The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History

The Colonial Period to 1877

Christos G. Frentzos, Antonio S. Thompson, Christos G. Frentzos, Antonio S. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317813347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History provides a comprehensive analysis of the major events, conflicts, and personalities that have defined and shaped the military history of the United States. This volume, The Colonial Period to 1877, illuminates the early period of American history, from the colonial warfare of the 17th century through the tribulations of Reconstruction.

The chronologically organized sections each begin with an introductory chapter that provides a concise narrative of the period and highlights the scholarly debates and interpretive schools of thought in the historiography, followed by topical chapters on issues in the period. Topics covered include colonial encounters and warfare, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, diplomacy in the early American republic, the War of 1812, westward expansion and conquest, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

With authoritative and vividly written chapters by both leading scholars and new talent, this state-of-the-field handbook will be a go-to reference for every American history scholar's bookshelf.

PART I

A Clash of Cultures
1607–1676

1
COLONIAL WARFARE IN NORTH AMERICA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Kyle F. Zelner

In the past, the colonial period of American History—especially the seventeenth century—often received scant attention in American military historiography. Standard studies frequently offered only a miniscule introductory chapter on the colonial period, while other studies, such as Russell Weigley’s influential The American Way of War, omitted the period altogether.¹ That changed in the late 1960s with the birth of social history and the attendant refocusing of the historical lens on the colonial period. The rise of ethnohistory at the same time offered historians new ways to study and understand Native American history on its own accord, not just from a skewed European perspective. As American Indians were central participants in every colonial war, this was another crucial step in the development of the field. The rise of social and cultural history, along with ethnohistory, gave birth to new ways of looking at colonial warfare. As practitioners of the study of war and society, along with traditional military historians, focused on the period, other historians came to understand that the study of warfare was not just a marginal, technical field, but the examination of a crucial aspect of life in colonial North America. That new understanding has fueled, since the 1980s, a deluge of scholarly works on conflict in seventeenth-century America.

A number of synthetic studies of colonial warfare have been written that offer detailed, if divergent, overviews of the field’s major themes. Frequently, these works—as summaries of the entire colonial period—offer coverage beyond the seventeenth century, but they are crucial to note. One of the earliest works in this regard is Douglas Edward Leach’s 1973 Arms for Empire, a narrative of the military history of the English colonies from 1607 to 1763 with the addition of some social history analysis.² In 1994, Ian K. Steele published Warpaths, which offered a sweeping history of conflict in early America, paying attention not only to English colonization efforts, but Spanish and French endeavors as well.³ Steele’s main contribution, however, was his portrayal of Native Americans not as victims of superior European technology, but as fully realized actors in the colonial saga, who more than held their own militarily for most of the seventeenth century.

Two noteworthy studies of colonial warfare were published in the early 2000s. Guy Chet’s Conquering the American Wilderness, while focusing exclusively on the Northeast, lays out an ambitious critique of the long-standing notion that an Americanization of colonial tactics benefited the colonists.⁴ Chet argues the opposite, stating that the loss of European martial traditions was extremely detrimental to colonial military success; he finds his strongest proof in mid-century conflicts such as King Philip’s War. Only later, Chet argues, in the eighteenth century—when they returned to European methods of war while fighting alongside the British Army—did colonials start winning battles again. In 2005, John Grenier published The First Way of War, which was diametrically opposed to Chet’s argument.⁵ Grenier wrote his book to combat Russell Weigley’s notion that the “American” way of war had no colonial roots. However, Grenier’s argument—that there was a successful early “American” way of war that centered on making deliberate attacks on non-combatants, food stores, and communities; a professionalization of warfare based on scalp bounties; and a reliance on rangering—is in sharp discord with Chet’s work. The debate between these two books and their acolytes continues.

Several other overview works on the seventeenth century focus on one particular aspect of colonial warfare: its violent nature. In his A Wilderness of Miseries, John Ferling focuses on the detrimental influence war had on both combatants and the societies they came from.⁶ Ferling examines the entire colonial period and argues that “total war” was practiced in America long after it ceased in Europe. John Morgan Dederer’s War in America to 1775 is a study of the intellectual origins of the American military and argues that colonists practiced war based on an ideology rooted not in the latest European military ideas, but instead on concepts from the Bible and the classical world.⁷ Another wider study is Wayne E. Lee’s Barbarians and Brothers.⁸ Lee’s 2011 book focuses on the dual nature of warfare as atrocity and restraint and how those seemingly opposite actions were inextricably linked during war. Lee maintains that societies limited or escalated the destructiveness of their war making depending on the race, ethnicity, religion, and culture of their enemy—whether the enemy was seen as a “barbarian” or a “brother.” An example of the reach and respect now afforded the field of war studies is the 2012 publication of Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years.⁹ Bailyn, a leading early American historian, seriously examines the subject of violence and conflict for the first time in his long career in this book. He argues that the European desire to recreate a new Europe in America fell apart in confusion and violence.

Beyond these general works lies a seeming endless sea of specialized studies and monographs. One of the most important areas of inquiry—driven by the work of ethnohistorians—is the violence that often occurred when Europeans came into contact with Native Americans. While most historians today understand the “frontier” as a zone of exchange on multiple levels (trade, marriage, war, family, sex, disease, etc.), as explained by Richard White in his classic study The Middle Ground, other scholars focus on the conflict that occurred at contact.¹⁰

Conflicts around the English settlement at Jamestown have engendered a number of important studies. J. Frederick Fausz has written extensively on Anglo-Powhatan wars and often challenges the ethnohistorical view that conflict was brought about by cultural misunderstanding. Fausz argues that the First Anglo-Powhatan War was instead a systematic attempt by the English to attack the Powhatan’s “political sovereignty, territorial legitimacy, and cultural integrity.”¹¹ This aggressive behavior, according to Fausz, set the pattern for the next 300 years. Taking a different approach, anthropologist Frederick W. Gleach, in Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia contends that the world views of Powhatan and the English were so divergent that conflict simply erupted between the two groups as both tried to “civilize” the other through diplomatic, trade, and military exchanges.¹² Gleach offers a new take on the famous 1622 “Massacre” (which he labels a “coup”) based on a close reading of the Powhatan’s true objectives and he argues that the English completely misunderstood the meaning of the attack, causing them to seek revenge for the wrong reasons. William L. Shea offers a narrative, institutional approach to the colony’s military history in his The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century.¹³ Shea argues that before the 1622 attack, there was no proper Virginia militia and only after the assault did the colony finally organize an operational force.

Contact wars occurred everywhere contact took place. Much of the scholarship on conflict in New England was inspired by two historians: Francis Jennings and Alden Vaughn. Francis Jennings, a pioneer of ethnohistory, published The Invasion of America in 1975.¹⁴ Jennings saw the colonization of New England as a Puritan conquest; his highly polemical yet scrupulously researched work sparked a wave of interest in conflict in New England. In response to Jennings’ work, Alden Vaughn penned New England Frontier, which offers a detailed and balanced overview of the period.¹⁵ Vaughn focused on discovering both the root of cultural misunderstandings between Natives and Europeans, as well as specific Puritan policies and beliefs that caused conflict in the region. For both books, the Pequot War of 1636–1637 is a focal point. Jennings sees the war as a leading act of the Puritan’s systematic campaign to divest Native Americans of their land and to subjugate them; while Vaughn portrays the war as an attempt by Puritan forces, allied with other Indians, to curb the aggressive and militant Pequots (Vaughn admits that in the post-war era, Puritan officials reveled in their growing hegemony over the Natives and enjoy their new land holdings).¹⁶

In the only modern book-length study of the Pequot War, Alfred A. Cave argues that it began as a conflict between various Native groups over access to European trading partners, but escalated when the Europeans got involved.¹⁷ Puritan leaders, according to Cave, used the war to intimidate the area’s Native peoples with an overwhelming show of force at Mystic Fort while at the same time reminding colonists that they “lived in daily peril of massacre at the hands of Satan’s minions” in order to keep the Puritan citizenry on a spiritual path.¹⁸ Ronald Dale Karr argues in “Why Should You Be So Furious?” that the escalation of violence during the war was due to both the incompatible, alien cultures of the groups and their inability to set restrictions on the conduct of war, mainly because of disagreements about religion.¹⁹

Other scholars have used the Pequot War and other early conflicts in New England as a lens to examine larger issues of conflict and culture in early America. An investigation of how military technology affected the culture of warfare in New England, Patrick Malone’s The Skulking Way of War argues that not only did Native Americans adopt newly available European weapons, they also embraced European tactics, especially the idea of “Total War.”²⁰ In 2003, Michael Oberg published Uncas, a full-length biography of the important Mohegan war leader.²¹ The volume offers a rare, Native American-centered view of diplomacy and warfare in seventeenth-century New England. A special issue of the journal Early American Studies published in the spring of 2011 focused on the historical lessons to be learned from studying the Pequot War, with Mark Meuwese examining the role the Dutch played in the conflict, Andrew C. Lipman investigating the death of colonial trader John Oldham, and Katherine A. Grandjean exploring the psychological aftermath of the war for soldiers and survivors, to name just a few of the articles.²² A 2011 article by Matthew S. Muehlbauer scrutinizes the fate of the refugees in the war and their changing relationship with the powerful Narragansett tribe, which caused friction that lasted over 40 years.²³

The political, military, and diplomatic tensions that accompanied the rise of the fur trade in North American were many and complex. Several violent conflicts erupted in the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region in the middle of the seven...