The King’s proclamation of 1763 provided the colonial organization for the American territories acquired by England after the Seven Years’ War. From the cessions of France and Spain the provinces of Canada and East and West Florida were created. The October proclamation also settled a number of long-standing colonial problems in British America. Initially, this decree was prepared to meet the demands of the American Indians, many of whom were involved in Pontiac’s northern insurrection. After 1762-1763 the specter of Pontiac apparently haunted the Whitehall personnel who formulated colonial policy. Since the general security of British America obviously required Indian satisfaction and peace, the Board of Trade employed the Proclamation of 1763 to accommodate the native populations. An Anglo-Indian boundary therefore necessarily emerged in England’s post-war planning.
The Anglo-Indian boundary in the southern colonies is the subject of this splendid historical geography. De Vorsey carefully scrutinizes the origins, arrangements, and ultimate delineation of the southern Indian line in both geographical and historical terms. An unexpected but welcome byproduct of this work is a sound, well-written historical survey of Indian affairs in the South from 1763 to 1775. Since the southern boundary passed along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast seaboard to the Mississippi River, De Vorsey presents a settlement by settlement analysis of the Anglo-Indian line that existed after 1763. His work is organized to reveal the post-war relationship of six colonial provinces—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, East Florida, and West Florida—with such powerful Indian tribes as the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks. In each province a frontier separating Indian and English communities was fashioned after a period of negotiations. The Indian Boundary in the Southern Colonies therefore offers geographers and historians alike a thorough account of the Anglo-Indian boundary settlement as it affected southeastern America following the Seven Years’ War.
Only a few criticisms are relevant. Readers will probably wish that De Vorsey had expended more effort to relate his excellent boundary maps to the textual presentation. Another criticism concerns the limited assessment of the extant southern Indians in the period 1763-1775. Only a few pages are devoted to a discussion of the “competitors for the land” as the author defines the late eighteenth century natives of the South. Except for these minor complaints, De Vorsey’s study must be considered an important contribution to colonial historiography and historical geography.
