At a very early date, it must have been apparent to the Chickasaws that their only hope of survival in the face of a steadily encroaching white man's world would be to imitate and emulate the latter's society, his Constitution, and his laws. Long before Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act destined to uproot large numbers of peoples and result in some of the greatest mass migrations in the history of the United States, the Chickasaws, largely by a process of trial and error, attempted to sow the seeds for their plan of survival in keeping with their realization of this all-important fact. After arriving in the new land soon to be known as Indian Territory, they continued this process in the hope that their identity as a tribe and a Nation might never be lost. The Chickasaw experience in Indian Territory became indicative of a culture confronted with possible extermination by a larger and more powerful culture. Their story illustrates an intense struggle on the part of the Chickasaws to utilize and regulate the land on a tribal basis of ownership in the face of a fast encircling world which favored the concept of individual private property. One of the major problems that concerned the Chickasaws during this crucial period was how to absorb some of the white man's institutions and way of life, and still cling to tradition and remain basically Chickasaw.

How did the Native South become the Deep South within the span of a single generation? This dissertation argues that these ostensibly separate societies were in fact one and the same for several decades. It significantly revises the history of the origins of antebellum America’s slave-based economy and shows that the emergence of a plantation society in Alabama and Mississippi was in large part a grassroots phenomenon forged by Indians and other native inhabitants as much as by Anglo-American migrants. This native transformation occurred because of a combination of weak European colonial regimes, the rise of cattle, cotton, and chattel slavery in the region, and the increasingly complex ethnic and racial geography of the Gulf South. Inhabitants of the Gulf South between the American Revolution and Indian removal occupied a racial and social milieu that was not distinctly Indian, African, or European. Nor can it be adequately defined by hybridity. Instead, Gulf southerners constructed something unique. Indians and native non-Indians—white and black—owned ranches and plantations, employed slave labor, and pioneered the infrastructure for cotton production and transportation. Scotsmen and Spaniards married Indians and embraced their matrilineal traditions. Anglo- and Afro-American migrants integrated into an emergent native cotton culture in which racial and cultural identities remained permeable and flexible. Thus, colonial and borderland-style interactions persisted well into the nineteenth century, even as the region grew ever more tightly bound to an expansionist United States. The history of the Gulf South offers a perfect opportunity to bridge the imagined divide between the colonial and early republic eras. Based on research in multiple archives across five states, my work thus alters our understanding of the history and people of an American region before the Civil War and reshapes our framework for interpreting the nature of racial and cultural formation over the long course of American history.