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Overview
The dark and bloody ground of the frontier during the years of the American Revolution created much that we associate with the idea of America. Between 1763 and 1795, westerners not only participated in a war of independence but also engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in the relationship between individuals and society. In the West, the process was stripped down to its essence: uncertainty, competition, disorder, and frenzied and contradictory attempts to reestablish order. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement, riddled with what we would regard as paradox, in which new notions of race went hand in hand with new definitions of citizenship. In the almost Hobbesian state of nature that the West had become, westerners created a liberating yet frightening vision of what society was to be. In vivid detail, Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials vying with one another to remake the American West during its most formative period.
Synopsis
The dark and bloody ground of the frontier during the years of the American Revolution created much that we associate with the idea of America. Between 1763 and 1795, westerners not only participated in a war of independence but also engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in the relationship between individuals and society. In the West, the process was stripped down to its essence: uncertainty, competition, disorder, and frenzied and contradictory attempts to reestablish order. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement, riddled with what we would regard as paradox, in which new notions of race went hand in hand with new definitions of citizenship. In the almost Hobbesian state of nature that the West had become, westerners created a liberating yet frightening vision of what society was to be.
In vivid detail, Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials vying with one another to remake the American West during its most formative period.
Publishers Weekly
Griffin's erudite account places ordinary settlers of America's frontier at the center of 18th-century political revolution. The British Empire's hold on the western edge of colonies like Pennsylvania was always tenuous, suggests the University of Virginia's Griffin (The People with No Name). The frontier was beset by violence between Indians and white settlers, and the latter thought Britain appeased the Indians at their expense. These settlers' disgust with the inadequacies of imperial policy, says Griffin, fomented the American Revolution, a titanic political clash that ultimately gave ordinary frontiersmen new rights. But they gained those rights at the expense of Native Americans whom they identified as irreconcilably other. Tensions continued after the revolution. The fragile new American government was unable to enforce order on the frontier, and settlers in the Ohio valley and other border regions believed the state had to eradicate Indians to secure a stable and safe society. (As Griffin puts it with elegant bluntness, the frontiersmen were building a commonwealth "on the bod[ies] of... dead Indian[s].") Griffin judiciously weaves analysis into riveting stories of riots and unrest, and weds attention to race and marginalized people with traditional political and military history. 8 pages of b&w illus., 3 maps. (Apr.)
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Editorials
From the Publisher
"A provocative study of how the war-of-each-against-all on the western frontier of America shaped the revolutionary nation." —Kirkus Reviews "[Griffin's] America—authoritarian, forged in violence—is a beast future historians of the Revolutionary period will need to reckon with." —Justin Reynolds, The New York SunPublishers Weekly
Griffin's erudite account places ordinary settlers of America's frontier at the center of 18th-century political revolution. The British Empire's hold on the western edge of colonies like Pennsylvania was always tenuous, suggests the University of Virginia's Griffin (The People with No Name). The frontier was beset by violence between Indians and white settlers, and the latter thought Britain appeased the Indians at their expense. These settlers' disgust with the inadequacies of imperial policy, says Griffin, fomented the American Revolution, a titanic political clash that ultimately gave ordinary frontiersmen new rights. But they gained those rights at the expense of Native Americans—whom they identified as irreconcilably other. Tensions continued after the revolution. The fragile new American government was unable to enforce order on the frontier, and settlers in the Ohio valley and other border regions believed the state had to eradicate Indians to secure a stable and safe society. (As Griffin puts it with elegant bluntness, the frontiersmen were building a commonwealth "on the bod[ies] of... dead Indian[s].") Griffin judiciously weaves analysis into riveting stories of riots and unrest, and weds attention to race and marginalized people with traditional political and military history. 8 pages of b&w illus., 3 maps. (Apr.)
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
In his first book, Griffin (history, Ohio Univ.) explores the nature of the settlers of the western frontier borderlands during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. While Alan Taylor's The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolutiondetails the creation of borders between the Indian nations and the English Colonies/American states, Griffin contrasts the formative ideologies of western frontier settlers regarding American Indians with those of the British Empire and the American tidewater revolutionary elite. Frontier corn whiskey culture, partially descended from mid-17th century English revolutionary culture, helped foster an American complex of racial and multicultural relations that lionized even arguably psychotic slayers of Indians, who avenged personal losses and brought a sense of order based on racial divisions to violent new homelands. Recommended for libraries with research interests in civil rights and racial relations in the early American republic.
—Nathan E. Bender Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information