Reviews of Books

So vibrant and fast-changing is the area of Native American history in the United States that this collection of essays, growing out of a conference held eight years ago, appears at once prescient and slightly out-of-date. The list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of the field, headed by such intellectual deans as Reginald Horsman and R. David Edmunds and featuring many of the figures—Frederick E. Hoxie, Colin G. Calloway, Richard White, Theda Perdue, Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Joel W. Martin, and James H. Merrell—who can rightfully claim to have created the "new" Indian history of the 1980s and 1990s. What brought them together was a conference sponsored by the United States Capitol Historical Society in Washington, D. C., the last gathering in the long and distinguished series, "Perspectives on the American Revolution," organized by Ronald Hoffman and ushered into print by Hoffman, Peter J. Albert, and occasional others. The choice of topic—Native Americans—for this final conference in the capital of the nation that set about dispossessing Indians of land and sovereignty from its very birth is surely ironic. To the Indian peoples who fell into the orbit of American power following the winning of Independence, the early republic was no cause for celebration. It stirred native struggles for survival and wars of resistance against the expansive new nation.	1
To set Native Americans at the center of the history and culture of the United States in the formative decades of the republic, from 1780 to 1840, puts this conference volume "in the vanguard" of history, as Merrell remarks in the closing essay. "Not so long ago neither this volume nor the conference that was its earlier incarnation would have been possible" (p. 333). Until recently, when Indians were considered at all in histories of the early republic, they were a "problem" for policy makers and an "issue" in politics, whose various resolutions were traced in the military and diplomatic actions of the federal government and in the "civilizing" programs of missionaries, intellectuals, and others. Merrell dubs this approach the "'policies and attitudes' school" of Indian history. Though its heyday is long past, its influence lingers on, even in Native Americans and the Early Republic. The volume, Merrell advises, is actually "a curious sort of vanguard," its progress limited by the "narrow, Eurocentric constraints" that the "timeworn topics" of the past imposed (p. 339). Viewed from the year 2001, it reads as a valedictory to an older historiography and a prospectus of things yet to come.	2
As co-editor Frederick E. Hoxie observes in the introduction, the early republic looks different when Indians are restored to an integral place in its affairs. It acquires "a new and unsettled past" (p. xi). Far from marking a fresh start, Independence was merely a pause in a protracted conflict with Native Americans. As Calloway suggests, viewed from Native American perspectives, the American Revolution becomes less a war for independence and more a "phase of a Twenty Years' War that continued at least until the Treaty of Greenville in 1795" (p. 3). Calloway explores the effects of that war on different Native American communities, both those allied with the British and those who supported the colonial rebels; whatever their position, they found their world "turned upside down" at war's end (p. 3). The new republic only intensified the upheaval in Indian experience. Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox may have had good intentions in encouraging a "mutually beneficial transfer of lands," Horsman suggests, but the "reality of expansion" (p. 50) contradicted their aims in almost every way, leading government policy makers toward the "racialism" (p. 59) that would mark subsequent nineteenth-century policies. Indeed, many of the essays identify the key trajectory of change in the early republic as a shift from Enlightenment comparativism (with an emphasis on "civilization" and assimilation) to nineteenth-century racialism (with policies of removal). While this trend has long been known, the different vantage points of each essay produce a layered account that is both convincing and comprehensive.	. . .