Miller, “Old Religion among the Delawares”; McMillan and Hutchinson, “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced”; Thrush with Ludwin, “Finding Fault.” Anthropologist Richard O. Clemmer has argued that Hopi prophecies of disaster as punishment for misbehavior have remained central to how Hopis both relate to outsiders and seek reforms. See Clemmer, “‘Then Will You Rise.’” See also Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows, 145–47. 15. Nancy Shoemaker has shown how Native Americans and Euro Americans constructed notions of difference despite sharing a “strange likeness” in their approaches to land tenure, record keeping, governance, alliance building, and gender in the eighteenth century. See Shoemaker, Strange Likeness. 16. Wallis, “Folk Tales from Shumopovi,” 12; Ball, Indeh, 15 and 58; Robinson, Apache Voices, 110. 17. Roger Williams to John Winthrop, June 1638, in Bartlett, Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 6:99; Field, Haddam and East-­Haddam, 4; Kendall, Travels through the Northern Parts, 1:99–103. The Moodus noises continue to this day. See Rierden, “Steady Observer for Trembling Moodus.” 18. Marie de L’Incarnation, 20 Aug. 1663, in Marshall, Word from New France, 297–98; Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 48:​193 and 207–9; Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 47: 255–57. 19. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 48: 43 and 219–20. For a survey of the history of Native Americans and alcohol in British North America, see Mancall, Deadly Medicine. On alcohol among Cherokees, see Ishii, Bad Fruits. 20. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 48:​217. 142

Notes to Pages 35–42

21. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 48: 53–57; Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 49: 89–91. 22. The scholarship on Native American encounters with Christianity is vast. For a longer view of “cycles of evangelism” that predated the arrival of Europeans and continued into the colonial era, see Brooks, “Women, Men and Cycles of Evangelism.” See also Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions; McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries; Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood”; Richter, Facing East, 83–90; Greer, Mohawk Saint; Barr, Peace Came; Silverman, Faith and Boundaries; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening. 23. MacLean, “Shaker Mission to the Shawnee Indians,” 223–25; Trowbridge, Shawnese Traditions, 56. The Shawnee Brothers both likened Americans to evil snakes, but in one instance, Tenskwatawa referred to “great snakes under the earth.” For various interpretations, see John Sergeant to Reverend Dr. Marsh, 25 Mar. 1808, John Sergeant Letters, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America Records, MSS 48, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.; Trowbridge, Shawnese Traditions, 45; Hunter, Memoirs of a Captivity, 45; Pokagon, “Massacre at Fort Dearborn,” 650; Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 76; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 106. 24. McClinton, 17 Feb. 1812, MSMC, 474. 25. Ira Ellis Cornelius Diary, Smith (Floy) Collection, MDAH. 26. Ira Ellis Cornelius Diary, Smith (Floy) Collection. 27. In Doomsayers, historian Susan Juster suggests “that we stop seeing the enlightenment and religious enthusiasm as distinct and antagonistic forces” (viii). But because evangelical and empirical understandings about the operation of the natural world relied on individual experience and observation, they also stoked debate. People who privileged one mode of understanding over another exaggerated their counterparts’ earthquake interpretations. As historian Christopher Grasso has cautioned more recently, “While we certainly should be wary of any stark opposition between religion and the Enlightenment, we should not be lulled to sleep by the happy harmonies of the ‘enlightened and Christian’ rhetoric either.” See Grasso, “Religious and the Secular,” 368. 28. Aristotle, Meteorologica, 48–54; Horrox, Black Death, 177–82. 29. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 111–16. Historian of science John Gates Taylor Jr. has argued that western European understandings of earthquakes did not change substantially between the first and seventeenth centuries. See “Eighteenth-­Century Earthquake Theories.” 30. Isaiah 5:25; Psalms 46:8. 31. Matthew 27:​51–54, 28:1–6; Revelation 11:​13, 19. 32. Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 340–43; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 72–115. 33. Levin, “Giants in the Earth”; Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, cited in De Vorsey, “Mapping the World Below”; Mather, Christian Philosopher, 109. On North Atlantic flows of information about nature and the roles of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and Euro American colonists as thinkers and specimen gatherers, see Parrish, American Curiosity. 34. Taylor, “Eighteenth-­Century Earthquake Theories,” 70–90; Prince, Earthquakes: The Work of God; Winthrop, Lecture on Earthquakes. On the debate between Prince and Winthrop, see Delbourgo, Most Amazing Scene, 66–69, and Errington, “Wonders and the Creation of Evangelical Culture.” Errington has argued that conflicting interpretations of “natural wonders” revealed “a gulf between learned and unlearned understandings Notes to Pages 42–49

143

of divine agency” in late eighteenth-­century New England, as “learned rationalists” and “unlearned enthusiasts” squared off over the extent to which reason could explain natural phenomena (2). 35. On the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and its impact on the study of earthquakes during the Enlightenment, see Taylor, “Eighteenth-­Century Earthquake Theories,” 154–85; Araujo, “European Public Opinion”; Georgi, “Lisbon Earthquake and Scientific Knowledge.” 36. Wesley, Serious Thoughts. See also Wesley, “Sermon CXXIX,” 7:394. On Wesley’s response to the Lisbon earthquake and his understanding of scientific inquiry, see Riss, “John Wesley’s Reactions”; Webster, “Lisbon Earthquake”; Schofield, “John Wesley and Science.” Wesley’s major works on natural laws and medicine included The Desideratum, his treatise on electricity; Primitive Physic, his compilation of remedies for illnesses; and A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation, or a Compendium of Natural Philosophy, a 1763 compilation that Schofield has described as the “best example of Wesley’s religious interest in science.” On the theological implications of the Lisbon earthquake, see Bassnett, “Faith, Doubt, Aid and Prayer”; Brightman, “Lisbon Earthquake.” 37. On Wesley’s means of attracting followers, see Abelove, Evangelist of Desire. 38. On theological shifts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly the evangelical departure from Calvinism to Arminianism, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 170–79; Hollifield, Theology in America, 128–35; Wilson, Benevolent Deity, 61–79; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 438–39. As Ahlstrom and others have noted, the Calvinist-­Arminian dialectic was overstated, as Methodists and Presbyterians exaggerated their theological differences in their competition with one another. 39. On Bradbury’s travels before the earthquakes and interaction with Jefferson, see Bradbury, Travels in the Interior; True, “Life of John Bradbury”; Rickett, “John Bradbury’s Explorations.” 40. On early national U.S. science and its continuing dependence on Britain, see Greene, American Science; Yokota, “‘To Pursue the Stream.’” Yokota has limited her analysis to the “upstream” flow of knowledge after the Revolutionary War, but as Cotton Mather’s case demonstrates, an Anglo American intellectual inferiority complex also pervaded the colonial period. On the intellectual companionship that elite men sought through their scientific correspondence, see Dierks, “Letter Writing.” 41. Williams, “Observations and Conjectures,” 291. 42. Williams, “Observations and Conjectures,” 304–6. 43. Williams, “Observations and Conjectures,” 577–79. On deism, see Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 40–43. 44. Volney, View of the Climate and Soil, 117–21. 45. Mitchill, “Review of A View of the Climate,” 173–74; “Review of A View of the Climate,” Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review 5, no. 8 (1808): 441–49. Mitchill’s response to Volney mirrored Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to counter Georges-­Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s theory of North American degeneracy in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. On Jefferson’s response to Buffon and his notion of degeneracy, see Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose. 46. “Review of Volney,” Monthly Anthology, 444–49; Mitchill, “Review of A View of the Climate,” 175 and 195–96; Stoddard, “Observations on the Native Salt,” 49. 47. Historian Andrew J. Lewis describes this unique intellectual climate and its decline through nineteenth-­century professionalization in A Democracy of Facts. On 144

Notes to Pages 49–57

the tensions between more democratic scientific discourse and an elite desire for order, see Looby, “Constitution of Nature,” and Lewis, “Democracy of Facts.” On the blurred intellectual lineages of the Second Great Awakening and the Enlightenment, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 34–40; Wood, “Evangelical America.”

Chapter 3 1. Hughes, Solemn Warning, 1–24. Juster situates Hughes among a “rogues’ gallery” of self-­styled prophets who exploited the increasing commercialism of early nineteenth-­ century print culture. On historical studies that address Hughes, see Juster, Doomsayers, 178–215; Holland, Sacred Borders, 95–98. 2. John Widney to Samuel Williams, 13 Nov. 1811, Samuel Williams Manuscripts, Eli Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser (New Orleans), 27 Nov. 1811; Goshen Mission Diary, 7 Feb. 1812, Moravian Archives, Northern Province, Bethlehem, Pa.; New-­Jersey Journal, 21 Jan. 1812. 3. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 10 Feb. 1812; Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 20 Apr. 1812; John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 3 May 1812, all in Looney, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4:483–85 and 642–43, and 5:11–14; McPherson, Short History, 7–8 and 25–26. On McPherson, see Berkeley, “Prophet without Honor”; Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords, 214–16. 4. This statistical survey builds on previous work about evangelical responses to the New Madrid earthquakes by historians Walter Brownlow Posey and Tom Kanon. It considers regional variations and African Americans in western Methodist church membership and adds Baptist data at the church and associational level from church books at the SBHLA in Nashville, Tennessee, and the KHS in Frankfort, Kentucky. On previous studies about the importance of the earthquakes in the western growth of Methodism, see Posey, “Earthquake of 1811”; Kanon, “‘Scared from their Sins.’” See also Aron, How the West Was Lost, 185–86. All Methodist membership statistics drawn from the Methodist Episcopal Church: Minutes . . . for the Year 1811, 22–29; Minutes . . . for the Year 1812, 19–26; Minutes . . . for the Year 1813, 28–35; Minutes . . . for the Year 1814, 23–31; Minutes . . . for the Year 1815, 21–29, Minutes . . . for the Year 1816, 27–35; Minutes . . . for the Years 1773– 1828, vol. 1. 5. Bethel Baptist Church Minutes, WMC. Baptist statistics are drawn from the following: Minutes of the Concord Association of Baptists, Minutes of the South District Association of Baptists, Minutes of the South Kentucky Association of Separate Baptists, Minutes of the Long Run Association of Baptists, and Minutes of the Salem Baptist Association of Baptists, all in SBHLA; Minutes of the Licking Association of Baptists, KHS; Masters, History of Baptists, 55 and 167–84. 6. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 187–88. 7. Smithfield Baptist Church Records and Boone’s Creek Baptist Church Records, SBHLA. 8. Polly Wilson McGee to Joshua Lacy Wilson, 24 Feb. 1812, Joshua Lacy Wilson Papers, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago; Peter A. Pelham to Sarah Dromgoole, 3 May 1812, in Sweet, Methodists, 201; Shaw, “New Madrid Earthquake Account”; “Autobiography of Jacob Bower,” in Sweet, Baptists, 191; Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 203. 9. Warren, “Missions, Missionaries, Frontier Characters and Schools,” 583–84; Notes to Pages 59–66

145

“Biographical Department,” Christian Advocate and Zion’s Herald (New York City), 16 July 1830. Thanks to Christina Snyder for the reference to Dinah. 10. John and Anna Rosina Gambold to John Herbst, 18 Jan. 1812; John and Anna Rosina Gambold to Samuel Stoltz, 15 Feb. 1812; Gottlieb and Dorothea Byhan to John Herbst, 8 Feb. 1812; and John and Anna Rosina Gambold to Simon Peter, 11 May 1812, all in SPMC. On Cherokee-­Moravian debates about the earthquakes’ meaning, see Hancock, “Shaken Spirits.” 11. Bradbury, Travels in the Interior, 204–9. 12. “Extracts from the Autobiography of John Allan,” in Sweet, Baptists, 826. 13. Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 201. 14. Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 203–4. On Nineveh in the book of Jonah and the book of Nahum, see Theodore Hiebert’s introductions to the books in O’Day and Peterson, Access Bible, 1192 and 1207. 15. Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 202–5. 16. Woehrmann, “Autobiography of Abraham Snethen,” 319; Crawford, “Mrs. Lydia B. Bacon’s Journal,” 385; John and Anna Rosina Gambold to Samuel Stoltz, 15 Feb. 1812, SPMC; “Autobiography of Jacob Bower,” in Sweet, Baptists, 191–92. 17. Ross, Elder Reuben Ross, 204. 18. “Extracts from the Autobiography of John Allan,” in Sweet, Baptists, 826; Polly Wilson McGee to Joshua Lacy Wilson, 25 Mar. 1812, Joshua Lacy Wilson Papers, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago. Allan’s meditations on sleepless nights of self-­doubt also capture a perspective missing in the celebratory tone of many nineteenth-­century narrations of evangelicalism’s western growth: evangelical conversion could be an exhausting, unpleasant experience. 19. “Autobiography of Jacob Bower,” in Sweet, Baptists, 200; Mary Morriss Smith Memoirs, 14–20, TSLA. 20. Joseph R. Underwood to Edmund Rogers, 13 Feb. 1812, Underwood Collection, WKU. 21. On tensions between lawyers and evangelicals in Lexington and the disregard that Lexington newspapers showed for the “Great Revival” in the early nineteenth century, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 187–88. On social divisions over interpreting natural phenomena in late colonial and early national New England, see Errington, “Wonders and the Creation of Evangelical Culture.” 22. Savannah Evening Ledger, 8 Feb. 1812; Connecticut Mirror, 2 Feb. 1812; New-­York Herald, 22 Feb. 1812; “The Earthquake,” Massachusetts Baptists Missionary Magazine 3, no. 5 (1812): 160. 23. “Thoughts on Subterraneous Fires,” Halcyon Luminary, and Theological Repository (New York) 1, no. 1 (1812): 17–19. 24. Evangelical Record, and Western Review 1, no. 1 (1812): 15–16. 25. Evangelical Record, and Western Review 1, no. 1 (1812): 17; Carolina Gazette (Charleston, S.C.), 28 Dec. 1811; Georgia Journal, 12 Feb. 1812. 26. Broadside from 2 Nov. 1815 by Methodist Evangelist Lorenzo Dow, FHS; Dow, Journey, 79–80; “Editorial Address,” Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) 1, no. 1 (1812): 1; Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) 1, no. 45 (1813): 711–12. 27. “Speech of the Cherokee Skaquaw” in Bringier, “Notices of the Geology,” 39. On

146

Notes to Pages 66–77

pre-­removal Cherokee migrants to Arkansas, see Myers, “Cherokee Pioneers in Arkansas”; Smithers, Cherokee Diaspora, 49–57. 28. On the Thunder Boys, see Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas, 242–48. 29. Return J. Meigs, “Some Reflections on Cherokee Concerns,” 19 Mar. 1812, RCAET. For Cherokee understandings of the river, see Mooney, “Cherokee River Cult.” 30. McClinton, 8 Mar. 1812, MSMC, 478; Meigs, “Reflections on Cherokee Concerns,” 19 Mar. 1812, RCAET. 31. Anderson, Brown, and Rogers, Payne-­Butrick Papers, 1:16; McClinton, 23 Feb. 1812, MSMC, 475; McClinton, 24 Feb. 1812, MSMC, 477; McClinton, 1 Mar. 1812, MSMC, 477; McClinton, 17 May 1812, MSMC, 489. 32. McClinton, 17 Dec. 1811, MSMC, 461; Hudson, “Uktena”; Lankford, “World on a String,” 208; Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas, 297; Teuton et al., Cherokee Stories, 245. 33. Nunez, “Creek Nativism,” 149. 34. Swanton, Myths and Tales, 30–36. 35. In explaining why the Red Sticks turned on Captain Isaacs, Dowd has cast the tie-­ snake as an embodiment of “pure malevolence,” but these oral histories show that the snakes were not entirely evil in the way that Tenskwatawa associated white people with the biblical snake from the Garden of Evil. See Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 170. 36. Woodward, Woodward’s Reminiscences, 96. On the ceremonial uses of the “black drink,” see Hudson, Black Drink. On Moniac and his familial ties to the Red Sticks, see Samuel Manac Deposition, ADAH; Benjamin Hawkins to John Armstrong, 28 June 1813, LBH, 643. 37. Nunez, “Creek Nativism,” 155; John Innerarity to James Innerarity, 27 July 1813, in West, “Prelude to the Creek War,” 250–51; Pickett, History of Alabama, 2:252; Harry Toulmin to Ferdinand L. Claiborne, 23 July 1813, ADAH; David Holmes to John Armstrong, 3 Aug. 1813, in Territorial Papers of the United States, 6:390; Benjamin Hawkins to John Armstrong, 28 July 1813, LBH, 651; Joseph Carson to Ferdinand L. Claiborne, 30 July 1813, ADAH; Hoithleponiyau to Benjamin Hawkins, 17 Aug. 1813, LBH, 656. Waselkov has likened the prophet’s convulsive state to the behaviors of traditional Creek kithlas, who were responsible for diagnosing disease and, among other special functions, seeking to control the weather. See Waselkov, Conquering Spirit, 83–84. On the flooding, see Benjamin Hawkins to William Eustis, 3 Feb. 1812, LBH, 601–2; Benjamin Hawkins to William Eustis, 26 Feb. 1812, LBH, 602; Benjamin Hawkins to William Eustis, 9 June 1812, LBH, 609; Mauelshagen and Davis, Partners in the Lord’s Work, 67. 38. Alexander Cornells to Benjamin Hawkins, 22 June 1813, in Lowrie and Clarke, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 1:845; Adam James to “the head Chiefs in the Creek nation,” 29 Nov. 1813, Adam James Letter, ADAH; Thomas Johnson to Andrew Jackson, 27 May 1812, PAJ, 2:298. 39. Nunez, “Creek Nativism,” 154–55 and 169; Benjamin Hawkins to John Armstrong, 21 Sept. 1813, LBH, 665. On casualty estimates at Fort Mims, see Waselkov, Conquering Spirit, 190–93. On the Fort Mims attack as a symbolic gesture of punishment, see Davis, “‘Remember Fort Mims’”; Waselkov, Conquering Spirit, 111. While Creek opponents of the Red Sticks may have exaggerated some of these details in order to cast the Red Sticks as fanatics, these particulars align with the Red Sticks’ overall approach to ridding Creek lands of what the Red Sticks perceived as impurities.

Notes to Pages 77–82

147

40. Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis), 21 Mar. 1812; William Wells to William Henry Harrison, 24 May 1812, in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 2:52; William Wells to William Henry Harrison, 22 July 1812, reel 5, WHH; William Henry Harrison to William Eustis, 13 Oct. 1812, reel 6, WHH. 41. Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 115–17; Cave, “Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe,” 651–61. 42. Virginia Argus, 24 Dec. 1811; Columbian (New York City), 14 Feb. 1812. Other newspaper accounts implicating Tenskwatawa include New-­York Herald, 26 Feb. 1812; Georgia Journal, 25 Mar. 1812. 43. John Gambold to Simon Peter, 21 Mar. 1812, SPMC; Goshen Mission Diary, 31 Dec. 1811 and 23 Jan. 1812, Moravian Archives, Northern Province, Bethlehem, Pa. 44. Halcyon Luminary, and Theological Repository (New York) 1, no. 6 (1812): 275–76; Georgia Journal, 27 May 1812. 45. Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis), 21 Mar. 1812. 46. Speck, Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony; Frank G. Speck Papers, APS; Miller, “Old Religion among the Delawares”; Grumet, Voices from the Delaware Big House Ceremony; John Heckewelder to Caspar Wistar, 3 Apr. 1816, John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder Letters, APS; John Heckewelder to Benjamin Smith Barton, 26 Sept. 1795, Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, APS. On Delaware mobility and their adaptable sense of homeland in the Ohio Valley, see Marsh, “Creating Delaware Homelands.” 47. On Delaware neutrality, see William Henry Harrison to William Eustis, 15 Apr. 1812, “Message to the Delawares,” 17 Apr. 1812, and William Henry Harrison to William Eustis, 29 Apr. 1812, both reel 5, WHH; William Wells to William Henry Harrison, 24 May 1812, in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 2:52; Benjamin Stickney to William Henry Harrison, 11 Oct. 1812, reel 6, WHH; Benjamin Stickney to William Henry Harrison, 16 Mar. 1813, and John Johnston to William Henry Harrison, 31 Mar. 1813, both reel 7, WHH. On Tenskwatawa’s witch-­hunts, see Miller, “1806 Purge”; Cave, “Failure of the Shawnee Prophet’s Witch-­Hunt.” On Tenskwatawa’s view of the Delawares, see Trowbridge, Shawnese Traditions, 9. 48. Supernaw, interview; James, James’s Account, 57. An audio recording of the Supernaw interview is also available at the Quapaw Oral History website. See http:// www.quapawtribalancestry.com/oralhistory/page2.htm.

Chapter 4 1. On obstacles to religion as a unifying force in the early U.S. republic and the argument that “sacred honor” became an alternate unifier, see Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 4 and 176–207. 2. Neal Smith to James Smiley, 8 Jan. 1814, Dr. Neal Smith Letter, ADAH. 3. Big Warrior, Alexander Cornell, and William McIntosh to Benjamin Hawkins, 26 Apr. 1813, in Lowrie and Clarke, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 1:841; Benjamin Hawkins to John Armstrong, 13 July 1813, LBH, 647. 4. Methvin, “Legend of the Tie-­Snakes.” 5. McClinton, 30 Apr. 1812, MSMC, 487. 6. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 117–23. 7. McClinton, 8 Mar. 1812, MSMC, 478; Return J. Meigs, “Some Reflections on

148

Notes to Pages 82–93

Cherokee Concerns,” 19 Mar. 1812, RCAET. On the backgrounds of Red Stick prophets, see Waselkov, Conquering Spirit, 32–55; Halbert and Ball, Creek War, 40. 8. Benjamin Hawkins to William Eustis, 3 Oct. 1811, LBH, 591; Sugden, “Early Pan-­Indianism”; Sugden, “Tecumseh’s Travels Revisited”; Woodward, Woodward’s Reminiscences, 94; Nunez, “Creek Nativism,” 145; Ninian Edwards to William Eustis, 4 Aug. 1812, in Edwards, History of Illinois, 334. 9. John Gambold to Simon Peter, 21 Mar. 1812, SPMC; Teuton et al., Cherokee Stories, 59 and 75; Fogelson, “Who Were the Aní-­Kutánî?,” 255–63; Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas, 399–400. Thanks to Ray Fogelson for the peacock feather story reference. 10. On the flexible, “shape-­shifting” nature of Native social and political formations in the wider Great Lakes region, see Witgen, Infinity of Nations. On Native politics and diplomacy in the Ohio Valley during the War of 1812, see Hancock, “Widening the Scope.” 11. “Proceedings of a Council,” in Quaife, War on Detroit, 199–201. 12. “Speeches of Five Medals and Benjamin F. Stickney,” 12 May 1812, reel 5, WHH; “Speeches of Indians at Massassinway,” 15 May 1812, in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 2:51. 13. Speck, Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony; James, James’s Account, 57; Bradbury, Travels in the Interior, 227; Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis), 21 Mar. 1812; Thomas Forsyth to William Clark, 23 Dec. 1812, Tesson Family Papers, MHSA; Robert Dickson to John Lawe, 11 Feb. 1814, in Draper, “Lawe and Grignon Papers,” 102–3; Robert Dickson to John Lawe, 2 Mar. 1814, and Robert Dickson to John Lawe, 4 Feb. 1814, both in Thwaites, “Dickson and Grignon Papers,” 108, 291; Ninian Edwards to William Eustis, 12 May 1812, and Ninian Edwards to William Eustis, 2 June 1812, both in Edwards, History of Illinois, 319, 325. On Main Poc and the Potawatomis, see Edmunds, “Main Poc”; Edmunds, Potawatomis, 166–69. On the centrality of the fur trade, rather than competition for land, for Native Americans in the northwestern theater of the War of 1812, see Reda, From Furs to Farms, 75–98. 14. Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 165–75; Warren, Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 17; Thomas Forsyth to Rufus Easton, 18 Sept. 1814, in Thwaites, “Letter-­Book of Thomas Forsyth,” 331. 15. William Henry Harrison to William Eustis, 14 Dec. 1812, reel 6, WHH; John Payne to William Henry Harrison, 7 Feb. 1813, and “Order to Johnston,” 14 Mar. 1813, both reel 7, WHH; William Henry Harrison to John Armstrong, 26 May 1813; Shawnee Chiefs to William Henry Harrison, 17 July 1813; and William Henry Harrison to John Armstrong, 22 July 1813, all reel 8, WHH. On Shawnee allies of the United States during the War of 1812, see Edmunds, “Forgotten Allies.” 16. William Henry Harrison to John Armstrong, 13 May 1813; William Henry Harrison to John Armstrong, 26 May 1813; William Henry Harrison to John Armstrong, 8 June 1813; and Attachment in John Wingate to William Henry Harrison, 15 June 1813, all reel 8, WHH, reel 8; Robinson, “Sioux Indian View”; Sundstrom, “Smallpox Used Them Up,” 315–17; “Speech of Tecumseh to Henry Proctor,” 18 Sept. 1813, reel 9, WHH. 17. Robert G. Wilson to William J. Wilson, 27 Feb. 1812, L. C. Glenn Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 18. Columbian (New York City), 3 Jan. 1812; New-­York Herald, 1 Feb. 1812; 19. Washington County Deed Book, 1810–1812 Indentures, 373, HSWC; Property Tax Census, 1812–1816, HSWC; Unfiled Court Records of Washington County, 8:163–64,

Notes to Pages 93–100

149

HSWC; Perry, “Cosmopolite’s Mount Sinai Domains.” For other archival traces of Hughes, see Helms, “Apocalypse Not”; Bychowski, “Nimrod, Newspapers, and the Apocalypse of 1812.” 20. Georgia Journal, 3 June 1812; Wilmer, Address, 1–15. James Jones Wilmer to James Madison, 13 June 1813, PJM-­PS, 4:481–82. 21. Annals of Congress, 24:​1384–86. On the U.S. aid, see Bierck, “First Instance of U.S. Foreign Aid”; Dauber, Sympathetic State, 19–20. 22. John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Albany Petition,” 6 May 1812, and John C. Calhoun to James MacBride, 16 Feb. 1812, both in Meriwether, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 1:91 and 107. 23. Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 4 June, 27 June, 8 July, 18 July, and 17 Nov. 1812, in Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:1138, 1145–46, 1154, and 1167; John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 19 March and 17 Aug. 1812, in Biddle, Old Family Letters, 372 and 422. 24. Campbell, Portrait of the Times, 3–18; Stansbury, God Pleading with America, 10; Plummer, Dreadful Earthquake; Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) 1, no. 51 (1813): 806–7. 25. Stansbury, God Pleading with America, 14–20. On religious divides over the war, see Gribbin, Churches Militant; Bergamasco, “‘Trust Ye in the Lord Yehovah.’” 26. Stansbury, God Pleading with America, 15. 27. Stansbury, God Pleading with America, 3; Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) 1, no. 1 (1812): 1; Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) 1, no. 45 (1813): 711–12; Evangelical Record, and Western Review (Lexington, Ky.) 1, no. 1 (1812): 16; Wilson, War, the Work of the Lord, 6. 28. Dow, Sermon, 8; McLeod, Scriptural View, 198; Worcester, Substance of Two Sermons, 10. 29. Dwight, Discourse, 6. For background on Dwight, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, esp. 17–19; Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, esp. 123–25. 30. Dwight, Discourse, 16–39. On Massachusetts Federalists’ critiques of the War of 1812 and an articulation of nationalism grounded in religion and regionalism in Massachusetts during the war, see Park, American Nationalisms, 115–55. 31. Campbell, Portrait of the Times, 34. On the “wartime fusion” of civil religion and patriotism, see Watts, Republic Reborn, esp. 275–321.

Chapter 5 1. Daniel Chapman Banks Diary, 19 May 1822, FHS; Kramer, Navigator. 2. On the early federal welfare legislation and its limits, see Dauber, Sympathetic State, 17–25; Davies, “Dealing with Disaster”; Kierner, Inventing Disaster, 143–65. Kierner has noted that federal disaster aid also flowed to U.S. port cities after major fires in the early nineteenth century. 3. On the legacies of Fort Mims, see Waselkov, Conquering Spirit, 177–84. 4. Amy DeRogatis examines Protestant missionary activity, mapping, and links between Anglo American conceptions of space and morality in early nineteenth-­century Ohio in Moral Geography. 5. Missouri Territory General Assembly, Resolution . . . for the Relief of the Inhabitants of New Madrid County. On Clark’s territorial leadership, see Kastor, William Clark’s World, 153–56. 6. U.S. Congress, Annals of Congress, 24:​1348–52. On U.S. aid to Caracas and early 150

Notes to Pages 101–11

nineteenth-­century U.S. relations with the Spanish Empire and Latin American independence movements, see Chandler, Inter-­American Acquaintances, 48–49; Bierck, “First Instance of U.S. Foreign Aid”; Griffin, United States and the Disruption of the Spanish Empire, 50. On U.S. enthusiasm for republicanism in Latin America, which guided the aid to Caracas, see Fitz, Our Sister Republics. 7. Missouri Territory General Assembly, Resolution . . . for the Relief of the Inhabitants of New Madrid County; U.S. Congress, Act for the Relief of the Inhabitants . . . of New Madrid, 211–12. 8. Edward Coles to James Madison, 6 Nov. 1815, PJM-­RS, 30–32; Frederick Bates to George Graham, 25 Sept. 1823; George Graham to Frederick Bates, 12 Nov. 1823; and Thomas Sloo to George Graham, 22 Nov. 1823, all in Dickens and Allen, American State Papers: Public Lands, 4:45–47. 9. “New Madrid Sufferers,” 18 Dec. 1826, in U.S. Congress, Register of Debates, 3:12–13; “Application of Missouri for Further Relief,” George Graham to R. Rush, 22 Dec. 1825; William Wirt to Josiah Meigs, 22 Jan. 1822; and E. G. Houts to John Scott, 24 Jan. 1826, all in Dickens and Allen, American State Papers: Public Lands, 4:881–85; deposition, 7 Oct. 1828, Alvord Collection, WMC; Peck, Forty Years of Pioneer Life, 147; Treat, National Land System, 303–7. 10. Treat, National Land System, 303–07; Musick, Stories of Missouri, 149–50. 11. New Madrid Certificate Claims, John E. Knight Papers, Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock. 12. New Madrid Certificate Claims, John E. Knight Papers; Cash, “Arkansas in Territorial Days”; Jones and Jones, “Stephen F. Austin in Arkansas,” 338 and 345; Key, “‘Outcasts upon the World’”; DuVal, Native Ground, 230–37; Williams, Historic Little Rock, 7–15; Smith, “Preparing the Arkansas Wilderness,” 383. 13. Bolton, Arkansas, 1800–1860, 69–74; Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 228–31. On the process of Allotment and Native American responses to it, see Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family. 14. Lyell, Second Visit, 2:179; Kelley, “John Hardeman Walker.” On the hidden evidence of the earthquakes’ effects, which contributed to modern doubts about historical accounts of the damage, see Valencius, Lost History, 216–72. 15. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, 13 Oct. 1813, and Willie Blount to Andrew Jackson, 24 Nov. 1813, both in PAJ, 2:461; Andrew Jackson to Willie Blount, 18 Apr. 1814, PAJ, 3:64; Benjamin Hawkins to Alexander J. Dallas, 2 June 1815, LBH, 738–39. 16. “Andrew Jackson to the Cherokee and Creek Indians,” in Hickey, War of 1812: Writings, 476–78. 17. Big Warrior to Hawkins, 6 Aug. 1814, PAJ, 3:106–8. 18. Andrew Jackson to Big Warrior, 7 Aug. 1814, PAJ, 3:109–11; Benjamin Hawkins, “Journal of Occurrences,” Documents Relating to the Negotiation of the Treaty of 9 Aug. 1814, with the Creek Indians, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 19. Benjamin Hawkins to Andrew Jackson, 26 May 1815, LBH, 729–30; Hawkins, “Journal of Occurrences,” Ratified Treaty No. 61, Documents Relating to the Negotiation of the Treaty of 9 Aug. 1814, with the Creek Indians, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi -­bin/History/History-­idx?id=History.IT1814no61. 20. Hawkins, “Journal of Occurrences,” Documents Relating to the Negotiation of the Treaty of 9 Aug. 1814, with the Creek Indians; Benjamin Hawkins to James Monroe, Notes to Pages 111–18

151

21 Dec. 1814, LBH, 709; Benjamin Hawkins to Captain Iverson, 2 June 1815, LBH, 735; Benjamin Hawkins to Andrew Jackson, 17 July 1815, LBH, 741; Benjamin Hawkins to William H. Crawford, 9 Sept. 1815, LBH, 751; Benjamin Hawkins to William H. Crawford, 8 Dec. 1815, LBH, 765–66; Benjamin Hawkins to George Graham, 1 Aug. 1815, LBH, 744. 21. Cherokee Chiefs to Return J. Meigs, 23 July 1813, Penelope Johnson Allen Collection, Hoskins Special Collections Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Pathkiller to Andrew Jackson, 22 Oct. 1813, PAJ, 2:439. For a comprehensive study of Cherokee participation in the Red Stick War, see Abrams, Forging a Cherokee-­American Alliance. 22. Path Killer to Andrew Jackson, 28 Dec. 1813, Andrew Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Return J. Meigs to John Armstrong, 5 May 1814, Penelope Johnson Allen Collection. 23. Abrams, Forging a Cherokee-­American Alliance, 83–99. On Cherokee emigration prior to the 1830s, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 206–27; DuVal, “Debating Identity, Sovereignty, and Civilization”; Smithers, Cherokee Diaspora, 27–57. 24. On Native militancy in the northwestern theater of the War of 1812 following Tecumseh’s death, see Hancock, “Widening the Scope,” 379–85. 25. Fisher, “Treaties of Portage des Sioux”; Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 120–21. On Native dispossession and removal in the Midwest, see Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians. 26. Campbell, Portrait of the Times, 19–20; Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser (New Orleans), 21 Dec. 1811; “Elihu on Foreign Missions,” Evangelical Record, and Western Review (Lexington, Ky.) 1 (1812): 175. 27. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, 1:184–217; Baudier, Catholic Church in North Louisiana, 14–15; census, 10 Jan. 1811, Frederick Bates Papers, MHSA; La Roche, “Sailor’s Record”; Howlett, “Bishop Flaget’s Diary,” 47; Stephen Hempstead Letterbook and Diary, 57, MHSA; Witcher, “Establishment of the Episcopal Church in Louisiana,” 38; Carter and Carter, So Great a Good, 14. 28. “New Madrid Earthquake Account of Col. John Shaw,” 19–20; Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 224; Tucker, Methodist Church in Missouri, 34; John and Anna Rosina Gambold to John Herbst, 18 Jan. 1812, SPMC. 29. “New Madrid Earthquake Account of Col. John Shaw,” 92; Watson, Judge Goah Watson’s Autobiography, WMC; Phelps, “Diary of a Chaplain,” 273; Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 178 and 222; “Alvan Baird Report,” Western Christian Advocate (Cincinnati, Ohio), 18 Sept. 1835; Samuel Postlethwaite, “Journals of 2 Trips” 8 Apr. 1813, Postlethwaite Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Casseday, History of Louisville, 123–26; Timothy Flint to Abel Flint, 10 Oct. 1816, Timothy Flint Letters, MHSA. 30. Paine, William M’Kendree, 180–81 and 276–77; Redford, Methodism in Kentucky, 255; Spencer, Kentucky Baptists, 567; Jewell, Methodism in Arkansas, 23–26. 31. Paine, William M’Kendree, 276–77. 32. Volney, View of the Climate and Soil, 121; Alexander Montgomery to Benjamin Smith Barton, 16 Feb. 1812, and M. Harvey to Benjamin Smith Barton, 28 May 1812, both in Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, APS. 33. Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis), 21 Dec. 1811; Pierce, An Account, 13–14. 34. On other newspaper stories that cited Indian reports of volcanoes, see Carthage (Tenn.) Gazette, 8 Feb. 1812; Western Sun (Vincennes, Ind.), 22 Feb. 1812; Western Spy (Cincinnati, Ohio), 14 Mar. 1812; Georgia Journal, 25 Mar. 1812; Columbian (New York City), 1 Apr. 1812. On newspaper stories that connected the earthquakes to volcanoes, see 152

Notes to Pages 118–25

Western Spy (Cincinnati, Ohio), 28 Dec. 1811; Western Spy (Cincinnati, Ohio), 4 Jan. 1812; Savannah Evening Journal, 8 Feb. 1812; Georgia Journal, 12 Feb. 1812; Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis), 29 Feb. 1812. 35. Robert G. Wilson to William J. Wilson, 27 Feb. 1812, L. C. Glenn Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Epilogue 1. William C. Bullitt to John Stadler Allison, 16 Oct. 1824; John Stadler Allison to William C. Bullitt, 17 Oct. 1824; and William C. Bullitt to John Stadler Allison, 17 Oct. 1824, all in Bullitt Family Papers–­Oxmoor Collection, FHS. 2. Benjamin Stickney to William Harrison, 29 Sept. 1812, reel 6, WHH; Hunter, Memoirs of a Captivity, 47. On Hunter’s account, see Drinnon, White Savage. 3. Nunez, “Creek Nativism,” 147. Tecumseh Papers, vol. 4YY, Lyman Draper Manuscripts, series YY (microfilm), Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life, 383–401; Dean, “‘Tecumseh’s Prophecy.’” 4. On the Shawnee Brothers’ legacy in popular historical memory and historiography, see Buff, “Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa.” On regional divides in historical memories of Tecumseh between the U.S. North and South, see Dowd, “Thinking outside the Circle,” 40–41 and 45. 5. Russell, “Remarks on the Centennial,” 16 Dec. 1911, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 6. War Eagle to Frank G. Speck, 4 Mar. 1935, Frank G. Speck Papers, APS. 7. On contemporary scientific understandings of the links between earthquakes and wastewater injection wells in Oklahoma, see Keranen, “Potentially Induced Earthquakes”; Pollyea, “Geospatial Analysis.” On the frequency of earthquakes and the Pawnee Nation’s lawsuit against oil companies for damages from a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in 2016, see Sean Murphy, “Oklahoma Tribe Sues Oil Companies in Tribal Court over Quake,” Associated Press, 3 Mar. 2017.

Notes to Pages 125–32

153

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Manuscripts Alabama Division of Archives and History, Montgomery Adam James Letter Dr. Neal Smith Letter John Evans, “Reminiscences of Olden Times” Joseph Carson Letter Letters of Harry Toulmin, 1813–1818 Samuel Manac Deposition American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia Benjamin Smith Barton Papers Frank G. Speck Papers John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder Letters Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock John E. Knight Papers Eli Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington Meigs Manuscripts Samuel Williams Manuscripts Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky. Broadside from 2 Nov. 1815 by Methodist Evangelist Lorenzo Dow Bullitt Family Papers–­Oxmoor Collection Daniel Chapman Banks Diary Hosea Smith Letter Preston Family Papers Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Frederick Kimball Letters Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia, Abingdon Property Tax Census, 1812–1816 Unfiled Court Records of Washington County, Vol. 8 Washington County Deed Book, 1810–1812 Indentures

155

Hoskins Special Collections Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Penelope Johnson Allen Collection Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Joseph James Russell, “Remarks on the Centennial of the New Madrid Earthquakes” Postlethwaite Collection Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis Hite-­Bowman Papers Samuel Williams Manuscripts William Henry Harrison Papers (microfilm), edited by Douglas Clanin and Ruth Dorrel Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort McGready-­Ingram Collection Minutes of the Licking Association of Baptists Sarah McConnell Letter Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. John Shaw Papers Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Adams Family Papers (microfilm) Winthrop Sargent Papers (microfilm) Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson Ebenezer Baptist Church Records, 1806–1865 Judith Sargent Murray Papers (microfilm) Smith (Floy) Collection Missouri Historical Society Archives, St. Louis Frederick Bates Papers Judge Goah Watson’s Autobiography Samuel M. McDaniel Reminiscences Stephen Hempstead Letterbook and Diary Tesson Family Papers Timothy Flint Letters Moravian Archives, Northern Province, Bethlehem, Pa. Goshen Mission Diary Moravian Archives, Southern Province, Winston-­Salem, N.C. Springplace Mission Correspondence, translated by Elizabeth Marx National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Ratified Treaty No. 61, Documents Relating to the Negotiation of the Treaty of 9 Aug. 1814, with the Creek Indians (digitized microfilm available through the University of Wisconsin–­Madison Libraries at http://digicoll.library .wisc.edu/cgi-­bin/History/History-­idx?id=History.IT1814no61) Records of the Cherokee Agency of East Tennessee (microfilm) Ohio Historical Society, Columbus C. A. Dillingham Papers James Miller Papers Winthrop Sargent Papers Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. John Sergeant Letters, Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North America Records 156Bibliography

Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tenn. Boone’s Creek Baptist Church Records Minutes of the Concord Association of Baptists Minutes of the Long Run Association of Baptists Minutes of the Salem Baptist Association of Baptists Minutes of the South District Association of Baptists Minutes of the South Kentucky Association of Separate Baptists Smithfield Baptist Church Records Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill L. C. Glenn Papers Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville Jane Thomas Memoir Mary Morriss Smith Memoirs, 1886–1895 Nathan Vaught Memoir University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago Joshua Lacy Wilson Papers Western Kentucky University Special Collections Library, Bowling Green John Geter Letter Journal of E. M. B. Taliaferro (typescript) Meteorological Record of John E. Younglove Underwood Collection Western Manuscripts Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri—Columbia Research Center, Columbia Alvord Collection Bethel Baptist Church Minutes “Historical Sketch of Pemiscot County, 1786–1936” Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison Lyman Draper Manuscripts, Tecumseh Papers (microfilm)

Newspapers and Periodicals American Journal of Science and Arts (New Haven, Conn.) American Museum (Philadelphia) Associated Press Carolina Gazette (Charleston, S.C.) Carthage (Tenn.) Gazette Charleston (S.C.) Courier Christian Advocate and Zion’s Herald (New York City) Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (New York) Columbian (New York City) Connecticut Mirror Evangelical Record, and Western Review (Lexington, Ky.) Georgia Journal Bibliography

Halcyon Luminary, and Theological Repository (New York) Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (New York City) Massachusetts Baptists Missionary Magazine Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence (New York) Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review Liberty Hall (Cincinnati, Ohio) Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis) Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser (New Orleans) National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.) Nature New-­Jersey Journal 157

New-­York Evening Post New-­York Herald New York Times Savannah Evening Ledger Star (Raleigh, N.C.) Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York

Virginia Argus Weekly Register (Baltimore) Western Christian Advocate (Cincinnati, Ohio) Western Spy (Cincinnati, Ohio) Western Sun (Vincennes, Ind.)

Published Primary Sources An Account of the Earthquakes; Which Occurred in the United States, North America, on the 16th of December, 1811, the 23d of January, and the 7th of February 1812. Philadelphia: Robert Smith, 1812. Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. Edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Anderson, William L., Jane L. Brown, and Anne F. Rogers, eds. The Payne-­Butrick Papers. Vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Anderson, Thomas G. “Narrative of Capt. Thomas G. Anderson.” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 9 (1882): 183–90. Aristotle. Meteorologica. Translated by H. D. P. Lee. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952. Audubon, Maria R., ed. Audubon and His Journals. Vol. 2. New York: Dover, 1960. Badger, Joseph. A Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger: Containing an Autobiography, and Selections from His Private Journal and Correspondence. Hudson, Ohio: Sawyer, Ingersoll, 1851. Bartlett, John Russell, ed. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Vol. 6, Letters of Roger Williams, 1632–1682. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Biddle, Alexander, ed. Old Family Letters: Copied from the Originals for Alexander Biddle, Series A. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892. Black Hawk. Life of Ma-­ka-­tai-­me-­she-­kia-­kiak or Black Hawk. Boston, 1834. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Page references are to the 2008 edition. Brackenridge, Henry Marie. Views of Louisiana: Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962. Bradbury, John. Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Brigham, Clarence, ed. “Letters of Abijah Bigelow, Member of Congress, to His Wife, 1810–1815.” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 40 (1930): 305–406. Bringier, Louis. “Notices of the Geology, Minerology, Topography, Productions, and Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Regions around the Mississippi and Its Confluent Waters— in a Letter from L. Bringier, Esq. of Louisiana, to Rev. Elias Cornelius—Communicated for This Journal.” American Journal of Science and Arts 3, no. 1 (1821): 15–46. Campbell, John P. A Portrait of the Times; or, The Church’s Duty. Lexington, Ky.: Thomas T. Skillman, 1812. Casseday, Benjamin. The History of Louisville from its Earliest Settlement till the Year 1852. Louisville, Ky.: Hull and Brother, 1852. Crawford, Mary M., ed. “Mrs. Lydia B. Bacon’s Journal, 1811–1812.” Indiana Magazine of History 40, no. 10 (1944): 367–86.

158Bibliography

Dickens, Asbury, and James C. Allen, eds. American State Papers, Senate, 18th Congress, 2nd Session: Public Lands. Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: Duff Green, 1834. Dow, Lorenzo. History of Cosmopolite; or The Four Volumes of the Rev. Lorenzo Dow’s Journal, Concentrated in One, Containing His Experience and Travels from Childhood to 1814, and The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil as Exemplified in the Life, Experience and Travels of Lorenzo Dow. 5th ed. Wheeling, Va.: John B. Wolff, 1848. ———. A Journey from Babylon to Jerusalem, or The Road to Peace and True Happiness. Lynchburg, Va.: Haas and Lamb, 1812. Dow, Moses. A Sermon, Preached in Beverly, August 20, 1812, the Day of the National Fast, on Account of War with Great-­Britain. Salem, N.Y.: Joshua Cushing, 1813. Drake, Daniel. Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country. Cincinnati: Looker and Wallace, 1815. Draper, Lyman Copeland, ed. “Lawe and Grignon Papers, 1794–1821.” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 10 (1909): 90–141. Dudley, Timothy. “The Earthquake of 1811 at New Madrid, Missouri.” In Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 421–24. Washington, D.C.: James B. Steedman, Printer, 1859. Dunbar, Rowland, ed. Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816. Vol. 6. Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917. Dwight, Timothy. A Discourse, in Two Parts, August 20, 1812, on the National Fast, in the Chapel of Yale College. New York: J. Seymour, 1812. Evangelical Tract Society. The Comet Explained and Improved, in a Conversation between a Minister and One of His Parishioners. Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1812. Edwards, Ninian Wirt, ed. History of Illinois, from 1778 to 1833; and Life and Times of Ninian Edwards. Springplace: Illinois State Journal, 1870. Esarey, Logan, ed. Governors Messages and Letters. Vol. 2. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922. Federal Writers’ Project. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Vol. 1, Alabama Narratives, and vol. 16, Texas Narratives. Washington, D.C., 1941. Field, David D. A History of the Towns of Haddam and East-­Haddam. Middletown, Conn.: Loomis and Richards, 1814. Finley, James B. Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley; or Pioneer Life in the West. Edited by W. P. Strickland. Cincinnati, Ohio: Looker and Wallace, 1855. Flint, Timothy. The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley. 2 vols. Cincinnati, Ohio: E. H. Flint, 1833. ———. Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi. Boston: Cummings, Hillard and Company, 1826. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1968. Page references are to the 1968 edition. Grant, C. L., ed. Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins. Vol. 2, 1802–1816. Savannah, Ga.: Beehive, 1980. Grumet, Robert S., ed. Voices from the Delaware Big House Ceremony. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Harrison, Eliza Cope, ed. Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851. South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1978. Heckewelder, John. An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs, of the Indian Nations,

Bibliography

159

Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1818. Hickey, Donald R., ed. The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence. New York: Library of America, 2013. Horrox, Rosemary, trans. and ed. The Black Death. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994. Howlett, W. J., ed. “Bishop Flaget’s Diary.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 29, no. 1 (1918): 37–59. Hughes, Nimrod. A Solemn Warning to All the Dwellers upon the Earth. 2nd ed. New Jersey: printed for the booksellers, n.d. Hunter, John D. Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America. London: Longman, Hurst, Reeds, Orme, and Brown, 1823. James, Edwin. James’s Account of S. H. Long’s Expedition, 1819–1820. In Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, vol. 15, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, 39–321. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905. Johnston, John. “Account of the Present State of the Indian Tribes Inhabiting Ohio.” Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 1 (1820): 271–98. Kendall, Edward Augustus. Travels through the Northern Parts of the United States. Vol. 1. New York: I. Riley, 1809. Kramer, Zadok. The Navigator. Pittsburgh, Pa.: R. Ferguson, 1817. Kreider, Angela, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, Katharine E. Harbury, and Anne Mandeville Colony, eds. The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series. Vol. 10, 13 Oct. 1815–30 April 1816. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. La Roche, Firmin. “A Sailor’s Record of the New Madrid Earthquake.” Missouri Historical Review 22, no. 2 (1928): 268–70. LaTrobe, Charles Joseph. The Rambler in North America, 1832–1833. Vol. 1. London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1835. LaTrobe, J. H. B. The First Steamboat Voyage on the Western Waters. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1871. Looney, J. Jefferson, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series. Vols. 4 and 5. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007 and 2008. Lowrie, Walter, and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds. American State Papers, Class II: Indian Affairs. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832. Lyell, Charles. A Second Visit to the United States of America. Vol. 2. New York: Harper Brothers, 1850. MacLean, John Patterson. “Shaker Mission to the Shawnee Indians.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publications 11 (June 1903): 216–29. Malotki, Ekkehart, trans. and ed. Hopi Tales of Destruction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Marshall, Joyce, ed. Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de L’Incarnation. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. Marshall, Thomas Maitland, ed. The Life and Times of Frederick Bates. Vol. 2. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1926. Mather, Cotton. The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvements. London: Printed for E. Matthews, 1721. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, edited by Winton U. Solberg. Page references are to the 1994 edition. 160Bibliography

———. The Wonders of the Invisible World. Boston: Harris for Phillips, 1693. Mauelshagen, Carl, and Gerald H. Davis, trans. and ed. Partners in the Lord’s Work: The Diary of Two Moravian Missionaries in the Creek Indian Country, 1807–1813. School of Arts and Sciences Research Paper 21. Atlanta: Georgia State College, 1969. McBride, James. “Brief Accounts of Journeys in Western Country, 1809–1812.” Quarterly Publication of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 5, no. 1 (1910): 27–31. McClinton, Rowena, ed. The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees. Vol. 1, 1805– 1813. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. McLeod, Alexander. A Scriptural View of the Character, Causes, and Ends of the Present War. New York: Eastburn, Kirk, 1815. McMurtrie, Henry. Sketches of Louisville and Its Environs. Louisville, Ky.: S. Penn, 1819. McPherson, Christopher. A Short History of the Life of Christopher McPherson, Alias, Pherson, Son of Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords: Containing a Collection of Certificates, Letters, &c. Written by Himself. 2nd ed. Lynchburg, Va.: Christopher McPherson Smith, 1855. Meriwether, Robert L., ed. The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Vol. 1, 1801–1817. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959. Methodist Episcopal Church. Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, for the Years 1773–1828. Vol. 1. New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1840. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1811. New York: John C. Totten, 1811. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1812. New York: Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, 1812. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1813. New York: John C. Totten, 1813. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1814. New York: John C. Totten, 1814. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1815. New York: John C. Totten, 1815. ———. Minutes Taken at the Several Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for the Year 1816. New York: John C. Totten, 1816. Missouri Territory General Assembly. Resolution of the General Assembly of the Missouri Territory for the Relief of the Inhabitants of New Madrid County Who Have Suffered by Earthquakes. Washington: A. and G. Way, 1814. Mitchill, Samuel L. “A Detailed Narrative of the Earthquakes Which Occurred on the 16th Day of December, 1811, and Agitated the Parts of North America That Lie between the Atlantic Ocean and Louisiana.” Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York 1 (1815): 281–308. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, 1900. Reprint, James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Asheville, N.C.: Bright Mountain Books, 1992. Page references are to the 1992 edition. Moser, Harold D., Sharon MacPherson, and Charles F. Bryan Jr., eds. The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Vol. 2, 1804–1813. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. ———, David R. Hoth, Sharon MacPherson, and John H. Reinbold, eds. The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Vol. 3, 1814–1815. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Bibliography

161

Nolte, Vincent. Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant. New York: Redfield, 1854. Nunez, Theron A., Jr., ed. “Creek Nativism and the Creek War of 1813–1814.” Ethnohistory 5, no. 2 (1958): 131–75. O’Day, Gail R., and David Peterson, eds. The Access Bible: New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Peck, John Mason. Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck, D.D. Edited by Rufus Babcock. Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1864. Phelps, Dawson A., ed. “The Diary of a Chaplain in Andrew Jackson’s Army: The Journal of the Reverend Mr. Learner Blackman—December 28, 1812–­April 4, 1813.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1953): 264–81. Pierce, William Leigh. An Account of the Great Earthquakes, in the Western States, Particularly on the Mississippi River; December 16–23. Newburyport, Mass.: Herald Office, 1812. ———. The Year: A Poem in Three Cantoes. New York: David Longworth, 1813. Pliny the Elder. Natural History of Pliny. Translated and edited by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. Vol. 1. London: George Bell and Sons, 1893. Plummer, Jonathan. The Dreadful Earthquake and the Fatal Spotted Fever. Newburyport, Mass.: printed for the author, 1812. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. 3rd ed. London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831. Prince, Thomas. Earthquakes the Works of God. Boston: D. Fowle, 1755. Pusey, Wm. Allen, ed. “New Madrid Earthquake—An Unpublished Contemporaneous Account.” Science 71, no. 1837 (1930): 285–86. Quaife, Milo Milton, ed. War on Detroit: The Chronicles of Thomas Verchères de Boucherville and the Capitulation by an Ohio Volunteer. Chicago: Lakeside, 1940. Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. 2, South Carolina. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972. Robinson, Doane. “A Sioux Indian View of the Last War with England.” South Dakota Historical Collections 5 (1910): 397–401. Ross, Charles. The Earthquakes of 1811. Cincinnati, Ohio: E. Shepard, 1847. Ross, James. Life and Times of Elder Reuben Ross. Philadelphia: Grant, Faires and Rodgers, 1882. Rush, Benjamin. Letters of Benjamin Rush. Vol. 2, 1793–1813. Edited by L. H. Butterfield. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press for the American Philosophical Society, 1951. Ruter, P. S. Reminiscences of a Virginia Physician. Louisville, Ky.: Ben Casseday, 1849. Sargent, Winthrop. “Account of Several Shocks of an Earthquake in the Southern and Western Parts of the United States.” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 3, no. 2 (1815): 350–59. Shaw, John. “New Madrid Earthquake Account of Col. John Shaw.” Missouri Historical Review 6, no. 2 (1912): 91–92. Smith, Mary Morriss. “I, Mary Morriss Smith, Do Recollect. . . . ” Edited by Virginia Lawlor. Tennessee Historical Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1970): 79–87. Stagg, J. C. A., Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan Holbrook Perdue, eds. The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series. Vol. 3, 3 November 1810–4 November 1811. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. 162Bibliography

———, Jeanne Kerr Cross, Jewel L. Spangler, Ellen J. Barber, Martha J. King, Anne Mandeville Colony, and Susan Holbrook Perdue, eds. The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series. Vol. 4, 5 Nov. 1811–9 July 1812. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Stansbury, Arthur Joseph. God Pleading with America. A Sermon, Delivered on the Late Fast Day, Recommended by the American Churches by the President of the U. States. Goshen, N.Y.: T. B. Crowell, 1813. Stoddard, Amos. “Observations on the Native Salt, Bearded Indians, Earthquakes, and Boundaries of Louisiana.” The Medical Repository 4 (1806): 44–50. ———. Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1812. Supernaw, Bill, Jr. Interview with Maude Supernaw. “Earthquake (Continuation of, Quapaws Meet White People),” 1962. Quapaw Oral History. http://www.quapaw tribalancestry.com/oralhistory/page2.htm. August 9, 2020. Sweet, William Warren, ed. The Baptists, 1783–1830: A Collection of Source Material. New York: Cooper Square, 1964. ———. The Methodists, 1783–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. The Territorial Papers of the United States. Vol. 6, The Territory of Mississippi, 1809–1817, contd. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937. Thwaites, Reuben G., ed. “Dickson and Grignon Papers, 1812–1815.” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 11 (1888): 90–141. ———. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. Vols. 47–49. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1899. ———. “Letter-­Book of Thomas Forsyth.” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 11 (1888): 316–55. Trowbridge, Charles Christopher. Shawnese Traditions: C. C. Trowbridge’s Account. Edited by Vernon Kinietz and Erminie W. Voegelin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1790. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975. U.S. Congress. An Act for the Relief of the Inhabitants of the Late County of New Madrid, in the Missouri Territory, Who Suffered by Earthquakes, 13th Cong., 3rd Sess., Ch. 45, 1815. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850. ———. Annals of Congress, Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1789–1825. Vol. 24. ———. Register of Debates in Congress. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1829. Volney, Constantin-­François. View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America. London: J. Johnson, 1804. Wesley, John. Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Earthquake at Lisbon. 6th ed. London, 1756. ———. The Works of John Wesley. Vols. 7 and 8. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1996. West, Elizabeth Howard, ed. “A Prelude to the Creek War of 1813–1814: In a Letter of John Innerarity to James Innerarity.” Florida Historical Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1940): 247–66. Williams, Samuel. “Observations and Conjectures on the Earthquakes of New-­England.” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1 (1783): 260–311. Wilmer, James Jones. An Address, Delivered in Havre-­de-­Grace, June 4, 1812: In Consequence of a Pamphlet Set Forth by a Certain Nimrod Hughes, Denouncing That Day as the Awful Bibliography

163

Period of Visitation to the Inhabitants of This Earth, by the Almighty. Baltimore: B. W. Sower, 1812. Wilson, Joshua L. War, the Work of the Lord, and the Coward Cursed. A Sermon Delivered in the First Presbyterian Meeting House in Cincinnatti, Ohio, to the Cincinnatti Light Companies. Concord, N.H.: I. and W. R. Hill, 1812. Winthrop, John, IV. A Lecture on Earthquakes. Boston: Edes and Gill, 1755. Woehrmann, Paul, ed. “The Autobiography of Abraham Snethen, Frontier Preacher.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 51 (1977): 319–20. Woodward, Thomas Simpson. Woodward’s Reminiscences of the Creek, or Muscogee Indians. Montgomery, Ala.: Barrett and Wimbush, 1859. Worcester, Noah. The Substance of Two Sermons, Occasioned by the Late Declaration of War. Concord, N.H.: George Hough, 1812.

Secondary Sources Abelove, Henry. The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ablavsky, Gregory. “Species of Sovereignty: Native Nationhood, the United States, and International Law, 1783–1795.” Journal of American History 106, no. 3 (2019): 591–613. Abrams, Susan A. Forging a Cherokee-­American Alliance: From Creation to Betrayal. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Altman, Heidi M., and Thomas N. Belt. “Reading History: Cherokee History through a Cherokee Lens.” Native South 1 (2008): 90–98. ———. “Tõhi: The Cherokee Concept of Well-­Being.” In Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency, edited by Lisa J. Lefler, 9–22. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. Araujo, Ana Cristina. “European Public Opinion and the Lisbon Earthquake.” European Review 14, no. 3 (2006): 313–19. Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Aveni, Anthony F. “Archaeoastronomy in the Ancient Americas.” Journal of Archaeological Research 11, no. 2 (2003): 149–91. Bagnall, Norma Hayes. On Shaky Ground: The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–1812. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Baker, Meredith Henne. The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Ball, Eve. Indeh: An Apache Odyssey. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1980. Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Bassnett, Susan. “Faith, Doubt, Aid and Prayer: The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Revisited.” European Review 14, no. 3 (2006): 321–28. Baudier, Roger. The Catholic Church in North Louisiana: A Historical Sketch of Pioneer Days and of the Diocese of Natchitoches and Its Successor the Diocese of Alexandria. New Orleans: Diocese of Alexandria, 1953. Bergamasco, Lucia. “‘Trust Ye in the Lord Yehovah, Forever’: The 1812 War Sermons.” In 164Bibliography

1812 in the Americas, edited by Jean-­Marc Serme, 127–61. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. Bergmann, William H. The American National State and the Early West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Berkeley, Edmund, Jr. “Prophet without Honor: Christopher McPherson, Free Person of Color.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 77, no. 2 (1969): 180–90. Berkhofer, Robert F. Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Responses. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965. Bickham, Troy. The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Biel, Steven, ed. American Disasters. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Bierck, Harold A., Jr. “The First Instance of U.S. Foreign Aid: Venezuelan Relief in 1812.” Inter-­American Economic Affairs 9, no. 1 (1955): 47–59. Bird-­David, Nurit. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (1999): S69–­S91. Boles, John B. The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Bolton, S. Charles. Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998. Bottiger, Patrick. The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. ———. “Prophetstown for Their Own Purposes: The French, Miamis, and Cultural Identities in the Wabash-­Maumee Valley.” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 1 (2013): 29–60. Bowden, Henry Warner. American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Bowes, John P. Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-­Mississippi West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. ———. “Transformation and Transition: American Indians and the War of 1812 in the Lower Great Lakes.” Journal of Military History 76, no. 4 (2012): 1129–46. Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins & Duffels: The Creek Trade with Anglo-­America, 1685–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Brightman, Edgar. “The Lisbon Earthquake: A Study in Religious Valuation.” American Journal of Theology 23, no. 4 (1919): 500–518. Brooke, John L. “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-­ Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis.” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 1 (2009): 1–33. Brooke, John L. and Julia C. Strauss. “Introduction: Approaches to State Formations.” In State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood, edited by John L. Brooke, Julia C. Strauss, and Greg Anderson, 1–21. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Brooks, James F. Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awot’ovi Massacre. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. ———. “Women, Men and Cycles of Evangelism in the Southwest Borderlands, A.D. 750–1750.” American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (2013): 738–64. Bibliography

165

Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Buff, Rachel. “Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa: Myth, Historiography and Popular Memory.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 21, no. 2 (1995): 277–99. Butler, Jon. “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction.” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 305–25. Carson, James Taylor. “Ethnogeography and the Native American Past.” Ethnohistory 49, no. 4 (2002): 769–88. Carter, Hodding, and Betty Werlein Carter. So Great a Good: A History of the Episcopal Church in Louisiana and of Christ Church Cathedral, 1805–1955. Sewanee, Tenn.: University Press, 1955. Cash, Marie. “Arkansas in Territorial Days.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1942): 229–34. Cave, Alfred A. Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. ———. “The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe: A Case Study of Historical Myth-­Making.” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 1 (2002): 651–61. Cayton, Andrew R. L. The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780– 1825. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986. Champagne, Duane C. Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Chandler, Charles Lyon. Inter-­American Acquaintances. Sewanee, Tenn.: University Press, 1917. Clemmer, Richard O. “‘Then Will You Rise and Strike My Head from My Neck’: Hopi Prophecy and the Discourse of Empowerment.” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1995): 31–73. Connelley, William E. “Notes on the Folk-­Lore of the Wyandots.” Journal of American Folklore 12, no. 45 (1899): 116–25. Crosby, Alfred. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–99. Cumfer, Cynthia. Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Daggar, Lori. “The Mission Complex: Economic Development, ‘Civilization,’ and Empire in the Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 35, no. 3 (2016): 467–91. Dauber, Michelle Landis. The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Davies, Gareth. “Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789–1861.” American Nineteenth Century History 14, no. 1 (2013): 53–72. Davis, Karl. “‘Remember Fort Mims’: Reinterpreting the Origins of the Creek War.” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 4 (2002): 611–36. Dean, Lewis S. “‘Tecumseh’s Prophecy’: The Great New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–1812 and 1843 in Alabama.” Alabama Review 47 (1994): 163–71. Delbourgo, James. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Deloria, Philip J., K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Mark N. Trahant, Loren Ghiglione, Douglas Medin, and Ned Blackhawk, eds. “Unfolding 166Bibliography

Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-­First Century.” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 147, no. 2 (2018): 1–172. Dennis, Matthew. Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Denson, Andrew. Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. DeRogatis, Amy. Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Devens, R. M. Our First Century: One Hundred Great and Memorable Events. Springfield, Mass.: C. A. Nichols, 1880. De Vorsey, Louis. “Mapping the World Below: Athanasius Kircher and His Subterranean World.” Mercator’s World 8, no. 2 (2003): 28–32. Dierks, Konstantin. “Letter Writing, Masculinity, and American Men of Science, 1750– 1800.” Explorations in Early American Culture 2 (1998): 167–98. Dormon, James H. “The Persistent Specter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 18, no. 4 (1977): 389–404. Douglass, Robert Sidney. History of Southeast Missouri. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1888. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———. “Thinking and Believing: Nativism and Unity in the Ages of Pontiac and Tecumseh.” American Indian Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1992): 309–35. ———. “Thinking outside the Circle: Tecumseh’s 1811 Mission.” In Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812, edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund, 30–52. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Drake, Daniel. Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet: With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians. Cincinnati: H. S. and J. Applegate, 1852. Drake, James D. The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Meta-­Physics of Indian-­Hating and Empire-­Building. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. ———. White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter. New York: Schoken Books, 1972. Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. DuVal, Kathleen. “Debating Identity, Sovereignty, and Civilization: The Arkansas Valley after the Louisiana Purchase.” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 1 (2006): 25–58. ———. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Edling, Max. A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Edmunds, R. David. “Forgotten Allies: The Loyal Shawnees and the War of 1812.” In The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, edited by David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, 337–51. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. ———. “Main Poc: Potawatomi Wabeno.” American Indian Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1985): 259–72. ———. The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Bibliography

167

———. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. ———. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. ———. “‘A Watchful Safeguard to Our Habitations.’” In Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, 162–99. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1999. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Part 2. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1895. Errington, Sara Beth. “Wonders and the Creation of Evangelical Culture in New England, 1720–1820.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2000. Eslinger, Ellen. Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Ethridge, Robbie. Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Eustace, Nicole. 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Feldman, Jay. When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes. New York: Free Press, 2005. Fenn, Elizabeth A. “Whither the Rest of the Continent?” In Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field, edited by John Lauritz Larson and Michael A. Morrison, 17–25. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Fisher, Linford. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fisher, Robert L. “The Treaties of Portage des Sioux.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 9, no. 4 (1933): 495–508. Fitz, Caitlin. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of Revolutions. New York: Liveright, 2016. Fogelson, Raymond D. “Who Were the Ani-­Kutánî? An Excursion into Cherokee Historical Thought.” Ethnohistory 31, no. 1 (1984): 255–63. Frank, Andrew K. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Fritz, Gayle J., and Robert H. Ray. “Rock Art Sites in the Southern Arkansas Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley.” Arkansas Archaeological Research Series 15, edited by Neal J. Trubowitz and Marvin D. Jeter, 240–76. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archaeological Survey, 1982. Frymer, Paul. Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. Fuller, Myron L. The New Madrid Earthquake. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 494. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912. Furstenberg, François. “The Significance of the Trans-­Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History.” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 647–77. Georgi, Matthias. “The Lisbon Earthquake and Scientific Knowledge in the British Public Sphere.” In The Lisbon Earthquake: Representations and Reactions, edited by

168Bibliography

Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner, 81–96. Oxford, U.K.: Voltaire Foundation, 2005. Gordon, David M., and Shepard Krech III, eds. Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. Grasso, Christopher. “The Religious and the Secular in the Early American Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 359–88. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Governance and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Greene, John C. American Science in the Age of Jefferson. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984. Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gribbin, Edward. The Churches Militant: The War of 1812 and American Religion. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. Griffin, Charles Carroll. The United States and the Disruption of the Spanish Empire, 1810– 1822. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Griffin, Patrick. American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Gronim, Sara Stidstone. Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Gudmestad, Robert H. Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Guyatt, Nicholas. Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Halbert, H. S., and T. H. Ball. The Creek War of 1813 and 1814. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Hancock, Jonathan Todd. “Shaken Spirits: Cherokees, Moravian Missionaries, and the New Madrid Earthquakes.” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 4 (2013): 643–73. ———. “Widening the Scope on the Indians’ Old Northwest.” In Warring for America, 1803–1818, edited by Nicole Eustace and Fredrika Teute, 359–85. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2017. Harper, Rob. Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Hartwig, Jason. “‘We Will Put Our Old Men and Chiefs behind Us’: Generational Conflict and Native American Confederation in the Ohio Country, 1770–95.” Northwest Ohio History 76, no. 1 (2008): 1–20. Haselby, Sam. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Hassig, Ross. “Internal Conflict in the Creek War of 1813–1814.” Ethnohistory 21, no. 3 (1974): 251–71. Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Herschthal, Eric. “The Persistent Fears of Black Revolt and Spanish Collusion in Territorial Louisiana, 1803–1812.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2 (2016): 283–311. Bibliography

169

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Hickey, Donald R. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Bicentennial ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Hinderaker, Eric. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Holland, David F. Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hollifield, E. Brooks. Theology in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Horsman, Reginald. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812. East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 1967. Hough, Susan E. “Writing on the Walls: Geological Context and Early American Spiritual Beliefs.” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273 (2007): 107–15. Hough, Susan E., and Morgan Page. “Toward a Consistent Model for Strain Accrual and Release for the New Madrid Seismic Zone, Central United States.” Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011): B03311. Howard, James H. “Yanktonai Ethnohistory and the John K. Bear Winter Count.” Plains Anthropologist 21, no. 73 (1976): 1–78. Hudson, Angela Pulley. Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Hudson, Charles, ed. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. ———. “The Cherokee Concept of Natural Balance.” Indian Historian 3, no. 4 (1970): 51–54. ———. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. ———. “Uktena: A Cherokee Anomalous Monster.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 3, no. 2 (1978): 62–75. Irwin, Lee. “Different Voices Together: Preservation and Acculturation in Early 19th Century Cherokee Religion.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 18 (1997): 3–26. Ishii, Izumi. Bad Fruits of the Civilized Tree: Alcohol and the Sovereignty of the Cherokee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Jewell, Horace. History of Methodism in Arkansas. Little Rock, Ark.: Press Printing, 1892. Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Jones, David S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. ———. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–42. Jones, Robert L., and Pauline H. Jones. “Stephen F. Austin in Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1966): 336–53. Jortner, Adam. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Juster, Susan. Doomsayers: Anglo-­American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Kanon, Tom. “‘Scared from Their Sins for a Season’: The Religious Ramifications of the New Madrid Earthquakes, 1811–12.” Ohio Valley History 5, no. 2 (2005): 21–38. 170Bibliography

Kastor, Peter J. William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011. Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2008. Kelley, Max L. “John Hardeman Walker—Cattle King.” Missouri Historical Review 25, no. 2 (1931): 383–85. Kelton, Paul. “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival.” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (2004): 45–71. ———. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Keranen, Katie M. “Potentially Induced Earthquakes in Oklahoma, USA: Links between Wastewater Injection and the 2011 M w 5.7 Earthquake Sequence.” Geology 41, no. 6 (2013): 699–702. Key, Joseph Patrick. “‘Outcasts upon the World: The Louisiana Purchase and the Quapaws.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2003): 272–88. Kidwell, Clara Sue. “Ethnoastronomy as the Key to Human Intellectual Development and Social Organization.” In Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, edited by Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins, 5–19. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. ———. “Native Knowledge in the Americas.” Osiris, 2nd series, 1 (1985): 209–28. ———. “Systems of Knowledge.” In America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus, edited by Alvin M. Josephy Jr., 369–404. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Kierner, Cynthia A. Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Kokomoor, Kevin. Of One Mind and One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Krech, Shepard, III, ed. Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Kroeber, A. L. “Earthquakes.” Journal of American Folklore 19, no. 75 (1906): 322–25. Kronk, Gary W. Cometography: A Catalog of Comets. Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lakomäki, Sami. Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Lankford, George E. “World on a String: Some Cosmological Components of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.” In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp, 207–18. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004. Levandowski, Will, and Christine A. Powell. “Evidence for Strain Accrual in the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone from Earthquake Statistics.” Seismological Research Letters 90, no. 1 (2019): 446–51. Levin, David. “Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather’s Letters to the Royal Society.” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1998): 751–70. Bibliography

171

Lewis, Andrew J. “A Democracy of Facts, an Empire of Reason: Swallow Submersion and Natural History in the Early American Republic.” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2005): 663–96. ———. A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Looby, Christopher. “The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Jefferson, Peale, and Bartram.” Early American Literature 22, no. 3 (1987): 252–73. Mancall, Peter C. Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America. Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Marchand, Michael E., Kristiina Vogt, Asep Suntana, Rodney Cawston, John Gordon, Mia Siscawati, Daniel Vogt, John Tovey, Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir, and Patricia Roads, eds. The River of Life: Sustainable Practices of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Marsh, Dawn. “Creating Delaware Homelands in the Ohio Country.” Ohio History 116 (2009): 26–40. Martin, Calvin. Keepers of the Game: Indian-­Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Martin, Joel W. Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon, 1991. Masse, W. Bruce, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Luigi Piccardi, and Paul T. Barber. “Exploring the Nature of Myth and Its Role in Science.” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273 (2007): 9–28. Masters, Frank M. A History of Baptists in Kentucky. Louisville: Kentucky Baptist Historical Society, 1953. Mathews, Donald. “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis.” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1969): 23–43. McKenney, Thomas Loraine, and James Hall. History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: D. Rice and J. G. Clark, 1849. McLoughlin, William G. The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789–1861. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984. ———. Cherokee Renascence in the Early Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. ———. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. McMillan, Alan D., and Ian Hutchinson. “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America.” Ethnohistory 49, no. 1 (2002): 41–68. Merritt, Jane T. “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania.” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997): 723–46. Methvin, J. J. “Legend of the Tie-­Snakes.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 5, no. 4 (1927): 391–95. Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Miller, Jay. “Old Religion among the Delawares: The Gamwing (Big House Rite).” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (1997): 113–34. 172Bibliography

———. “Why the World Is On the Turtle’s Back.” Man 9, no. 2 (1974): 306–8. Mooney, James. “The Cherokee River Cult.” Journal of American Folklore 13, no. 49 (1900): 1–10. Morrow, Lynn. “New Madrid and Its Hinterland: 1783–1826.” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 36 (1980): 241–50. Mueller, Myrl Rhine. Lost in the Annals: History and Legends of the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811–12. Little Rock, Ark.: J and B Quality Book Bindery, 1990. Mulcahy, Matthew. Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Musick, John Roy. Stories of Missouri. New York: American Book, 1897. Myers, Robert A. “Cherokee Pioneers in Arkansas: The St. Francis Years, 1785–1813.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1997): 127–57. Nelson, Melissa K., and Dan Shilling, eds. Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Nichols, David Andrew. Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Nooe, Evan. “Common Justice: Vengeance and Retribution in Creek Country.” Ethnohistory 62, no. 2 (2015): 241–61. Olson, Roberta J. M., and Jay M. Pasachoff. Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. Ostler, Jeffrey. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. ———. “‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–­1810.” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2015): 587–622. Owens, Robert M. Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-­Indian Alliances in the Anglo-­ American Mind, 1763–1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Page, Jake, and Charles Officer. The Big One: The Earthquake That Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Paine, Robert. Life and Times of William M’Kendree. Vol. 1. Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1874. Pandora, Katherine. “Popular Science in National and Transnational Perspective: Suggestions from the American Context.” Isis 100, no. 2 (2009): 346–58. Park, Benjamin E. American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783– 1833. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006. Penick, James Lal, Jr. The New Madrid Earthquakes. Rev. ed. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.

Bibliography

173

Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. ———. “Clan and Court: Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic.” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2000): 562–69. Perry, Seth. “Cosmopolite’s Mount Sinai Domains: Lorenzo Dow Dreams of Empire in the Era of Good Feelings.” Commonplace 15, no. 3 (2015). Persico, V. Richard, Jr. “Early Nineteenth-­Century Cherokee Political Organization.” In The Cherokee Nation: A Troubled History, edited by Duane H. King, 92–109. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. Pickett, Albert James. History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Charleston, S.C.: Walker and James, 1851. Piker, Joshua. “Lying Together: The Imperial Implications of Cross-­Cultural Untruths.” American Historical Review 116, no. 4 (2011): 964–86. Pokagon, Simon. “The Massacre of Fort Dearborn at Chicago.” Harpers New Monthly Magazine 97, no. 586 (1899): 649–56. Pollyea, Ryan M. “Geospatial Analysis of Oklahoma (USA) Earthquakes (2011–2016): Quantifying the Limits of Regional-­Scale Earthquake Mitigation Measures.” Geology 46, no. 3 (2018): 215–18. Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Posey, Walter Brownlow. “The Earthquake of 1811 and Its Influence on Evangelistic Methods in the Churches of the Old South.” Tennessee Historical Magazine 1, no. 2 (1931): 107–14. Powell, J. W. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Part 2. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899. Rasmussen, Birgit Bander. Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Rasmussen, Daniel. American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Reda, John. From Furs to Farms: The Transformation of the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. Redford, A. H. The History of Methodism in Kentucky. Vol. 2, From the Conference of 1808 to the Conference of 1820. Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Methodist, 1870. Reed, Julie L. Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Rice, James D. “Early American Environmental Histories.” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2018): 401–32. ———. “Into the Gap: Ethnohistorians, Environmental History, and the Native South.” Native South 4 (2011): 1–23. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Rickett, H. W. “John Bradbury’s Explorations in Missouri Territory.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 94, no. 1 (1950): 59–89. Rierden, Andi. “A Steady Observer for Trembling Moodus.” New York Times, 6 Aug. 1989. Riss, Richard Michael. “John Wesley’s Reactions to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.” Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 2007.

174Bibliography

Robeck, Cecil M. The Asuza Street Mission Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2006. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Robinson, Sherry. Apache Voices: Their Stories of Survival as Told to Eve Ball. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Rodriguez, Junius P. “Always ‘En Garde’: The Effects of Slave Insurrection upon the Louisiana Mentality, 1811–1815.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 33, no. 4 (1992): 399–416. Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of Public Lands, 1789–1837. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Rothensteiner, John. History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Vol. 1. St. Louis, Mo.: Blackwell Wielandy, 1928. Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Royce, C. C. Map of the Territorial Limits of the Cherokee “Nation of” Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1884. Rozario, Kevin. The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Sachs, Honor. Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-­ Century Kentucky Frontier. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Saler, Bethel. The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Sassi, Jonathan. A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-­Revolution New England Clergy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schlereth, Eric R. An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Schofield, Robert E. “John Wesley and Science in 18th Century England.” Isis 44, no. 4 (1953): 331–40. Settle, William B. “The Real Benjamin Banneker.” Negro History Bulletin 16, no. 7 (1953): 153–58. Sheidley, Nathaniel J. “Unruly Men: Indians, Settlers, and the Ethos of Frontier Patriarchy in the Upper Tennessee Watershed, 1763–1815.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1999. Shoemaker, Nancy. “An Alliance between Men: Gender Metaphors in Eighteenth-­ Century American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi.” Ethnohistory 46, no. 2 (1999): 239–63. ———. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-­Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Silverman, David J. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Skinner, Alanson. “Traditions of the Iowa Indians.” Journal of American Folklore 38, no. 125 (1925): 425–60. Bibliography

175

Sleeper-­Smith, Susan. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018. Smith, David A. “Preparing the Arkansas Wilderness for Settlement: Public Land Survey Administration, 1803–1836.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2012): 381–406. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Smith-­Rosenberg, Carroll. This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Smithers, Gregory D. The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Snyder, Christina. “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era.” Journal of American History 104, no. 2 (2017): 386–409. ———. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Spangler, Jewel. Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Speck, Frank G. “Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians.” Anthropological Publications of the University Museum 1, no. 1 (1909): 1–154. ———. “Penobscot Tales and Religious Beliefs.” Journal of American Folklore 48, no. 187 (1935): 1–107. ———. A Study of the Delaware Indian Big House Ceremony. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1931. Spencer, J. H. A History of Kentucky Baptists. Vol. 1. Cincinnati: for the author, 1834. Steinberg, Ted. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Strang, Cameron B. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018. Stremlau, Rose. Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Sugden, John. “Early Pan-­Indianism: Tecumseh’s Tour of the Indian Country, 1811–1812.” American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1986): 273–304. ———. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ———. “Tecumseh’s Travels Revisited.” Indiana Magazine of History 96 (2000): 150–68. Sundstrom, Linea. “Smallpox Used Them Up: References to Epidemic Disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714–1920.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 2 (1997): 305–43. Swanton, John Reed. Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-­Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. Tanner, Helen Horbeck, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press for The Newberry Library, 1987. Taylor, Alan. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Taylor, John Gates, Jr. “Eighteenth-­Century Earthquake Theories: A Case-­History

176Bibliography

Investigation into the Character of the Earth in the Enlightenment.” Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1975. Teuton Christopher B., with Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess, and Woody Hansen. Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Thomas, Prentice M., Jr., L. Janice Campbell, and James R. Morehead. “The Burkett Site (23MI20): Implications for Cultural Complexity and Origins.” In Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast, edited by Jon L. Gibson and Philip J. Carr, 114–28. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Thrush, Coll, with Ruth S. Ludwin. “Finding Fault: Indigenous Seismology, Colonial Science, and the Rediscovery of Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Canada.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 31, no. 4 (2007): 1–24. Tiro, Karim. “The View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian Removal.” Journal of the Early Republic 35, no. 1 (2015): 25–54. Treat, Payton Jackson. The National Land System, 1785–1820. New York: E. B. Treat, 1910. True, Rodney H. “A Sketch of the Life of John Bradbury, Including His Unpublished Correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 68, no. 2 (1929): 133–50. Tucker, Frank C. The Methodist Church in Missouri, 1798–1939: A Brief History. Nashville, Tenn.: Parthenon, 1966. Tuttle, M. P., J. Collier, L. W. Wolf, and R. H Lafferty III. “New Evidence for a Large Earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone between AD 1400 and 1670.” Geology 27, no. 9 (1999): 771–74. Valencius, Conevery Bolton. “Accounts of the New Madrid Earthquakes: Personal Narratives across Two Centuries of North American Seismology.” Science in Context 25, no. 1 (2012): 17–48. ———. The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ———. “Mudslides Make Good History.” In Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field, edited by John Lauritz Larson and Michael A. Morrison, 102–9. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Valencius, Conevery, David I. Spanagel, Emily Pawley, Sara Sidstone Gronim, and Paul Lucier. “Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 1 (2016): 73–123. Van Arsdale, Roy B., Heather R. DeShon, and Martitia P. Tuttle. “New Madrid Seismic Zone Field Trip Guide.” In From the Blue Ridge to the Coastal Plain: Field Excursions in the Southeastern United States, Field Guide 29, edited by Martha Cary Epps and Marvin J. Bartholomew, 123–36. Boulder, Colo.: Geological Society of America, 2012. Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Walker, Charles F. Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-­Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Wallis, Wilson D. “Folk Tales from Shumopovi, Second Mesa.” Journal of American Folklore nos. 191–92 (1936): 1–68. Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. London: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bibliography

177

Warren, Harry. “Missions, Missionaries, Frontier Characters and Schools.” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 8 (1904): 571–98. Warren, Stephen. The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ———. The World the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Watts, Steven. The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Webster, Robert. “The Lisbon Earthquake: John and Charles Wesley Reconsidered.” In The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions, edited by Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner, 115–26. Oxford, U.K.: Voltaire Foundation, 2005. Wheeler, Rachel. “Hendrick Apaumat: Christian-­Mahican Prophet.” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 2 (2005): 187–220. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wildcat, Daniel R. Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2009. Wilder, Craig Steven. In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Williams, Fred. Historic Little Rock: An Illustrated History. San Antonio: Historical Publishing Network, 2008. Wilson, Robert J., III. The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696–1787. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Wisecup, Kelly. Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. Witcher, Robert Campbell. “The Establishment of the Episcopal Church in Louisiana, 1803–1838.” M.A. thesis, Louisiana State University, 1960. Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Wood, Gordon. “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism.” New York History 61, no. 4 (1980): 359–78. Yokota, Kariann Akemi. “‘To Pursue the Stream to Its Fountain’: Race, Inequality, and the Post-­Colonial Exchange across the Atlantic.” Explorations in Early American Culture 5 (2001): 173–229. ———. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Online Resources African American Intellectual History Society. Black Perspectives (blog). https://www .aaihs.org/black-­perspectives. August 8, 2020. Bychowski, Brenna. “Nimrod, Newspapers, and the Apocalypse of 1812.” Past Is Present: The American Antiquarian Society Blog, July 17, 2017. https://pastispresent.org/2017 /fun-­in-­the-­archive/nimrod-­newspapers-­and-­the-­apocalypse-­of-­1812. August 8, 2020.

178Bibliography

Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis. “New Madrid Compendium.” https://www.memphis.edu/ceri/compendium. August 8, 2020. Helms, Bari. “Apocalypse Not.” The UncommonWealth: Voices from the Library of Virginia (blog), January 9, 2013. https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2013/01 /09/apocalypse-­not. August 8, 2020. Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. “New Madrid Earthquake: A River Runs Backward.” https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/animation/new_ madrid_earth quake_a _ river_ runs_backward. August 8, 2020. Library of Congress. “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875.” https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw /lawhome.html. August 8, 2020. National Archives and Records Administration. “Founders Online.” https://founders .archives.gov. August 8, 2020. Proctor, Risë Supernaw. “Quapaw Oral History.” Quapaw Tribal Ancestry. http://www .quapawtribalancestry.com/oralhistory/quapaworalhistory.htm. August 8, 2020. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “The Papers of Andrew Jackson.” https://thepapers ofandrewjackson.utk.edu/publications. August 8, 2020. U.S. Geological Survey. “The New Madrid Seismic Zone.” https://www.usgs.gov/natural -­hazards/earthquake-­hazards/science/new-­madrid-­seismic-­zone?qt-­science_center _objects=0#qt-­science_center_objects. August 8, 2020.

Bibliography

179

This page intentionally left blank

Index Adams, John, 16, 21, 60, 87, 102–3 African American Intellectual History Society, 137n7 African Americans, 32–34, 57, 60, 61, 129 Age of Reason, The (Paine), 104 agriculture, 11, 18, 22, 23, 69, 88, 130–31 “Airquake” theory, 49 alcohol, 39, 40, 41, 44, 64, 80, 104, 121 Allan, John, 68, 70, 71 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 15, 16 American Philosophical Society, 14, 55, 103, 124 Anaximenes, 46 Angel, Mary Maude, 85 Aní-­Kutánî, 94 apocalypse. See divine punishment archeology, 37 Aristotle, 46 Arkansas, 37, 77, 113–14, 126 Arminianism, 50 astronomy, 13, 14, 36, 45, 49, 68. See Also comet; meteors; weather atheism, 89, 99, 103–04 Bacon, Lydia, 70 Banks, Daniel Chapman, 109 Banneker, Benjamin, 33 Baptist Church, 20, 62, 63–65, 68, 72, 101, 123, 126 Barber, Charley, 33–34

Barton, Benjamin Smith, 14, 124 Bates, Frederick, 17 Bible, the, 16, 31, 44, 47, 59, 67, 68–69, 73, 98, 106–7 Big House Ceremony, 84–85, 96, 131 Big Warrior (Creek chief), 93, 116–17 black drink, 80, 81, 89 Black Hoof (Shawnee leader), 27 Blount, Willie, 115 Bower, Jacob, 65, 70, 75 Bradbury, John, 7–8, 52, 67 Bryan, Eliza, 16, 131 Calhoun, John C., 102 California, 36, 39 Calvinism, 50 Campbell, John, 103, 107–8, 121 Captain Isaacs (Creek prophet), 79, 91 Carthage Gazette, 125 Catholicism, 39–40, 41–42, 48, 61, 102, 107, 121–22 Champagne, Duane, 92, 135n4 Cherokee Nation, 22, 24, 79–80, 86, 108, 126, 132; migrants to Arkansas, 11, 24, 76–77; differentiated order in, 23, 92, 98; Chickamauga Cherokees, 24; nationalization of governance and diplomacy, 24, 87, 98; cultural tensions within, 24–25, 78, 92; and ideas about health, 35–36, 76–77; reception of prophets in, 66, 76–78, 83, 91–92, 93–94, 181

98; waterways in, 77–78; and War of 1812, 89–90, 118–20. See also Southeastern Indians Choctaw Nation, 65 Christian Monitor and Religious Intelligencer (periodical), 75, 104, 105 Christian nationalism, 21, 98, 103, 105–8, 134n3 Cincinnati, 10, 16 Claiborne, William C. C., 17 Clark, William, 111, 120 Columbian (newspaper), 125 comet: Great Comet of 1811, 12, 21, 67, 68, 76, 83, 100; as cause of earthquakes, 13, 67, 69 Congregational Church, 20, 50, 53, 65, 106–7, 122 Cornelius, Ira Ellis, 44–45 Cornells, Alexander, 81 cosmology, 37, 39, 46 Creek Nation, 86, 108, 110, 117–18, 132; governance tensions within, 23, 25, 87, 92; undifferentiated order within, 23, 92–93, 98; opposition to U.S. road, 25–26; response to Red Sticks, 89–91, 110, 115–16, 126 Crows Nest Island (“Rogue’s Nest”), 109, 121 deism, 53–54, 65, 74, 75 Delaware Nation, 10, 38, 84–85, 86, 96, 120, 131–32 Democritus, 46 DeRogatis, Amy, 110 Dickson, Robert, 5–6 differentiation, 5, 87–88, 94, 98, 103, 107–8, 131, 135n4 Dinah (enslaved woman), 65 diplomacy, 22, 23, 115–20, 136n6. See also treaties disease, 16, 17, 37, 75, 98; and association with earthquakes, 4, 31, 39, 46; and European colonialism, 4, 40, 42, 136– 37n7; Cherokee ideas about, 35–36, 38 divine punishment: Native American claims about, 1, 35, 38, 78; Euro American claims about, 17, 41, 50, 54, 59–61, 66, 68,

104, 105; African American claims about, 32, 60 Dixon, Thomas, 34 Doublehead (Cherokee chief), 24 Dow, Gregory Evans, 136n6 Dow, Lorenzo, 16, 75–76, 99, 100, 131 Dow, Moses, 106 Dwight, Timothy, 106–7 “earthquake religion,” 61, 68, 70–73, 86, 110 earthquakes: Greco-­Roman theories about, 31, 45–47; Caribbean, 33; Charleston (1886), 33–34; New England (1750), 48–49; Lisbon (1755), 49–50; Caracas (1812), 101–2, 109; Oklahoma, 132. See also comet: as cause of earthquakes; disease: and association with earthquakes; Native Americans: and ideas about earthquakes; New Madrid earthquakes (1811–12); Tenskwatawa (Shawnee Prophet): earthquake prophecy of eclipses, 13, 31, 46, 78, 102 Edwards, John, 125 Edwards, Ninian, 18, 120 electricity, 49, 50, 53 empiricism, 31, 45, 51, 67–70, 143n27 Enlightenment, 31 epidemics. See disease Episcopal Church, 121 evangelicalism, 131, 140n29, 146n18; and moral reform, 17, 121–22; and institutional growth, 19–20, 62–65, 123–24, 126, 145n4; and conversion experiences, 34, 65, 70–73, 86; and empiricism, 45, 51, 69–70, 143n27; in early U.S. print culture, 73–75. See also Baptist Church; Dow, Lorenzo; Methodist Church; revivalism Evangelical Record, and Western Review (periodical), 74, 105 fasting, 38, 78, 84, 99, 106 Ficklin, Joseph, 19 Five Medals (Potawatomi chief), 95 Flint, Timothy, 15, 122–23 flooding, 12, 24, 26 Fort Meigs, 97 Fort Mims, 81–82, 89

182Index

Fort Wayne, 82 Franklin, Benjamin, 50 fur trapping, 10, 11 gender, 22, 95. See also kinship; men, Native American; women Georgia Journal (newspaper), 100 German Coast revolt, 18 God Pleading with America (Stansbury printed sermon), 104 Green Corn Ceremony, 38 hailstorms, 47, 59, 78, 92 Halcyon Luminary, and Theological Repository (periodical), 73–74 Harrison, William Henry, 28, 82, 85, 118, 130 Hawkins, Benjamin, 90, 115–18, 126 Holy Ground (Red Stick town), 89 Hopi Nation, 38, 39 Horseshoe Bend, Battle of, 90, 115, 118 Hughes, Nimrod, 59–60, 86, 87, 89, 100–101, 106, 107, 108 Hunter, John D., 130 hunting, 10, 22, 24, 27, 77, 84, 95, 96, 114, 131 Huron Nation, 41–42. See also Wyandot Nation hydraulic fracturing, 132, 153n7 illness. See disease impurity, earthquakes as signs of, 4, 132. See also disease Indiana Territory, 65, 71 Jackson, Andrew, 18, 110, 114–18, 120, 126 Jefferson, Thomas, 19, 33, 52, 60 Jesus, 42, 60 Johnson, Richard Mentor, 118, 130 judgment day. See divine punishment Kickapoo Nation, 93 Kimball, Frederick, 18 kinship, 23, 24, 92, 98 Kircher, Athanasius, 48 Kwakwaka’wakw Nation, 39 land certificates, 112–14, 126 land speculation, 111–14, 121, 131 Index

Lewis and Clark expedition, 52 Lexington, Ky., 65, 72, 74 Liberty Hall (newspaper), 16–17 Little Prairie (town), 10 Little Rock, Ark., 113–14, 126 Little Turtle (Miami chief), 27, 29 Logan (Shawnee chief), 97 Lord Dunmore’s War, 27 Louisiana Gazette, 82, 96, 125 Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 13, 121 Louisiana Territory, 10, 55 Louisville, Ky., 41, 64, 123 Lyell, Charles, 114 Machemoodus noises, 40 Madison, James, 19, 101, 120 Main Poc (Potawatomi chief), 96 Mary (mother of Jesus), 42, 47 Mather, Cotton, 48, 49, 50–51 Meigs, Return J., Sr., 118, 126 men, Native American, 22, 95, 97 meteorology. See weather meteors, 14, 33, 36, 70 Methodist Church, 20, 62–63, 71, 72, 101, 122, 123–24, 126 McGee, Polly Wilson, 71 Miami Nation, 27, 97, 130 misinformation, 14–15, 41–42, 56 missionaries, 23, 27, 28, 39, 40, 42, 60, 78, 121–24. See also Catholicism; Moravian church; Shaker church Mississippi River, 1, 5, 7, 8, 10, 52, 67, 137n3 Mississippian city-­states, 38, 79 Mississippi Territory, 15, 18, 44 Missouri Bootheel, 10, 11, 37 Missouri Territory legislature, 111–12 Mitchill, Samuel, 15, 55 Moniac, Samuel, 80 Monthly Anthology (periodical), 55, 56 Mooney, James, 4 “moral geography,” 110 Moravian church, 20, 60, 83, 93, 122 McPherson, Christopher, 60–61, 87 Murray, Judith Sargent, 16 Musick, John Roy, 113 183

Narragansett Nation, 40, 131 Nashville, Tenn., 122 Natchez (plantation settlement), 18, 121 Natchitoches (Louisiana Territory), 122–23 Native Americans: and ethical boundaries in historical study, 4; and ideas about earthquakes, 4, 31, 35–44, 57; attacks as Euro American concern during earthquakes, 7, 10, 17; governance structures of, 22–25, 26–28, 75, 130, 134–5n3, 135n4; and engagement with Christianity, 23, 26, 42–43; and militancy, 24, 26, 27, 28–29, 136n6; and earthquakes as critiques of colonialism, 39–44; and reactions to New Madrid earthquakes, 61–62, 84–86. See also Ohio Valley Indians; Southeastern Indians; specific tribal nations Native South. See Cherokee Nation; Choctaw Nation; Creek Nation; Southeastern Indians Navigator, The (manual), 109 Neolin (Delaware prophet), 85 New Madrid (town), 9–10, 11, 65–66, 121– 22. See also earthquakes New Madrid County, 109–13 New Madrid earthquakes (1811–12), 10–11, 12, 14, 134n2; descriptions of, 1, 8, 9; geographical scope of, 1, 8–9; Mississippi River flowing backward during, 8, 137n3; U.S. newspaper reporting about, 13, 14–15, 16–17, 73, 83, 125; misinformation about, 14–15, 110, 124–25, 127. See also Native Americans: and reactions to New Madrid earthquakes New Madrid Relief Act of 1815, 5, 111–14, 126, 130 New Orleans, 18, 60, 121 New Orleans (steamboat). See steamboats New-­York Evening Post, 125 Nineveh, 68–69 North Carolina, 14–15

22–23, 26, 87, 108; and generational tensions, 27, 95, 97. See also Delaware Nation; Kickapoo Nation; Miami Nation; Potawatomi Nation; Shawnee Nation; Winnebago Nation; Wyandot Nation Oklahoma, 131–32 oral histories, 4, 79, 90, 93, 94 Osage Nation, 8, 10, 96, 120, 125, 130 Osi (Cherokee word), 35–36 Otoe Nation, 9, 85, 96

Ohio River, 109 Ohio Valley Indians, 38, 94–98, 110, 118, 120, 126, 130; intertribal prophecy among, 1, 26, 87–88; and governance,

Quapaw Nation, 85, 86, 113–14, 126

Paine, Robert, 123 Paine, Thomas, 103–4 Path Killer (Cherokee chief), 118 Peck, John Mason, 112 Penobscot Nation, 38 petroglyphs, 36 Pierce, William Leigh, 21, 125 plantations, 18–19, 32 Pliny the Elder, 46 Plummer, Jonathan, 104 Potawatomi Nation, 93, 95, 96, 120 Preemption Act (1814), 113 Presbyterian Church, 20, 50, 98, 103, 106, 121, 125 Prince, Mary, 32–33 Prince, Thomas, 49 prophecy, 58, 87–89, 98, 108; among Ohio Valley Indian nations, 1, 26, 27–28, 43–44, 75, 130; in Cherokee society, 25, 35, 76–77, 78, 92; in Creek society, 26, 75–76, 90, 92, 115–16, 126, 130; in the early United States, 44, 58, 59–61, 78, 87–88, 99–101, 108. See also Hughes, Nimrod; McPherson, Christopher; Red Sticks; Tenskwatawa Prophetstown (Shawnee Brothers’ settlement), 28–29, 82, 83, 85, 93, 94 Protestantism. See specific Protestant denominations Pueblo people, 42

Randolph, John, 101–2 Red Sticks, 84, 92–93, 98, 110, 130; and

184Index

critiques of Creek society, 25, 75, 80, 88, 108; and claims to spiritual power, 79–81, 89, 90; military campaign of, 81–82, 90, 114; Southeastern Indian opposition to, 89–91, 115, 116 Red Stick War, 89–91, 110, 114, 120 Reelfoot Lake, 10, 138n9 revivalism, 5, 12, 58, 86, 108, 135n4; in the United States, 19–21, 33–34, 57, 62–65, 66–67; skepticism about, 71–73. See also Baptist Church; Dow, Lorenzo; evangelicalism; Methodist Church; Prophecy; Red Sticks; Tenskwatawa Richmond Theatre Fire, 17, 73, 100, 104, 109–10 Ridge, The (Cherokee leader), 25 Ross, John, 118 Ross, Reuben, 65, 68–69 Rush, Benjamin, 102–3 Russell, James Joseph, 130 Sargent, Winthrop, 15 Sauk Nation, 120 Shaker church, 20, 28 Shawnee Nation, 10, 22, 27, 84, 85, 92, 126–27, 132; outside the Ohio Valley, 10, 27; and opposition to intertribal nation, 97–98, 118, 120 Shoemaker, Nancy, 142n15 Sioux Confederacy, 82, 97–98 Skaquaw (Cherokee leader), 76–77 slavery, 18, 24, 25, 32–33, 81, 92, 104–5, 129 Smith, Mary Morriss, 72 snakes, 1, 35, 38, 39, 80, 84–85, 147n35. See also tie-­snakes; uktena Snethen, Abraham, 69–70 Southeastern Indians, 22–23, 79–82, 89–90, 93, 98, 116. See also Cherokee Nation; Choctaw Nation; Creek Nation Sower Mush (Cherokee chief), 91 Stansbury, Arthur, 104 state formations, 2–3, 22, 23, 87–88, 90, 92–94, 98, 101, 134–35n3. See also Cherokee Nation; Creek Nation; Ohio Valley Indians steamboats, 7 St. Francis River. See Arkansas Index

Stiggins, George, 130 St. Louis, 8, 17, 52, 113, 121, 123 Supernaw, Maude (Quapaw elder), 30 Tecumseh, 27–28, 82, 97–98, 116, 118, 120, 129–30 Tenskwatawa (Shawnee Prophet), 59, 84, 87, 89, 95, 120; earthquake prophecy of, 1, 5, 29, 75, 82–84, 86, 130; leadership, 27–29; teachings, 27–28, 43–44, 80 Thames, Battle of the, 98 Thunder Boys, 77 tie-­snakes, 79–80, 89, 90–91. See also uktena Tippecanoe, Battle of, 12, 28, 75, 82, 83, 84, 86, 95, 100 Tohi (Cherokee word), 35–36 trade, 10, 18, 19, 21, 22, 36, 87, 96 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), 36 treaties: Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), 27; Treaty of Greenville (1795), 27, 95, 97; Treaty of New York (1790), 115–16; Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814), 115–17, 119–20; Treaty of Ghent (1814), 116–17, 120, 126; Treaty of the Cherokee Agency (1817), 119; Treaty of Turkeytown (1816), 119; Treaty of the Maumee Rapids (1817), 120 Tuckabatchee (Creek town), 83–84, 90–91, 93, 130 Tugaloo (Cherokee town), 35 turtles, 35, 38 uktena, 78–79 Underwood, Joseph, 72 United States: print culture in, 13–17, 21–22, 53–57, 59–61, 66–67, 71, 73–75, 100–101, 108; scientific inquiry in, 15, 52–57, 135– 36n5; population growth in, 18; political parties in, 18, 19, 88, 107; territorial expansion of, 19, 52, 63; Congress, 19, 101–2, 110–12l religious institutions along western border of, 19–21; “civilization” plan of, 23, 27, 118, 126; federal road through Creek territory, 25–26, 80–81; military, 27, 28, 29, 82, 97, 98, 104, 108, 110, 115–20; and disaster relief aid, 102, 109– 114; Public Land Office in, 112 185

volcanoes, 14–15, 48, 55, 110, 124–25, 127, 152–53n35 Volney, Constantin-­François, 49, 54–56, 103–4, 124 Walker, John Hardeman, 114 War Eagle (Delaware chief), 131 War of 1812, 75, 87, 100, 105–6, 108; alliances in, 3, 89, 94–98; opposition in the United States to, 19, 101–2, 103, 104 Washington, George, 103, 116 weather, 14, 18, 31, 70 Weatherford, William, 80 Wesley, John, 49–51, 74 Western Spy (newspaper), 16–17

Williams, Roger, 40 Williams, Samuel, 53, 73 Wilmer, James Jones, 101 Wilson, Joshua, 105 Wilson, Robert G., 98, 125 Winnebago Nation, 29 winter counts, 36 Winthrop, John, IV, 49 women, 16, 22, 32–33, 34, 65, 69–70, 129 Woodbury, Julia, 34 Worcester, Noah, 106 Wyandot Nation, 38. See also Huron Nation Yuchi Nation, 38

186Index