Atlantic History Native Americans and the American Revolution
by
Kristofer Ray
  • LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2022
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0360

Introduction

Historians have come a long way since the era when Whig rhetoric provided blanket explanations for the causes of the American Revolution. Few scholars, for example, accept that ideas or constitutionalism can explicate fully the demise of the British North American Empire. Most concede the impact made by customs abuse, land speculation, and other forms of corruption upon the colonial/imperial rule of law. They regularly address the contradiction between the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of slavery in North America during the Revolutionary era. In combination with the “continental” historiographical turn, such diligence has led some scholars to rethink the centrality of the Native experience to the Revolution. Indeed, Euro-Americans lived on the periphery of an Indigenous North America in the last half of the 18th century. Try as they might the British Empire, Spanish Empire, and, subsequently, the new American Republic could not simply assume control over the continent. Even to begin to try was a task requiring significant investment—both in terms of more systematic Indigenous diplomacy and in terms of addressing political structures unfit to accommodate imperial (and state formation) needs. And while the war itself was divisive and destructive, it by no means broke Native Country—Indigenous polities maintained their agency and sovereignty well past 1776, 1783, or 1815. This article focuses on historians who examine Native and continental realities in the extended era of the American Revolution.

General Overviews

These works offer multiple approaches to the generic issue of the American Revolution in Native Country. Fullagar and McDonnell 2018 takes a global approach, while Taylor 2016 and Saunt 2014 consider the era from the perspective of the continent. Ray 2020 emphasizes the importance of blending “eastern” Revolutionary narratives with events in the trans-Appalachian west to understand the origins of the Revolution. Calloway 1995 is the groundbreaking study of the topic for the eastern third of North America, and Schmidt 2014 offers a similar argument with more extensive detail. Deloria 1999 critiques 20th-century narratives of the Revolution. Fisher 2016 offers a strong introduction to recent historiographies of the Revolution.

  • Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511816437Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The classic starting point for the topic. Calloway focuses on eight communities and shows how policies of neutrality gave way as the British civil war stretched into Native Country.

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  • Deloria, Vine, Jr. “The American Revolution and the American Indian: Problems in the Recovery of a Usable Past.” In Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader. Edited by Vine Deloria Jr., 206–222. London: Fulcrum, 1999.

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    Slightly dated, but this essay offers a strong critique of the 20th-century American tendency to whitewash the nature and meaning of the Revolution.

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  • Fisher, Samuel. “Fit Instruments in a Howling Wilderness: Colonists, Indians, and the Origin of the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly 73.4 (2016): 647–680.

    DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.73.4.0647Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Solid overview of important Revolutionary historiography.

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  • Fullagar, Kate, and Michael McDonnell, eds. Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

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    Argues that Indigenous people around the globe both created and exploited the volatility of the era to secure their sovereignty. Authors include Tony Ballantyne, Justin Brooks, Colin Calloway, Kate Fullagar, Bill Gammage, Robert Kenny, Shino Konishi, Elspeth Martini, Michael McDonnell, Jennifer Newell, Joshua Reid, Daniel Richter, Rebecca Shumway, Sujit Sicasundaram, and Nicole Ulrich.

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  • Ray, Kristofer. “The Indigenous Roots of the American Revolution.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Edited by Jon Butler and Angela Hudson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

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    Maintains that understanding the origins of the Revolution requires scholarly examination of how trans-Appalachian affairs affected eastern colonies.

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  • Saunt, Claudio. West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

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    Explains that imperial Europeans fought over land they could not control while Native polities secured advantages of their own. Examples of Native agency include the Osages (west of the Mississippi), the Sioux (the Dakotas), and the Creeks (who navigated the Caribbean to trade with Cubans).

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  • Schmidt, Ethan. Native Americans in the American Revolution: How the War Divided, Devastated, and Transformed the Early American Indian World. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014.

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    Focuses on Indigenous reactions rather than pursuing a more proactive narrative, but nevertheless provides a well-written extension of Calloway 1995.

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  • Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.

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    Casts aside traditional interpretations of the Revolution as a minimally violent, high-minded war over ideas. While not a Native-centric work, Taylor weaves a story that would be incomplete without the vital contributions of Native peoples.

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Textbooks and Surveys

No textbooks specifically focus upon the Indigenous experience in the American Revolution. The books listed here offer strong surveys of the Native experience broadly. Calloway 2008 and Oberg 2018 are comprehensive narratives from pre-contact to the present. Hurtado, et al. 2014 offers an introduction, historians’ essays, and primary documents for a broad chronological sweep of Native history. DuVal and DuVal 2009 and Rushforth and Mapp 2009 are collections of primary documents with introductions and other editorial guidance for the early American period. Taylor 2001 weaves Euro-American history with Native history to show how each influenced the other in early North America.

Journals

No journal is devoted specifically to the Revolutionary era, although those that publish on early America cover it in great detail. Early American Studies, Commonplace, Journal of Early American History, and William and Mary Quarterly focus on the period from first contact through the early 1800s. The Journal of the Early Republic deals with the era between the Revolution and the American Civil War. Articles on American Indians from pre-colonization to the present appear in American Indian Quarterly and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Articles in Ethnohistory are by historians and anthropologists studying Indigenous peoples, mostly in the Americas. Native South is much the same but limits its geographic focus to the area loosely corresponding to the geographic bounds of the “American South.”

Primary Sources

In addition to the document collections listed under Textbooks and Surveys, the works cited here are primary texts in accessible publications. They constitute only a brief entry into the primary sources available on the Indigenous experience in the Revolution. The sources are European in origin, but ethnohistorical methods allow glimpses of Native perspectives and motivations. Adair 2005 [originally published in 1775] and King 2007 both follow British soldiers in the era of the Seven Years’ War. Sullivan 1921–1965 is a near-comprehensive printing of the correspondence of Britain’s first Indian superintendent for northern affairs. Cook 1885 is a collection of journals associated with the brutal 1779 Sullivan-Clinton campaign into Iroquoia. Abbot 1985– is a comprehensive publication of correspondence received by George Washington during the War of American Independence. Deloria and Demallie 1999 provides a large amount of Native-centric diplomatic material, as does Vaughn 1979–2004. Caughey 1938 publishes letters between Creek leader Alexander McGillivray and his Spanish contacts in the 1780s. Carter 1934– offers selected documents relevant to American expansion in the 1780s and 1790s. Waselkov and Braund 2002 document naturalist William Bartram’s descriptions of the Revolutionary-era Native South.

  • Abbot, William, David R. Hoth, William M. Ferraro, et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 1775–1783. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985–.

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    28 vols. to date. Not Native specific, but General Washington received detailed reports of Native polities, military actions in which Indians were involved, and the impact of the war upon Indigenous lives.

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  • Adair, James. The History of the American Indians, Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

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    Originally published in 1775 (London: E & C Dilly). Flawed narrative suggesting that Native peoples descended from the “Lost Tribes of Israel,” but Adair nevertheless provides snapshots of the lifeways, events, politics, and diplomacy of the Native South. Reprint ed. by Kathryn Holland Braund.

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  • Carter, Clarence Edwin, ed. The Territorial Papers of the United States. Vols. 2, 3, and 4. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934–

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    Chronicles Native, European, and American encounters across trans-Appalachia during the 1780s and 1790s.

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  • Caughey, John Walton. McGillivray of the Creeks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938.

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    Letters offering important insight into the multiple competing interests in the Revolutionary era Gulf South.

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  • Cook, Frederick. Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779. Albany: New York State Secretary’s Office, 1885.

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    A collection of journals relating to this 1779 campaign. Much of the volume details centennial celebrations of that campaign, offering insight into 19th-century Revolutionary memory and ethnocentrism.

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  • Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Raymond Demallie, eds. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775–1979. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

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    An important collection of treaty-making material from two premier scholars of Native America.

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  • King, Duane, ed. The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake: The Story of a Soldier, Adventurer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756–1765. Cherokee, NC: Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press, 2007.

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    Richly detailed account of Cherokee life during the Seven Years’ War. Timberlake visited the Overhill Town region in 1761 and 1762, subsequently accompanying three Cherokee men on a diplomatic visit to meet with George III and other British political figures.

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  • Sullivan, James, Alexander Clarence Flick, Milton Wheaton Hamilton, et al., eds. The Papers of Sir William Johnson. 14 vols. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–1965.

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    Johnson was the British superintendent for northern Indian affairs from the 1750s until his death in 1774. His papers offer invaluable snapshots of Native (primarily though not exclusively Haudenosaunee) lifeways, politics, and diplomacy.

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  • Vaughn, Alden, ed. Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1979–2004.

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    Indispensable twenty-volume collection of documents related to Euro American–Indigenous encounters. Volumes 11, 12, 14, and 18 are particularly relevant for the study of the Revolutionary era.

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  • Waselkov, Gregory, and Kathryn Braund, eds. William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

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    Modern edition of naturalist William Bartram’s travel narrative through the Native South between 1773 and 1777.

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The Extended Revolution

To understand the Revolutionary moment scholars should move beyond rigid chronological boundaries and consider broader impacts. Revolutionary complexities neither began in 1763 nor ended in 1783. Greene 2007 cautions against arbitrary historiographical demarcations. Greer 2018 compares three imperial policies of land use in early America. Calloway 2018 offers a Native-centric biography of George Washington. Jortner 2011 highlights the contingency of Native-US encounters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Dowd 1992 shows how evolving ideas of Indigenous identity both shaped and were shaped by forces across the 18th century. Cayton and Teute 1998 illuminates the creative construction of frontiers. Kelton 2015 details the impact of smallpox in shaping Indigenous narratives of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Merritt 2003 and Silver 2008 show the process by which disparate white and Native groups constructed racial identities. Owens 2020 offers a military overview of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

  • Calloway, Colin. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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    Uses Washington’s life as a window into important Native leaders and the polities they represented. In so doing, Calloway places Indigenous people at the center of the Revolutionary narrative.

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  • Cayton, Andrew, and Fredrika Teute, eds. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

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    Explores how Natives, Europeans, and Africans constructed frontiers defined as “creative arenas” for new forms of social and political organization. Authors include Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William Hart, Jill Lepore, James Merrell, Jane Merritt, Lucy E. Murphy, Elizabeth Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika Teute.

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  • Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

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    Tells the fascinating and vital story of how spiritual renewal movements across the eastern half of North America stimulated the idea that Native peoples were a single race. Out of it developed a struggle between advocates of Indigenous nationalism and advocates of a pan-Indian identity.

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  • Greene, Jack. “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem.” William and Mary Quarterly 64.2 (April 2007): 235–250.

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    Green’s focus is not upon Indigenous history but rather upon how scholars should avoid rigid chronological barriers dividing the colonial period from the Revolution and early Republic.

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  • Greer, Allan. Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Lands in Early Modern North America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

    DOI: 10.1017/9781316675908Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Examines the formation of land tenure in New France, New Spain, and New England. Greer specifically focuses upon how Europeans (and Euro-Americans) used the idea of “property formation” to claim jurisdiction and continental resources.

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  • Jortner, Adam. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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    A vivid account of encounters between the new American Republic and Tenskwatawa’s Prophetstown Movement as both communities struggled to come to grips with the meaning of the Revolution. Jortner emphasizes the religious ideas animating both sides and rejects standard (Turnerian) tropes that early-19th-century Native polities were fated to fall victim to dispossession and destruction.

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  • Kelton, Paul. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

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    Challenges the virgin soil thesis and steers clear of the usual sweeping generalizations typically associated with historical accounts of smallpox. Colonialism was the root cause of Ani-Kituwah suffering and depopulation, although Kelton reveals how they proactively dealt with the epidemiological problems confronting them.

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  • Merritt, Jane T. At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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    Traces how colonists and Natives in western Pennsylvania developed racialized visions of each other during the Seven Years’ War.

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  • Owens, Robert M. “Indian Wars” and the Struggle for Eastern North America, 1763–1842. New York: Routledge, 2020.

    DOI: 10.4324/9781003045021Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Examines contests between Indigenous polities and Euro-Americans for the eastern third of the continent through the lens of Native attempts to establish pan-Indigenous coalitions.

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  • Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

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    Shows how shared experiences of fear and hatred led disparate European communities to unify and “other” Native populations—specifically Delawares and Shawnees—in Pennsylvania. Included in Silver’s narrative are accounts of massacres at Conestoga Manor (1763) and Gnadenhutten (1782).

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Continental America in the Extended Revolutionary Era

West of the thirteen British seaboard colonies existed large Native populations and a vast geography where Indians held more power than Europeans. The subfield of continental Indigenous history points to specific examples of this fact. Not every entry focuses on the Revolutionary moment per se, but they all offer excellent contextual insight. Calloway 2014 reveals the relative strength of Native military actions at the dawn of the new Republic. Taylor 2016 focuses on the violence of the war in a number of theaters. Fenn 2014, Blackhawk 2006, Brooks 2002, and Fischer 2017 delve into trans-Mississippi polities on their own terms. Rindfleisch 2019, Saxine 2019, and Witgen 2013 explore Native stories that both include and go beyond the thirteen rebellious colonies. Frank and Crothers 2017 examines the borderlands concept and its creative application in the era of the Revolution and early Republic.

  • Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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    Focuses on the Paiutes, Shoshones, and Utes of the Great Basin from pre-contact through the early 19th century, with particular attention to increasing and pervasive violence.

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  • Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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    Explores the evolution of a captive exchange economy in the southwestern borderlands from the era of Spanish colonization to the end of the 19th century.

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  • Calloway, Colin. The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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    Illuminates how an American army was overwhelmed by a motivated and well-led Indigenous force in 1791. Directly challenges the myth that Native armies were no match for Euro-American methods and models of warfare and suggests the importance of contingency in the eventual American acquisition of the Ohio Valley.

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  • Fenn, Elizabeth. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. New York: Hill and Wang, 2014.

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    Thoroughly rooted in interdisciplinary methodology and a sweeping timeframe, Fenn offers keen insight into Mandan identity and lifeways in the era of the American Revolution.

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  • Fischer, John Ryan. Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

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    An important foray into continental environmental history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Fischer shows how cattle altered California’s and Hawai’i’s ecologies and cultures, and how Native populations in both locations proactively dealt with these alterations.

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  • Frank, Andrew K., and A. Glenn Crothers, eds. Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America’s Contested Spaces, 1500–1850. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.

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    Extends the borderlands concept to regions not typically interpreted that way and demonstrates how scholars in recent years have used it to describe unstable spaces where people, cultures, and viewpoints collide. Authors include Tyler Boulware, A. Glenn Crothers, Andrew Frank, Carla Gerona, Rob Harper, Rebekah M.K. Mergenthal, Michael Pasquier, Philip Mulder, and Julie Winch.

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  • Rindfleisch, Bryan C. George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

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    Shows how George Galphin’s multilayered relationships with Creeks, British, French, and African people created a North American “family.” By connecting to the West Indies and the imperial Atlantic more broadly, Rindfleisch expands Revolutionary narratives to include regions south and east of the thirteen colonies.

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  • Saxine, Ian. Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier. New York: New York University Press, 2019.

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    Illuminates an extended struggle to reinterpret 17th-century land transactions and treaties in 18th-century New England. The difficulties associated with agreements over land ownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and legal legacies.

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  • Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

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    Uses both European and Native language sources to explicate how Indigenous people controlled the western interior of the continent until well into the 19th century. Witgen specifically focuses on the Anishinaabe (the Great Lakes) and Dakota people (Northern Great Plains), showing how their political and economic interests dominated these interconnected regions and set the parameters of Euro-American expansion.

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Seven Years’ War and Its Aftermath

The Seven Years’ War is the point from which most scholars begin discussions of the Revolution. This list is by no means comprehensive, but the following works cover key issues while pointing to the long-term complexities of the British victory in this global war. Anderson 2001 offers encyclopedic insight into the North American theater of the war, while Preston 2015 breaks down a crucial early moment in that theater. Piker 2013 looks at the intersection of imperial and Native politics and diplomacy in the American South. Shannon 2000 explains why the 1754 Albany Congress was so important both for Indigenous and for imperial interests. Calloway 2006 and Campbell 2012 focus on land speculation. Spero 2016 and Dowd 2002 offer insight into Pontiac’s War, while Tortora 2015 illuminates its Southern “counterpart”—the Anglo-Cherokee War. Sosin 1961 chronicles how western issues affected political debates in London.

  • Anderson, Fred. The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Vintage, 2001.

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    Eurocentric, but currently the most comprehensive account of the Seven Years’ War and its impact upon the eastern half of the continent.

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  • Calloway, Colin G. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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    Explores the dramatic effects of the 1763 Treaty of Paris and the October 1763 Royal Proclamation upon North American land claims.

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  • Campbell, William J. Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

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    Highlights the intersection of diplomacy, land speculation, and empire, in the process revealing how intricately interwoven were European and Native lives on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

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  • Dowd, Gregory. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

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    Uses Anishnaabe lifeways to understand Pontiac’s uprising. Dowd provides complex portraits of Pontiac as well as other Native and British leaders and offers excellent insight into the military and diplomatic strategies used by both sides.

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  • Piker, Joshua. The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

    DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674075603Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    A deeply researched analysis of the execution of a minor Creek leader (mico) in 1752, told from the local, colonial, imperial, and Indigenous perspectives. All parties agreed Acorn Whistler had to die, but Piker explains why—whether because of the evolving nature of the British Empire, emerging Creek nationhood, to protect Indigenous models of local political life, or to clarify the ambiguities of colonial power.

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  • Preston, David. Braddock’s Defeat: Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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    Challenges traditional interpretations of Braddock as an arrogant officer incapable of adapting to North American political and military realities. Shows how the Franco-Indigenous coalition’s victory stemmed from more effective leadership, diplomacy, and tactics, along the way offering excellent insight into Native military discipline and how that translated into victory on the battlefield.

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  • Shannon, Timothy. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

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    Shows how the British convened this Anglo-Haudenosaunee conference to address difficult questions surrounding Native trade and diplomacy in Northern colonies. Importantly, Shannon rejects the Albany Congress’s alleged connection to narratives of the inevitability of revolution.

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  • Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

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    Eurocentric but useful account of the impact of trans-Appalachia on British imperial policy. Important because it details debates in London, in the process revealing how Indigenous affairs could drive political narratives at the highest levels of imperial governance.

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  • Spero, Patrick, ed. Special Issue: 1763: Pontiac and Paxton. Early American Studies 14.2 (Spring 2016).

    DOI: 10.1353/eam.2016.0011Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Special issue exploring two crucial moments of the end of the Seven Years’ War. Authors include Georgia Carley, Jeffrey Kaja, Michael Goode, Christian Crouch, Scott Paul Gordon, Judith Ridner, and John Smolenski.

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  • Tortora, Daniel. Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

    DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469621227.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Chronicles the series of clashes erupting from 1758 to 1761 between Cherokees, settlers, and the British. In so doing Tortora offers a good reminder for historians not to detach the Anglo-Cherokee conflict from other events taking place in the latter stages of the Seven Years’ War.

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Trans-Appalachia

The region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River was an Indigenous world both before and after the War of American Independence. Relatively weak—but growing—Euro-American colonialism provides abundant examples for studying Native agency and power. Furstenberg 2008 highlights the contingency of regional affairs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Usner 1992 shows how both Indigenous polities and the French responded to 18th-century pressures in the lower Mississippi River valley. Englebert and Teasdale 2013 and Hinderaker 1997 focus on interactions between Natives and newcomers as well as ideologies of institution-building. Sleeper Smith 2018 emphasizes Native control of the Wabash River valley, while Cumfer 2007 and Harper 2018 highlight the role of state policy (or lack thereof) in framing and understanding regional violence. McDonnell 2015 illuminates Anishnaabe control of the Great Lakes and surrounding areas, while Aron 2006 and DuVal 2006 cover the Arkansas, upper Mississippi, and Missouri River valleys.

  • Aron, Stephen. American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

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    Focuses on the confluence of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers between 1600 and 1860 and shows how the region transformed from Native Country to a metaphorical battleground over American systems of slavery.

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  • Cumfer, Cynthia. Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

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    Offers a multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the southwestern frontier in the Revolutionary era.

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  • DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

    DOI: 10.9783/9780812201826Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Shows how the Quapaws and the Osages incorporated French, Spanish, and English interests into their systems of diplomacy and war. They framed encounters in the Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi River valleys throughout the Revolution and would not begin to lose control until after 1815.

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  • Englebert, Robert, and Guillaume Teasdale, eds. French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.

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    A collection of essays demonstrating the complexity of encounters in the uplands (pays d’en haut), Illinois country (pays des Illinois) Great Lakes, Missouri River valley, and Louisiana. Authors include Kathryn Magee Labelle, Christopher Parsons, Robert Morrisey, Richard Weyhing, Gilles Havard, Arnaud Belvey, John Reda, and Nicole St. Onge.

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  • Furstenberg, François. “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History.” American Historical Review 113.3 (June 2008): 647–677.

    DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.3.647Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Important article hypothesizing that the central problem of North American history between 1754 and 1815 was the fate of the trans-Appalachian west. Animating questions for all actors on the continent: Would the region remain Indigenous? Would it fall under the control of a European power? Or might it eventually become part of the new American Republic? Furstenberg suggests the latter outcome was perhaps the least likely.

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  • Harper, Rob. Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

    DOI: 10.9783/9780812294491Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Indigenous and Anglo-American people hoped to establish political orders that would affirm land claims, minimize violence, and promote trade. Efforts failed not because of racial antipathy or competition, Harper argues, but because of American state policies demanding Native dispossession and rapid colonization.

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  • Hinderaker, Eric. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511528651Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Study of the Indian, European, and eventually American competitors for the Ohio Valley, with important insights into how empires are constructed on the ground. The last section focuses upon the American “Empire of Liberty” and how that concept altered older formulations of Native-European encounters.

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  • McDonnell, Michael. Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015.

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    Argues that the Great Lakes were central to the establishment of power in North America. Because they controlled the region the Anishnaabeg, and specifically the Odawa, determined the geopolitical successes of Natives and Europeans alike.

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  • Sleeper Smith, Susan. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio Valley, 1690–1792. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

    DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640587.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Examines how Algonquian-speaking polities along the Wabash River survived Haudenosaunee incursions, absorbed Native refugees and French invaders, and exploited terrestrial resources to their advantage. In so doing, they maintained control of the Wabash Valley at least through the end of the 18th century.

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  • Usner, Daniel H. Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

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    Pathbreaking exploration of trade and diplomacy on both sides of the Mississippi River as lower valley life was shaped by Indian, French, Spanish, and British interests.

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The Northeast

These works detail experiences traditionally associated with the colonies/states of the North, eastern Canada, and their borders. Graymont 1975 is one of the first systematic explorations of the War of American Independence in Haudenosaunee Country, while Glatthaar and Martin 2006 and Wallace 1972 focus on the experiences of specific members of the Six Nations. Koehler 2018 rethinks the basic premises of the 1779 Sullivan-Clinton campaign into Iroquoia. Herndon and Seketau 1997 describes the impact of the war in Narragansett Country, Rhode Island. Taylor 2007 applies the borderlands concept to Northern affairs. Willig 2008 examines the reconstruction of British-Native diplomacy in Canada after 1783.

  • Glatthaar, Joseph, and James Kirby Martin. Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. New York: Hill & Wang, 2006.

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    Explores how Oneidas helped birth the new United States at the expense of their own nation, only to be metaphorically removed from narratives of mainstream Revolutionary memory.

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  • Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1975.

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    Focuses upon the Haudenosaunee’s military and political role in the Revolution while at the same time describing the impact made by both Americans and the British upon Native cultures.

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  • Herndon, Ruth Wallace, and Ella Wilcox Seketau. “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era.” In After King Phillip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Edited by Colin Calloway, 114–143. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1997.

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    An important reminder of continuing efforts by New England polities to maintain their sovereignty and agency.

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  • Koehler, Rhiannon. “Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779.” American Indian Quarterly 42.4 (Fall 2018): 427–453.

    DOI: 10.5250/amerindiquar.42.4.0427Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Lays out the geopolitical situation stimulating American land grabs in Iroquoia before quantifying the destruction of the campaign itself. Koehler sees it as one part of a broader initiative by Anglo-Americans to deny the authority, sovereignty, and even humanity of the Haudenosaunee.

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  • Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 2007.

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    Offers keen insight into the borderlands concept, the long-term consequences of the war, and the nature of struggles over land in the North.

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  • Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage, 1972.

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    Explores religious responses by Senecas to the war and its aftermath.

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  • Willig, Timothy. Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

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    Explains how Anglo-Indigenous relations were affected by the emergence of the new United States, intertribal relations, Native cultural revitalization, and issues of Indigenous sovereignty and legal status vis-à-vis the British Empire. Because Britain could not establish a single policy for the Great Lakes, the Empire had to adapt to regional conditions and circumstances.

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The Southeast

Here, the British, Spanish, French, and—subsequently—the new American Republic clashed and collaborated with some of the continent’s most notable 18th-century Native polities. Duval 2015 looks at the American Revolution through the lens of the Gulf South. Haynes 2018 explores the Creek commitment to securing their borders. Lee 2001 examines violence in North Carolina and in Cherokee Country. O’Brien 2002 highlights Choctaw agency. Boulware 2011, Saunt 1999, and Merrell 1989 explore how Cherokees, Creeks, and Catawbas (respectively) responded to Europeans’ evolving power in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Frank 2005 and Mize 2021 study Native Southern gendered realities. Ray 2016 offers insight into the legal/philosophical discourse underpinning Euro-American civilization/removal impulses.

  • Boulware, Tyler. Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Region, and Nation among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011.

    DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813035802.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Shows how social and political ties gradually connected Ani-Kituwah villages and regions into a singular nation. Boulware also highlights the importance of borderlands interactions in Cherokee political decisions.

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  • DuVal, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. New York: Random House, 2015.

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    Focuses on the war as experienced by slaves, women, loyalists, and, most notably, Indigenous polities in the Gulf South. In this region Spanish forces challenged British military strength, but both European powers competed with American interests for the allegiances of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek Nations.

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  • Frank, Andrew. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

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    Examines intermarriage between Creek women and Euro-American men in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Along the way, Frank sheds light on the evolution of the concept of race in the American South.

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  • Haynes, Joshua. Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

    DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1vhtrk4Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Describes Revolutionary-era Creek raids upon Euro-American settlements as border patrol actions. These actions harnessed popular commitment to defend Creek Country, argues Haynes, but they also sharpened divisions over political leadership—for Creeks and the new Republic alike.

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  • Lee, Wayne. Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.

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    Shows how North Carolina society shaped, understood, and directed violence in the Revolution. While the first half of the book focuses exclusively on British North American concerns, the second half offers fascinating insight into the violence associated with the “patriot” invasion of Cherokee Country.

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  • Merrell, James H. The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

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    Describes how a group of Native communities in what is now the Carolinas both coalesced and responded to challenges to their autonomy and power.

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  • Mize, Jamie. “‘To Conclude on a General Union’: Masculinity, the Chickamauga, and Pan-Indian Alliances in the Revolutionary Era.” Ethnohistory 68.3 (2021): 429–448.

    DOI: 10.1215/00141801-8940515Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Utilizes the lens of gender to explore political decisions made by Cherokee men. Specifically, Mize looks at how Chickamaugas attempted to maintain historical expressions of manhood, worked to establish pan-Indigenous alliances, and hoped to unite military actions against American invaders. Their efforts helped establish the warrior-diplomat as a masculine ideal in Cherokee society.

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  • O’Brien, Greg. Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

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    Explores how Choctaws established and maintained political power by focusing upon two different chiefs, Taboca and Franchimastabé.

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  • Ray, Kristofer. ““The Indians of every denomination were born free and independent of us’: White Southern Explorations of Indigenous Slavery, Freedom, and Society, 1772–1830.” American Nineteenth Century History 17.2 (2016): 139–159.

    DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2016.1215019Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Uses the 1772 freedom suit Robin v. Hardaway as a window into the construction of a legal contradiction: Indigenous people were both inherently free and outside the evolving Anglo-American body politic, which meant whites could legitimately deprive them of property, happiness, and safety. This legal discourse came to underpin civilization policies as well as removal once older understandings of Anglo-American “civility” became untenable to Southern whites.

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  • Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511554Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Traces the 18th-century evolution of class, political hierarchies, and plantation slavery within the Creek Nation.

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The Gulf South and the Caribbean

An overlooked but crucial aspect of the Revolutionary era was the extent to which Native communities in the Gulf South established and maintained connections to the Caribbean. Recent scholarship draws much needed attention to this point, in the process reinforcing both Native agency in the Atlantic World and the global nature of the American Revolution. Din 2012 views the complexities of Gulf South loyalism, diplomacy, and international chaos through the lens of one man’s experiences. Hill 2014 examines how Creeks, Cubans, and the Spanish Empire each interpreted trade connections in a Florida Gulf Coast borderland. McCutchen 2020 focuses on how gunpowder trading affected the Creeks and Spanish alike, while at the same time showing that Native communities looked beyond the Southeast for European commodities. Rindfleisch 2019 uses the “familial” experiences of a British trader to draw explicit links between the Creeks and the West Indies.

  • Din, Gilbert C. War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.

    DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813037523.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Focused on Spanish rather than Native realities, Din nevertheless exposes how Bowles tried unsuccessfully to manipulate Creeks and deprive the Spanish of territorial claims. In telling this story he sheds light on the complexity of the connections between the Gulf South and the Caribbean.

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  • Hill, James L. “‘Bring them What They Lack’: Spanish-Creek Exchange and Alliance Making in a Maritime Borderland, 1763–1783.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12.1 (Winter 2014): 36–67.

    DOI: 10.1353/eam.2014.0000Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Shows how trading with the Spanish along the Florida Gulf Coast served as an economic and diplomatic safety valve for Creeks. For the Spanish, meanwhile, the Creek connection represented an opportunity to reassert their influence in Florida and challenge the expansion of the British Empire.

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  • McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe. “‘More Advantageous to be with Spaniards’: Gunpowder Creek-Spanish Encounters in Cuba, 1763–1783.” Terrae Incognitae 52.3 (2020): 245–260.

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    Uses gunpowder as a lens for exploring how the Spanish trade shaped Creek gender dynamics, personal relationships, local-level politics, and cultural structures. In the process, it also helped to shape Spanish geopolitics in the Atlantic World.

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  • Rindfleisch, Bryan C. George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

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    Shows how George Galphin’s multilayered relationships with Creeks, British, French, and African people created a North American “family.” By connecting to the West Indies and the imperial Atlantic more broadly, Rindfleisch expands Revolutionary narratives to include regions south and east of the thirteen colonies.

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