A detailed account of Captain Basil Hall's travels in North America between 1827 and 1828, first published in 1829.

A British navy officer travels extensively, from New England to the deep South and a bit into the Mid-West, offering thoughts on American manners, morals, political views and situations, and so forth. vol. 3 of 3

At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were moved—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks’ collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement. Unlike the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen and their people. Christopher D. Haveman’s meticulous study uses previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the ethnohistory of American Indian removal.

Excerpt from Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, Vol. 3 of 3 Washington stands on the left bank of the Potomac, in what is called the District of Columbia - a portion of territory distinct from all the States in the Union, and appropriated by common agreement as the site of the capital, and the residence of the General Government. This space contains one hundred square miles; and many persons in that country believe the time will come when their capital shall cover the whole area of this great square. Washington offers so many objects of attraction to strangers, that we were tempted to remain there upwards of a month. The society is very agreeable, and is interesting, in many respects, from being composed of persons assembled from every part of the Union, and, I may add, from every part of Europe - for the Corps Diplomatique form a considerable party of themselves. The same kindness and hospitality were shown to us here, as elsewhere; and the hours for evening parties being always early, it was possible to go a good deal into company without much fatigue; although the smallness of the rooms made the heat and crowd sometimes not very pleasant. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the effects of democracy in America were seen to spread from Congress all the way down to the personal habits of its citizens. Bringing together political theorists, historians, and literary scholars, this volume explores the idea of American democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. The essays span the period from Independence to the First World War and trace an intellectual history of Anglo-American relations during that period. Leading scholars trace the hopes and fears inspired by the American model of democracy in the works of commentators, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Charles Dilke, Matthew Arnold, Henry James and W. T. Stead. By examining the context of debates about American democracy and notions of ’culture’, citizenship, and race, the collection sheds fresh light on well-documented moments of British political history, such as the Reform Acts, the Abolition of Slavery Act, and the Anti-Corn Law agitation. The volume also explores the ways in which British Liberalism was shaped by the American example and draws attention to the importance of print culture in furthering radical political dialogue between the two nations. As the comprehensive introduction makes clear, this collection makes an important contribution to transatlantic studies and our growing sense of a nineteenth-century modernity shaped by an Atlantic exchange. It is an essential reference point for all interested in the history of the idea of democracy, its political evolution, and its perceived cultural consequences.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

America was a source of fascination to Europeans arriving there during the course of the nineteenth century. At first glance, the New World was very similar to the societies they left behind in their native countries, but in many aspects of politics, culture and society, the American experience was vastly different - almost unrecognisably so - from Old World Europe. Europeans were astounded that America could survive without a monarch, a standing army and the hierarchical society which still dominated Europe. Some travellers, such as the actress Fanny Kemble, were truly convinced America would eventually revert to a monarchy; others, such as Frances Wright and even Oscar Wilde, took their opinions further, and attempted to fix aspects of America - described in 1827 by the young Scottish captain Basil Hall, as 'one of England's "occasional failures"'. Many prominent visitors to the United States recorded their responses to this emerging society in their diaries, letters and journals; and many of them, like the fulminating Frances Trollope, were brutally and offensively honest in their accounts of the New World. They provide an insight into an America which is barely recognizable today whilst their writings set down a diverse and lively assortment of personal travel accounts. This book compares the impressions of a group of discerning and prominent Europeans from the cultural sphere - from the writers Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Oscar Wilde to luminaries of music and theatre such as Tchaikovsky and Fanny Kemble. Their reactions to the New World are as revealing of the European and American worlds as they are colourful and varied, providing a unique insight into the experiences of nineteenth century travelers to America.

In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession. By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.