A Republic of Fear

On December 24, 1776, as General George Washington made final preparations for the Continental Army’s surprise attack at Trenton, New Jersey, he drafted two letters. Surprisingly, these dispatches—which Washington penned from his Pennsylvania headquarters—addressed neither the logistics of crossing the frozen Delaware River the following night nor what to expect from the Hessian force that waited on the other side. Instead, Washington devoted precious minutes to stifling potential unrest among Native Americans hundreds of miles away. “Our Enemy the King of Great Britain endeavoured to Stir up all the Indians from Canada to South Carolina Against Us,” he wrote the leaders of two New England tribes. “The Cherokees and the Southern Tribes were foolish enough to listen to them, and to take up the Hatchet Against us. . . . Upon this our Warriours went into their Country, burnt their Houses, destroyed their Corn, and Oblidged them to sue for peace” (Parkinson, pp. 308–9). Do not make the same mistake, Washington warned.

Generations of American boys and girls have been weaned on the brave exploits of George Washington and his men as they crossed the Delaware the subsequent evening—a snowy Christmas night raid that, as historian Robert Parkinson observes, “is a staple of America’s founding mythology” (p. 308). What has long been forgotten, however, is the fact that in this crucial moment—and countless others—Washington and his fellow Patriots could not stop thinking about their nonwhite neighbors. The two books under review here seek to recover the early American obsession with African Americans and Indians. Together, these impressive works demonstrate that white perceptions of blacks and Indians—especially their abiding fear of these groups—shaped the early United States as much as midnight heroics and arguments about representation and rights.

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson’s The Common Cause explores the Patriot campaign to unify the thirteen American colonies during their struggle to break with Great Britain. Drawing a clear distinction between the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War, Parkinson argues that, once fighting broke out in 1775, Patriot leaders turned to war stories—many exaggerated, if not fabricated out of whole cloth—to mobilize support for war against their cultural cousins. If the burgeoning imperial crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s was, at its root, “a massive argument” over the meaning of “opaque words” such as “liberty” and “consent,” then the war that followed decisively shifted the terms of the debate (p. 4). Thereafter, Patriot leaders labored to unite colonists together behind a common cause that rested as much on accounts of slave insurrection and Native American atrocity as it did on abstract defenses of liberty and self-determination.

The printing press was the chief weapon in this new ideological battle. Newspapers had proliferated in the colonies in the decades leading up to the Revolution, so much so that by the time the first shots of the war were fired on Lexington Green, thirty-seven printers operated between Boston and Savannah. The struggle with Great Britain also politicized the American press. On the cusp of the Revolution, nearly all of the colonies’ printers—whether Patriot or Loyalist—used their weekly papers to disseminate partisan letters, essays, and stories through “intricate communication webs emanating from American seaports” (p. 43). Deftly reconstructing the web of one of these Patriot papers—William Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal—from its subscription books, Parkinson exposes a network of delivery routes that radiated out from Philadelphia into the interior of Pennsylvania, surrounding colonies, and beyond.

Bradford’s allies were quicker to recognize the importance of this colonial communication network than their Loyalist counterparts, building a new postal system, funneling information and funds to fellow Patriots, and harassing printers they viewed as untrustworthy. George Washington saw its value, too. In July 1777, he...