Journal of Southern History

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Native confederacies in the U.S. Southeast began to adopt some of the trappings of Anglo-American governance, law, and culture. Historians have long debated how to interpret these transformations. Where an earlier generation of scholars saw “renascence,” as William G. McLoughlin described the Cherokee Nation’s refashioning in Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, 1986), more recent works have stressed both the superficiality of these changes and the role of a mestizo elite that self-interestedly ushered in what Claudio Saunt has called “a new order of things” centered on private property (A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 [New York, 1999]).

In Of One Mind and of One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic, Kevin Kokomoor, by focusing on the Creeks, offers another analytical frame for this change: the rise of the nation-state. In a short period from the late 1790s through the War of 1812, Kokomoor argues, the Creeks shifted “from the diffuse nature of Creek Country to the ordered framework of the Creek Nation,” which relied on “coercive legal authority” and legitimized violence to govern its territory (pp. 17, 19). He particularly emphasizes the Creek National Council, a national institution he seeks to redeem from accounts that have questioned its efficacy or even its existence.

Kokomoor relays his story in three parts. The first suggests how long-standing Creek localism, well suited to the pre-Revolutionary “‘play-off’ diplomacy” system, failed to contain violence during the chaotic 1790s, leaving Creek Country “practically in shambles” (pp. 142, 173). The second recounts the rise of the Creek National Council from a “cosmopolitan” collection of Creek leaders favorably disposed toward the United States (p. 177). Beginning with a key meeting in 1794, these men coalesced into the council, which sought to collectively punish murder and horse theft in the name of the entire nation. Kokomoor acknowledges both the innovative and the imperialist nature of these changes, noting the prominent role of federal agent Benjamin Hawkins, but he also stresses how these shifts built on long-standing Creek political structures. Kokomoor further insists on the council’s efficacy in establishing legitimacy and maintaining order, which forestalled violence and made the Creek Nation “good neighbors” (p. 216). But, as Part 3 points out, these shifts were not enough to protect Creek autonomy. Georgia, aided by the federal government, continued its assault on Creek land and sovereignty, and this attack [End Page 143] substantially undercut the legitimacy of the council, which had relied on U.S. promises. The result was the Red Stick War, which Kokomoor persuasively reinterprets as a struggle over the Creek National Council’s authority. The council ultimately won, but at the cost of a U.S. intervention that devastated Creek power. Creek reinvention, Kokomoor notes in an epilogue foreshadowing removal, still could not force the United States to recognize the nation as fully sovereign.

By taking the Creek National Council seriously and depicting its origins within Creek politics, Kokomoor’s account makes an important contribution. Perhaps his most significant corrective to current literature is his well-supported claim, “The Creek nation-state project was no engine of political and cultural destruction, forced upon the Creek people from above,” although he undermines this argument’s force by employing somewhat uncritically the freighted term “modernization” to describe this process (pp. 29, 28). Ironically, casting the narrative as the Creek Nation’s “rise and fall” also obscures some of the work’s most important potential insights. While significant, the Creek National Council of the early nineteenth century was a tentative work-in-progress—especially when compared with the present-day Muscogee Creek Nation, with its three-branch government that provides services to thousands of Oklahomans, both Native and non-Native. In this sense, Kokomoor’s emphasis on removal as ending is overly pessimistic. What his book recounts is not a brief doomed experiment but the roots of a project of Creek political and institutional development that is not just ongoing but also thriving.