Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860 : Bonds of Rebellion

Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries is a collection of essays on the tangled yet variegated histories of rebellious actors in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gulf South and its linked environs. These essays bring into relief the preponderance of rebellion in the Gulf South—broadly conceived of as the region encompassing the modern states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas and their peripheries—as a driving force of social, political, and cultural change. Following diverse rebels, revolutionaries, militants, insurgents, opportunists, and subversives from the early eighteenth-century alluvial floodplains of Louisiana to the mid-nineteenth-century coastal prairies of southeast Texas, this volume recasts the Gulf South as a centripetal region in the history of early America, a place where worlds collided, overlapped, combined, and renewed themselves, where revolutionary fervor could thrive and percolate, mix, and coagulate. Bound together by violence, exploitation, greed, honor, family, community, and ideological commitment, Gulf South rebels drew from longer traditions of insurgency, even as they forged new ones. Their legacies would resonate well beyond their seemingly localized disturbances, from the Caribbean to western Europe, illuminating how Indigenous, Black, and Euro-American Gulf South rebels operated in a rapidly shrinking, colonial world.