A New Order of Things : Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816(Hardback) - 2010 Edition

Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History

by Claudio Saunt

Claudio Saunt vividly depicts a dramatic transformation in the eighteenth century that overturned the world of the powerful and numerous Creek Indians and forever changed the Deep South. As the Creeks amassed a fortune in cattle and slaves, new property fostered a new possessiveness, and government by coercion bred confrontation. A New Order of Things is the first book to chronicle this decisive transformation in America's early history, a transformation that left deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless.

Genres: History, Native American History, Nonfiction, Native American, American History, Politics, Native Americans

Unknown Binding

First published December 8, 1995

About the author

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things; Black, White, and Indian; and West of the Revolution. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a unique look at how the Muscogee Nation (called Creek by the Europeans) developed into a culture after the arrival of Europeans. The author provides an excellent start to the research available on this subject by looking at the aspects that affect Creek culture following not only the coming of Europeans but the United States as well. Saunt looks at religion, trade, the role of women, and the most importantly how private property changed the conception of what the Creek believed. European viewpoints became infused with Indian ones creating a "new order" that changed the Indians lives. The final part of the book looks at the response to the New Order through the redstick war and the British support during the war of 1812. This is popularly remembered in American history as Andrew Jackson's war against the Creeks. The war was vicious and the slaughter was great on both sides. Saunt does an excellent job of capturing the significance of the war and not getting caught up in the gory details. Although as other reviewers point out the book lacks a conclusion it is a great start to the understanding of the people that make up the Muscogee Nation.

This book comes after years of hard work looking at primary sources. The current trend especially with the creek is for those who read not only the British and American sources but the Spanish as well. The Spanish kept excellent records that were well preserved and have offered many valuable insights into Indian culture. When writing an enthnohistory such as this it is always very difficult to capture the Indian voice and not sound like everything is coming from a European and Saunt does this well. The reader feels as though they are included in what the Indians were thinking and going through.

[Eric Burke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saunt traces the transformation of Creek society from one of "traditional" matrilocal tribes centered upon the deerskin trade and cohesive due principally to persuasion (c1730s) to one marking "the new order of things," bent on the accumulation of power and property, and cohesive only through top-down coercion and law enforcement (c1810s). In short, this is the story of Upper Creek acculturation of Anglo-American societal organization and values (by and through the efforts of U.S. Indian Affairs agents to "civilize" the Creek), resistance from the traditional Creek vanguard to this "new order of things" (driven in part by fugitive black slaves and other African Americans living amongst the Creek), and the eventual failure of such resistance.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claudio Saunt's history of the Creek Indians in the late 18th-early 19th century is a portrait of a Native community at a crossroads and a moment of internal rupture. The central tension of the book is over the fate of the Creek Indians between the "old order" (a lack of preoccupation with property, an emphasis on communality and oral history, and a rejection of Western notions of racial and sexual hierarchy) and the "new order" (private property and wealth, including permanent land settlement, enslaved peoples, and cattle; traditional forms of marriage and more private domestic responsibilities for women; centralized political power, including that of policing and legislation). What makes Saunt's account of the Creek transformation more unusual than traditional narratives is that the threat to the Creeks come from those who might be considered their own--mestizo children of Spanish settlers and Creek women who would assert the necessity of shifting to a Western mode of living.

Saunt's intervention is to center his text's chronological scope on the Creek system of belief, one that he notes has often been misrepresented or misunderstood due to the mestizo voices who took control of its (written rather than oral) documentation. He notes the unreliability of Creek "advocates" such as Andrew McGillivray, a Mestizo son who burnished his power and property-ownership by claiming to advocate for Creek clans through falsified records and treaty negotiations. McGillivray was part of a generation of mestizo leaders who would push the Creek toward a "plan of civilization," a plan that occasionally garnered Creek support (especially among women who desired more autonomy). Yet particularly during the famines of the 1810s, those Creek who chose the "old order" found themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack, theft, and forced migration out of their homeland. Saunt ends his text with a brief period of resistance to these changes (through the Seminole resistance of 1811, in which Creeks served as partial allies, along with runaway slaves and free blacks). Yet such resistance from the Creeks soon devolved into civil war, as the Redsticks (opposing the new order) fought with the mestizos and their white allies to regain some control over their future and way of life.

While this text is only peripherally valuable to me in my study of rural history, it's valuable to note the tensions between the old property-indifferent way of doing things and the "new" property-centric way of life imposed by the Spanish and Americans. It is also valuable to note the complexity of intermingled descendants in shaping the direction of the native communities, and how resistance to such changes required alliances across Native communities as well as the enlistment of blacks of varying degrees of freedom. Standalone chapters that might be especially good for teaching are the chapter on Creek attitudes about property, written records, and women, as they foreground particular technologies and material culture as instruments of change and "modernization."

[Janice]

Good account.

[Michelle Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saunt's work is a wonderful beginning for those interested in Creek/Muskogee history, or American Indian Studies as a whole. Much of this information presents description of pre-contact Creek history and then discusses the colonial impact on Creek communities. I used this as a source in my thesis, and was not disappointed. Offers lots of background information that can help you with future studies.

[Tree Rings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended for clear depiction of Creek social stratification; quick read. The cover is NOT Chief Alexander McGillivray.