Native Americans in the American Revolution: How the War Divided, Devastated, and Transformed the Early American Indian World by Ethan A. Schmidt (review)

This new book by Ethan A. Schmidt is the first single-volume treatment of the history of Native Americans in the Revolution since Colin G. Calloway’s book The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). While Calloway offers vibrant case studies of several key groups and their experiences, Schmidt’s goal is a “comprehensive, yet succinct” account of all of America’s indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi River (p. 6). The intended audience is students in upper-division history courses on the American Revolution. Lacking images, artwork, or graphics, and including just one map, the volume seems more likely to be useful as a reference book, and a very nicely written one at that.

Schmidt’s treatment is organized into eight chapters. After a brief introduction, chapter 1 explores Pontiac’s Rebellion and the resulting end of “middle ground” diplomacy on which so much early American strategy rested (p. 13). The next three chapters explore “The Collapse of British Indian Policy” in the South, the North, and the West, respectively. Then there are three chapters about the actual fighting and diplomacy of the American Revolution, again divided regionally into the South, the North, and the West. The eighth chapter provides a too-brief overview of the aftermath of the American Revolution, with all three regions covered in fewer than twenty pages. The conclusion abruptly shifts to images of Indians in popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to reflect on the long struggle of Native Americans in American history.

The book’s great strength is its detail and particularity. In the middle six chapters, Schmidt provides not just general regional discussions but also particular narratives for specific tribes. In contrast to Calloway’s book, Schmidt’s account is indeed more comprehensive at the tribal level. While these details are impressive, they are sometimes overwhelming. To his credit, Schmidt writes in an engaging fashion, and the narrative flows smartly and logically. Schmidt explains complex Indian actions well, and he succeeds in presenting Indian perspectives. Still, it is hard to imagine an undergraduate audience finding all this fine detail useful or easily comprehensible.

Additionally, one sometimes feels that the work of true synthesis—the identification of unifying themes and issues—could have been strengthened. Perhaps this would be asking for the impossible; Schmidt very often stresses that particularity itself is the only take-home point, since each Indian group “made its decisions regarding the Revolutionary War for reasons specific to its own situation and for the purpose of ensuring its own survival” (p. 118). At the same time, the themes in each of the individual tribal experiences— generational conflicts, balance-of-power diplomacy, shifting alliances—feel familiar enough from one case to the next to call for greater synthetic discussion. Sometimes one even wonders whether these themes, or at least a more chronological framework, could have provided a better organizational scheme for the book. In addition to helping tell a more truly synthetic story, a thematic organization would have reduced repetition. Still, the book is a fine and welcome contribution. For teachers of the American Revolution, it may not belong on the syllabus, but its contents will be invaluable for planning lessons and lectures.