Archives for October 2020

Colin G. Calloway: The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

 

For decades, standard interpretations of American foreign policy have been fundamentally misconceived. The claim that American imperialism began with the acquisition of the Philippines, Cuba, and other territories from Spain in 1898 is obviously nonsensical. The great period of American imperialism, in which Americans went from sea to shining sea, reducing the Amerindian nations and tribes to dependent status, was over by then. The territories acquired from Spain were marked for independence, which most of them received. The claim that regime change in foreign nations America had defeated in war began with Germany, Japan, and Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War is also false; when not based squarely on ignorance, it depends on the fanciful notion that the Indians weren’t foreign peoples. 

It is one of the great merits of Professor Calloway that he knows these things. Although his book at some points is somewhat marred by excessive sympathy for the Indians (it scarcely would have gotten published by a major university press if it were not), he frames George Washington’s Indian policy as it should be framed: as part of a geopolitical struggle in which Americans could not be assured of victory. “The Revolution was not only a war for independence and a new political order; it was also a war for the North American continent.” Therefore, “in Washington’s day the government dealt with Indians as foreign nations rather than domestic subjects. The still-precarious republic dared not ignore the still-powerful nations on its frontiers.” At the same time, in North America “Indian country was not exclusively Indian, and had not been for a long time.” Nearly two centuries of interaction with European settlers—English, Spanish, and French, and Swedish—had already begun to ‘hybridize’ their ways of life, from their diet to their household goods, to their language. Shakespeare’s Caliban was right: many Amerindians “could speak English and… their own languages lacking profanity, had learned to swear in it.” Regime change, indeed.

Amerindian regimes resembled the political societies of antiquity, as described by Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City, published a few years after Washington’s death. They were family- and clan-based communities, “measur[ing] their influence in the extent, and status, of personal connections.” Polytheistic and animistic, they “kept the world in balance by prayer, ritual, and ceremony, and kinship with the spirit world.” “Spiritual forces,” they believed, “permeated everyday lives and possessed and exerted power.” They regarded land not as ‘real estate’ or property but as sacred soil to be defended as the place where their ancestors, now among those spiritual forces, were buried. Triumph in war meant that the gods of the victors were more powerful than the gods of the defeated. “Upheaval and catastrophe reflected loss of spiritual power that could be explained as a result of weakened traditional culture”—literally, the cultus—and by “declining observance of necessary rituals.” Wars against the English were typically seen as religious revival as much as military-political self-defense.

When Washington’s home colony of Virginia saw its first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, there were approximately 40 Amerindian tribes living there, numbering perhaps 20,000 altogether. By the time Washington was born in 1732 the Native population had declined by 80%, ravaged by diseases, especially when smallpox arrived (“probably on board African slave ships”) in 1696. Thanks to British immigration policies and superior methods of farming, English Virginians already had outnumbered Native Virginians by 1640, and they had defeated the principal Indian chief, Opechancanough, who had launched “a brutal war against the aggressive infant colony.” Some Indians were enslaved by the colonists; others participated in the slave trade, ranging into the more southerly colonies to capture Indians there and to sell them to the whites. And although, as one British official remarked, each Indian nation was “perfectly well acquainted with its exact original [territorial] bounds,” those bounds were no more respected by the more powerful Indian nations than they were by the English; for example, the Iroquois, originating in the northern part of the New York colony, had fought their way to western Virginia by the early 1700s. As one of its chiefs put it in 1744, “All the World knows we conquered the several Nations” living along the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers, as well as those “on the back of the Great Mountains in Virginia.”

The young Washington entered this contested terrain as many Tidewater Virginians had done and would continue to do for decades: as a surveyor and land speculator. By the age of sixteen he was already surveying along a southern branch of the Potomac in Maryland; he began his military career in 1753, by which time he was already interested in lands in the Ohio territory. Washington was associated with the Virginia-based Ohio Company, which had purchased lands west of Virginia from the Six Nations (that is, the Iroquois Confederation), which had in its turn claimed those lands by right of conquest, having defeated other Indian nations which had settled their. The Ohio Company acted in full cooperation with the British Crown, “advanc[ing] the Crown’s imperial interest by pursuing its own self-interest.” The Crown needed to proceed carefully, however, because a too-aggressive policy of territorial acquisition might push some of the Indians “into the arms of the French,” one of England’s imperial rivals on the continent. There were other competing claimants to that land, ranging from rival Virginia companies to Indian rivals of the Iroquois. No one really ruled it, except to some extent the Shawnees, who broke with the Iroquois and allied with the English against the French. 

Seeing an opportunity, in 1753 French forces gathered, hoping to seize Ohio territory. Virginia Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie appointed the twenty-one-year-old Washington to reconnoiter in the territory. With a small escort of Indians accompanying his Virginia men, Washington confirmed the French incursion; he was sent back as second-in-command with a force numbering 300, whose members, Dinwiddie promised, would receive land grants after the war. This would result in what Americans called the French and Indian War, called the Seven-Years’ War by the English who fought it in Europe. And it truly was a French and Indian war, with the various Indian nations in the region allying with either the French or the English. When one of the Indian chiefs saw the loss of an English fort whose construction he’d approved, his own prestige among the Indians declined. That same chief, Tanaghrisson “tried to save face” by goading the inexperienced Washington into a battle against the French; although Washington “is often credited with starting” the war by this action, it was really Tanaghrisson who began what many historians now consider the first of the ‘world wars.’

Washington can scarcely be said to have covered himself with glory in that war. Most fundamentally, he “consistently misread the motives and actions of the Ohio Indians who wanted to maintain a balance of power in the region” and had no intention of siding with the English and their Indian allies. Nor did Washington understand that Indian customs didn’t entail a European-style military chain of command; Indian chiefs themselves needed to persuade their warriors to fight or not to fight and, if they chose to fight, when, where, and how to do so. Chief Tanaghrisson himself complained that “Washington tried to command us as he did his slaves,” often refusing their advice. It is true that the chief was shifting the blame for his own bad advice, which Washington did take. After losing the Battle of Jumonville, Washington resigned his commission rather than accept a demotion, returning home.

The war hardly went smoothly after Washington’s departure, even with more experienced English officers in command. Colonial assemblies were reluctant to contribute a substantial share of men and material to the effort. Neither the English nor the French had accurately estimated the power of the Indians. General Edward Braddock was no better at managing Indian relations than Washington had been, and his troops suffered defeat at the Battle of Monongahela against a better-trained French force, one whose officers had more experience with Indians and were better at coordinating with them. By then, Washington had rejoined the army and survived the ambush, “escorting the mortally wounded Braddock from the field with the straggling remnants of the army.”

The main reason the French-allied Indians eventually lost the war was disunity amongst themselves. “Different tribes, and even groups within tribes, fought their own parallel wars.” They wanted “to keep their country free of European settlement” but also free of one another. One-third of the Virginia troops died, and the settlers abandoned nearly 30,000 square miles of territory. In effect, the French and Indian forces won the war in the South. Luckily for them, the war shifted to the North, where English troops were more substantial. Meanwhile, the Virginians held their (greatly reduced) line by recruiting Cherokee warriors from South Carolina and by joining with forces from Pennsylvania, which finally “abandoned its long tradition of [Quaker] pacifism in the spring of 1756.” Washington wanted to lead an expedition against Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania, the center of resistance to British troops in the region, but London quite understandably had other ideas, selecting the Scottish officer John Forbes, who wisely mad sure that the Indian allies were well supplied. They proved as unreliable as Washington expected them to be, but by 1758 Forbes had 6,000 British troops at his command, and they turned the proverbial tide. Duly noting this, the Iroquois Six Nations and the Susquehanna Delawares made peace with the Cherokee, aligning against the French forces. Those forces were defeated at Fort Duquesne in November 1758; before retreating, they blew up the fort, a site Forbes renamed ‘Pittsburgh’ in honor of William Pitt, the British Secretary of State who had appointed him. Washington again resigned his commission, two months later, marrying the widow Martha Custis and taking over her plantation, including her 200 slaves. 

Elected to a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington turned to building his wealth and political status in Virginia. His regiment was disbanded at the end of 1762, and the war was concluded the next year. Assessing the war, “there were those who questioned Washington’s fitness for command. He hardly deserved the military reputation he had acquired by the end of the war, and the Revolutionary War would demonstrate, time and again, that he still had plenty to learn.” And “contrary to popular myth, he did not learn how to defeat the British in the Revolution by fighting in the ‘Indian style’ he learned in the French and Indian War.” He rather learned to add that style to his tactical repertoire while continuing to prefer the European way of war, with its clear lines of command and full-on battles coordinating infantry and artillery. What no one questioned was his courage. Even and especially in retreat, he never panicked and he kept his defeated troops together. His character would prove to be his fortune, not his expertise in cultural anthropology, a discipline that did not yet quite exist beyond the pages of Montesquieu, who didn’t think much about military strategy and therefore could offer little guidance to his readers in that area.

In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France ceded its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain, those west of the Mississippi to Spain, whom they hoped would contain the English advance. “Indians thought differently. In their view the French had no right to give their country to the English. Never having been conquered by the English or the French, nor subject to their laws, they considered themselves ‘a free people.'” Anticipating the deal, they planned war against the British, and seized several forts west of the Appalachians, nearly breaking “Britain’s hold on the interior of North America.” The war finally stalemated; its major effect was to convince London that it needed to keep a standing army in North America, to be funded by the Stamp Act of 1765. By law, “London, not the colonies, controlled western expansion,” but, like the Indians, the Americans thought differently and continued to settle in Indian territories claimed by their mother country. Land speculation flourished and, as before, Washington was in on it. Calloway quotes his fellow historian Joseph Ellis, who writes, “At bottom lurked a basic conflict about the future of the Ohio Country: Washington believed it was open to settlement; the British government believed it was closed; and the Indians believed it was theirs.” London greatly assisted the Americans’ ambitions by negotiating the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which moved the western boundary “hundreds of miles to the west.” “George Washington was back in business.” A land rush ensued, but so did American restiveness under British rule, as London tightened its central-state controls over its colonies. When a 1774 ruling from London courts disallowed the Ohio land claims of Virginia war veterans, Washington became indignant. The War for Independence was brewing. 

During that war, Washington adopted a defensive strategy against the British, rightly depending on the vast, forested lands of North America to protect his soldiers from assaults from professional troops. Simultaneously, “he consistently advocated offensive war against Indians,” who had every reason to fear the Americans more than the British, for precisely the same reason that Washington thought he could outlast the King’s men: The British were foreigners in their own colonies, and those colonies were too big to rule militarily from London—especially since London had a much nearer enemy, France, a short distance from its western flank. Despite these fears, some Indian nations and tribes allied with the Americans if only because they expected them to win. Washington now welcomed them, recalling “from firsthand experience the psychological impact of Indian warriors and Indian ways of fighting,” maintaining “that a body of Indians combined with American woodsmen would strike fear into the British and foreign troops, especially the new recruits.” In the event, however, his suspicions remained, and he used Indians primarily as scouts. 

Crucially for his own subsequent political career, the Virginia gentryman became identified with ‘the democracy’ at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, when he suffered the bitter cold with his troops. In such a circumstance, his character meant more than his military savvy or his ‘anthropological’ expertise—both of which, though much improved, remained dubious. His popularity with Americans hardly suffered when he ordered expeditions into Iroquois country against tribes that allied with the British, expeditions that centered not so much on man-to-man combat as the destruction of Iroquois crops, a form of siege warfare adapted to open country. This forced the British to confront “a refugee crisis as Indian families who had lost everything flooded” into their Niagara base. “The scorched-earth campaign and terror tactics that Washington ordered” helped to win the war while “caus[ing] untold human misery.” Nonetheless, the Iroquois continued to fight alongside their allies, if increasingly in vain.

“American actions made it impossible for Indians to ignore British warning that the rebels intended to steal their country and destroy them.” The Ohio tribes fought hard, but increasingly saw that the British would lose. For his part, Washington told the Delawares that the British are a “boasting people,” and that their only chance of survival was to learn to live with the Americans. “Learn our arts and ways of life, and, above, all the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.” Knowing that Americans, for their part, should also learn to live with the Indians, even as they would take most of their land, he began to think of regime change among those nations and tribes as the only way to ensure the safety and prosperity of both sides. He “knew what the Indians knew: the war in the West was a war for Indian land,” but he did not necessarily want Americans to take all of it, if the Indians would ‘Americanize’ and integrate themselves into the American regime. The ruinous smallpox epidemic of 1779-80, which began in Mexico City and spread northward, further weakened Indian defenses against American plans. 

This notwithstanding, as the Articles of Confederation constitution took hold in the United States, “Indians remained the dominant power in the trans-Appalachian West,” with a population of about 150,000. The mountains were a formidable barrier for settlers to cross. Politically, “the thirteen states had achieved independence but did not yet constitute a nation, let alone an imperial republic with a manifest destiny to occupy the continent.” To observers at the time, “a more likely prospect in 1783 was that North America would continue to be divided among several empires, Indian confederacies, and multiple sovereignties that might include more than one American republic if individual states and settlements of Americans… went their separate ways,” as some indeed intended, with varying degrees of intensity, for decades to come. “Could the infant nation resist these powerful centrifugal tendencies,” given these geopolitical facts, its untried republican regime, and its loosely confederated system of states? Those states would prove a major obstacle to any unified American policy toward the Indians from the Washington administration through that of Andrew Jackson. But as in the colonial wars, Amerindians were even more divided than their U.S. rival, and they lacked modern technology, aside from things they could acquire by barter.

As president under the 1787 Constitution, “Washington thought the precarious republic’s security, prosperity, and future depended upon creating a strong government, creating a national market in Indian lands, and turning hunting territories over to commercial agriculture and economic development.” With Benjamin Franklin, he considered it “a matter of both justice and policy” that “Indians should have the opportunity to give up their lands by consent in treaties, and he hoped the process could be carried out with a minimum of bloodletting,” thanks to his policy of regime change. This country, he wrote, “is large enough to contain us all.” He preferred the Virginia colonial policy of purchasing large tracts of lands by major investors (such as himself), who would rent small plots to settlers; this contrasted with Thomas Jefferson’s approach—the “empire of liberty” in which settlers would own their own land and, once sufficiently numerous, would organize the territories into political communities which would join the Union as states equal to the original thirteen, unlike the European colonial empires. Initially, Washington’s tenant-settler policy prevailed; when Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792 only one-third of the “adult white male residents” owned land, as the majority were tenants. 

With the French removed and the British holding on to some forts in the West, America’s principal imperial rival in the South was Spain. The Chickasaws played a balance-of-power game, but as in the United States, by then factionalized by passions attendant to the French Revolution, “the diplomatic shuffling intensified divisions within the nation.” Unfortunately for the Chickasaws the empires they confronted bordered their lands, whereas the empires the Americans confronted were centered overseas. 

In the opinion of Washington as well as Jefferson, “territories shed their colonial status when they became states,” while the Indians would shed that status “when they became ‘civilized’ and incorporated into the Republic.” By ‘civilized’ Washington and the other Founders meant modern with respect to political economy and republican with respect to government. In the meantime, the Indians on their territories were regarded as self-governing protectorates of the United States, entitled to local self-rule but not to an independent foreign policy. From Vattel and from Locke before him they took the doctrine that such treatment was entirely just, given the superior civility, the superior security for natural rights, afforded by regimes that encouraged farming instead of “war and plunder.” As for the political economy of the United States, it needed to acquire and sell western land to repay its war debt. 

Accordingly, “Washington wanted Indian relations in the United States to demonstrate to the world that his nation was the equal of European nations in humanitarianism and waging civilized war.” His Secretary of War, Henry Knox, concurred, writing that “Indians possess the natural rights of man,” and ought to be treated with “justice and humanity.” What Calloway miscalls “social engineering” was actually regime change. In exchange for such change, which would reduce the amount of land the Indians needed to support themselves, the Indians would avoid further conquests by an increasingly more powerful American regime. This would free more land for purchase by American settlers. 

The problem was not so much that the Indians resisted regime change but that the settlers wanted all of their lands, even though their national government didn’t want them to have it. They continued to move west, ignoring the strictures of the federal government. “The federal government deplored their actions as contrary to its declared policies but did little to stop them. Even imposing what little control it could on the frontier risked losing westerners’ loyalties and votes.” The settlers held the trump cards: in regime terms, republicanism empowered them against the wealthy speculators and federal officials alike; in ‘state’ terms, federalism made their secessionist threats credible. As Knox wrote to Washington, “The angry passions of the frontier Indians and whites are too easily inflamed by reciprocal injuries, and are too violent to be controlled by the feebler authority of the civil power” in its attempts to enforce treaties. The best Washington could do was to send agents to live among the Indians to give the national government a presence among them. He did this at the request of the Indians, who rightly felt threatened by the ever-encroaching settlers, often backed by the state governments, especially in the South. The regime-change policy, including the agents, was funded by Congress in 1793. “The Indian policy that Washington envisioned and implemented continued with variations for more than one hundred years.” 

Although the Cherokees and Chickasaws adopted this policy, the Creek and Muskogee nations in the South resisted. Together, they numbered about 15,000-20,000 “ethnically and linguistically diverse people” living in more than fifty towns. A Scottish-Indian named Alexander McGillivray intended to form them into a “unified nation”; had he been successful, they would have ruled “a block of territory as big as a modern state” consisting of northern Florida, western Georgia, northern Alabama, and eastern Mississippi. McGillivray wanted to make a treaty with the United States; Washington, mindful of the Spanish threat and the settler threat, and the threat posed by Georgia land speculators, and knowing as well the weakness of his own government, entered negotiations. The result was the 1790 Treaty of New York, whereby the Creeks accepted the status of a protectorate. In return, the United States guaranteed protection of Indian hunting grounds against settler encroachments and the furnishing of domestic animals and farm implements to the Creeks. The treaty eventually failed, thanks to “preexisting divisions within Creek society, Spanish intrigues, opposition to McGillivray, Georgia’s resent at the imposition of federal authority in its Indian affairs, and dissatisfaction with specific terms of the treaty.” McGillivray soon returned to his alliance with Spain, before his death in 1793. 

“In the South, Washington tried to curtail the assault on Indian lands and prevent war”; in the Northwest Territory, governed under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, “he moved quickly to acquire the Indian lands he deemed essential to the nation’s future, a move that virtually guaranteed war.” He continued to offer the Indians the option of treaties or what he called “punitive strokes” to induce them to subordination. “He badly miscalculated.” The Northern Indians wanted no part of a system of private property instead of communally-owned lands, thus rejecting a core principle of the American regime. Regime conflict loomed, with the ever-warlike Iroquois allying in confederation with the Miamis, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis. Meanwhile, the Mohawks, under their chief Joseph Brant, stood ready to negotiate a compromise. The warrior confederacy defeated American troops in Shawnee country, putting the fragile United States “in a precarious position,” as frontiersmen feared for their lives and began to suspect that “the federal government lacked the resolve to bring order in the West.” Still-hostile Great Britain, fearing for its Canadian colonies, proposed “turning the Northwest Territory into a neutral Indian barrier state.” But Washington wasn’t about to cower out so easily.

In 1790 he appointed Timothy Pickering to approach the Iroquois, hoping to persuade them to act as intermediaries with the western Indians and to arrange a peace settlement. Washington knew Pickering well, having appointed him adjutant general of the Continental Army in 1777 and having served with him in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. By now, Pickering was a county official in Pennsylvania and a fellow land speculator. He told Washington that “a man must be destitute of humanity, of honesty, or of common sense” if he did not feel compassion for the Indians’ circumstances. He found a tutor in Indian ways in the Seneca chief Sagoyewatha, a.k.a. Red Jacket. Red jacket was unimpressed with the administration’s policy of regime change, saying that “the Great Spirit intended Indians and whites to walk different paths,” with the Indians “follow[ing] our ancient rules.” Pickering persisted in defining the policies dictated by compassion and prudence differently, concurring with Washington’s strategy of regime change. He offered the Six Nations a conference with the president to discuss the introduction of agriculture, spinning and weaving, and literacy to their peoples. With the Indians fresh from victory in their most recent battle with the Americans, the two sides reached an impasse. Subsequent negotiations also failed; in his preparations for war, Washington took care to supplement the militia troops with an augmented complement of professional soldiers. For its part, Congress reorganized the militia and gave them better supplies.

Meanwhile, Indian factionalism intensified. The Ottawas, Ojibwas and Potawatomis dropped out. And the British, still occupying forts in the West, declined to intervene in any renewed war. Defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Indians applied for sanctuary at Fort Miamis, but the Brits denied them entry. “That dispirited the Indians more than the outcome of the battle”; they could recover from one loss, but they knew they needed the modern military force of the British if they were to hold off the Americans, who in their turn took the victory as proof of effectual sovereignty, “the young nation [having] demonstrated the ability to enforce its will by force of arms.” “The federal government and its new army had finally answered westerners’ calls and defeated the Indians”; that army went on to suppress the settlers’ Whiskey Rebellion, too.

Negotiated by Pickering, the Treaty of Canandaiga solemnized Indian cession of most of Ohio to the United States in return for goods valued at $20,000. “For the Iroquois people it was, and remains, a clear recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and the seminal document in their relationship with the United States.” As usual, it didn’t stop traders and land speculators from operating in Indian country, with backing from powerful New Yorkers. The much more famous—and at the time, controversial—Jay Treaty of 1794 saw the removal of the British forts on the northern frontier, although Jefferson, Madison, and other ‘democratic-republican’ figures disliked provisions allowing the Brits to continue their free trade with the Indians and, more significantly, seemingly to align America with Britain against the Jacobin-republican regime of France. Financially, these treaties made eminent sense: “Between 1790 and 1796 the United States spent $5 million, almost five-sixths of the total federal expenditures for the period, fighting the war against the Northwestern Confederacy.” Now it “could finally generate income from sales of western land to pay down its debt.” With the 1795 Pinckney Treaty with Spain, America’s southern flank was also secured. “Washington had set the nation firmly on the path of westward expansion and laid the foundations of the nation’s empire in Indian country,” although he needed to divest himself of his own western lands to meet his personal debts. 

Being a contemporary historian, Calloway tends to interpret Washington’s intentions as if the first president were a historicist. “For Washington,” he claims, “civilization has less to do with present conduct and living Christian lives than with future progress—for both Indians and the United States.” This too-Wilsonian Washington thought that “a society based on private property could not accommodate tribal societies based on communal landholding, and Christian or not, Indians could have no place within the United States if they continued to hunt, hold their lands in common, and live separate from American jurisdiction.” This is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that Washington, along with the rest of the Founders, regarded property as a natural right and that natural rights existed not only to be secured but to be enhanced—as in the phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So, yes, he wanted to “prepare them to assume their place in the new nation as individuals rather than as members of sovereign tribes,” an assumption that “would also free unused hunting territory to fuel the nation’s growth.” But he understood that as an enhancement of natural human capacities, a moral good inseparable from economic prosperity. And yes again, he may well have concurred with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who taught that “human societies developed in stages from hunters to herders to farmers,” but Adam Smith was no historicist, and neither was that uncompromising critic of natural right, David Hume, whom the Founders associated with moral skepticism and Toryism. Nor did Washington and Knox confuse natural right with biological determinism or ‘racism.’ With Locke and many other natural-rights thinkers, Knox held that “the idea that the difference between civilized and savage ways of life was based on different ‘races of men possessing distinct primary qualities’ was fallacious; the differences arose from ‘education and habits.'” In this he, and Washington, followed the argument of that firm natural-rights man Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, his refutation of the Comte du Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, an early example of ‘race science,’ a doctrine eventually tied to historicist evolutionism.

Notoriously, for many subsequent decades Southern slaveholding plantation oligarchs turned to Buffon, not Jefferson, and the Southern Indians followed them in their claims, or at least in the practices supposedly justified by those claims. “By the time Washington died, many Creeks and Cherokees held and regarded African slaves much as their white neighbors did.” A decade or so after Washington’s death, the Creeks then succumbed to the sort of religious fanaticism Locke, Washington, and Jefferson had all worked against, as those who saw the benefits of regime change were overbalanced by what Calloway calls “a movement of spiritual and cultural rejuvenation that ultimately led to civil war within the Creek Nation and war with the United States.” This is a rather sanitized description of the Red Stick War, a campaign inspired by the itinerant Shawnee chief, Tecumseh who, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa ‘the Prophet,’ drew upon the claims of previous Amerindian seers who had claimed that Americans would be destroyed by in a vast apocalypse ordained by the Great Spirit, acting through His peoples. Tecumseh had uncompromisingly opposed the treaties ceding Indian lands in Ohio and Indiana, continued to call for a united Indian nation that would extirpate the Americans once and for all. This false prophecy induced a strong faction of Creeks, called the Red Sticks, to precipitate first a civil war among the Creeks and then a foreign war against the Americans. Leaders of the majority of Creeks, who preferred to adhere to the treaties with the United States, were murdered for their pains, their property seized by the Red Sticks. In the war, concurrent with the Americans’ War of 1812 against Britain, Creek leaders requested assistance from the aged George III, which was more than enough to goad General Andrew Jackson to crush the rebellion and confiscate 23 million acres of Creek land, exercising the same right of conquest that Indians and Europeans alike had recognized for centuries, albeit on different terms. 

Overall, Calloway excellently conveys the geopolitical complexities Washington and his contemporaries confronted, complexities they met with strategies including federal- and commercial-republican imperialism and regime change. Their policies met with mixed success, although in the longer term and for the most part the American founding succeeded spectacularly, in time serving as a bulwark against the tyrannies of the twentieth century and to this day.