In this paper we examine the activities of US Army topographers and engineers in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) watershed during the violent transformation of the region from the heartlands of the Creek confederacy to US territorial control. A vital waterway for the Creek in the late eighteenth century, the rivers would become an important transportation network in the US plantation economy by the early nineteenth century. We emphasize that the army made its initial infrastructural improvements in the region to provide security for the plantation system. Army engineering in the ACF watershed began in the struggle for the Gulf borderlands, as white American settlers, British forces, Indigenous peoples, and Black maroons fought for control over the contested terrain. US engineers and topographers produced territorial knowledge and physical infrastructure to facilitate the occupation of Indigenous territory and elimination of potential spaces of Black freedom. Topographic knowledge would later serve as the foundation for restructuring the land as property, naturalizing its possession by white plantation owners. Similarly, roads and waterway improvements, created to facilitate troop movements, would later serve as vital transportation infrastructure for settlement and expanding plantation slavery. This paper demonstrates how military engineering techniques designed to secure the Nation in the context of race war subsequently provided the coordinates for reorganizing the land within an emergent plantation economy inside its territorial borders.

中文翻译：

---

在墨西哥湾东南部沿岸设计土著剥夺和种植园奴隶制


在本文中，我们研究了美国陆军地形学家和工程师在该地区从克里克邦联中心地带向美国领土控制的暴力转变期间在阿巴拉契科拉-查塔胡奇-弗林特 （ACF） 流域的活动。这条河是 18 世纪后期克里克河的重要水道，到 19 世纪初，这条河将成为美国种植园经济的重要交通网络。我们强调，军队在该地区进行了初步的基础设施改进，为种植园系统提供安全保障。ACF 流域的军队工程始于争夺海湾边境地区的斗争，当时美国白人定居者、英国军队、土著人民和黑人黑人为争夺有争议的地形的控制权而战。美国工程师和地形学家创造了领土知识和物理基础设施，以促进对原住民领土的占领和消除黑人自由的潜在空间。地形知识后来成为将土地重组为财产的基础，使其归化为白人种植园主的所有权。同样，为方便部队移动而建造的道路和水道改善，后来成为定居和扩大种植园奴隶制的重要交通基础设施。本文展示了在种族战争背景下旨在保护国家的军事工程技术如何随后为其领土边界内新兴种植园经济中的土地重组提供坐标。