Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a
borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial
intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the
Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of
rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the
complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer
offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American,
African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with
one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and
the territory they came to share.
The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions
about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved
away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace
nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves
revived and modified African and American premises about patronage
and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American
doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying
particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of
civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other
Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to
contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and
destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.