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  • White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America
  • Greg O’Brien
White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America. By Fintan O’Toole . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. ISBN 0-374-28128-9. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 402. $26.00.

As the principal mediator between the British government and the Iroquois Indians, especially the Mohawks, in the mid-eighteenth century, British Indian Superintendent William Johnson figured prominently in the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War) as a leader of colonial militia and Indian forces against the French. He famously led the forces that captured French commander Baron de Dieskau in 1755 and that seized Fort Niagara in 1759. As a result of these efforts and others like them, Johnson became wealthy and titled, becoming a baronet in 1755 and being granted hundreds of thousands of acres of land by the British Crown and by Indian nations. Acting partly out of self-interest and partly on behalf of the British empire, Johnson ingratiated himself among the Iroquois by learning their language, participating in their condolence ceremonies, hosting their incessant visits to his home at Johnson Hall, acquiring trade goods for their use, and fathering children with Iroquois women (the most important of whom was Molly Brant).

Because he played such a pivotal and intimate role in Iroquois-British relations, Johnson has long intrigued scholars of the Iroquois and the colonial northeast, and has attracted numerous biographers. The fourteen volumes of his papers published by the State University of New York in the mid-twentieth century added to Johnson's utility as a primary source. Though scholars have long noted Johnson's Irish roots, few, until Fintan O'Toole, have attempted to explain Johnson's actions among the Iroquois on the basis of his supposed Gaelic cultural norms and suppressed Catholicism. O'Toole treads new ground with his thesis that Johnson represented one of the first examples of the Irish invention of America (by Irish, O'Toole means culturally Gaelic and spiritually Catholic), but he has stretched circumstantial evidence to make the case.

There are too many instances of O'Toole drawing tenuous conclusions, such as the Anglican Johnson's hypothetical Catholicism, to deconstruct in this short review, but one is especially worthy of mention. O'Toole writes that there were certain "aspects of [Johnson's] Irish background that made him peculiarly sensitive to the nature of Indian culture" (p. 57). However, the one "British" ethnicity that interacted with Indians as traders, Indian agents, and military officers to a higher degree than any other was the Scots. The history of British–Native American relations is replete with Stuarts, Camerons, McIntoshes, McGillivrays, Grants, and Campbells, among others. Though the eighteenth-century Irish and Scots shared some general cultural characteristics, the evidence suggests that we should be looking for something peculiarly Scottish, rather than Irish, in trying to understand the success of large numbers of British mediators with American Indians.

Though a journalist for the Irish Times, and not a professional historian, O'Toole nevertheless has mined the relevant secondary literature and the [End Page 916] multi-volume collection of Johnson's papers to produce a handy starting point for beginning to understand William Johnson and the world he lived in.

Greg O’Brien
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
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