Of One Mind and of One Government

Nationhood always comes at a cost. For many members of the Creek Nation, that cost became unbearable by 1813. In that year a faction known as the Red Sticks rose in rebellion against the Creek National Council, assaulting national leaders and killing their livestock. The Creek government tried to suppress the uprising, but in August Red Stick warriors attacked Fort Mims, in present-day Alabama, killing 250 Creek loyalists and white Americans and provoking armed intervention by the United States. In the ensuing war the Creeks lost 10 percent of their population and 20 million acres of land. Two decades later one of the invading army's commanders, Andrew Jackson, became the American president and took everything else. This cruel narrative provides the denouement to several recent histories of Creek politics and society, including Of One Mind and of One Government. The originality of Kevin Kokomoor's interpretation lies in his casting of the Red Sticks as political rebels rather than social or religious revolutionaries, and in his long and careful study of the rebels’ adversary, the Creek National Council. He argues that in the mid-1790s the national council ended an era of factional division, foreign intrigue, and internecine violence. It employed war parties as a police force, punishing horse thieves and flogging or executing Creeks who attacked white Americans. Council members concurrently took control of the Creeks’ foreign relations, negotiating a peace treaty and two land-cession treaties with the United States. These measures brought the Creeks internal peace and political nationhood

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