All I want in God’s creation

Is a pretty wife

And a big plantation—

Way down

In the Indian nation

—Popular ditty, especially in Georgia, ca. 

It is you [planters] who have eaten up the land: the spoil of the poor

is in your houses; what mean ye that you crush my people and grind

the face of the poor.

—From the ‘‘Ceremony of the Land,’’ by Howard Kester for the

Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, eastern Arkansas, ca. 

2

 

t

Before , ‘‘widowed’’ landscapes throughout the west-

ern fringes of the Euro-conquered South became public

land. During the Revolutionary War, beleaguered state gov-

ernments made cession treaties with sickened and retreat-

ing native nations, principally to provide bounties for sol-

diers, war widows, and anyone who aided the cause of

independence. Virginia reserved much of what became

Kentucky plus an enormous slice of what became south-

central Ohio for its veterans. And Georgia, by means of a

remarkable lottery, distributed what amounted to nearly

three-quarters of a big state to more than , men,

women, and families. The lottery was ‘‘democratical’’ by de-

sign, and it evokes, somewhat, the enlightened purpose of

Georgia’s British founders, who aimed to make a slavery-

free, white yeoman’s colony. With the lottery, old Chero-

kee and Upper Creek farms, gardens, and hunting grounds

were inherited (almost free), as it were, by land-hungry,

independence-minded settlers.^1

Georgians, most notoriously their governors and repre-

sentatives in Milledgeville, the state capital, also became

the most aggressive of white southerners in the acquisi-

tion of additional, remnant native preserves and then, at

last, total Indian removal. Ironically, by the time President