524 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. By Alan Taylor. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Pp. xii, 546.$35.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.)

Historians who have written about the Iroquois in the Revolu- tionary era have generally oriented their coverage to the war itself. As a narrative framework, the division and destruction of the Iro- quois Confederacy provides a tragic counterpoint to the birth of the United States that is hard to resist. In an enduring work like Barbara Graymont’s The Iroquois in the American Revolution (1972), the story of the Iroquois highlights the impact American independence had on native peoples. In less capable hands, the incident lends itself to florid accounts of noble but doomed Indians falling prey to the grinding march of Anglo-American civilization. Alan Taylor’s new book is one of several recent titles to revisit this terrain, and it is the most significant of the bunch. To its credit, it does not linger long on the battles of the war years. Instead, it focuses on the post- Revolutionary dispersal and dispossession of the Iroquois on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Taylor correctly sees that the de- cline of the Iroquois had far more to do with the international politics of the post-Revolutionary settlement between Britain and the United States than with the war itself. Soldiers and warriors did cut a wide swath of destruction through Iroquoia during the War for Indepen- dence, but the more lasting devastation came after the peace, when private and public agents used all sorts of arm-twisting and legal chicanery to push the Iroquois off their homelands and onto tiny reservations. Taylor’s title consciously evokes another important work on European-Indian relations in early America, Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). In that book, White explained how na- tives and colonizers carved out a geographic and metaphorical space of mutual accommodation until the balance of power tipped in favor of the latter and they used brute force to impose their notions of law and property on the landscape. Taylor would seem to be picking up where White left off, but in fact he is telling a similar story. He starts The Divided Ground in the 1760s, when some British imperial agents, Christian missionaries, and Iroquois leaders were still trying to hold together a middle ground of diplomatic and cultural mediation that had taken root in Iroquoia in the seventeenth century. The American Revolution divided those officials, colonists, and Indians into warring

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.3.524 by guest on 28 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 525

camps of patriots and loyalists and imposed new political borders be- tween them, thus turning the “middle ground” of Iroquoia into the “divided ground” of the United States and British Canada. Taylor brings out the human dimensions of his story by framing it around the biographies of two contemporaries, the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant and the Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland. Brant and Kirkland met in their late teens when both attended Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian school in Lebanon, Connecticut. Thereafter, they led parallel lives, with Brant gaining fame as a leader of Iroquois loyalists, while Kirkland served as the Continental Congress’s envoy to those Iroquois who sided with the patriots. Both of these men dis- appear from Taylor’s narrative for long stretches of time, temporarily crowded off the stage by a parade of other Indian and European play- ers in this drama. While not quite dealing with a cast of thousands, Taylor exhibits a Tolstoyan ambition in his effort to incorporate as many voices and personalities as possible, and he is an adept prac- titioner of the historian’s stock-in-trade, the thumbnail sketch. The drawback, however, is a narrative that often seems to meander rather than progress, and the book eventually falls prey to an overstuffed quality that can prove distracting. In short, The Divided Ground could use more forest and fewer trees. A pervasive gloom also hangs over this story from start to finish. Of course, it is not Taylor’s job to put a smiley face on history, and it would in fact be disingenuous for him to try and do so when his subject concerns the post-Revolutionary plight of the Iroquois people. He is dealing here with the same problem that confronts other historians of Native Americans in this period, the sense that we have all heard this story before and we know that it is not going to end well. Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Good Peter, and other Iroquois leaders of the Revolutionary generation did their best to adapt to the new geopolitical realities that American independence dealt them. They struggled to retain what shreds of their pre-war autonomy they could and skillfully played the Americans and the British against each other. Yet, time and again, the stone they had pushed up the hill rolled back down over them. On the American side of the border, state officials in New York ignored federal laws meant to protect Indian sovereignty, and rapacious land speculators used bribery and liquor to gain title to Iroquois land. On the Canadian side, the British failed to deliver on promises to support Iroquois resistance to American expansion along the Niagara and Ohio frontier. In both regions, government agents insisted on asserting pre-emption rights

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.3.524 by guest on 28 September 2021 526 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

over the sale of Iroquois land, interfering with efforts by chiefs like Brant, Red Jacket, and Good Peter to lease their land to Anglo settlers who could then forge productive new partnerships with the Iroquois. The central insight of this long book comes early: “by stereotyping Indians as naıve¨ primitives, colonial officials frustrated native attempts to exploit the commercial value of their land” (p. 43). The Divided Ground is well worth reading. It easily rises above sim- ilar recent works because of the insights it offers into the international and transnational context of Iroquois dispossession. By treating the U.S.-Canadian border as a single borderland, Taylor captures for his readers the possibilities and limits the Iroquois faced in reconstituting their homelands after 1783. The military destruction of Iroquoia may offer flashier material, but Taylor’s recounting of the postwar political and legal destruction of Iroquois power is the more significant story, for in it rests the foundation of the reservation system still with us today.

Timothy J. Shannon is an Associate Professor of History at Gettysburg College and author of the forthcoming The Iroquois and the Diplomacy of the Early American Frontier.

Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. By Chris Beneke. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 306.$35.00.) Chris Beneke’s Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of Amer- ican Pluralism seeks the origins of pluralist culture in the United States. It followed, in his view, a long and winding road, from or- thodoxy through toleration to ecclesiastical liberty and full religious equality. Beneke is good at conveying complexity. He insists that there were two distinct transformations: the more familiar history of legal and institutional development that moved society from persecution to toleration, and a second shift, spiritual and cultural, that replaced the presumption of uniformity with the acceptance of diversity. He considers the latter transformation to have been the more important. This is, in many respects, a familiar story. It has many of the usual influences: the multiplicity of groups present in the colonies, enlightenment philosophy, the spirituality of religious awakening, and the rise of print culture. It has many of the usual turning points as well: the Glorious Revolution and England’s Act of Toleration, the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.3.524 by guest on 28 September 2021