Native Americans In The American Revolution

Examines the Native American experience during the American Revolution.

For many colonists, the American Revolution provided the opportunity to continue displacing Native Americans. This book provides an account of the role of Native Americans in the Revolution's outbreak, progress, and conclusion. It provides full coverage of the Revolution's effects on Native Americans, and details how Native Americans were critical to the Revolution's outbreak, its progress, and its conclusion. The work covers the experiences of specific Native American groups such as the Abenaki, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, Seminole, and Shawnee peoples with information presented by chronological period and geographic area. The first part of the book examines the effects of the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s on Native peoples in the Northern colonies, Southern colonies, and Ohio Valley respectively. The second section focuses on the effects of the Revolutionary War itself on these three regions during the years of ongoing conflict, and the final section concentrates on the postwar years. It adds the Native American perspective to reader's understanding of the American Revolution, a critical aspect of this period in history ; Supplies a synthesis of the best current and past work on the topic of Native Americans in the American Revolution ; And shows how the struggle over the definition and utilization of Native American identity, an issue that was initiated with the American Revolution, is still ongoing for American Indians. -- From publisher's website.

This valuable book provides a succinct, readable account of an oft-neglected topic in the historiography of the American Revolution: the role of Native Americans in the Revolution's outbreak, progress, and conclusion. There has not been an all-encompassing narrative of the Native American experience during the American Revolutionary War period—until now. Native Americans in the American Revolution: How the War Divided, Devastated, and Transformed the Early American Indian World fills that gap in the literature, provides full coverage of the Revolution's effects on Native Americans, and details how Native Americans were critical to the Revolution's outbreak, its progress, and its conclusion. The work covers the experiences of specific Native American groups such as the Abenaki, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, Seminole, and Shawnee peoples with information presented by chronological period and geographic area. The first part of the book examines the effects of the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s on Native peoples in the Northern colonies, Southern colonies, and Ohio Valley respectively. The second section focuses on the effects of the Revolutionary War itself on these three regions during the years of ongoing conflict, and the final section concentrates on the postwar years.

"An authoritative, sweeping, and fresh new biography of the nation's first president, Colin G. Calloway's book reveals fully the dimensions and depths of George Washington's relations with the First Americans."--Provided by publisher.

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. This important work recounts the tragic events on the forgotten Western front of the American Revolution—a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. The Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, are erroneously presented in history texts as allies (or lackeys) of the British, but Native America was working from its own internally generated agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest. Native America won the war in the West, holding the land west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems. While the British may have awarded these lands to the colonists in the Treaty of Paris, the Native Americans did not concur. Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and their associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. Food, livestock, homes, and trees were destroyed, first in the New York breadbaskets, then in the Ohio granaries—spreading famine across Native lands. Uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio. This book tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, the Natives held back the American onslaught.

George Washington had contact with Native Americans throughout most of his life. His first encounter as a teenager left him with the impression that they were nothing more than an "ignorant people." As a young man he fought both alongside and against Native Americans during the French and Indian War and gained a grudging respect for their fighting abilities. During the American Revolution, Washington made it clear that he welcomed Indian allies as friends but would do his utmost to crush Indian enemies. As president, he sought to implement a program to "civilize" Native Americans by teaching them methods of agriculture and providing the implements of husbandry that would enable them to become proficient farmers--the only way, he believed, Native Americans would survive in a white-dominated society. Yet he discovered that his government could not protect Indian lands as guaranteed in countless treaties, and the hunger for Indian land by white settlers was so rapacious that it could not be controlled by an inadequate federal military establishment. While Washington appeared to admit the failure of the program, this book--a unique and necessary exploration of Washington's experience with and thoughts on Native Americans--contends he deserves credit for his continued efforts to implement a policy based on the just treatment of America's indigenous peoples. Distributed for George Mason University Press

At the time of the Revolutionary War, a fifth of the Colonial population was African American. By 1779, 15 percent of the Continental Army were former slaves, while the Navy recruited both free men and slaves. More than 5000 black Americans fought for independence in an integrated military--it would be the last until the Korean War. The majority of Indian tribes sided with the British yet some Native Americans rallied to the American cause and suffered heavy losses. Of 26 Wampanoag enlistees from the small town of Mashpee on Cape Cod, only one came home. Half of the Pequots who went to war did not survive. Mohegans John and Samuel Ashbow fought at Bunker Hill. Samuel was killed there--the first Native American to die in the Revolution. This history recounts the sacrifices made by forgotten people of color to gain independence for the people who enslaved and extirpated them.

A rising-star historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award • Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize • Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America’s marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by slaves, American Indians, women, and British loyalists living on Florida’s Gulf Coast. While citizens of the thirteen rebelling colonies came to blows with the British Empire over tariffs and parliamentary representation, the situation on the rest of the continent was even more fraught. In the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish forces clashed with Britain’s strained army to carve up the Gulf Coast, as both sides competed for allegiances with the powerful Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations who inhabited the region. Meanwhile, African American slaves had little control over their own lives, but some individuals found opportunities to expand their freedoms during the war. Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war’s outcome. DuVal introduces us to the Mobile slave Petit Jean, who organized militias to fight the British at sea; the Chickasaw diplomat Payamataha, who worked to keep his people out of war; New Orleans merchant Oliver Pollock and his wife, Margaret O’Brien Pollock, who risked their own wealth to organize funds and garner Spanish support for the American Revolution; the half-Scottish-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, who fought to protect indigenous interests from European imperial encroachment; the Cajun refugee Amand Broussard, who spent a lifetime in conflict with the British; and Scottish loyalists James and Isabella Bruce, whose work on behalf of the British Empire placed them in grave danger. Their lives illuminate the fateful events that took place along the Gulf of Mexico and, in the process, changed the history of North America itself. Adding new depth and moral complexity, Kathleen DuVal reinvigorates the story of the American Revolution. Independence Lost is a bold work that fully establishes the reputation of a historian who is already regarded as one of her generation’s best. Praise for Independence Lost “[An] astonishing story . . . Independence Lost will knock your socks off. To read [this book] is to see that the task of recovering the entire American Revolution has barely begun.”—The New York Times Book Review “A richly documented and compelling account.”—The Wall Street Journal “A remarkable, necessary—and entirely new—book about the American Revolution.”—The Daily Beast “A completely new take on the American Revolution, rife with pathos, double-dealing, and intrigue.”—Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World