Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2617.

Adviser: John Mack Faragher.

This dissertation is a study of the role of mobility within and between the Southeastern Indian nations and the states of the U.S. South from the 1790s through the 1820s. It focuses specifically on the delineation of boundaries between the Creek Nation and the states that grew up around it, particularly Georgia and Alabama, and the opening of roads that crossed those boundaries. The work seeks to uncover the convergent and divergent ways in which the inhabitants of the Deep South Interior---Indians, slaves, and settlers---made sense of their shared world and their freedom, or lack of freedom, to move through it.

The work deploys the methods of ethnogeography to reconstruct the categories of meaning and definitions of space and mobility devised by Creek, European, and African-descended peoples according to their own specific needs and desires.

The dissertation consists of three interlocking arguments. The first is that mobility was a primary concern for the Creek Nation in the early national period. When white Americans began to press on the edges of Creek Country and insist on the right to traverse it over land and by water, the Creeks drew on both long-standing traditions of mobility and emergent innovations of sovereignty in order to define their territory and control who would be able to enter it. The second is that the push for U.S. internal improvements (such as roads and canals) in the early republic cannot be adequately considered without an understanding of how these developments influenced Indian affairs and vice versa. Overcoming the presence of sovereign Indian nations seen as obstacles to progress and prosperity, particularly the extension of cotton agriculture and plantation slavery, was a significant concern in the early national period. The third argument is that both Indian affairs and the debate over internal improvements were deeply sectional in nature. The dissertation asserts that we must see the beginnings of Southern political separatism not only in debates over slavery, but also in the contests over boundaries and roads between the southern Indians and the states that ultimately claimed to have jurisdiction over them.