View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository A WORLD CONVULSED: EARTHQUAKES, AUTHORITY, AND THE MAKING OF NATIONS IN THE WAR OF 1812 ERA Jonathan Todd Hancock A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Kathleen DuVal Theda Perdue John Wood Sweet Cynthia Radding Harry L. Watson Andrew R.L. Cayton ©2013 Jonathan Todd Hancock ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT JONATHAN TODD HANCOCK: A World Convulsed: Earthquakes, Authority, and the Making of Nations in the War of 1812 Era (Under the direction of Kathleen DuVal) This dissertation examines responses to a series of earthquakes emanating from the Mississippi River shortly before the War of 1812. As the strongest earthquakes in the North American interior in the last 1,000 years, the tremors alarmed communities from the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast. I consider how people across this expanse sought to explain and interpret the earthquakes in light of their own political, territorial, and cultural struggles. By incorporating all North Americans’ ideas about a common event, this dissertation seeks to broaden intellectual, religious, and environmental history to include interpretive communities well beyond the Atlantic coast. In current historiography, following the American Revolution, the continent’s entangled, contingent origins quickly narrow into a conflict between U.S. expansion and collective indigenous resistance. Slower to recognize contingency and a similar multiplicity of people and interests in the early national era, historians tell the story of the post-revolutionary borderlands as an almost inevitable ideological clash between self-interested land grabbing and spiritualized resistance. I argue that the dichotomy between U.S. greed and Native American spirit misses the deep connections that all early modern people drew among the human, natural, and spiritual orders. The struggle to explain the earthquakes prompted people to engage in debates about who could claim rightful authority and what sources of knowledge they could marshal to iii assert their visions for human order. The earthquakes and related geopolitical upheaval thereby summoned a range of responses that an over-simplified showdown between American expansionists and militant Indians cannot capture. This dissertation is an intellectual history of the borderlands. Because all people took matters of spirit, territory, society, and politics into account to interpret the earthquakes, this cross-cultural approach yields insights into structures of religious and political authority, intellectual trends, and geopolitical strategies across the eastern half of North America. And amid the rush to describe expansion and change in histories of the early republic, this dissertation ultimately invites us to slow down and re-imagine early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This effort cannot approach the levels of guidance, expertise, enthusiasm, and support that I have received from my teachers, family, and friends in my time in graduate school. My advisor Kathleen DuVal encouraged this unorthodox project from the start, and I cannot thank her enough for all of the above. I was fortunate to learn from an amazing array of faculty along the way. In particular, Theda Perdue, Mike Green, John Sweet, Cynthia Radding, Drew Cayton, Harry Watson, Lil Fenn, and Clara Sue Kidwell helped guide my dissertation and comment on the project’s next steps. Research for the dissertation demanded that I log many miles across the eastern United States, and I am grateful to many institutions for the financial support that made my research travel possible. At UNC, thanks go to the History Department, the Royster Society of Fellows, the Graduate School, the program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Center for the Study of the American South. Further afield, I 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, and Dartmouth College. In addition to the staffs at these research institutions, I also thank the folks at a number of other archives: the Alabama Division of Archives and History, the Eli Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, the Indiana Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Missouri History Museum, the Moravian Church Archives in both Winston-Salem and Bethlehem, the Ohio Historical v Society, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Western Kentucky University Special Collections Library, and the State Historical Society of Missouri. Carolina was the ideal location for graduate school – not only because of the scholarly guidance I received, but the lifelong friendships that I made with other graduate students. Thanks especially to David Williard, Anna Krome-Lukens, Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Kim Kutz, Nora Doyle, Rike Brühöfener, and Liz Ellis, and everyone else who made the UNC History Department a supportive and collegial environment for graduate students. I also owe special thanks to Emily and Chris Kreutzer, Alex Punger, Anders and Jess Larson, Thomas Vasilos, Karl Welzein, Kathleen Conti, Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Jon Fishman, and Page McConnell for their essential, on-point contributions to my life outside academia. Returning home to North Carolina meant that I could be closer to most of my family for the last six years, and it’s to all of them that I dedicate this work. My parents and sisters have supplied unlimited support and good cheer, and my grandparents always will be my inspiration. As I move away from North Carolina again, I’ll take my family’s love – and all that I’ve learned from them – with me. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………….viii ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………………….ix Chapters Introduction……………………………….…………………………………..1 Part I: Lineages of Thought………………………………………………………….11 1. The Roots of North American Earthquake Inquiry: Negotiating Natural Causes and Human Responsibilities…………………...12 Part II: Indian Country….………………………………………...………………….54 2. “Convulsive movements” in the Native South………………………...…….59 3. “A great disturbance of mind”: Native Authority in the Ohio Valley and Beyond…………………………...90 Part III: The Early Republic....………………………………………………..……131 4. “Earthquake Christians”……………………………………………………133 5. “Authentic information from some places”: The Politics of Earthquake Reporting in the Early Republic………………187 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….....227 Bibliography………………………………………………………………..230 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Methodist Church Membership by Conference, 1810-1815……………………137 2. Western Methodist Church Membership by District, 1810-1815………………139 3. Western Methodist Church Membership by Locale, 1810-1815……………….139 4. African-American Methodism by Conference, 1810-1815………………...…..141 5. Southern and Western African-American Methodism by Locale, 1810-1815....141 6. Baptisms by Baptist Association, 1810-1820…………………………………..142 viii ABBREVIATIONS ADAH Alabama Division of Archives and History, Montgomery. ASP:IA American State Papers, Class II: Indian Affairs. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832. CSHSW Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin . FHS Filson Historical Society, Louisville. IHS Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. KHS Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort. LBH Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins. Vol. 2: 1802-1806, edited by C.L. Grant. Savannah, Ga.: The Beehive Press, 1980. MASP Moravian Archives – Southern Province, Winston-Salem. MDAH Mississippi Division of Archives and History, Jackson. MHM Missouri History Museum, St. Louis. OHS Ohio Historical Society, Columbus. JR The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610- 1791. Vols. 1-70 edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Cleveland: The Burrows Brothers Co., 1896-1901. WHH The Papers of William Henry Harrison. Edited by Douglas Clanin. Microfilm copy from IHS. SBHLA Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville. SHSM State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia. SPMD The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees. Vol. 1 edited by Rowena McClinton. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. TSLA Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. ix INTRODUCTION “The Crisis is not far off when I trust in God that the Tyrant [Napoleon] will be humbled, & the Scoundrel American Democrats be obliged to go on their knees to Britain…Never did War rage as it does at present, the World seems convulsed.” 1 - British Indian Agent Robert Dickson, 1814 From December 1811 through the spring of 1812, the world actually convulsed. Emanating from the Mississippi River, the strongest earthquakes in the North American interior in the last 1,000 years alarmed communities from the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast. Separated by months of persistent quivering, three major shocks approaching 7.0 on the Richter Scale unleashed astounding damage on the land near their epicenters under the Missouri boot heel. Frightened communities of American Indians