Book Reviews Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. x, 259. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6228-7.) Gregory D. Smithers attempts to do what most historians would consider impossible: write the history of a vast region, home to numerous and diverse Native communities; cover a broad sweep of time, from Indigenous origins to the 1830s; incorporate Native voices and perspectives, not as relics of the past, but as living stories that give the region a deeper meaning; and do so in less than two hundred pages of text. One would have to go back to at least the publication of J. Leitch Wright’s The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York, 1981) to find a similar un- dertaking, but Wright focuses mostly on the period before the American Revolution. One would really have to go back to R. S. Cotterill’s The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes before Removal (Norman, Okla., 1954). But these books cannot compare with what Smithers has managed to accomplish. Smithers skillfully utilizes an immense library of books and articles that have been produced over the past few decades. Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, often with a spirit of mutual interest and collaboration, have investigated a seemingly exponential number of new questions and topics. Scholars now know more about the nature of the chiefdom societies that dominated the South before Europeans arrived: we appreciate how they had history before that arrival; how they crafted stories and practices to sustain themselves in a changing environment; and how they went through cycles of growing, devolving, and rebuilding. Historians now understand more fully the shattering impact that the arrival of Europeans had as slave raids and epidemics remade the social landscape. We understand the various conflicts between Natives and newcomers as more complex than simple explanations revolving around cultural clashes. Smithers teachers his readers all of the above while moving them steadily and quickly ahead in time. Scholars view Native polities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as complicated and diverse, from petite nations of a few hundred people to larger coalescent societies built on regional clusters, moi- eties, towns, and clans. We know the Native Southeast was composed not only of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles but also of Catawbas, Yuchis, Occaneechis, Lumbees, Saponis, Natchez, Houmas, Caddos, and others. All of these were actors in creating new worlds of exchange and diplomacy that characterized the region. Historians now more fully ap- preciate that, no matter how entangled European empires and Native polities became, the Southeast was Native ground in which the claims of Britain, France, or Spain remained contested and stunted. We also appreciate how devastating the American Revolution was and how extensively the logic of settler colonialism pervaded the early American republic. Settler colonial- ism democratized white populations but marked Indigenous peoples for The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXVI, No. 2, May 2020 440 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY elimination. But historians also know that diasporic Indigenous peoples rebuilt their lives in Indian Territory, while Native communities remained in southern states and continue to this day to fight for recognition and sovereignty. The history of the Native South, as Smithers demonstrates, did not end with the Trail of Tears. One hopes the story that Smithers sketches sounds familiar to historians of the South. If it does not, such historians should pick up a copy of Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal, read it, and revise their lectures ac- cordingly. Even if this narrative sounds familiar, southern historians now have a go-to survey, which is accessible to nonspecialists, students, and a general reading audience. Stony Brook University Paul Kelton The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. By Andrew Lawler. (New York: Doubleday, 2018. Pp. xx, 426. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-385-54201-2.) The secret token mentioned in the title to Andrew Lawler’s new book is the three letters, CRO, that governor of the Roanoke colony and artist John White found carved into a post upon his return to Roanoke Island in 1590 after an absence of three years. Despite having a strong hunch as to the location of the 117 English settlers he left behind, White never found the so- called Lost Colonists. Lawler is the most recent of a number of writers who have continued the search. Where did the colonists go? What happened to them, and why? And what does our continued fascination with this story say about us? Lawler has done his homework. In the book’s opening section, he tells the story of English efforts to establish an outpost on North American shores. Though there is nothing in this account that will surprise those familiar with the history of Roanoke, Lawler is a gifted writer, and he provides a familiar story well told. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke moves along briskly. It is an easy and accessible read. Lawler began this project at a time when a number of new discoveries offered tantalizing but incomplete clues as to the Lost Colonists’ fate. In the second section of the book, Lawler explores the scholarly efforts to locate the outposts planted by the English in 1585 and 1587. He discusses the work of archaeologists Jean “Pinky” Harrington and Ivor No¨elHume. Lawler’s in- terviews with historians and others investigating Roanoke are the book’s most interesting contributions, providing valuable insights into how historians and archaeologists frame questions, conduct research, and, in some cases, allow their desires and prejudices to cause them to see things that are not there. In the book’s final section, Lawler assesses several explanations for the colonists’ fate. Following in the footsteps of David La Vere, he discusses the history of the infamous Dare Stones found scattered throughout the South from North Carolina to Georgia in the 1930s. He searches for the elusive Sim~ao Fernandes and looks at the history of the Lumbees and the Roanoke-Hatteras Native American community. He discusses the patch on John White’s 1587 map, under which a fort symbol was found, and the recent archaeological work by the First Colony Foundation at Site X, near the head of Albemarle Sound, The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXVI, No. 2, May 2020 BOOK REVIEWS 441 where the fort symbol indicated. Throughout, Lawler examines myths about Roanoke so powerful that they “cast spells that cannot be broken by facts” (p. 7). His conclusions are reasonable but predictable: the first Dare Stone may be authentic; the Site X investigation is promising; and the colonists, if they survived, likely assimilated into Native American communities. Lawler often becomes so enamored with the colorful characters in the Roanoke drama that he overlooks important matters of context. Those English colonists settled on Native ground, and it was Indians, more than anyone else, who determined the colony’s fate. Lawler sometimes seems to lose track of the forest for several of his story’s very interesting trees. But beyond these criticisms, Lawler has done a workmanlike job, for the most part, in synthesizing the work of many scholars into a highly readable narrative. From their hard-earned wisdom and experience, he cobbles together a story geared toward the interested public. There is nothing in this book that will surprise readers of this journal who are familiar with early English colonization efforts, but Lawler stands on the shoulders of the giants in this small field. If he fails to see as far as he might, he draws together the scholarship of the past and the continuing investigations of the present into an appealing synthesis nonetheless. SUNY-Geneseo Michael Leroy Oberg 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy. By James Horn. (New York: Basic Books, 2018. Pp. xii, 273. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-465- 06469-4.) In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), that seminal study of life in early Virginia, Edmund S. Morgan argues that bondage and freedom were connected in such a way that one could not exist without the other. Almost from their very beginning, the two emerged knotted and disfigured, like conjoined twins of a peculiar sort, as tobacco came to define the economic destiny of the English colony. Since its publication, Morgan’sworkhas inspired others to write about the strange pairing. In 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy, James Horn revisits the subject, establishing the year 1619 as an important date in the birth of a nation. A close reading of a plethora of seventeenth-century sources, 1619 is a tragic yet gripping story. That year marked the advent of democracy in British North America. To promote colonization, Virginia Company investors, led by Sir Edwin Sandys, adopted “the idea of a commercial commonwealth” (p.44).This“shift from a society based on Company control of the land to a society founded on individual ownership was momentous,” Horn writes, “and necessarily required wholesale changes to the way the colony was governed” (p. 44). With the introduction of tobacco in 1614, the once fledging enterprise began to flourish as the English developed a taste for the “‘nicotian weed’” (p. 51). In its acknowledgment of individual property rights, equality under the law, and representative governance, Virginia’s commonwealth predated the Great Charter, anticipated the emergence of the gentry class—“‘ancient planters’” who exploited headright to enlarge their own landholdings—and encouraged thousands of poor white people to brave the high seas in search of what seemed to be a promised land (p.
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