You Say You Want A Revolution

The American Revolution was a watershed Frontier Partisan conflict. It opened the floodgates for Trans-Appalachian settlement, which had just gotten a toehold in the years immediately preceding the conflagration. The frontier theaters of the Revolutionary War in New York, Pennsylvania, the Ohio River Country and the Tennessee country were not decisive, but they were no mere sideshows, either. The ability of the Americans to hold on to territory in the face of a concerted onslaught of British-allied native peoples determined the shape of the settlement of the war, and allowed the new United States to grow into a continental power.

The native peoples who aligned with Great Britain made a strategic choice based on self-interest. If they were to preserve their lands and way of life, the British were a  better bet than the rapacious Americans. Unfortunately for the Indians, Great Britain utterly abandoned their interests in the peace talks that ended the war. They are not even mentioned in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

Yankee veterans of the French & Indian War — including experienced Rangers — formed the tough core of the militia that kicked off the ruction in New England in 1775, and frontier riflemen played a key role in signal American victories at Saratoga and Kings Mountain.

For two centuries, the narrative of the beginning of the conflict was almost entirely devoted to events in Boston. In recent years, scholarship has emphasized the importance of the western frontier in the movement toward revolution. One of the key grievances that turned the colonial elite against the Crown was the restriction on settlement the Crown imposed in order to appease the native peoples, monopolize trade, and avoid a repeat of the devastating 1760s uprising led by the Odawa Pontiac and the Seneca Guyasuta. Such restrictions interfered with the grandiose land speculation of folks like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Patrick Henry.

In his book Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776, Patrick Spero highlights the way in which unrest in the Pennsylvania backcountry played a significant role in setting the conditions for rebellion. In fact, the Pennsylvania backcountry was in a state of armed rebellion before Massachusetts was.

And it should be noted that the men who fought in Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 in the Ohio River Country offered in the Fort Gower Resolves an early and  full-throated declaration of their readiness to fight for American liberty.

All that is to say that historians today recognize the vital role the frontier people of all nations played in the revolutionary conflict.

It looks like the forthcoming Ken Burns documentary will give this story its due. I was most gratified to glimpse Robert W. Griffing’s work in the trailer that dropped a few days ago. I spotted Cornplanter and Dragging Canoe in there…

As Burns well knows, we tend to view the American Revolution through a gauzy veil of civic piety (or, alternatively, through a hostile revisionist lens). The events and personalities of our founding can feel distant, abstracted into a kind of stage play, scripted in high-flown Enlightenment prose with a quill pen.

In fact, the American Revolution was written in hot blood and gunpowder smoke, by men and women who put their flesh and blood on the line along with their fortunes and sacred honor. The war as it was fought on the frontier was as savage a conflict as Americans have ever engaged in, rife with both epic heroism and soul-searing atrocity. The Southern Campaign in the backcountry and the fighting in the Mohawk Valley of New York pitted neighbor against neighbor, and in the debatable lands around New York City, conditions degenerated into virtual banditry, a rustling, thieving war of Cow-Boys and Skinners.

While the lofty ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence were certainly real, the American Revolution is a gritty human story. I trust Burns to convey this with power and insight.

*

Geoffrey C. Ward has produced a companion book that will be released in conjunction with the film. The film premiers November 16; the book arrives on November 11:

In defeating the British Empire and giving birth to a new nation, the American Revolution turned the world upside down. Thirteen colonies on the Atlantic coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired independence movements and democratic reforms around the globe.

The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. In this sumptuous volume, historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom up—and through the eyes of not only our “Founding Fathers” but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations such as women, African Americans, Native Americans, and American Loyalists, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

*

If you want human drama in the Revolutionary War, look no further than the heroic, tragic career arc of Benedict Arnold.

His name is synonymous with treason, but before he turned his coat — out of wounded body and ego, and a legitimate if exaggerated sense of injustice — he was America’s best and most energetic combat leader. In 1775, he led one prong of an invasion force that sought to take Canada. His force’s trek through the Maine wilderness was arduous in the extreme. The campaign was wonderfully recounted in Kenneth Roberts’ 1938 novel Arundel, one of the first works to somewhat rehabilitate the reputation of the great but troubled soldier.

Antun-Shei Films just dropped a long video of a trek tracing the route of Arnold’s march on Quebec,

It’s one thing to sit in your favorite armchair and read about Colonel Benedict Arnold’s grueling march across the wilds of Maine to seize the fortress of Quebec City from the British – it’s another to strap your hiking boots on, hop in a boat, and try to do it yourself. Join me and Benton Guinness as we trace Arnold’s route over lakes, mountains, and portages through one of the last great wildernesses of America’s East Coast.