Source: http://thesga.org/2010/04/must-have-book-hudsons-southeastern-indians/
April 9, 2010
Must-have book: Hudson’s Southeastern Indians
Submitted by Sammy Smith (sammy@thesga.org)
Ethnohistorian Charles Hudson’s book The Southeastern Indians is still in print.
That’s saying something; it was originally published in 1976. Mostly, it indicates that this readable, data-filled volume remains relevant and important.
In other words: save your pennies and get your own copy!
Yes, archaeologists and historians have gathered significant new information since this book was published, but what’s between the covers means this title is worth having in your own library.
Hudson’s writing is both lyrical and factual. Consider the initial paragraph:
The native people of the American South—the Southeastern Indians—possessed the richest culture of any of the native people north of Mexico. It was richest by almost any measure. At the time Europeans first came to the New World, the Southeastern Indians lived on the fruits of an economy which combined farming with hunting and gathering; they organized themselves into relatively complex political units; they built large towns and monumental ceremonial centers; and they possessed a rich symbolism and an expressive art style. But hardly any of this has left an impression on our historical memory. The average American has some notion of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and of the role they played in our early colonial history; he has a clear but stereotyped concept of the Indians who lived on the Great Plains; he may know something about the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; but he knows little or nothing about the Southeastern Indians.
Remember, Dr. Hudson wrote this in 1976. Still, many “average Americans” know little about the native peoples who lived in Georgia. If you want to learn about them, this book, with its maps and black-and-white photographic plates, is an excellent place to start. It remains available in paperback at a reasonable cost.
What other volumes do you consider must-have for your own library on Georgia archaeology? Log in and comment!
Charles M. Hudson, 1976, “The Southeastern Indians,” University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. 573 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0870492488.
Cracker Culture is a provocative study of social life in the Old South that probes the origin of cultural differences between the South and the North throughout American history. Among Scotch-Irish settlers the term “Cracker” initially designated a person who boasted, but in American usage the word has come to designate poor whites. McWhiney uses the term to define culture rather than to signify an economic condition. Although all poor whites were Crackers, not all Crackers were poor whites; both, however, were Southerners.
The author insists that Southerners and Northerners were never alike. American colonists who settled south and west of Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries were mainly from the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. The culture that these people retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the difference between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowlands of the southeastern half of the island of Britain. From their solid base in the southern backcountry, Celts and their “Cracker” descendants swept westward throughout the antebellum period until they had established themselves and their practices across the Old South. Basic among those practices that determined their traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was the herding of livestock on the open range, in contrast to the mixed agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in New England. The Celts brought to the Old South leisurely ways that fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors, Southerners were characteristically violent; they scorned pacifism; they considered fights and duels honorable and consistently ignored laws designed to control their actions. In addition, family and kinship were much more important in Celtic Britain and the antebellum South than in England and the Northern United States. Fundamental differences between Southerners and Northerners shaped the course of antebellum American history; their conflict in the 1860s was not so much brother against brother as culture against culture.
Source:
http://personal.tcu.edu/swoodworth/McWhineyCracker.html
Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South.
By Grady McWhiney. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988)
According to Grady McWhiney, the North and
the South were destined to develop incompatible lifestyles because of each
regions’ unique ethnic roots. Whereas the North came from the stock of
industrious hard working Englishmen, the South spawned from the pastoral and
primitive society of the British Isle’s Celtic people. Written in 1988,
Cracker Culture presented the broadest attempt at surveying the common
white man of the Old South since Frank Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old
South published almost forty years before.
The book examines the culinary,
agricultural, herding, and entertainment activities of the Old South and
compares them to McWhiney’s understanding of pre-capitalistic Celtic
society. He continually asserts that these practices made Southern
lifestyle incompatible with the more Anglo oriented activities of the North,
and that the Civil War was almost preordained to happen because the
societies must eventually come into “mortal combat” to solve their
differences (269).
McWhiney formulaically arranges his book
into comparisons between Northern and Southern lifestyles and then English
and Celtic. The book does rely heavily on primary sources to further
McWhiney’s thesis, but he fails to engage the numerous critics that arose to
argue against him when he stated his “Celtic Thesis” in 1984 with the book
Attack and Die. He also never expands his argument to examine other
pre-capitalist agriculture societies to see if the activities of McWhiney’s
“Celts” are actually unique to that ethnic groups at all, or rather a
function of being a pre-capitalist society in general. The other major
issue with the book that McWhiney fails to address by sticking so close to
the primary sources is just how he is defining who a Celt is. Even by the
time of American Revolution, significant integration had begun to occur
between English and “Celts” in numbers that would have made a pure
distinction possible. Ironically, McWhiney has as hard a time defining
“Celts” in the Old World as much as some southern urban centers had defining
“Blacks” in the Old South.
The book does contain a number of
enlightening observations on the Old South though, despite its controversial
thesis. One of the most important is the emphasis on cattle and swine
herding. Previously, historians of open range ranching in the United States
have written about that agricultural pursuit’s development in the
Southwestern United States following the Mexican-American War and especially
after the American Civil War. They argued that it was rural
Anglo-American’s interactions with Mexican vaqueros that helped
develop open range ranching in the United States, but McWhiney skillfully
highlights that there was a longstanding tradition already in the South and
that it was that tradition that moved out west with Southerners as they
emigrated.
Cracker Culture’s thesis will invite
argument and debate for years to come, but it does have some features that
recommend it for use in the existing historiography. There are specific
sections that historians of the Old South can use as a springboard for
further investigation, and the overall narrative of the book would be useful
for sparking heated intellectual debate at the graduate level.
Unfortunately, the controversial nature of the book’s thesis would tend to
detract from its use at the undergraduate level. The book is an important
addition to the historiography of the Old South in a unique way.
Joe Stoltz
Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. By
Grady McWhiney. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.
Dr. McWhiney is a retired Texas Christian University
History Professor who held the Lyndon Baines Johnson chair for several years.
In his work, he puts forth the argument that the cultural lifestyle of
antebellum southerners in the United States had a strong similarity to the
cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales regions of the British
Empire. The author details these similarities in chapters noting settlement
patterns, heritage, herding styles, tendency towards hospitality, pleasures,
violence, morals, education progress and, worth.
In this work, Dr. McWhiney argues that the markedly
distinctive characteristics of Southern culture is an extension of Celtic traits
transplanted to the United States during the migration of that populace in the
eighteenth century. McWhiney contends that while the South became the receptacle
of the Celtic traditional society, the North became home to the more urbane,
worldly, strict, White Anglo Saxon Protestant English who followed the
Protestant work ethic.
This continuation of the habits morals and, values from the
two disparate cultures allowed the propagation of certain conceived bias,
prejudices and resentments to carry over into the newly settled lands. McWhiney
states, “This Cultural conflict between English and Celt not only continued in
British North America, it shaped the history of the United States” (p. 7). In
this argument, he also states that the Celtic southerners openly despised hard
work and felt that the more important aspects of life revolved around the
leisurely pursuits of drinking, gambling, fighting, hunting and all types of
sports. While in the North, more traits that are useful came to the front such
as hard work, attention to detail, thriftiness, education, and civilized
behavior to one another.
Most of the book details the similarities of the Celtic
culture and the Southern populace by extensively using personal accounts of
travelers from the North and foreign countries. The points that Dr. McWhiney
makes about the Southern culture involve the issues of the laziness of Anglos,
also known as Crackers. In his book, McWhiney states, “Nobody seems to have
worked very hard in the Old South” (p. 47). This statement also pertained to
slaves who, according to the author, also had a tendency towards idleness (p.
45-6). Would the slaves feel differently if they could state their own case
on labor and work ethics?
There are some problems with the author’s work; the attempt
to deny the importance of wealth and status among the southerners is laughable.
The remarks of slaves also becoming lazy and insolent appear false; after all,
slave owners would not have tolerated such insolence and after working in the
cotton fields all day, would slaves feel the same way? Dr. McWhiney also leaves
out the very important voice of the slaves in the Southern culture. He also
states that the Native Indians were lazy, slothful and lacking in work ethic
while not truly exploring or understanding the native culture that they come
from.
While interesting to the average reader, the book has flaws
tend to detract from the effort that Dr. McWhiney devoted to his book. His
arguments on the surface are plausible and many readers will chuckle when
specific examples are familiar to the reader; however the lack of a
bibliographical section and the extensive use of long footnotes also detract
from an otherwise interesting book.
Texas Christian
University
Thomas Walker
Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. By
Gradey McWhiney.
This book argues that a Celtic culture developed and existed in the
antebellum south. Author, Gradey McWhiney, affirms that Celtic natives
brought their culture to southern colonies in British North America, and
that their decedents (Crackers) passed on ancestral ways and daily traditions
that became rooted in the south. According to the author, this Celtic
culture was anti English and developed into anti Yankee sentiment before
and during the Civil War. His thesis explores and describes similarities
between Celts and Crackers. By exploring the accounts of southern
travelers, the author denotes their characterizations of these Celtic culture’s
attitudes and he classifies them as Scottish, Irish, and Welsh culture
characteristics. He will note how both Celts and Crackers held similarities
in values of hospitality, education, wealth, and most importantly violence.
The author will claim that these southerners were lazy, idle, illiterate
herders, who would rather fight, chew tobacco, hunt, play music, and loaf
rather than toil in agricultural pursuits. The rural attitudes that
developed in the south from these Crackers were not shared by their northern
counterparts and McWhiney will claim that, “Celts and Southerners were
simply too lazy, too unstable, too migratory, and too committed to sensual
pleasures to be yeomen.” This thesis based solely on the accounts
of traveling observers is a bold claim and its debate continues today.
McWhiney’s evidence is disputed in several ways, for example his claims
that a people could not change after several migrations, technological
advances, wars, and economic influences seems weak and unsubstantiated.
It appears that the author is creating a romantic idea of southerners and
their culture in the nineteenth century and does so without referring to
the anthropological scholarship. However, by exploring the cultural
heritage of southerners and their ancestors, he paints an interpretive
snapshot of those middle class travelers in the antebellum south.
It looks as if McWhiney defines this culture as completely unchanging and
with it their ideals of daily life. The authors’ denial of the importance
of wealth by these southern Crackers and Celts seems absurd. Surely
many white males desired the dollar, even among the Cracker Culture. By
surveying travelers’ accounts and perceptions of the southern people, one
must question their accuracy and definitions of the accounts or expressions
of the Cracker Culture. McWhiney interprets these travelers’
accounts well in order to support his thesis and it only demonstrates a
biased view rather than a multifaceted historical account.
This book is very entertaining reading although the evidence seems weak
at times. The author seems to dismiss those southern gentry who did
not follow the Cracker or Celtic influences. While reading the book
one is easily swayed that, all southerners who established themselves in
the south were Celts or Crackers and such was not the case. It is
a significant historical account of a unique culture because it tries to
define a exclusive class of southern white men – the Cracker. The
important debate of this cultures’ attitude on violence, slavery, religion,
racism, paternalism, and daily cultural lifestyles that according to McWhiney,
always resisted human and environmental influences is worthy of the historical
exploration.
Jeff Tucker
Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. By Grady
McWhiney with Forrest McDonald. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1988) Pp. 290.
In a very controversial but undeniably interesting book, Grady McWhiney
takes a hand at explaining why the north and south differed so much before
the Civil War. In short, he points to the settlement patterns of
the Old South. Predominately, he claims, Celts from the fringes of
Britain settled the southern colonies, while the more puritanical English
settled the northern ones. Each side carried with it their culture,
and the same oppositions that existed in the Old Country took root in the
new. Historians should look to Celtic culture, rather than slavery
or cotton, to explain what made the south southern.
The book is mainly a comparison between southern "cracker" culture and
that of the Celts in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. McWhiney hold
the two up side by side intending for his readers to be shocked by the
similarities between them. He follows a single basic formula throughout
the book, using a topical approach. He deals first with settlement
patterns to prove that Celts did indeed make up a majority of southern
settlers. He also employs surname analysis to this end. Next,
he examines the Celtic culture as a whole to show exactly what sort of
culture the settlers took with them. Here, he shows the Celts to
be lazy, illiterate, warm-hearted drunken shepherds who loved poetry, song,
fighting, hunting, gambling, etc.
Succeeding chapters take each area separately and make the thrilling
discovery that southerners seemed to like all those things too. There
was a basic underpinning that allowed southerners to live as they liked:
the vast majority of them engaged in free range herding. This in
itself might be one of the more controversial points of his book, as it
denies the knee-jerk stereotype of the south and king cotton. Still,
crackers put a premium on spare time for leisure, and herding allowed them
just that. They simply turned their cows or hogs loose into common
pasturage and picked them back up when they needed them.
As for hospitality, McWhiney argues that they certainly had more than
their share of it, like the Celts themselves. Yet, it sometimes seemed
less so to northerners, who often seemed less impressed with the spirit
of the moment than they did repulsed by the fare that accompanied it.
Like the Celts from whom they inherited their generosity, southern hospitality
was more spontaneous than planned, and usually did not plan for guest ahead
of time. Not surprisingly, McWhiney also argues that the southern
population also inherited its love for certain pleasures, such as hunting.
His chapter on violence is of the most interesting. Visitors to
the South often declared its inhabitant's love for violent play simply
barbaric. To southerners, however, flirting with danger was an enthralling
pastime. Also, like the Celts, would duel at the drop of a hat.
Some managed to get particularly gruesome, and the law rarely intervened.
In fact, in both areas, in order to be fully accepted as a man in society,
a boy must prove himself in a fight with another. Yet, strangely,
theft was not a real issue. This is partially explained by Celtic
culture once again, as they considered thievery lower than low, while violence,
committed honorably, just another fact of life. McWhiney finishes
out his book with chapters comparing Southern and Celtic views on education,
morals, progress, and various methods of judging value and worth.
Quite a few historians turned their guns to bear on this book after
it appeared in 1988. Their criticisms are, in some part, deserved.
The idea that the South's Celtic origins are the panacea to all that ails
antebellum historians seems more than a bit simplistic, to say the least.
McWhiney also needs to do more than simply point to a series of amazing
similarities in order to prove his point. They could, after all,
be mainly gigantic coincidences; surely Celts and Southerners are not the
only people groups to act in the manner he describes.
Other attacks miss their mark by a country mile. In a review for
the Journal of American History, Elliot J. Gorn of Miami University
takes issue with the idea that a culture can remain static enough to have
the kinds of effects that McWhiney wants to ascribe to it. This may
be true to a certain point, cultures do indeed change, but it is not at
all evident that McWhiney literally intends to argue that Celtic culture
remained unaltered for over the centuries. Rather, he alleges the
Southerners inherited their cultural forms from their ancestors, proving
it by showing their similarities to their forefathers. Another odd
assault comes from Michael P. Johnson of the University of California,
Irvine. Here, he complains that McWhiney fails to focus sufficiently
on women and blacks. Though he might have spent more time on women,
he does make clear that they tended to fall into line with the men, liking
the same things and looking at them in largely the same way. As to
the latter half of his objection, from the very beginning it is abundantly
clear that this is a book on cracker culture. McWhiney simply stayed
on topic by focusing mainly on whites. Though he may criticize the
book as "malarkey", Johnson seems to be spinning a few half-baked yarns
of his own if he actually means to suggest that significant numbers of
blacks should be grouped as crackers, and therefore included (1).
Though the ultimate utility of the book may be open to question, it
is still an interesting and informative read. The similarities between
the two cultures seem to be too strong to simply dismiss off hand, but
whether McWhiney's conclusions are fully correct remains to be seen.
Texas Christian University
Brian C. Melton
