| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Grenier. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 232. $30.00.
Much of American scholarship on the colonial era has focused on the cultural and political transformation of Englishmen into Americans in thirteen of Britain's American colonies. In the field of military history, this result-oriented investigation has produced the oft-told story of "Indianized" sharp-shooting frontiersmen fighting as irregulars (avoiding large-scale combat and focusing on small hit-and-run engagements). This narrative suggests that English colonists were militarily transformed from defensive-minded collectivists to offensive-minded individualists. Understandably, this storyline has been used as an allegory for a much wider cultural transformation that explains not only the American victory in the War of Independence, but also the birth of American democracy, nationhood, and separatism.	1
Academic historians from both sides of the Atlantic have effectively challenged the validity, but not the appeal, of this explanatory model. John Grenier offers a novel approach to the birth of a uniquely American way of war by shifting the focus from "American tactics" (that is, the transition from defensive to offensive tactics) to logistics and martial culture. According to Grenier, what distinguished colonial forces in America from English forces in the Old World was their commitment to irregular and total war: targeting enemies' logistical resources, such as crops, food stores, villages, and noncombatants, rather than enemy troops themselves, who often proved too elusive. From the Indian wars of the early seventeenth century to the War of 1812, this strategy proved successful in undermining adversaries' ability and will to sustain the war effort. When viewed against this colonial and early national backdrop, Grenier concludes, acts of "extravagant violence" against noncombatants and civilian logistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem not as aberrations from the American way of war but as a reemergence of Americans' "first way of war."	. . .

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