Whatever the solution to Britain’s problems in North America might have been, by the end of 1767 it should have been evident that the army was not it. His Majesty’s forces had been the starting point for British reasoning about the future of the empire at the end of the war. The Triumvirate’s reforms and Grenville’s revenue measures had aimed at paying for an American military establishment that was supposed to defend the colonies and control the conquered territories. But these efforts to solve problems of control and finance had strained relations between colonies and metropolis to the snapping point, and the army had proven incapable of projecting imperial authority beyond the gates of its forts. The preeminent agency of British sovereignty in America had proved itself a blunt instrument at best, but nonetheless one capable of striking sparks wherever it touched.8 Whether anyone in London understood that the postwar colonies might grow more combustible with every administrative miscalculation—or for that matter if such an epiphany would enable the Rockingham ministry to shift British policy out of the course Halifax and Grenville had set at war’s end—remained to be seen.
THUS A STORY that began with a blundering Anglo-American military force attempting to project British imperial power beyond the Appalachians, at the Forks of the Ohio, ends with British military detachments stationed not only at the Forks but at Michilimackinac on the upper Great Lakes, Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi, Pensacola on the Gulf of Mexico, St. Augustine in East Florida, and Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. The distresses that followed the war, in the form of Indian rebellion and civil unrest in the colonies, had been resolved, and no immediate threat to the empire’s future tranquillity loomed. Thus ministers and policy makers and members of Parliament might well have believed that, despite its unlikely beginnings and its anxious conclusion, the story had been a narrative of imperial triumph. But in truth the British army was fully in control at none of these far-flung posts. The vast empire survived not because of Britain’s power, but despite its weakness, at the sufferance of the peoples whom the British believed they had conquered, and on the strength of the emotional ties between Britons and the Anglo-American colonists who had participated in the conquest. And the great Indian war had shown, as the Stamp Act crisis had demonstrated, that both the sufferance of the supposedly conquered and the allegiance of the colonists had limits that were all too easy to exceed.
Acknowledgments
The only thing that tempers the joy of thanking the many people and institutions that have helped me produce this book is the virtual certainty that the following list is incomplete. In that sense it seems fitting that a book that began with a confession should close with an apology: to those whose names deserve to appear below, but do not, I plead the poor defense of a faulty memory, and ask forgiveness. In the same spirit, I must also acknowledge my overwhelming debt to all the authors on whose work I have drawn, and without whose researches I could never have attempted to write a synthetic narrative—the kind of book that depends most of all on previous historians’ creativity, industry, and insight. To anyone whose work I have misconstrued, let me say that I freely claim all shortcomings, misstatements, and errors as my own.
Many institutions have contributed expertise, goodwill, and (not least) money to support this project. The generous financial aid of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center of Harvard University, and the Council on Research and Creative Work at the University of Colorado, Boulder, supported me as I read and wrote my way through to the end. En route I benefited from the help of staff members at Norlin Library (especially the interlibrary loan office), Widener Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and—particularly—the William L. Clements Library. A trip to Ann Arbor in late 1998 not only reminded me of the great generosity and kindness of Arlene and John Shy, but also revealed something that I had only dimly sensed before, the amazing richness of the Clements’s collections of eighteenth-century maps and images. Thanks to the help, advice, and knowledge of Arlene, John Dann, and Brian Dunnigan, I found in that library’s holdings nearly 90 percent of this volume’s illustrations, including the Scenographia Americana, which appears complete (I believe for the first time) at its center.
In recognition of that extraordinary contribution, the Clements receives the special credit line that appears on the title page. This gesture must not, however, be understood to reflect any lack of gratitude to the other institutions that have contributed portraits and engravings from their collections. I am, therefore, most pleased to thank the John Carter Brown Library, the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the McCord Museum of Canadian History/Musée McCord d’histoire canadienne, the National Galleries of Scotland, and Washington and Lee University for copies of the images that each has furnished, along with the necessary permissions to reprint them here.
I doubt that any author has ever had better luck in the all-important endeavor of finding editors and others expert in the care and handling of manuscripts. Christopher Rogers initially encouraged me to undertake a book on the Revolutionary era and showed great forbearance when the project began to shift its shape. Chris’s successor, Peter La Bella, saw the manuscript through its transition from a college-list to trade book. Jane Garrett read the unfinished manuscript, encouraged me to rethink the limits of my story, and ultimately enabled me to bring to light the book that lurked in what I had come to fear was an unpublishable heap of pages. I owe her more than I can easily say. I take pleasure, too, in acknowledging the patience and helpful good humor of Webb Younce and Megan Quigley, Jane’s assistants; Hannah Borgeson’s astonishing scrupulousness and skill as a copy editor; the discernment and care of Constance Areson Clark in creating the index; the professionalism of the production editor, Kathleen Fridella, and the production manager, Claire Bradley Ong; and the accomplished artistry of Robert Olsson and Archie Ferguson, who designed, respectively, the book and its jacket. Finally, Patricia Murphy’s astuteness as a processor of words and ingenuity as a solver of computer problems—not to mention her willingness to work overtime—allowed me to submit the manuscript on time and in a usable electronic format. Without Pat, neither of those things would have been possible.
Friends and colleagues have helped out in numerous invaluable ways. At the University of Colorado I have benefited from the advice, support, and encouragement of colleagues in a history department well stocked with superb scholars. I am indebted to them all, but particularly to Professors Philip Deloria, Steven Epstein, Robert Ferry, Martha Hanna, James Jankowski, Gloria Main, Jackson Turner Main, Ralph Mann, and Mark Pittenger, all of whom have listened, offered advice, and helped me clarify my thinking over the long process of writing and revision. Others at the University of Colorado and other institutions have also contributed equally generously as readers, advisers, critics, and supporters: Gary Holthaus, John Stevenson, and Dennis Van Gerven; Robert Bakker, Michael Bellesiles, John Boles, Ira Gruber, and Timothy Breen (as well as the students in his graduate and honors seminars at Northwestern, who helped me improve a chapter from part 1, way back in the spring of 1990); Susan Hunt of the Charles Warren Center and Barbara DeWolfe of Widener J; Kevin Kelly, P. J. Kulisheck, Barry Levy, David A. Macdonald, Charles Royster, David Sicilia, and the 1992–93 seminar participants at the Warren Center and the American Antiquarian Society.
As important as these, in another way, are the seven members of my “imagined audience.” Knowing that the general readers whom I hoped to reach might have no more in common than a love of stories and a willingness to take ideas seriously, as I wrote I tried to keep in mind a group that shares those qualities: a biologist, a farmer, a teacher, a geologist, a lawyer, a college administrator, and a pillar of the RFLPOA. Dwight Anderson, Joseph Erickson, Donald Anderson, Scott Mefford, Christopher Jedrey, Micheline Jedrey, and Melva Anderson may all be surprised to see their names here. But in fact they have (as I imagined) looked over my shoulder for years, urging me to speak more dire
ctly, chiding me for my pomposities, helping me to decide what to write, what to keep, and what to throw away. I hope I have not disappointed them; they have been indispensable to me.
Whatever else it brings, arriving at midcareer allows one the gratifying opportunity to rely equally on former teachers and former students. I have continued to draw inspiration and encouragement, as well as a due measure of blunt criticism, from William Griswold, Arthur Worrall, and Bernard Bailyn: men who first taught me what historians do, and whose examples move me to admiration no less today than they did thirty years ago. Similarly, three former students, Ruth Helm (senior instructor in American Studies at the University of Colorado), Eric Hinderaker (associate professor of history at the University of Utah), and Brian DeLay (currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard), have reminded me of how much teachers stand to learn from those whom they have been privileged to teach. Ruth gave the manuscript a close reading when it was partially complete, in 1993; Eric and Brian read it all, when it was finished; and all three gave me criticism full of insight and helpful suggestions. Two old friends and graduate-school contemporaries of different disciplines also read the completed manuscript and offered their unique, and uniquely valuable, perspectives on it. Randy Fertel brought a literary critic’s expertise to bear on the book’s narrative structure and style, and for his generous commentary I am truly grateful. Andrew R. L. Cayton, on whose historical judgment and knowledge I have relied for two decades, performed the singularly heroic act of reading the book through twice: piece by piece as I wrote it, and again at the end, as a whole. In conversations touching not only on the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, but on a huge range of topics inside and outside of early American studies, Drew has helped me understand many things. Most of all, however, he has enabled me to see why it is a professor’s duty at least to try reaching readers beyond the academy’s bounds.
Two final obligations, the most important of all, remain to be declared. Samuel DeJohn Anderson is almost the exact contemporary in age of a project that has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for absorbing his father’s time and attention, yet he has never shown anything less than tolerance toward the book and charity toward its too-often-preoccupied author. No son could reasonably have done more, nor could any have given a father more delight. Perhaps some of the camping and fishing trips that Sam has forgone can still, somehow, be repaid; the debt of happy memories that I owe him for the ones we’ve thus far managed to fit into our summers, however, can never be.
Similarly, what Virginia DeJohn Anderson has contributed to this project, and to my life, lies so far beyond reckoning that it seems fruitless even to try describing it. After twenty years together, she still listens patiently when I talk about my work; still helps me think though my interpretations; still reads my prose and prods me to write it more clearly. That I should have found such a partner in graduate school, of all places, fills me with gratitude, the smallest token of which appears at the front of this book. Though for years I thought that the only possible dedicatee would be Zeno’s paradoxical frog, Virginia helped me kick the little wretch over the cliff’s edge at last. And for that, as for so many other things, I owe her much, much more than she knows.
Notes
INTRODUCTION:
The Seven Years’ War and the Disruption of the Old British Empire
1. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York, 1997), xi.
PROLOGUE: Jumonville’s Glen, MAY 28, 1754
1. This account reflects inferences drawn from a variety of documents and described below, in notes for chapter 5. It derives from: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington,Colonial Series, vol. 1, 1748-August 1755 (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 107–25 (Washington to Dinwiddie, 29 May 1754 [two letters]; to Joshua Fry, 29 May 1754; to John Augustine Washington, 31 May 1754; to Dinwiddie, 3 June 1754); from “Journal de Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, Lieutenant des Troupes, 1754–1755,” Archives de Québec: Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec, 1927–28, esp. 372–3, 378–80; the deposition of John Shaw, 21 Aug. 1754, in William L. McDowell, ed., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754–1765 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 3–7; evidence from the Dinwiddie papers quoted in L. K. Koontz, Robert Dinwiddie: Servant of the Crown (Glendale, Calif., 1941), 313–15. Also George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase, 1744–1760 (Toronto, 1968), 54–5; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 6, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York, 1968), 30–2; Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973), 334–6; and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 240–1.
PART I: THE ORIGINS OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1450-1754 CHAPTER ONE: Iroquoia and Empire
1. The British colonists, having already named one war after the reigning monarch, tended to call this conflict the French and Indian War. Historians, equally stumped, have either followed the colonists’ practice, invented other names (the Fourth Intercolonial War, the Great War for the Empire, the War of the Conquest), or used its European title, the Seven Years’ War—despite the fact that it lasted seven years in Europe, where hostilities extended from 1756 to 1763, and slightly over six in North America. While a case can be made for referring to the European and American phases of fighting by different names, I will use “the Seven Years’ War” to describe the entire conflict.
2. Tanaghrisson’s origins: Francis Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy (Syracuse, N.Y., 1985), 250–1; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, s.v. “Tanaghrisson.” On the Great League and the Confederacy see esp. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 1–49; and id., “Ordeals of the Longhouse: The Five Nations in Early American History,” in id. and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1987), 11–27; also Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1970), 21–107. The Iroquois were called the Five Nations until the 1720s, when they became the Six Nations by admitting the Tuscarora Indians to the Great League. On the defeat of the Tuscaroras by the Carolinian colonists, the Tuscarora migration to New York, and the adoption by the Iroquois, see Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Durham, N.C., 1928), 158–61; Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Federation of Indian Tribes with the English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984), 297; and id. et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 173.
3. On mourning war, ritual torture, and adoption practices, see Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1983): 528–59. For the epic of Deganawidah and Hiawatha, see Paul A. W. Wallace, The White Roots of Peace (1946; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y., 1968). On the condolence ceremony as a basis for Iroquois diplomacy, see William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in Jennings et al., Iroquois Diplomacy, 3–36, esp. 18–21; also Richter, Ordeal, 30–49.
4. Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago, 1982), 26; Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 42–3; Richter, “War and Culture,” 528–59.
5. Francis Jennings, “Iroquois Alliances in American History,” in id. et al., Iroquois Diplomacy,39.
6. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Republics, and Empires in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991); see esp. 1–185. I have adopted White’s conceptual scheme and with it most of his terminology. Thus I speak of the refugee groups who gathered west of Lake Michigan (the heart of the geographical “middle ground”) as Algonquians, even though, as White points out, th
e Algonquians were only the predominant linguistic grouping among peoples who included Iroquoians (the Huron-Petuns) and Siouans (Winnebagos). Although I have spoken of fatherhood in terms of Algonquian kinship systems, the cultural role of father as mediator was also common to the Iroquois, who like their enemies reckoned kinship matrilineally. (In both cases, the disciplinary parenting responsibilities belonged to mothers and maternal uncles.) The word “father” resonated very differently for Europeans— whose kinship structures were patrilineal and who thought in terms of patriarchal power— than for Indians in matrilineally organized cultures. As the French experience suggests, however, divergent meanings could open a path to fruitful intercultural relations, built creatively out of mutual misunderstanding; but this could happen only if the Europeans refrained from exercising power coercively.
7. Richter, Ordeal, 190–235.
8. For varying views of the character of Iroquois neutrality, see Jennings, “Iroquois Alliances,” 39; Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 111–14; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit, 1983), 15–18 et passim; and Richter, Ordeal, 236–54.
9. For the French perspective on these aspects of the Iroquois policy, which served French interests but also, through the entente with the Far Indians, exacerbated the difficulties woven into the structure of the fur trade, see esp. W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1983), 133–6. White tends to agree, although he argues for more complexity; see Middle Ground, 119–85. Jennings believes the French enjoyed more benefits; see “Iroquois Alliances,” 39.
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