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

Colin Calloway’s latest book—in a career filled with pioneering works in Native America and early American history—effectively demystifies George Washington by firmly rooting his lifespan from adolescence to the presidency in Indian Country: “Indian people . . . loomed large in Washington’s world . . . [and] his life intersected constantly with them, [as] events in Native America shaped the direction his life took” (4). Washington’s pervasive exposure to the Indigenous peoples of eastern North America was nowhere more evident when it came to land, for “Indian land dominated his thinking and his vision for the future,” given his occupations as surveyor, speculator, military commander, and president (4). Washington was surrounded by “the Indian world of his time”; his life was shaped by collaborative and oppositional relationships by Indian people (15). The enormity of this influence is central to Calloway’s purposes for the book: “this is not another biography of Washington, but it employs a biographical framework to show how Native America shaped the life of the man who shaped the nation” (15).

Calloway divides his book into three parts, tracking the centrality of Indigenous peoples to Washington’s life as he grew from childhood to adulthood. Part One details Washington’s early years, to young adulthood, culminating in his experiences in the Seven Years’ War. As Calloway demonstrates, the central Native figure in Washington’s early life was Tanaghrisson, one of the “half-kings” appointed by the Haudenosaunee to represent the Six Nations’ political interests in the Ohio River Valley and the man who, through his influence upon Washington, ignited the Seven Years’ War in North America. Throughout Washington’s teenage escapades as a surveyor and his speculative efforts in the Ohio Company, his fortunes in the “Indian land business” hinged on Native peoples and politics, and particularly on Tanaghrisson’s maneuverings among Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, and other Native communities in the Ohio River Valley (357). Washington and Tanaghrisson never crossed paths in person during these early years, a situation—great influence without face-to-face contact—that changed in 1753–1754 when Governor Robert Dinwiddie tasked a 21-year old Washington with staking Virginia’s claims to lands in the Ohio River Valley. As Washington stepped into Tanaghrisson’s world, he proved but a “novice in the geopolitics [of] Indian diplomacy,” blundering his way into several Native intrigues that culminated in the 1754 Battle of de Jumonville Glen and the execution of the French commander. These two events propelled England into war with France and dramatized vividly to all onlookers the scope of Haudenosaunee influence within the Ohio River Valley (66). Part One extends its discussion of Washington’s early experiences in Indian Country with analysis of his exploits during the Seven Years’ War alongside Native diplomats, combatants, and refugees, focusing in particular, first, on the ways that the “frontier war [was] fought against Delawares and Shawnees . . . in collaboration with Cherokees and Catawbas” and additionally on Cherokee attacks upon Virginia between 1759 and 1761 (124).

Part Two explores Washington’s continued immersion in Native America up through the Revolutionary War. Calloway makes plain Washington’s failure to learn from his youthful experiences as a surveyor and speculator in his discussion of Washington’s continuing investments in the “Indian land business” and his joining of the Mississippi Land Company, actions that helped instigate Pontiac’s War/Rebellion in 1763. Among Washington’s partners and friends in this period is William Crawford, well-known among historians of early America for participation in the raiding and destruction of Indian villages in Ohio through the 1770s; in 1782, Crawford would be burnt at the stake by an alliance of Ohio tribes taking revenge for the Gnaddenhutten Massacre, the execution earlier that year by Pennsylvania militiamen of 28 Delaware men, 29 women, and 39 children, Christian...