The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation by Colin G. Calloway (review)

While virtually all Americans acknowledge George Washington's significance in U.S. history, few understand how deeply Native people influenced him and his career. Interactions with Indians formed his character, fired his ambitions, set their stamp on his prospects and projects, molded his principles and politics, shaped his military strategies, and informed his policies as president. The latter, in turn, reshaped the world in which Indians lived, and constrained their capacity for self-determination. Washington's life thus provides a uniquely powerful lens through which to view the agency of Native and Euro American peoples alike in the Revolutionary era.

This summary states (I hope accurately) the central claim of Colin Calloway's important book, a volume unique in the library of works on Washington's life and times. Wide in scope, densely detailed, and crammed with characters, The Indian World of George Washington is not an easy read. The same can be said of War and Peace, of course, and legions of readers will testify that it's well worth reading. So is this book, which also shares another characteristic with Tolstoy's masterpiece.

Isaiah Berlin maintained that Tolstoy was neither a "hedgehog [that] knows one big thing"—a thinker whose worldview provides a "single, universal, organizing principle"—nor a "fox [that] knows many things," a writer whose plenitude of ideas are "centrifugal rather than centripetal" in character.¹ Rather "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog," and that offers the key to his work.² That Calloway also believes in being a hedgehog is evident in the summary above, which reflects the insight that informs all his work: American history cannot, must not, be separated from Native American history. Yet Calloway is also by preference a fox, whose fine-grained narratives situate incidents and individuals at the heart of the highly contingent histories of groups and nations.

As contemporary critics pointed out of War and Peace, telling detailed stories in the service of a single grand insight risks tendentiousness, confusion, or both. That is equally true of this book, which makes its large point through a narrative populated by scores of Native actors, many of them known, like characters in Russian novels, by several names. Calloway minimizes confusion, in part, by prefacing the book with a descriptive list of 115 Indian characters (more than in the Oxford edition of War and Peace). Even those figures who make a single appearance contribute something to a tale that amounts to more than the sum of its parts; together they give solidity to Calloway's story.

But what exactly is that story? Calloway provides too few mid-level generalizations—narrative signposts—to keep the reader continually oriented to the relation between specific incidents and larger meanings. The result is a story that sometimes doubles back on itself chronologically, often elides causal explanations, and postpones until the last pages any direct discussion of significance. Unless the reader has been taking careful notes, she or he may well reach that brief conclusion with too vague a recollection of events and actors to be sure that the narrative supports Calloway's contentions.

That the story does in fact cohere with the claims set out at the beginning of this review can be seen from a summary of the plot, a Cliffs' Notes version of which I herewith offer as an aid in navigating Calloway's three-part tale. Its beginning traces Washington's views of Indians to his interactions with them before the early 1760s; the middle follows his story and those of Native peoples through two decades of revolutionary upheaval; and the end explains how lessons he began to learn in his twenties informed the Indian policy he...