North American Baroque: Fred Anderson's Crucible of War.

Dowd, Gregory Evans

Like a musician using a period instrument, Fred Anderson employs mostly old methods to bring new insights to an old topic: the Seven Years' War in America. The result is majestically Baroque, beautifully and richly composed of men draped in their ambitious dreams. Anderson briefly sets his work off against the materialist and ideological schools that dominated interpretations of the revolution in the late twentieth century, but he never mentions the earlier imperial school, with which he has much in common. To be sure, Anderson's extensive endnotes acknowledge his debt to imperial scholars Lawrence Henry Gipson, but nowhere does he articulate his agreements and differences with Gipson. Like Gipson, Anderson is deeply convinced of the importance of empire and its transoceanic nature. Unlike Gipson, who celebrated the spread of the English language and British institutions around the globe, Anderson, though brilliant with the language, is less admiring of the institutions and the men who inhabited them. Where there was courage, innovative strategic thinking, or resourcefulness, Anderson openly admires it, but he also leaves us appalled at waste of life, the lack of lofty ideals, and the grim, cutthroat nature not only of imperial war but of imperial politics. One might read the book as a sustained critique of power, and of the woefully flawed men who inevitably abuse it.

But this is not a book with a single argument. On the origins of the Seven Years' War, Anderson is less agnostic than polytheistic. The war stemmed from "such a chain of events" that "would have defied the most exuberant imagining" (pp. 72-73). Sometimes, Anderson sees the war erupting from the convergence of large forces: the "interests of the Iroquois Confederacy, the government of New France, the governor of Virginia, and a group of Anglo-American land speculators" (p. 7). But wary of determinism, he advances no social, economic, or demographic explanations. We do not learn until deep into the war that the British colonists vastly outnumbered the French on the North American continent. If the social force of population is absent, so are ideals. History here turns on the fate of individuals yearning for power, and there are many of them. The land speculators' crass interests (the stuff of the old progressive school) combine with the Crowns' and colonies' strategic concerns (the stuff of the old imperial school) and with the happenstance of personality and faction (as with the students of Sir Lewis Namier) to place individuals at levers of a history that is less a well-oiled engine than a slot machine, the precise workings of which neither could they nor can we pretend to understand.

Even American Indians, to whom Anderson pays admirable and detailed attention, are represented mainly by the individuals Tanaghrisson, Teedyuscung, and Pontiac. Tanaghrisson receives this remarkable credit: "The Seven Years' War could not have begun unless a single desperate Iroquois chief had tried to keep the French from seizing control of the Ohio Valley" (p. xviii). The credit becomes less extraordinary when it is viewed beside what Anderson writes of others; fully a third of the chapter titles contain the names of leading British, French, or Indian men. Anderson occasionally brings us down into the ranks, introducing us to ordinary New England provincials Captain Samuel Jenks, Ensign Rufus Putnam, and Private Gipson Clough (pp. 413-14). Through these soldiers, however, we learn much less of their contest with the French and Indians than we do of the ice forming between Great Britain and New England.

The men described so vigorously appear to have limited loyalties -- mostly to factions and partners, rarely to larger ideals. Thomas Hutchinson, the Marquis de Montcalm, and most ordinary New Englanders generally all come off rather well in this work as men of principle among men on the make, but they are literally swamped by men who reek with ambition. We are left in the dark as to why men pursue so energetically their dreams of power and wealth; they simply do. And if Tanaghrisson was as hungry for power as were young George Washington and Jeffery Amherst, then perhaps the pursuit of power is human nature.

In counterpoint to this emphasis on personality and power, Anderson places a very different theme, which he develops with his elegant explanation for the British victory, the Indian wars that attended it, and the partial collapse of the empire that soon followed. He posits "the decisive influence of cultural factors in shaping the last and greatest of America's colonial wars" (p. 136). Cultural factors appear most boldly in two instances: first, when Anderson resurrects his brilliant arguments from the 1980s about the cultural clash between New England soldiers and British officers; the former, young men of at least prospective means from a relatively egalitarian society deeply imbued with their Puritan forbears' notions of contract, and the latter, ambitious and dutiful men accustomed to social mastery and command. Second, cultural factors appear when he deploys Ian K. Steele's interpretation of the tension between Montcalm, for whom European codes of honour conditioned his sense of self, and his Indian allies, whose expectations from warfare the great French general seemed determined to frustrate (pp. 153-54, 187-201). Assumptions about universal ambition give way to culturally conditioned human desires, clashes which led inexorably to the Cherokee War, to Pontiac's War, and to the American Revolution (pp. 453-56). Perhaps, through examining the cultural context of ambition, one could search for the origins of the Seven Years' War itself, closely interpreting, say, the social and cultural sources of the Virginians' quests for lands and authority, the British officers' and parliamentarians' powerful will to command, or the Ottawas' willingness to endure extreme privation in quest of victory.

As in the older imperial school, Native Americans play here substantial, if far more active, roles. Those who are treated closely emerge, like their European counterparts, as "pols," actively engaged in their quests for power. Anderson dwells on the Six Nations Iroquois League, and, to a lesser degree, their semisubordinates, the Delawares. He sees the League councillors as busily engaged in "complementary, activist policies" (pp. 15-16) actuated by the "central principle" of playing France against England (p. 16), an interpretation that underestimates League factionalism. It is equally likely that the League and its arrangements with its neighbours were collapsing. Anderson well understands that Delawares, Shawnees, and other semi-dependents broke free of the League, but they were not its most serious problem. Sizeable contingents of Six Nations peoples living in villages in the Ohio country, the Niagara region, and the St. Lawrence acted independently of the League, which was more than fraying at the edges. The desire of League leaders to regain control over the Ohioan peoples provides Anderson with an explanation for Tanaghrisson's service in the company of George Washington in 1754, but if that was strong, it is difficult to understand why the League -- save for a faction of the Mohawks who had little to do with the Ohioans -- essentially failed to support the British until 1759.

If League influence is overrated, the role of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and other Indians of the pays d'en haut remains under-examined. Great Lakes Indians were enormously active in the war; they almost certainly participated in greater numbers and in far more actions than did the Six Nations. Indeed in some readings of the Seven Years' War, they led the first action -- not at Jumonville's Glen, but at the Miami town and British trading posts at Pickawillany attacked by Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade (a man both Ottawa and French), 210 Great Lakes Indians, and a mere 30 French soldiers in 1752 (pp. 28-29). Great Lakes-area Ottawas and Ojibwas who allied with France also lived in an alliance that was fraying at the edges, and they joined France's expansion into the Ohio Country to combat the factionalism that threatened to destroy a system that had benefitted them. When the French invaded the Ohio Country, Great Lakes Indians usually accompanied them. When, for example, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers sallied out from Fort Duquesne to fight George Washington at Fort Necessity, he had in his company mission Indians from the reserves on the St. Lawrence River as well as Algonkins, Mississaugas, Nipissings, Ottawas, and others from the Great Lakes. Anderson lists Washington's enemies at Fort Necessity as Shawnees, Delawares, and Mingos, relying on the indirect and anonymous report of a resident of(of all places) Paxton, Pennsylvania. French sources do mention Ohioan Senecas, but the company consisted mainly of Indians long allied with France. Why these people were camping about Fort Duquesne in 1754 -- before they knew a war would present opportunities for booty -- requires some attention. It may be, as Anderson suggests, that over the next five years booty, brandy, trophies, and potential ransom lured Great Lakes peoples and the southerly Cherokees into the great fray (pp. 99, 103, 187, 458) while strategic considerations animated Iroquois, but we might also credit (or discredit) Indians of the lakes, and their Cherokee enemies, with larger ambitions.

There are, though, many insights for the Indian historian. A wonderful, brief chapter describes Fort Pitt as both a symbol and a betrayal. A terrific chapter on the Cherokee War makes a fine case for the influence of that war on the formation of Jeffery Amherst's disastrous Indian policy. Much as the Seven Years' War begat the Revolution, it begat sooner and in rapid succession the Cherokee War and Pontiac's War (which also gets careful treatment). Interestingly, demographic forces are credited with precipitating Pontiac's War, as Anderson attends to the "dynamism of a farming population" (p. 526). No doubt the war was about land in the Susquehanna and the Ohio valleys, but it could not have been largely about land in Detroit, where, far from the colonies, it began.

Indians, then, get much consideration. Women, on the other hand, receive a paragraph (p. 684), and slaves, who surface rarely, are left alone. We can only guess how the war in the Caribbean, which "starved" planters of "manufactures and foodstuffs" (p. 490) affected the slaves' already poor lives. If the issues of gender, race, and class that have so animated recent historians are largely (save for the work on Indians) absent, so is a sustained discussion of great constitutional issues or vigorous, animating ideologies; instead, while the issues at stake in the Stamp Act and its aftermath do lace through the narrative, they are covered in the dense foliage of personalities, "local competition, tensions, and anxieties" (p. 729).

Those with a taste for vaulting complexity, for the elaboration of patterns, for deep skepticism about human nature, and for the rejection of social and ideological explanations of change will love this book. Whatever one's tastes, Anderson's mastery of detail, narrative, and breadth of action invite both deep admiration and serious attention.

University of Notre Dame