Session Abstract

Using the Mississippi River as a point of confluence, this panel explores the vital links between Native American Trails of Tears and enslaved African American forced migrations, treating them as part of a process of creating a white supremacist republic extending into an astonishingly dynamic zone of agriculture, transportation, and commerce, namely the lower Mississippi Valley. The panel brings together scholarship on the development of American capitalism in the context of two great forced migrations that dispossessed southeastern American Indians of their sovereign territories and disarticulated African American families. Exploring the lives and stories of forced migrants in the same frame as agents of their enforced relocation, this panel examines nation-building, commercial modernization, and related issues of race and diaspora.

Ben Schiller's paper, “The River Flows both Ways: Slaving and Enslavement in the Making of the Trans-Mississippi West,” uses letters and journals authored by slaves and ex-slaves to apply an analytical schema that understands slavery as a process rather than an institution. By conceptualizing this history in terms of a reiterative process by which marginal men (slave traders) sought to improve their own status by uprooting, socially isolating, and exploiting already commodified African American bodies, such an approach is profitable because it permits us to gain new insights into the storied lives of slavers and enslaved. This analysis, which has been applied to African and transatlantic slaving, is particularly relevant to the trans-Mississippi West. It also permits new understandings of African Americans’ successful attempts to counter this diasporic process via the construction and maintenance of trans-American social networks.

Joshua Rothman's paper, titled, "America’s Greatest Slave Trader: Toward a Prospective Biography of Isaac Franklin,” explores the business of a pioneer of the interstate slave trade.  Franklin took advantage of both territorial expansion and the development of a national market economy in the United States to create what was by the 1830s a commercial empire rooted in dealing commoditized human beings for profit. Franklin moved to New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi. Joining forces with a nephew named John Armfield, Franklin built a firm with a reach from Virginia to the lower Mississippi Valley that utilized cutting-edge financial and business practices, simultaneously transforming the workings of the slave trade and making Franklin personally one of the wealthiest men in the country.

Calvin Schermerhorn's paper, “Soul Drivers, Nation Builders: The Business of Removal along the Creek Trail of Tears,” argues that the business of dispossessing Indians drew local Euroamericans into a project of nation-building on a southeastern frontier in which the miseries of the subjects of forced migration featured as areas to exploit for profit. This paper highlights the career of Vermonter William Beattie, who arrived nearly penniless in Alabama in 1828 to explore the enforced migration Creek or Muskogee citizens from Alabama and up the Mississippi River to "Indian Territory" in the 1830s.  Beattie became an agent of Indian removal but in the process also acted as a counter-agent of Creeks who were being victimized by the company for which Beattie worked.