Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

III. Facing the Revolution from Indian Country

172 Gregory H. Nobles define the connection between the colonies’ racial identity and revolutionary independence. The answer to the question of slavery in the colonies, Waldstreicher suggests, came in a question: “Why not simultaneously reform both colonial relations and that subset of colonial relations known as African slavery?”88 It comes as no surprise that Franklin and his fellow Founders failed to accomplish both. Even in Franklin’s post-Revolutionary embrace of antislavery, Waldstreicher concludes, he seemed hardly ahead of the rest: “His antislavery, like that of the American Revolution, was a runaway’s antislavery: compromised, and compromising.”89 The strength of Waldstreicher’s book does not depend on his estimation of the strength of Franklin’s character or the timing and depth of Franklin’s commitment to antislavery. Rather, it stems from his convincing insistence that the question of slavery, far from being a late-breaking result of revolutionary strategy or ideology, “was present at the creation.” Franklin’s own journey from runaway to revolutionary took him down “the path from British to American nationhood, a path that . . . would be traced not only around, but also directly through, the problem of slavery.”90 Franklin did not walk alone. How other Founders navigated the same path through the problem of slavery becomes, then, a similarly critical question to ask of all the prominent men in the Revolution’s upper reaches. No student of the Founders can now responsibly turn away from that path and, without careful investigation and explanation, dismiss it simply as the road not taken. III. Facing the Revolution from Indian Country 7. Native American Perspectives on Euro-American Struggles At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Daniel Richter challenged early American historians to do what he and other scholars of Native Americans had been doing for years: to look at the colonial and Revolutionary eras by “facing east from Indian country.” Making that simple-seeming shift in perspective had important implications. First, it meant turning around from the Eurocentric viewpoint of the determined conquest of the continent (or “the invasion of America,” as Francis Jennings called it a gen88 Ibid., 181, 186. 89 Ibid., 244. 90 Ibid., 177, 144. Waldstreicher expands his interpretation of the Founders in Slavery’s Constitution : From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2002). Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution 173 eration ago) and the traditional east-to-west, colony-to-nation narrative of early American history.91 Instead, taking the view from Indian country helps us understand Native people’s perspectives on what they saw. Seeking the perspective of Indian people on history, in fact, means seeing Indians in history, not only as people who made an appearance on the margins of the American narrative but as people central to the story, who made a critical contribution to the long-term transformation of early America. The longenduring tendency among earlier historians to portray Indians as stereotypical savages turned them into subhuman obstacles, ominously blocking the path of progress until swept aside by modernity or, more often, by the military. The more patronizing but equally dehumanizing tendency to see them as nature’s natives turned them into saccharine symbols, frozen in tradition and suspended on the sidelines of history.92 As an alternative, taking the view from Indian country now gives us a better understanding of Native peoples as active participants in a past they helped shape. Second, this alternative perspective of “facing east” also sets forth new geographical and conceptual boundaries for framing early American history , up to the American Revolution—and beyond. Facing east (or, better to accommodate other perspectives that come into play, outward, in all directions) from Indian country re-centers the narrative away from the coastal colonies and takes us deeper into the interior regions of the continent , where Native Americans, no less than Euro-Americans, pursued their own diplomatic and military strategies to secure their own interests. Indeed, the very terms “Native American” and “Euro-American” lose much 91 Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge , MA, 2001). Francis Jennings’s pathbreaking book, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonists , and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975), was one of the first works to offer scholars an alternative perspective on the implications of the European entry into North America, and the subsequent emergence of the so-called “new Indian history” discussed in this essay owes a great debt to this provocative approach. For the more immediate era...