American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (review)

In 1921, the town of Vincennes, Indiana, erected an elaborate monument to celebrate the sesquicentennial of George Rogers Clark’s epic march during the American Revolution. The expedition marked the first time that the American state asserted itself in the West, and so it is unsurprising that the predominant subject of the memorial is Clark himself. His figure appears as a “mythic” warrior, who sits confidently astride a horse while confronting a pair of awestruck, and apparently dumbfounded, Indian men who are either unable, or unwilling, to step aside. Behind him, two fearsome, but intrepid, soldiers struggle to follow the path blazed by their valiant leader (p. 274). Such a portrayal seems more befitting of the works of Frederick Jackson Turner than those of a modern scholar, and yet the Clark monument evokes a larger historical truth that forms a basis for the latest book by University of Virginia historian Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan.

In contrast to Turner’s “frontier thesis,” Griffin presents a far darker view of the nation’s origins, arguing that the ongoing conflict between Indian people and settlers, which emerged in the Ohio valley after 1763, bred a virulent racism among whites. When imperial officials rejected appeals for a genocidal offensive against Native American communities, the freedom-loving, Indian-hating westerners pressed for independence from Britain, and submitted loyally to the new United States government after it sent an army to crush Native American resistance. Such intervention, however, came at a high cost. While peace returned to the backcountry, the complete autonomy that settlers once knew gradually dissipated as the power and reach of the young republic grew. Thus, the Clark monument represents, for Griffin, a paradoxical “fable” of the nation’s founding which “relegated a revolution defined by essentialist hate and unfettered popular sovereignty to a forgotten past that had served as midwife to this more enlightened present” (p. 276).

Although the American Leviathan symbolizes the power of the Federal government, the settlers who streamed into the Ohio Valley after the Seven Years’ War are the real focus of this book. Many are, in fact, the very same folks that Griffin examined in his earlier study, The People With No Name, and he musters an impressive array of archival sources in support of his conclusions about them. Warfare was a personal affair in the West, and so Griffin cites a depressing litany of atrocities perpetrated by both sides to illustrate how the region’s Hobbesian environment injected settlers with racism. Unfortunately, Griffin does not fully explain the effect that such sustained violence had on the attitudes of Indian people, nor does he adequately explore Native American responses to the Revolution, which historians Daniel Richter, Gregory Evans Dowd, and Colin Calloway all suggest were varied and evolving. Nevertheless, his effort to remind us of the crucial position of the frontier in the Revolution, and his desire to uncover the active roles that westerners played in this struggle, represents a valuable and challenging addition to a historiography that too often focuses on events and people of more settled areas along the Atlantic coast. If Griffin is correct in describing the emergent American state as a “leviathan,” then surely the wave of settlers who invaded and occupied the interior could represent the “behemoth” that made such growth possible.