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Ethnohistory 47.2 (2000) 493-495



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Book Review

The Iroquois in the War of 1812


The Iroquois in the War of 1812. By Carl Benn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xiv + 272 pp., introduction, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.)

The League of the Iroquois emerged from the internecine turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the Lower Great Lakes region of North America. When Europeans began spreading into the region, the League became the foundation of a Native American political confederacy that was comprised first of five, later six, nations that spoke Northern Iroquoian languages. Their compact matrilineal village societies were home bases for Iroquois men who spent much of their time alternating between war and diplomacy before and during the colonial period. Competing Dutch, English, and French enterprises could not afford to ignore the Iroquois, and the Iroquois quickly learned that their own interests were not necessarily identical with those of any of the European powers.

Iroquois war parties destroyed many neighboring nations in the seventeenth century, extirpating, dispersing, or absorbing them in turn. In the eighteenth century they were major players in the wars between the French and the English. Various Iroquois communities were allied to one side or the other until the French were driven off of the continent. Most, but not all, sided with the British in the American Revolution, with the result that afterward many were removed permanently to reserves in Canada. Those that remained loyal to the Americans remained on reservations in New York. The Iroquois role in war and diplomacy seemed to be at an end at the beginning of the nineteenth century, their men domesticated to agricultural pursuits formerly relegated to women. [End Page 493]

Carl Benn has written a history of the last hurrah of the Iroquois as separate allied military units in the wars for North America. In 1812 it was still possible for the Iroquois nations of the United States and Canada to raise fighting units and operate more or less independently in support of American and British military campaigns. Benn shows that even in 1812 the Iroquois were still mindful of their own interests. British commanders were less ambivalent toward Iroquois combatants than American ones were, and the Canadian Iroquois avoided eviction to the West partly because of their loyalty. Many but not all Iroquois on the American side were similarly able to hold on in New York after the war ended.

To traditional Iroquois, war was the natural state of humanity. Peace was desirable but it needed constant tending. When peace failed, they prosecuted war as inexpensively as possible. To them the European willingness to make huge sacrifices in war and then put their faith in supposedly permanent treaties was fatuous. Nevertheless, Iroquois customs of warfare had changed by 1812. They no longer tortured captives, a sign that war had become as depersonalized for them as it was for Europeans. It was the last time that Iroquois soldiers would take scalps or adopt captives.

The book offers good historiography throughout. But chapter three stands out as something special. Here the reader finds out how military organization and technology were integrated around the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is an unusually lucid discussion of Iroquois troops as light infantry and their strategic and tactical importance. Far from being the erratic and uncontrolled auxiliaries portrayed in popular books and films, Iroquois units played vital roles in the armies that were lucky enough to have them. As skirmishers, scouts, rear guards, ambushers, and fast-moving flanking units, they were unsurpassed. They were trained in the hunt and in individual combat from early youth, and they were superb marksmen. Their very presence was a psychological weapon, for terror is not a twentieth-century invention. While it is currently popular to ridicule the rigid masses of brightly-colored regular infantry of the Napoleonic era, well-ordered regiments firing muskets in unison won wars, even in North America. But to achieve maximum effectiveness, they needed the integrated support of light infantry, and that is what the Iroquois and other American...

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