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| 51 3 “We are men” Native American and Euroamerican Projections of Masculinity During the Seven Years’ War Tyler Boulware “Your hands are like the hands of a child,” declared a Cherokee warrior to a European prisoner. “They are unfit for the chace, or for war. In the winter’s snow you must burn a fire; and in the summer’s heat you faint in the shade.” The Cherokee, on the other hand, “can always lift the hatchet: the snow does not freeze him; nor the sun make him faint. We are men.” Thomas Percival, an eighteenth-century English physician and author, directed this account to the young readers of his work A Father’s Instructions. Although intended as an allegory, the moral of the story was clear: the superior physical and martial capabilities of Native Americans meant they were real men, and thus the antithesis of Europeans and their colonists.1 The above encounter is not only a metaphor. During the Seven Years’ War in North America (1754–63), in which Britain and France struggled for imperial supremacy, the British superintendent of Indian affairs in the southern district directed his deputy agent to respect the wishes of their Cherokee and Catawba allies, who had signified their dislike of provincial soldiers joining their expeditions against French-allied Indians. Since these colonists were not “used to that kind of service & therefore not fit for it,” wrote Edmond Atkin, they “are a clog upon them and baulk them in their operations.” As experience had shown from previous campaigns, colonists could not keep up with Indians “either in marching or running; nor endure hunger; and by making much noise and fire in the woods, make a discovery of them to the enemy.” Atkin consequently instructed his commissary to prevent “any white men” from joining Indian scouting parties, “unless at the voluntary requests of those Indians.”2 Thomas Percival and Edmond Atkin lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic , but their understandings of Native American and Euroamerican capabilities —or lack thereof—in woodland warfare were remarkably similar. 52 | Tyler Boulware Where Percival differs from Atkin is his conspicuous association of proficiency in border warfare with masculinity, which can be explained by the nature of the two communications. Percival wrote to instruct English boys on how to become men, whereas Atkin’s administrative advice conveyed the wishes of Cherokee and Catawba warriors. Recent scholarship has examined the connections between Anglo-Indian warfare and masculinity. Ann Little’s Abraham in Arms is perhaps the most comprehensive account of the gendered dimensions of intercultural warfare between Native and newcomer in early America. Focusing on the northeastern borderlands primarily during the seventeenth century, Little demonstrates how European and Indian “ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways in which these people understood and explained their experience of cross-cultural warfare.” But such notions were not limited to colonial New England. The mid-eighteenth -century Ohio country and southeast exhibited many similarities with the seventeenth-century northeastern borderlands. In fact, Little argues that much of the gendered language used in woodland warfare during the mideighteenth century had its origins in seventeenth-century New England. Although the literature has been slow to develop these connections, masculinity -laden discourse among Native Americans, Europeans, and colonists permeated intercultural communication during wartime in both regions.3 Nevertheless, the era of the Seven Years’ War is distinctive for several reasons. First, warfare consumed a new region in North America and a new generation of borderland participants. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the mid-Atlantic and southern backcountries came to play a more decisive role in the shaping of British America, as tens of thousands of Euroamerican settlers surged west and south from Pennsylvania and Virginia, thereby engaging powerful Native American polities in the Ohio country and southeast. Most of these new arrivals had not been steeped in a “puritan warrior tradition,” as in New England, which limited the influence of Christian piety on masculine discourse. The period also witnessed an imperial contest that made warfare a seemingly constant endeavor in the American hinterlands. British regulars, diverse Native American warriors, and provincial soldiers, militiamen, and rangers engaged one another in border warfare on a scale never before seen—even in seventeenth-century New England, where English troops were absent in both the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. The Seven Years’ War also marks a turning point in the history of the mid-Atlantic and southeastern borderlands because it...

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