Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America

By Jonathan Todd Hancock

The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 were the strongest temblors in the North American interior in at least the past five centuries. From the Great Plains to the Atlantic Coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a broad cast of thinkers struggled to explain these seemingly unprecedented natural phenomena. They summoned a range of traditions of inquiry into the natural world and drew connections among signs of environmental, spiritual, and political disorder on the cusp of the War of 1812. Drawn from extensive archival research, Convulsed States probes their interpretations to offer insights into revivalism, nation remaking, and the relationship between religious and political authority across Native nations and the United States in the early nineteenth century. With a compelling narrative and rigorous comparative analysis, Jonathan Todd Hancock uses the earthquakes to bridge historical fields and shed new light on this pivotal era of nation remaking.

Through varied peoples' efforts to come to grips with the New Madrid earthquakes, Hancock reframes early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions amid prophecies, political reinventions, and war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469662190

Jonathan Todd Hancock

Jonathan Todd Hancock is associate professor of history at Hendrix College.

Book preview

CONVULSED STATES

Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America

Jonathan Todd Hancock

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Chapel Hill

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Amaltea, and Rudyard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Cover illustrations: flood scenes from the front page of the Marceline Business Directory, Marceline, Mo. (Nell and Kyes, 1891); courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Hancock, Jonathan Todd, author.

Title: Convulsed states : earthquakes, prophecy, and the remaking of early America / Jonathan Todd Hancock.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020038670 | ISBN 9781469662176 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469662183 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662190 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Earthquakes—United States—History—19th century. | Indians of North America—Government relations—1789–1869. | Nation-building—United States. | United States—History—19th century. | United States—Religion—19th century.

Classification: LCC E179 .H225 2021 | DDC 323.1197—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038670

a wave grant

Figure Foundation

tides of mind

For my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 QUAKING

2 KNOWLEDGE

3 SPIRIT

4 POLITICS

5 TERRITORY

Epilogue: Resonances

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures & Maps

FIGURES

1. Timeline of events

2. Scene of the Great Earthquake in the West

3. Methodist Church membership by conference, 1810–1815

4. Baptisms by Baptist associations, 1810–1820

5. Lorenzo Dow broadside

MAPS

1. Approximate geographical scope of earthquakes with selected sites

2. Post–War of 1812 territorial cessions by Creek, Cherokee, and Ohio Valley Indian allies of the United States, 1814–1817

Acknowledgments

I’ve never experienced an earthquake. One shook Chapel Hill while I lived there, but it didn’t register to me from the recesses of the library, where I was scanning microfilm for earthquake references. Over the course of this effort, what I have experienced is guidance, support, and love beyond measure.

Two people inspired me to take the plunge into becoming a history professor. Craig Steven Wilder showed me the transformative power of historical perspective and the critical importance of historiography and Early America. Craig D. Atwood introduced me to the practice of being a historian and the educational tradition of John Comenius. While this book’s subject matter ranges far from their work, I hope it reflects their influence. As a college student, I also was fortunate to learn from John P. Bowes, Colin G. Calloway, Clarence E. Hardy III, and Celia E. Naylor.

Kathleen DuVal let me run with my strange earthquake idea, offering guidance and encouragement along the way. I’ll always be grateful for her mentorship and good cheer (and Marty Smith’s cooking). While in the Research Triangle, I learned from an incredible cast of other faculty: the late Andrew R. L. Cayton, Elizabeth A. Fenn, the late Michael D. Green, Clara Sue Kidwell, Theda Perdue, Cynthia Radding, John Wood Sweet, and Harry L. Watson. A special thanks to Theda Perdue, whose advice about organizing the book was immensely helpful in moving it along. Conevery Bolton Valencius assured me that the earthquakes were big enough for the both of us to write about, and I have learned much from her work. I am also grateful to friends and colleagues from the profession and beyond: Thomas Vasilos, Anders Larson, Alex Punger, Jack Dunlap, David Williard, Anna Krome-Lukens, Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Kim Kutz, Nora Doyle, Liz Lundeen, Tol Foster, Warren Milteer, Rike Brühöfener, Kathleen Conti, Liz Ellis, Brooke Bauer, Mikaëla Adams, Julie Reed, Marty Richardson, Jacob Lee, Paul Heintz, Adam Michaelson, Jason Hartwig, Stephen Macekura, Annie Depper, Catherine Conner, and Emily and Chris Kreutzer.

Numerous institutions made my research and writing possible. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I am grateful to the Royster Society of Fellows, the Center for the Study of the American South, the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Graduate School, and the History Department. I also appreciate the support of the Newberry Library, the Filson Historical Society, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Bright Institute at Knox College, and Hendrix College. Spending time at the Newberry Library with Juliana Barr, the late Raymond D. Fogelson, and Scott Manning Stevens was especially formative. Joining the inaugural cohort of the Bright Institute at Knox College, directed by Catherine J. Denial, has been a rousing bookend to this book writing experience. I also thank the staffs of all of the libraries and archives cited in the book, as well as those librarians who facilitate interlibrary loan. On the road, Anders and Jess Larson and Hunter Price kindly hosted me at their homes during research trips through the Midwest, and Bo Taylor welcomed me into the 2009 Cherokee Language Immersion Course at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian on the Qualla Boundary.

I appreciated the opportunities to present portions of this work and receive feedback at workshops held by the Triangle Early American History Seminar, the Carolina Seminar in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and the Newberry Library Seminar Series in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, as well as meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Early Americanists, and the Southern Historical Association.

I am grateful to Hendrix College for the institutional support and flexibility to pursue my research and teaching interests. I thank my departmental colleagues, Todd Berryman, Sasha Pfau, Allison Shutt, Deb Skok, and Mike Sprunger, for their welcome and guidance. I’ve also appreciated the chance to collaborate with Hendrix faculty and staff members beyond the History Department: Jay Barth, Hope Coulter, Pete Gess, Robin Hartwick, Brett Hill, Mary Kennedy, Peter Kett, Kiril Kolev, Stacey Schwartzkopf, David Sutherland, and Leslie Templeton. Thanks also to Jasmine Zandi, Hendrix class of 2020, for creating the maps, and to Brett Hill for guiding Ms. Zandi.

It has been an honor to work with the University of North Carolina Press; I appreciate the work of Chuck Grench, Brandon Proia, Dylan White, Jay Mazzocchi, Elizabeth Crowder, and the rest of the staff. Readers Cynthia Kierner and Christina Snyder lent their expertise and keen insight to strengthen the manuscript. The book is better for their feedback, though errors of fact or interpretation belong to me.

In 2017, Devin and I found out just how fortunate we are to live in downtown Little Rock. We express our heartfelt gratitude to Anita Davis, Caroline Stevenson, and Kelly Fleming, and to the doctors, nurses, and staff at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, especially Drs. Daniela A. Ochoa, Angela Pennisi, Allen C. Sherman, and Keith G. Wolter.

Outside of academia, thanks also to the members of Kasvot Växt for creative inspiration, and to Roger Bennett and Michael Davies, Football Weekly, and my teammates on Baklava and The Magnificent Seven for soccer-related diversions.

I dedicate this book to my family. I honor the memory of my grandparents, Chick and Millie Blake and Jimmy and Marty Hancock, and I cherish all the time I got to spend with them. My parents, Kelley and Drew, have been a constant source of love and guidance, and my sisters, Tess and Emma, enliven (and tolerate) their idiosyncratic older brother. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and their kids ring our orbit, and we’ve been lucky to have Arjun, Meera, Som, Latha, Nacho, Harry, Susan, Megan, Chris, Hatton, and Rowe join us. Devin makes my life whole.

Introduction

Nearly four years before the earthquakes, Tenskwatawa predicted them. In relating a visit with the Great Spirit, the Shawnee Prophet threatened very specific consequences for Native people who spurned his growing movement to unite and repel U.S. expansion. Awful spirits in the air and great snakes under the earth awaited those who did not abide by the teachings of the Great Spirit, who, Tenskwatawa said, has power to change the course of nature. Other prophets also carried the message, which had been circulating across and beyond the Ohio Valley for decades, for a unified Native front to drive out invaders. But Tenskwatawa claimed ultimate authority among the prophets, direct access to the Great Spirit, and unique insight into forces of natural destruction. In the winter of 1807–8, his warning contained a precise prediction: in four years a day of judgment would come, and all the unbelievers shall be utterly destroyed.¹

When earthquakes arrived on a December night in 1811, their magnitude, frequency, and uncommonness made them impossible to ignore. Three major temblors and dozens of aftershocks emanated for months from the Missouri Bootheel. Estimated to approach magnitudes of 7.0 on the Richter scale, they alarmed communities from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. While only a faint oddity on the edges of the earthquakes’ vast footprint, the shaking assaulted the senses of those closer to the epicenters. All was confusion and terror, remembered an American doctor who was traveling down the Mississippi River. The sky became darker each moment, the stars grew dim till they were invisible; and from out the solid, almost intangible blackness of the night, issued those fearful sounds, as though the whole order of things and all the laws of nature were being broken up, and matter returning to its original chaos. Tenskwatawa had foretold what are still largely unpredictable to modern seismologists: the strongest earthquakes in the North American interior in at least the last five centuries.²

The earthquakes shook land and people without regard for territorial boundaries and social stations. Women and men, enslaved and free, Native and non-Native, leaders and commoners, skeptics of cosmological disruption and prophets of doom, they all experienced the shaking and interpreted its meaning. People grounded their interpretations in the systems of knowledge, ritual, and politics that their territories hosted—Creek, Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, Quapaw, Otoe, and the United States, among many others.

The convulsions coincided with contentious experiments in state building. Whether for territorial defense or expansion, Native Americans and Euro Americans alike sought to consolidate political authority and establish their standing among other nation-states with territorial boundaries, national laws, diplomatic agreements, and militaries to enforce their respective sovereignties. With a booming population and an expansionist platform to secure landowning opportunities for its citizens, the United States loomed over its immediate Indigenous neighbors, who confronted the differentials in population, territorial size, and firepower with state-building efforts of their own. Advocates of intertribal unity in the Ohio Valley and nationalization among Creek and Cherokee people in the Southeast sought to stand nation to nation with the United States.³

These efforts provoked common questions about the place of religious authority in nation-states. Often arising from societal margins to seize on the revivalism that gripped communities in the Appalachian borderlands, prophets and other charismatic figures warned that nations unmoored from religious authority risked divine punishment. Along with an impending war and a host of other anomalies that appeared in the natural environment in 1811, the earthquakes bolstered such claims and stoked disputes about the relationship between religious and political authority within these sites of state building. While these disputes assumed various forms across Indian country and the United States, the earthquakes roused widespread alarm and contention, sometimes years after the first temblor. Both in an array of historical records and in the land itself, the tremors created a constellation of common reference points, an eclectic guide through which to ask new questions of this pivotal era and to narrate it in a new way. Those new questions about revivalism, religious and political authority, and nation remaking are comparative, not only between Native nations and the United States, but among Native polities. And that new way of narration narrows the chronological scope, widens the geographical lens, and deepens attention to all people who registered their earthquake interpretations, no matter their location, culture, or social standing.⁴

Emerging from those calibrations is a sprawling landscape of world views and ideas about natural phenomena in early nineteenth-century North America. A broad cast of thinkers inhabited this landscape, many far from the formal libraries and laboratories to which scholars typically turn to write histories of ideas, intellectuals, and science. These thinkers drew from long-standing lineages of knowledge, combining their communities’ intellectual inheritances with their own firsthand observations of interrelated disorder in the natural environment, human affairs, and spiritual matters. In experiencing, interpreting, and debating about the earthquakes, people ascribed various and overlapping intellectual, spiritual, political, and diplomatic meanings to land.⁵

Convulsed States probes those meanings to provide a continental, cross-cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies in the early nineteenth century. Doing so demands traversing not only a massive geographical expanse, but also a range of historical fields and topics: environmental, religious, and intellectual history; ethnohistory; the history of science; disaster studies and the expansion of U.S. state power through disaster relief; and colonialism. Historians often have employed a continental approach to analyses of cross-cultural interactions in pre-1800 North America. However, in many studies of relations between the United States and Native Americans in the War of 1812 era, the hallmarks of a continental approach—a diversity of people and perspectives, wide geographical scopes, and attention to dynamics within and among Native polities—often give way to a narrower lens of focus on U.S. expansion and flash points where collective Indigenous resistance confronted it. Historians commonly narrate these confrontations as clashes between Native spirit and U.S. greed, or as one historian has put it, a holy war for the American frontier. Anchoring the story in the North American interior—following the tremors out from their epicenters—widens that analytical lens to capture the tangled alliances of the War of 1812 era, domestic struggles over differentiation in religious and political authority, and the connections that all people across eastern North America—not just Native people—drew among human, spiritual, and environmental matters. These tensions and entanglements registered in earthquake interpretations and debates. In the early nineteenth century, people in the United States were as attuned to environmental disturbances and their spiritual significance as people in Indian country were to political reinvention.⁶

Despite its analytical limits, historians’ emphasis on the spiritual dimension of Native militancy in this era has served the worthy purpose of countering the argument that epidemic diseases eliminated Indigenous peoples’ preexisting spiritual traditions and epistemologies. This study shares in the effort to emphasize historical continuity, as well as adaptability, in Indigenous ways of knowing. Native thinkers often associated the earthquakes with impurity and illness, and they employed the language of health in their various designs for restoring cosmological order. These figures belong in a new, broadening wave of historical study that foregrounds the intellectual lineages of Native American and African Americans, investigating them on their own terms, not just in regard to their interfaces with Euro Americans.⁷

Still, the academic study of Indigenous knowledge must respect boundaries. Medicine, as contemporary tribal communities refer to secret practices that are fundamental to spirituality, is a deeply sensitive topic that belongs to families and lineages of special practitioners, not curious outsiders. When missionaries and government-sanctioned anthropologists consulted with practitioners to record and publish medicinal information, they continued a colonialist tradition of binding academic study with Indigenous subjugation and dispossession. For all of the promise in ethnohistory’s bid to unbind scholarship from the legacy of colonialism, suspicion and resentment rightfully persist. Those currently trusted with medicine often find the very existence of published manuals and manuscripts on the subject deeply unsettling. For example, James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, a foundational text in Cherokee history cited in this book for its oral histories, contains information that a tribal storyteller recently has described as scary. This sacred knowledge is powerful and meant to be kept secret, because it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I mean, there’s things in that book that even I wouldn’t read. I look at it, part of it, and I’ll just put it back, the storyteller explained. Discussions of Native world views, rituals, and oral histories that follow seek to foreground Indigenous peoples’ ideas and debates about the earthquakes while acknowledging these sensitivities.⁸

Amid histories of the early republic focused on rapid change, the earthquakes invite the challenge to slow down, reframe early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions, and explore what else we can know about these people. Convulsed States begins with individuals’ experiences of the earthquakes within the context of early nineteenth-century nation remaking in the Native South, Ohio Valley, and United States. Reaching back further in time to consider the lineages of knowledge that framed understandings of the shaking, it then returns to Tenskwatawa’s prophecy and the ways in which the earthquakes figured into broader waves of revivalism across communities in the southern Appalachians and Ohio Valley. The leaders of new communities forged through common spiritual concerns sought to bring their surging religious authority and urgent earthquake insights to bear on the remaking of Native nations and the early formation of the United States. These political disputes about differentiation and territorial transformations, some of which stemmed directly from the earthquakes with the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815, and others that derived partly from U.S. blame cast on Native prophets, close the book.

Figure 1. Timeline of events.

In a letter to a colleague written two years after the strongest shaking, British trader and Indian agent Robert Dickson surveyed the geopolitics of eastern North America and western Europe. From his post along the upper Mississippi River, the far western theater of the War of 1812, Dickson assumed a broad angle of vision and a foreboding tone. Never did War rage as it does at present, the World seems convulsed, thank providence Our Country is still preheminent & will I trust continue so, he wrote. Whether or not he intended to refer directly to the earthquakes, Dickson’s use of the term convulsed captured the way in which people across cultures and a vast swath of the continent connected signs of human and natural disorder. His letter also dealt with a broad range of historical actors, many of whom left evidence of their understandings of the earthquakes and their debates about the shaking’s significance for intertwined matters of spirit, politics, and territory: a host of Native peoples, European militaries, and the Scoundrel American Democrats. With his choice of the word convulsed and expansive perspective from the middle of continent, Dickson created a useful reference point through which to return to that December night on the Mississippi River in 1811.⁹

1

QUAKING

Dawn revealed that Mississippi River navigation manuals were useless. Islands were missing, submerged logs rose to the water’s surface to block channels, and riverbanks had disintegrated. The New Orleans, one of the first steamboats ever to ply the river, was north of New Madrid during the first shock. Like many Euro Americans west of the Appalachians awakened by the shaking, the crew first supposed that the din was an Indian attack. As the boat passed through New Madrid, crowds from the bank begged to be taken aboard. People and houses already had been swallowed, and those seeking refuge hoped it would be safer to ride out the shocks while traveling downstream. Painful as it was, there was no choice but to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the terrified inhabitants of the doomed town, related the voyage’s chronicler. Even when the shaking subsided, trees and broken chunks of islands scratched at the boat’s hull, making it difficult to sleep onboard. What was supposed to be a crowning achievement of technological innovation, a celebration of a new era in the integration of markets and people in the growing nation, instead turned into a solemn passage full of anxiety and terror.¹

Others corroborated the astonishing riverside sights and sounds. Despite his crew’s desire to flee the boat and climb to land, Scottish naturalist John Bradbury decided to ride out the earthquakes in open water. He calmed each crew member with liquor and continued down the river. The next morning, Bradbury captured the sights and sounds of disorder during an aftershock. The trees on both sides of the river were most violently agitated, and the banks in several places fell in, within our view carrying with them innumerable trees, the crash of which falling into the river, mixed with the terrible sound attending the shock, and the screaming of geese and other wild fowl, produced an idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution, he wrote. A French boat pilot offered another description of the terrifying sound, which was in the ground, sometimes muffled and groaning; sometimes it cracked and crashed, not like thunder, but as though a great sheet of ice had broken. Passing through a village south of New Madrid, a another boat pilot surveyed the morose scene of a Catholic graveyard partially sunken into the river with a split wooden cross marking exposed graves. All nature appeared in ruins, and seemed to mourn in solitude over her melancholy fate, he wrote to his aunt in Pennsylvania."²

One recurring element of popular lore about the earthquakes was true: the Mississippi River temporarily flowed backward. The shaking combined with major cracks in the riverbed to disrupt the river’s flow, creating massive upstream waves. The French pilot described an immense swell traveling north: "So great a wave came up the river that I never seen one like it at sea. It carried us back north, up-stream, for more than a mile, and the water spread out upon the banks, even covering maybe three or four miles inland. It was the current going backward. Then this wave stopped and slowly the river went right again." A different pilot reported being carried upstream for ten to twelve miles. In St. Louis, the river did not reverse course, but the water churned and bubbled like it was boiling.³

Another long-held piece of trivia about the earthquakes—that they rang church bells in Boston—is less likely. The shaking tolled mistimed bells,