Footnotes and Bloodsport: Francis Jennings on the Early American Frontier

My all-time favorite footnote comes not far into Francis Jennings' Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (1988). In it, Jennings scolds Allan W. Eckert for unquestioningly repeating previous claims that Sir William Johnson slept with a thousand Iroquois women. Jennings notes that a simple cross-check with an Iroquois population estimate by Johnson's contemporary Conrad Weiser proves the idiocy of this statement: "Eckert's sustained orgy would have made Johnson the father of his country in real truth." But Jennings does not stop there. He dismisses the rest of Eckert's work "as the same sort of slop," and delivers the coup de grâce in the bibliographic documentation: "Eckert, Wilderness Empire: A Narrative [should be called A Fiction], (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969)."¹ Many a historian has been roughed up in the back alley of a footnote, but how many of us have been clocked over the head in mid-citation?

That footnote sums up Jennings' distinctive literary style and lifelong mission as a historian. It is pugnacious and impatient to the point of being spiteful. Jennings found Eckert guilty of two scholarly crimes. The lesser one was his willingness to repeat a falsehood when a cursory examination of the evidence proved otherwise. Eckert's greater sin was deception; he packaged his story as fact ("A Narrative") when it was so obviously "A Fiction." Garden-variety scholarly sloppiness made Jennings irate, but deception—the telling and repeating of lies—caused the venom to rise in his pen and spill out on to the page.

It has been almost a decade since Jennings died on November 17, 2000. Tributes and reflections on his scholarship appeared in the wake of his death, including a retrospective essay in this journal.² The passage of time provides the opportunity to look at his work anew and assess what kind of legacy it has left for early American and Native American history. A book is a historian's bid for immortality. We like to think that long after we are gone, our works will remain on library shelves, where they will continue to enlighten readers, serve as professional models to graduate students, or at least torment undergraduates facing research-paper deadlines. But when a historian such as Jennings takes on the task of debunking those who came before, then what comes after his exit is especially important. Did the dragons he set out to slay stay dead?

Jennings authored six books, edited a seventh, and published over a dozen journal articles. Three distinct stages of development are evident...