Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (review)

This thought-provoking essay sketches the transfer of English military culture to northeastern America, and challenges numerous prevailing assumptions. The theme is that the English succeeded when they had adequate logistic support, undertook an offensive strategy, and employed defensive tactics. The author distinguishes three phases: the contact generation, colonial inheritors, and the British army of 1755-65.

Militarily, early New Englanders were led by European veterans who successfully applied methods that could result in one-sided slaughters at Mystic (1637) or Weequaesgeek (1644) forts. Muskets had a greater range than bows and could be decisive with disciplined firing; well-built and well-defended garrison houses allowed the English to withstand Indian attacks. Defeat came when the English ignored their manuals, took the tactical offensive, or otherwise allowed themselves to be ambushed. When they invested enough persistently, the English won wars of attrition against Indians.

Chet assails the military incompetence of English colonials between 1675 and 1755. "Defensive lethargy" (p. 95) amid expansion created frontiers without adequate fortification, trained forces, or supplies. Colonial governments refused the cost of systematic defense, gambling on offensive raids by the untrained. Ultimately, this strategy failed; colonials did not fight "Americanized" warfare.

The British army were the conquerors of this book's title. Systematic and expensive roads, transport services, and fortifications, built by John Forbes, Lord Loudoun, Jeffrey Amherst, let the bigger army win. Braddock's fatal lapse in textbook precautions was disastrous, but even George Washington eventually went from critic to imitator of the British. Writing before the latest study by Alexander Campbell, Chet preserves the British army's myth of the irregular Royal Americans.

A short book with a bold argument is bound to prompt questions. While Chet claims not to be studying Indian warfare, he is implying a great deal. No distinction is made between hunter-gatherers, hunters who grew some grain, and those who depended primarily on their corn. Only the last would defend cornfields, as in Powhatan Virginia. Winter raids against the summer villages of dispersed hunters were rather empty victories. Chet measures success in European terms, as taking or holding places; he considers the Indians as recklessly offensive, and does not appreciate the place in Indian logistics of captives, or looted cattle, grain, and supplies. On the other hand, more could be made of the increasing Indian need for those rapidly deteriorating essentials, gunpowder and guns. Indians could not win wars without reliable European suppliers, as occurred in King Philip's War and Pontiac's War. Chet's perspective will also help in evaluating the French strategic struggle between marquesses Vaudreuil and Montcalm.

This clear and suggestive study, cautiously supported by several works in its strong bibliography, deserves the attention of all serious students of colonial and Indian warfare.