Make no mistake, I choose not to review books unless I feel they are credible and well done, and only after I have actually read them in their entirety. My interests may seem a bit narrow. I am inevitably drawn to some of the larger stories of our national formation and character; and, I often find in them revelations of how the South fits into that picture.

Some years ago, I read William Hogeland’s The Whisky Rebellion (Scribner, 2006) after listening to an interview with the author on C-Span. It was the story of the Pennsylvania frontier uprising against the new American republic’s efforts to tax whisky production. It is a rich story of the early nation and of President George Washington’s efforts to protect his own investments in western lands. As Hogeland explains in this first book on the subject, distilling spirits produced one of farmers’ few mediums of exchange. What other cash crop was possible given the difficulties of transport? Washington was not only president under a newly adopted constitution, but the owner of the largest whisky still in America. And Washington’s party, known as the Federalists, was bent on having a powerful central government and a national army. As you might suppose, Washington and the Federalists got an army -albeit not the standing one they wished for- and suppressed the western uprising with ease. Many of the western Pennsylvania packed up their whisky recipes and headed for the western Virginia counties, a fertile land destined to become the “Bourbon State” of Kentucky.

Engaging reading and well-wrought history, Autumn of the Black Snake is a granular look at another aspect of the new republic’s birthing The nation’s earliest Indian policy and the vexing relationship of that policy to the western territories ultimately gave the Federalists what they hoped for -a standing army and the neutralization of Native American claims to the northwest.

Among the “Intolerable Acts” that Americans felt justified their revolution against the mother country was the “Proclamation of 1763.” This act placed the western lands that lay beyond the continental divide off limits to settlers. When the American Revolution ended, the British forfeited this territory to the new United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783). Yet, the British continued to occupy their forts that were now on United States’ soil. And, the land itself was home to Native Americans who were determined to keep the Americans out -with British help. For the most part, the Eastern Native American tribes and their organizations had sided with the British in the Revolution. The new national government, weak as it was under the Articles of Confederation, had no national army, no workable central government and a conflicted foreign (as well as Indian) policy. The revolution had been financed with pledges of land grants in the west, land claimed by individual states -and by Native Peoples. Those claims had to be extinguished and the assumption of war debts as well has control of public lands in the west must be brought under control of a national governement with a permanent military force to back its decisions.

The fortunes of many men of importance were invested in the western lands, with plans for the settlement and development of millions of square miles. Great fortunes hung in the balance. Among these speculators was George Washington, around whom gathered the men who favored a strong central government and exploitation of the west -a nascent version of “Manifest Destiny” -and a continuation of the same “right by conquest” colonialism practiced by the British and other European powers.

Forget it, you say, “This is going to be about economic history and party politics and I will not be able to keep my eyes open to read it.” I approached the book with a similar lack of enthusiasm. But this turned out to be a a compelling story, populated by remarkable as well as inept men hoping to fulfill their ambitions or hide their shortcomings. Our first president was himself a major investor in western lands- lands not yet secured following the British cession of the “Northwest Territories” by Britain after the Revolution. Hogeland offers a reimagined version of Washington’s career, arguing that Washington actually became a surveyor as preparation for his career as a land speculator. He also helped set off the French and Indian War as a young man, helping to bring the bring western lands under British control and defeat the interests of the Native Americans who in the main supported the French in that war. Emulating his older brother, a successful planter and speculator, Washington sought to capitalize on his knowledge of the frontier to enrich himself and his cohort of Virginia slave-owning planters, men who were always greedy for land on which to grow the ever profitable tobacco crops that enriched them. Like the cotton crops that enriched the next generation of cotton planters in the deep south, tobacco also depleted the soil at an alarming rate. The west was the future and an urgent necessity for these men.

This was news to me, revealing aspects of our national history to which I had turned a blind eye. When I was a student, the history of the American Revolution held little interest. It seemed -and it was- a construct of shifting places and personalities, sometimes microscopic in the telling, I had always avoided it like the plague. But, Hogeland’s masterful work on this chapter of our earliest history as a nation makes for riveting reading. I was eager to get my hands on his later work, Autumn of the Black Snake when a friend dropped off his copy. The “Black Snake” is the newly created U.S. Army, “crawling” into the trans-Allegany west, the lands north of the Ohio River where the future of American lies.

This is the story of the formation of our national army and how its creation shaped the formation of the new republic and its parties (“Federalists” and “Antifederalists”). In fact, as we discover, the war to end British rule in the thirteen colonies was only the beginning of a a long struggle on the northwest frontier against Native American confederations and their British sponsors. The story opens with the devastating defeat of an American militia expedition led by Revolutionary War General Arthur St. Clair on the Wabash. This defeat reveals the (barely united) United States’ lack of a standing army, as well as its inability to control the enormous territories ceded to it in the Treaty of Paris by Britain. Here, Native American confederations hold power, determined to preserve their claims to this rich land of rivers, lakes and millions of acres of arable lands. Unfortunately, some readers might bring to this the assumption that these Native American entities are led by uneducated and unsophisticated savages . But, dealing with Europeans over the past two hundred years and more has revolutionized their societies and technologies, as well as their capacity for disciplined resistance and military organization. They are formidable in their determination to halt the Americans’ western expansion into their own treaty-sanctioned lands.

Opposition to a standing army and a reliance on a state-controled militia systems is a central motive of the Antifederalist opponents of the newly consolidated national government. Its new president, George Washington’ and his wartime Lieutenant, Alexander Hamilton, use the defeat of Sinclair to cajole the congress into creating a standing army. This is not easy. The former colonies claim lands in the northwest beyond the Allegany Mountains and they have sold off vast territories to private investors, while pledging land gifts to those who served in the Revolution. The Washington Administration relies on the gifting of western lands as a way to pay off debts incurred during the revolution to suppliers and servicemen, especially the officer corps. It is the skillful use of the St. Clair defeat and an insincere diplomatic outreach to the Native American confederacies that the Federalists use to achieve what they wanted all along: to get rid of the reliance on state militia forces and create a standing army and to use that army to open the west by force.

The appointment of “Mad” Anthony Wayne as the commanding general seems an inauspicious one. Despite his effective service in the revolution, Wayne is a bit worse for wear-broke and with few prospects. Energized by this second chance at fame and success, he shapes the new army and prepares it for its invasion of the heart of “Indian Country,” the region known as the “Three Miamis.” Congress is reluctant to proceed, insisting on efforts to parley rather than fight. Wayne grows anxious that his volunteer army’s enlistment will end and the weather will turn bitterly cold before he gets the president’s assent to move against the tribal towns.

Wayne is, to his men, frustratingly meticulous in his preparations, training, equipping and organizing this first truly American army. Partison conflict in Congress eats away at this disciplined approach. It seems the center cannot hold long enough to deploy the new army, so Wayne moves into Indian territory while still awaiting direct orders to wage war. Victory of course eventually comes, and it comes as a result of a skillful political campaign by the Federalists and the supremely professional preparations and discipline of a general that only Washington seemed to admire. But victory at Fallen Timbers changed the nation’s perspective, quashed British intrigue to control the vast northwest frontier and confirmed the decision to form a national army. For the historical moment, victory confirms the stature of Washington and his fellow Federalists.

Hogeland makes a good case that the public’s obsessive interest in the plains Indian wars of the post Civil War era . continues to be fired by the U.S. Cavalry campaigns to subdue and control the western plains Indian nations in the post Civil War period. The outpouring of books on the Little Big Horn and Custer is in contrast to the relatively few such works on the arguably more consequential struggle to control the northwestern territories, lands that will become the heartland of American industry and prosperity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the end, it is arguable that the Battle of the Little Bighorn changed little, despite public fascination with it.

From my perspective as a student of southern history, a similar argument could be made about the politics and “Indian wars” in the deep south, which are often conflated into the War of 1812-a war that corresponds to American intervention in a great civil war within the Creek nation. We all remember Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans (which actually took place after the war’s end had been negotiated at Ghent). But, before victory over the British at New Orleans came Jackson’s invasion of Alabama and the Gulf Coast, where quashing of Creek claims to much of the southeast was accomplished by military might planned neither by the administration in Washington or by higher military authority. Andrew Jackson, like Washington, profited politically and personally from the victorious wars against Native Americans who in the end were essentially trying to defend their own lands against American expansion. Jackson opened vast frontiers on which the “Cotton Kingdom” of the antebellum south would be built, just as Washington had extinguished Native American claims in the Northwest Territories.

I must end by saying that Hogeland is a brilliant writer and researcher. He has taken an old story that has fallen out of fashion, and imbued it with new meaning in the larger context of America’s birth as a nation. He is empathetic and detailed in his exploration of British and Native American motives, and razor sharp in simplifying and making intelligible the interplay of personalities, motives and politics that gave birth to the U.S. Army.

General readers may be startled by his treatment of Washington, who emerges as a cunning politician, patient opportunist and conscious creator of his own public image as the Father of HIS country. This kind of writing can only come from lifelong study and careful reflection on both detail and meaning, forging a readable account of an enormously complex subject.

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