Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

by Christina Snyder

Overview

In Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, prize-winning historian Christina Snyder reinterprets the history of Jacksonian America. Most often, this drama focuses on whites who turned west to conquer a continent, extending "liberty" as they went. Great Crossings also includes Native Americans from across the continent seeking new ways to assert anciently-held rights and people of African descent who challenged the United States to live up to its ideals. These diverse groups met in an experimental community in central Kentucky called Great Crossings, home to the first federal Indian school and a famous interracial family.

Great Crossings embodied monumental changes then transforming North America. The United States, within the span of a few decades, grew from an East Coast nation to a continental empire. The territorial growth of the United States forged a multicultural, multiracial society, but that diversity also sparked fierce debates over race, citizenship, and America's destiny. Great Crossings, a place of race-mixing and cultural exchange, emerged as a battleground. Its history provides an intimate view of the ambitions and struggles of Indians, settlers, and slaves who were trying to secure their place in a changing world. Through deep research and compelling prose, Snyder introduces us to a diverse range of historical actors: Richard Mentor Johnson, the politician who reportedly killed Tecumseh and then became schoolmaster to the sons of his former foes; Julia Chinn, Johnson's enslaved concubine, who fought for her children's freedom; and Peter Pitchlynn, a Choctaw intellectual who, even in the darkest days of Indian removal, argued for the future of Indian nations. Together, their stories demonstrate how this era transformed colonizers and the colonized alike, sowing the seeds of modern America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199399062
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	920,937
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Christina Snyder is McCabe Greer Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of the award-winning Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Great Path?
1. Warriors
2. A Family at the Crossing
3. Scholars
4. Indian Gentlemen and Black Ladies
5. Rise of the Leviathan
6. The Land of Death
7. Rebirth of the Spartans
8. The Vice President and the Runaway Lovers
9. Dr. Nail's Rebellion
10. The New Superintendent
11. Orphans among Strangers
12. Indian Schools for Indian Territory
Conclusion: Paths to the Future
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/05/2016
Snyder (Slavery in Indian Country), associate professor of history at Indiana University, opens the door on a fascinating, yet largely unknown episode in American history as she renders in fine detail the early 19th-century experimental interracial community in central Kentucky called Great Crossings, home to Choctaw Academy. The school, opened in the 1820s and shuttered in 1848, was molded by Richard Mentor Johnson, a former Indian fighter, prominent Kentucky politician, and vice president under Martin van Buren. Johnson and his enslaved African-American concubine, Julia Chinn, envisioned an “empire of liberty” that would link westward expansion with emancipation by sending freed slaves west to settle land there. Political motives blended with personal and religious ones. Chinn had been affected by the Second Great Awakening’s emphasis on progress, and both she and Johnson wanted a nurturing place to raise and educate their two daughters. The sections on Johnson and Chinn’s family life are particularly intriguing. Great Crossings became a truly multiracial community once the Choctaw Academy opened, attracting young Native American men determined to receive an academically rigorous education. There they interacted with white instructors and community leaders as well as enslaved African-Americans, resulting in both trouble and romance. This is a well-researched, engagingly written, and remarkable work of scholarship. Illus. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"In drawing our attention to these protagonists and to their complicated histories, Snyder has produced a work of importance to scholars of American history as well as of comparative Indigenous histories more generally. Great Crossings is a nuanced text ... This compelling work is, at its heart, a story about the conditions of liberty and citizenship that prevail over and through diversity within an imperial state." — Ben Silverstein, Australasian Journal of American History

"Great Crossings warrants attention from a wide multidisciplinary readership. From the short-lived experiment at Choctaw Academy, Snyder offers new insight into race, class, slavery, education, and other aspects of antebellum American society. She even shares a foreshadowing glimpse into what would become the United States' Indian boarding-school system later in the century. This book, moreover, contributes plenty to our understanding of how integral and intricate Indigenous experiences have been throughout American history." — Daniel Usner, Native American and Indigenous Studies

"In Great Crossings, Christina Snyder tells a compelling story with a diverse cast of vivid characters. At a Kentucky school for Indians run by a white visionary with an enslaved common-law wife, Snyder finds a more inclusive, revealing, and hopeful vision of the America we call Jacksonian. Written with clarity and verve, Great Crossings is the work of a great historian." - Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

"Great Crossings is a rare gem, a story that confounds assumptions about the American past. This is nuanced, personal, heartbreaking history with surprises at every turn. It will change the way we teach about Jacksonian America." - Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People

"Great Crossings is a beautifully told story that offers us an intimate and engaging perspective on the large-scale forces and pressures shaping the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. Snyder succeeds in bringing her readers into the Choctaw Academy and the lives of the diverse and fascinating individuals who lived there. The school transformed how all involved viewed the United States, its past, and its future. Snyder's wonderful book will do the same for readers." - Joshua Piker, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

"From the opening scene of Choctaw children reciting Cicero at a barbeque overseen by war hero politician Richard Mentor Johnson and his enslaved common law wife Julia Chinn, this book will change how you see nineteenth-century America. Deeply researched and vividly told, Christina Snyder's book shows how various Native, black, and white Americans came together at Great Crossings in a realistic attempt to create a multicultural life for themselves and future generations, as the rest of United States moved in the opposite direction." - Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

"In Great Crossings, Christina Snyder vividly brings to life a moment when Blacks, whites, and Natives came together in a fragile experiment designed to chart a new destiny for North America and its diverse peoples. The story of the extraordinary Choctaw Academy reveals in poignant detail the paths not taken as the United States transformed itself from a struggling new nation to a continental empire." - Karl Jacoby, author of The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

"What Snyder has found in the story of a modest school is the perfect confluence of the ethnic cleansing of Native America, the absolute manacling of black America, and the consequent creation of white America's modern United States. This historiographically rich, meticulously researched, and accessibly written book makes an important contribution. Yet Great Crossings also attests to the triumph of the racial thinking whose rise it narrates and subjects to such intricate criticism." —James Taylor Carson, Journal of American History

"Some stories are too incredible not to be true. The tale of Richard Mentor Johnson and his Choctaw Academy would tax the imagination of a novelist. The Indian academy becomes a triracial mixing ground and finally a cauldron, where all of Jacksonian America's complexities and contradictions of race, class, and gender play out in public view. The story is true, and Christina Snyder's Great Crossings tells it exquisitely. Snyder relates this fascinating tale with sensitivity and insight, in a narrative alive with personality and vignette. She wisely resists the temptation to typecast heroes and villains, or to frame the story in simple declensionist terms." —Daniel Feller, H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews

"Christina Snyder's Great CrossingsiR enhances the historiography of the Native South by opening a window into a fascinating world where Indian, white, and black social intimacies took shape, sometimes freely and productively, sometimes violently and with terrible consequences, especially for the enslaved. Through her detailed account, Snyder seeks to narrate as well as complicate a period in U.S. history associated with Indian removal rather than Indian initiative. In so doing, she presents a cast of Native actors whose interwoven biographies come alive in a study that simultaneously presents broader political and cultural developments in Indian nations (especially, but not solely, the Choctaw Nation) as well as in the United States." —Tiya Miles, American Historical Review

"A well-researched, engagingly written, and remarkable work of scholarship." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

12/01/2016
Great Crossings, KY, was the home of the Choctaw Academy from 1825 to 1848. Although governed by the U.S. War Department, the institution was a collaboration between the federal government and the Choctaw Nation to educate future Native leaders in hopes that they would lead the "civilizing" of their peoples. Richard Mentor Johnson, academy founder and eventual vice president to Martin Van Buren, endeavored to build a community established on mutual respect between races and peoples. Snyder (history, Indiana Univ.; Slavery in Indian Country) explains why Johnson's vision failed to materialize. President Andrew Jackson imposed a racially intolerant and violent regime, and like-minded followers who displaced Native Americans from most of the continent and utilized slavery to grow economically. Their methodology allowed the United States to span the continent by the end of the 19th century. VERDICT This monograph is highly recommended for readers interested in Jacksonian America or Native American studies. It should be read alongside John Demos's The Heathen School: The Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic.—John R. Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

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