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Reviews
The Scratch of a Pen
1763 and the Transformation of North America
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By Colin G. Calloway
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(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 219. Illustrations, notes, index. $28.00.)
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| In recent years, Colin G. Calloway has distinguished himself as one of the finest synthesizers of Indian and early American history. In New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (1998), he deftly summarized the literature on colonial "middle grounds," while the superb One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (2003) narrated more than one thousand years of the history of the American West before 1800. Calloway's new book focuses on the single year of 1763, examining the consequences of the end of the Seven Years War. In Calloway's hands, this seemingly narrow topic becomes an invitation to consider great changes among widely varied populations. |
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In negotiating the Peace of Paris, British leaders elected to retain conquered territory in North America rather than more valuable captured colonies like Guadeloupe or Martinique. That decision, Calloway writes, "set people and events in motion" across much of the continent (p. 15). French subjects in the Illinois Country moved west to territory now nominally under Spanish control, while Spanish subjects in Florida decamped for the Caribbean. Many Anglo-American colonists, meanwhile, saw the treaty as an invitation to migrate across the Appalachians in search of wealth and land. While British officials struggled to administer their new possession, Native Americans tried to adjust to the more powerful British presence and the withdrawal of a French authority that, for many tribes, had been a valuable economic and political partner. Most famously, the Peace of Paris helped to create the context for the American Revolution, as British efforts to retire the nation's war debt and to control its expanded empire met resistance that eventually grew into an independence movement. Calloway outlines these and other developments in a series of overlapping narratives that manage to combine a continental view with close descriptions of particular individuals and events. While he offers little new analysis of the specific episodes, his approach yields rich comparative writing of a sort rarely produced by academic historians. |
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The heart of Calloway's account is a description of conditions and events in the Old Northwest. For Native Americans in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region, 1763 brought new conflicts rather than peace. Tribal leaders had not participated in the treaty negotiations and, while many had allied with the French early in the war, they did not consider themselves defeated. Yet throughout the Northwest in 1763, Native Americans faced new Anglo-American settlers, unwanted British military posts, and imperial representatives who rejected long-established diplomatic and trade practices in favor of treating the tribes as subject peoples. The result was the armed conflict that Americans used to call "Pontiac's Rebellion," which Calloway refers to here as America's "First War of Independence." While his treatment of the conflict lacks the interpretive depth of Gregory Evans Dowd's recent War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (2002), his placement of Pontiac's War in continental context has considerable value. The Native American struggle for autonomy becomes one part of a larger picture of change and adjustment, inviting comparisons of the decisions made by a wide variety of North American actors, Native and European, famous and lesser-known. |
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The Scratch of a Pen belongs to Oxford University Press's series on Pivotal Moments in American History, and Calloway certainly demonstrates that 1763 represents a turning point every bit as important as the election of 1800 or the Crash of 1929. His work promises to deepen both academic and popular interest in the Seven Years War and eighteenth-century America. |
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Andrew Denson is assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, and the author of Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900 (2004).
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