Book Reviews
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Mexico in a concerted, often militant, effort to preserve Indian cultures, lands, and political and economic independence.
The prophets Dowd writes about are well known to scholars.
Neolin, Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh, Handsome Lake, Josiah Francis,
and others, the author claims, drew from a common prophetic heritage that linked them across time and space to the mythic past
and informed their efforts to acquire spiritual power. Properly invigorated with ritual and ceremony, such power could be harnessed
to shape the future for the benefit of all Indian people. But the
prophets and their nativist followers met stiff resistance within as
well as outside Indian country. Native people differed in their interpretations of events. Some believed their future was best served
in association with Europeans, not in opposition to them. These
“accommodationists” rejected the nativism of the prophets and
sought power elsewhere.
Dowd finds this history divided into three periods. During the
mid-eighteenth century nativists and accommodationists opposed
each other. In the Revolutionary period they united in alliance
with the British against the Americans, but by the 1790s they
were again at cross purposes. This pattern of factionalism, Dowd
argues, is a significant factor in the ultimate failure of the nativists to achieve their goals.
Dowd’s contribution lies in his approach. Anthony F. C. Wallace, R. David Edmunds, and other recent scholars have fleshed out
the histories of the prophets Dowd discusses. But Dowd puts them,
and their movements, into a broad context that emphasizes cultural similarity across tribal lines, that links their prophetic visions and teachings to both the ancient past and to each other, that
stresses Pan-Indianism, and that above all gives life and meaning
to their search for spiritual power. In this Dowd finds a place next
to Joel Martin’s Sacred Revolt, a recently published study of the
early nineteenth-century Creek prophetic movement.
Dowd understands the earlier period better than the later and
the North better than the South, and while his notes attest to the
breadth of his research, they also reveal the gaps in the evidence.
This is nevertheless a fascinating, important, and impressive book.
Dowd has revitalized the discussion of this very significant period
of Native American history.
MICHAEL
D. GREENis associate professor of history, University of Kentucky, Lexington. He is a student of Creek political and social history and is at work on a book
on the Creeks in Indian Territory in the decades immediately after their removal.
Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825.
By John Seelye. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Pp. xii, 430.Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $35.00.)
This evocative work continues John Seelye’s meditations on
rivers and their place in the American culture. Geopolitical imagination is the objective of Seelye’s research-such grand images of
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Indiana Magazine of History
collective purpose spread out on continental maps as were the
stock-in-trade of early American geographers, patriotic poets, explorers, speculators, boosters, and political founders.
Borrowing contemporaries’ appreciation for rivers as natural
spatial organizers, Seelye explores writings about rivers, seeking
clues to the evolution of American national purpose (he calls it the
“republican plan”). What he finds is an unanticipated reversal in
the promise of America’s waterways. At the dawn of national existence George Washington had seen a providential opportunity for
integration, coherence, and unity through inland navigation; the
next generation experienced instead centrifugal pressures that fostered ambition, competition, and disintegration. Both visions
yielded empire, to be sure; but where the first promised order and
enlightenment, the second favored chaos, individualism, and aggression. Seelye unpacks this contrast slowly, carefully explicating
for the reader the contents of such important texts as John Filson’s
Discovery and Settlement of Kentucke (1784), Jedidiah Morse’s
American Geography (17891, Joel Barlow’s Columbiad (1807), the
expedition journals of Zebulon Pike (1808) and Meriwether Lewis
(1814), Elkanah Watson’s History of the . . . Western Canals (1820)
and many others.
Seelye’s literary methods required him to treat with care the
rhetoric of visionary writers, and his path of inquiry often raises
questions that his sources do not readily address. Seelye’s nuanced
reading of texts beautifully traces a distinction (too little acknowledged by historians) between the designs of the founders and the
mere desires of their liberated children, between an almost mathematical rhetoric of enlightenment projection and its selfish echo
in a generation of political and economic hucksters. Unfortunately,
Seelye’s literary sources cannot explain the causes of this cultural
sea change. Thus the brilliant contrast between a heroic George
Washington and a scurrilous James Wilkinson (pp. 213-24) seems
rooted in the latter’s bad character (a historical accident). The
same limitation encourages Seelye to jump prematurely from the
celebration of the Erie Canal to an almost inevitable sectional crisis because of cultural change. Such a conclusion may be very true,
but the rich history that sustains such truth is not provided in this
volume.
Beautiful Machine is an important book, and Seelye’s title suggests the reason why: the United States was conceived as a beautiful machine, and there was from the beginning a close connection
in the minds of the founders between rivers and the republican
plan. If Seelye does not explain the whole connection over time, he
still exposes it skillfully to’public view.
JOHNLAURITZLAWONis associate professor of history, Purdue University, West
Lafayette, Indiana. He is currently writing a book about internal improvements in
the early United States through the Civil War era.