Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South

Daniel S. Dupre's Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South tells the story of the gradual transformation of one part of North America from native ground to middle ground to southern ground. The book begins with the Hernando de Soto entrada (1539–1543) and follows the subsequent interactions of European, Euro-American, Indian, and African American peoples through Indian removal in 1836. Dupre leans heavily on Richard White's idea of a middle ground. The story begins with an Indian world in flux, and neither the Spanish, the Mississippians, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the English, nor the French ever manage to impose any definitive control over it. Consequently, these various actors (national/imperial and individual) in pursuit of strategic ends—access to allies in all cases, trade goods for the Indians, and deer skins, converts, and slaves for the Europeans—forge alliances based on a combination of convenience, dependence, and opportunity. Wars and individual conflicts occur as peoples overplay their hands—Indians failing to recognize their dependence on European trade goods and Europeans overestimating the importance of those trade goods in the eyes of their Indian partners and rivals. African Americans are caught between these groups, always pursuing their own interests but usually finding themselves either freed or enslaved according to the economic and political needs of the other occupants of this middle ground. This unstable situation, as in White's original formulation, comes to a gradual end following American independence as the U.S. desire for land replaced earlier European, Euro-American, and Indian attempts to control natural resources or people. A combination of factors—the relationships among the region's residents, already-established economic networks, the rivalry between the federal government and the states, the residual influence of the Spanish and the French, and the diplomatic efforts of Indian leaders—preserved parts of Alabama's middle ground through the War of 1812. Civil war among the Creeks (1813–1814), the 1813 fight at Fort Mims and the consequent military campaign to crush Red Sticks, and the British retreat from North America after 1815, however, tipped the balance decisively in favor of the slave-owning, cotton-planting Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians who flocked to what was now Alabama. Squatters, of course, arrived first, but speculative fever, debt, and slave labor gradually allowed a cotton-planting elite to gain control of the state. In these years, Dupre concludes, elite Alabamians embraced both the dedication to slave labor and the suspicion of the federal government that eventually produced the Confederate States of America

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