Colorado Historian Spring 2016

THE COLORADO HISTORIAN AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION SPRING 2016

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Welcome to another edition of the Colorado Historian! This has been an exciting year for our publication. In addition to our online digital format, we now have hard copies in circulation as well. As editors and publishers, we’ve long dreamed of this moment, so to witness it come to fruition has been a fulfilling experience indeed.

This publication would not be possible without the support of our fellow students.

We appreciate all the submissions this year and hope for continued interest in the future. As an undergraduate publication, our goal is to showcase the best history papers CU students have to offer. The following papers were selected through a blinded and non-biased process, and we hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.

We would also like to say thank you to the University of Colorado History Department and Professor Sanjay Gautam for their patronage and guidance along the way.

Our publication is growing stronger by the year, and this is largely due to the support we receive from our mentors.

We appreciate your readership, and thank you for supporting the work of our fellow historians.

Ryan Lanham Editor-in-Chief

University of Colorado Editorial Team Ryan Lanham Editor-in-Chief Ryan, a senior from Fort Worth, Texas, is a history major and creative writing minor.

Undecided about his life’s ambitions, he remains open to serendipitous opportunities and unanticipated strokes of luck. When he is not studying the past, he enjoys reading, writing, playing guitar, and all things fitness.

Ben Robinson Managing Editor Ben is a junior from Centennial, Colorado majoring in history. Presently unsure of his postgraduation plans, Ben loves teaching, politics, and African history. In his free time, Ben enjoys listening to music, watching Denver Broncos games, and petting his dog Dora.

Michael Rupert Editor Michael is a senior from Denver, Colorado pursuing a degree in history with a certificate in secondary social studies education. After graduating he hopes to earn a master’s degree in museum studies and ultimately would like to educate people in history, outside of a traditional classroom setting. In addition to studying history, he enjoys snowboarding, playing guitar, and traveling.

University of Colorado Editorial Team Jesse Van Divier Editor Jesse is in his final year at the University of Colorado Boulder, studying history and secondary education. He deeply values, respects, and appreciates a well-thought-out pun, sometimes at the cost of his friendships. After graduating he will pursue a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in secondary social studies curriculum and instruction.

Christian Harrison Editor Christian is a senior from Boulder, Colorado. He is pursuing a major in history and a minor in geography. Currently, Christian is working on an honors thesis in the History Department, concerning the post-colonial development of the military of Kenya. While an avid student of history, he also enjoys exploring the Colorado backcountry, with skis or hiking boots.

Table of Contents 7 An Explanation for Mau Mau’s Early Success Christian Harrison 20 Moralizer and Profiteer: Dual British Roles in Imperial India Ryan Lanham 35 John Dickinson’s Dilemma Adam Blatt 53 A Foreign Battleground: The Diplomatic Struggle between Ambassador Wilson and Minister Hintze in La Decena Trágica Jesse Van Divier 66 Symbols and Savages: White Indians, Anti-Indian Sentiment, and the Boston Tea Party Marina Goggin 80 Lacrosse in Diplomacy and Conflict at Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Tragedy at Fort Michilimackinac Jhelene Shaw

An Explanation for Mau Mau’s Early Success

By Christian Harrison During the 1950s, the Mau Mau War erupted in British Kenya. The war pitted the colonial government and its allies against the Kikuyu-dominated Mau Mau. In Defeating Mau Mau, Louis Leakey provides a circumspect analysis on the conflict, focusing in particular on the ways in which a force as seemingly insignificant as Mau Mau was able to achieve early successes against a world super power.1 This is especially surprising considering that Mau Mau faced greater difficulties compared to other guerilla movements of the century. Mau Mau did not have the extensive military experience enjoyed by the Yugoslavian partisans in World War II, the access to safe havens across foreign borders utilized by the FLN in the French Algerian War, the support of outside powers the Vietcong capitalized upon in the Vietnam War, nor the religious motivation that propelled the Mujahedeen in the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.2 Furthermore, Mau Mau was not united ethnically or religiously.3 How then did this movement have such stunning early successes?

Even today, Leakey, who wrote in 1954 as Mau Mau was gaining momentum, provides clues to the answer of this question. While Leakey’s Defeating Mau Mau has not completely held up to modern scrutiny, it does provide valuable insight into the tactics and strategies of Mau Mau.4 His ideas about the religious nature of Mau Mau are precarious, but his understanding of Mau Mau’s aims, organization, and the effectiveness of its propaganda are astute. He also is critical of the Kenyan colonial government’s policies. He states that the Mau Mau War, and situations like it, would continue throughout the British Empire “unless those in authority are prepared to recognize frankly that they made many mistakes, and

1

Louis S. B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau (London: Methuen, 1954).

Marshall S. Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, & Politics (London: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 143-170.

3 There may be some discussion on ethnic unity in Mau Mau, but without a doubt, one of Mau Mau’s greatest adversaries was the group of Kikuyu who sided with the colonial powers. See: Daniel Branch, “The Enemy Within: Loyalists and the War against Mau Mau in Kenya,” Journal of African History 48 no. 2 (2007): 291-315.

4 Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 142.

2

Colorado Historian |7

unless they are prepared to spend considerable sums of money in the very near future in rectifying those errors.”5 Leakey’s analysis is especially important, as it critically shaped the government’s response to the war. This is confirmed, as Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale illustrate, “Leakey’s intellectual authority . . . shaped not only official understanding of Mau Mau, but more important aspects of policies for suppressing and eradicating it.”6 This analysis will demonstrate that Mau Mau’s early success is attributable to its extensive acquisition of local support, effective maintenance of that support, superior jungle combat tactics, and various mishaps by the Kenyan colonial government and British military in establishing competent leadership and implementing sound strategies.

I. Mau Mau’s Acquisition of its Support Base Concerning the Mau Mau war, Robert Eatman states, “As is the case with other insurgencies, [local] support of, or at least noninterference with, the rebels is critical to their success.” Mau Mau required public support for supplies such as food, weapons, ammunition, money, and recruits.7 They also required public support for protection and sanctuary. Mao Zedong confirms this, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”8 Mau Mau had multiple strategies for acquiring this civilian base. The first was to commandeer several aspects of the Kenyan African Union, or the KAU, a political organization meant to rally indigenous Africans in Kenya. The second was to create propaganda of its own to serve its shifting purposes. The third was to administer oaths to Mau Mau adherents. The fourth was to capitalize upon the actions of the Kenyan colonial government.

Much of Mau Mau’s support was derived or hijacked from the KAU. The KAU, which was led

by Jomo Kenyatta, sought to address the grievances experienced by indigenous Africans in Kenya. It is important to understand that the KAU did not become Mau Mau, nor did it purposely facilitate or aid in 5

Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 127.

Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau,” History and Anthropology 5 (1991): 144.

7 Robert M. Eatman, Strategic Assessment of the Mau-Mau Rebellion (Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 2007), 5.

8 Mao Tse-tung, On Guerilla Warfare (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

6

Colorado Historian |8

its creation. The KAU merely awakened the political aspirations of lower class Kikuyu and encouraged that social class to action. When the KAU, who had pledged to make adequate improvements, failed to deliver on their promises through democratic means, a more militant faction arose in the form of Mau Mau.9 In 1952, near the beginning of open hostilities, Kenyatta and other KAU leaders extensively toured Kenya and held mass political rallies.10 Kenyatta used rhetoric that angered and motivated his various audiences as he portrayed Europeans as oppressors.11 During one rally he shared his vision that he could become Prime Minister of Kenya, which was understood as a “call to action.”12 Frank Furedi explains that Kenyatta “told the crowds just what they wanted to hear and his militant speeches were received with great enthusiasm.13 Though Kenyatta neither condoned nor led the militant Mau Mau’s departure from the KAU, his propaganda and rhetoric are partly responsible for its creation. One new Mau Mau member proclaimed, “We started talking about moving into the forest after Kenyatta’s big tour of the Rift Valley. He was talking about how we would get freedom. We held many secret meetings. In these meeting we decided to fight the colonialists.”14 The KAU unwittingly gave rise to Mau Mau, which then usurped aspects of KAU’s political movement including its propaganda, call to action, and a significant portion of its support base.

Mau Mau also created its own successful propaganda to attract support. Colonial official Richard Frost portrays this propaganda as “brilliant in . . . psychology and efficient in . . . distribution.”15 One of the reasons for this efficiency is that the propaganda remained largely undetected by colonial authorities; as the historian Myles Osborne describes; Mau Mau propaganda is “replete with clever turns of phrase, 9

David Throup, Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-1953 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1988), 112.

Frank Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective (London: James Currey, 1989), 114.

11 Ibid., 104.

12 Ibid., 114.

13 Ibid., 115.

14 Ibid.

15 Myles Osborne, “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau,” Journal of African History 56 (2015), doi: 10.1017/S00218537140067X: 11.

10

Colorado Historian |9

proverbs, and deliberately ambiguous language with multiple meanings.”16 Mau Mau’s propaganda was also “brilliant” in influencing its audience. Osborne states that the propaganda of Dedan Kimathi, a significant Mau Mau leader, “threatened ‘collaborators’ . . . [and] cajoled and persuaded [others].”17 Osborne goes on to show how Mau Mau’s documentation and projection of its own history competently portrayed “a sovereign state” that stood in opposition to the colonial government in Kenya.”18 This also enabled Mau Mau to celebrate and make known the achievements of its fighters.19 These factors allowed Mau Mau’s propaganda to project a powerful and positive image to its audiences, which in turn attracted additional support.

Mau Mau also gained support through oath giving, which was done through an intense, symbolic, ritualistic process which initiated new members. While the implications of these oaths were misunderstood and overestimated by Leakey and some British Empire officials, they did have significance. Though the oath was not necessarily a means to incite violence against the colonial government, it was effective in creating unity, allegiance, and a sense of purpose amongst Mau Mau. Furedi explains that the oath “served to strengthen organizational links” and prepare “for physical resistance.”20 Bildad Kaggia, a Mau Mau member, states that the oath created “a solidarity and closeness of all members, a confidence they had in one another, which [before] was not evident.”21 The historian Marshall Clough explains that the oath instilled in the individual “a real sense of social purpose to defend the community against its enemies.”22 The highly educated Mau Mau leader Karari Njama went so far as to say of oathing’s importance that “the unity and obedience achieved by [oathing] was so great that it

16

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 15.

18 Ibid., 16.

19 Ibid.

20 Furedi, Mau Mau War, 113.

21 Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 100.

22 Ibid.

17

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 10

could be our only weapon for fighting against the white community.”23 Mau Mau used oathing to strengthen the bond between its members and prepare them for war.

Another function of the oath was to discover and potentially eliminate Kikuyu loyalists and those who were skeptical of Mau Mau. Clough reveals that the results from oathing “ostracized Kikuyu who had not taken the oath, brought peer pressure on some to take it, and stigmatized and isolated unreconstructed ‘loyalists.’”24 In some cases those who refused to take the oath were killed.25 Daniel Branch points out that Mau Mau not only killed loyalist Kikuyu soldiers and militia, but also “elders, agricultural instructors, nuns, schoolchildren, preachers, teachers and tax clerks.”26 Wunyabari Maloba states that through oathing and other techniques Mau Mau were “able to isolate traitors [loyalists] and eliminate them quickly.”27 Because of this Branch insists that the “fear of being declared a loyalist drove many to take oaths in order to protect themselves” and their families.28 In this way, Mau Mau further consolidated its support.

The Mau Mau were also effective in the use of propaganda to counter reconciliation efforts. The Kenyan colonial government took measures to address the growing dissent amongst the Kikuyu.29 Through various meetings, the government attempted to begin the process of negotiations with Kikuyu who lived in regions where Mau Mau were especially active. These efforts were foiled by Mau Mau’s counter propaganda; for instance, attendance at one such meeting was discouraged by a rumor which suggested that “[there were] machine guns hidden by Europeans in surrounding trees [that] were trained at the audience”.30 Even if the colonial government’s attempts at collaboration were superficial, the Mau 23

Ibid., 102.

Ibid., 101.

25 Branch, “The Enemy Within,” 300.

26 Ibid.

27 Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 115116.

28 Branch, “The Enemy Within,” 300.

29 Furedi, Mau Mau War, 115.

30 Ibid.

24

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 11

Mau countered any chance of such dialogue with effective propaganda. The colonial government then reverted to oppressive measures, which benefited Mau Mau’s acquisition of popular support.

The Kenyan colonial government’s early response to the crisis facilitated Mau Mau’s efforts to gain support. Beginning in early 1952, Kenya’s European settlers began to demand increasingly harsh measures from the Kenyan colonial government against the Kikuyu who they believed to support Mau Mau.31 Arrests and evictions of suspected Mau Mau members became wide spread, as Caroline Elkins explains, “removals were massive and indiscriminate, with the deportations often carried out shortly after Mau Mau strikes against Europeans or loyalists, a clear reaction to the outcry from European settlers.”32 She further demonstrates the extent of these efforts, noting that “as of May of that year, over one hundred thousand Kikuyu had been deported from their homes and returned to Kikuyu reserves.”33 The Kenyan colonial government’s punitive measures often unwittingly included innocent Kikuyu, which “served only to strengthen support for Mau Mau.”34 These evictions also bolstered Mau Mau’s support base by importing Mau Mau members and ideology into the reserves; the contemporary Governor Baring conceded that this “probably led to a further facilitation of gang [Mau Mau] recruitment.”35 The Kenyan colonial government’s early strategies not only failed to restrain or damage Mau Mau, they instead strengthened the movement.

II. Mau Mau’s Sustainment of its Support Base While gaining the support of the local population was critical to Mau Mau’s early success, equally important was sustaining that support. Without the continued aid of the local people for food, military supplies, recruits, and intelligence, Mau Mau would not have achieved the success it had in the

31

Ibid., 116.

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 57.

33 Ibid.

34 Furedi, Mau Mau War, 117.

35 Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19.

32

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 12

early years of the conflict. In fact, only when the Kenyan colonial government and the British military disrupted the Mau Mau supply system did the tide of conflict begin to change. Dedan Kimathi illustrates this when he stressed that “hunger is a greater threat than enemy patrols.”36 Mau Mau sustained its passive and military wing through the upkeep of their morale using reconstructed hymns, symbolic rituals, and hijacked British propaganda.

One simple but effective way Mau Mau maintained the morale of its members was through reconstructed hymns. Mau Mau took familiar religious and even British patriotic hymns and overhauled them with lyrics that encouraged the movement. The lyrics were set to such common hymns as “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Abide with Me,” “Jesus will Come,” and “God Save the Queen,” among others.37 The new lyrics maintained the lure of religious allusion, but they also praised Jomo Kenyatta as the savior of Kenya, prophesied that self-government and vengeance would come, and encouraged the singers to not be fearful or give up the struggle.38 Leakey states that Mau Mau “were quick to realize the very great opportunity which the Kikuyu love of hymn singing offered.”39 He believed that the genius of this lied in “the fact that such ‘hymns’ would be learned by heart, by those who could read them, and then taught to others, [which] meant that they would soon also become well known to the illiterate members.”40 Another fitting description of the effectiveness and significance of these hymns comes from a detained Mau Mau organizer, Kinuthia Mugia. Mugia noted the abstract benefits alongside the tangible: “Hymns form a voice which reaches speedily not only the ears but also the very hearts of the people.”41 Helen Macharia, a Mau Mau detainee, confirms this, recalling that they sang “to help us [Mau Mau]

36

Kennel Jackson Jr., “‘Impossible to Ignore their Greatness’ Survival Craft in the Mau Mau Forest Movement,” in Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority, & Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 181.

37 Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 54-73.

38 Ibid., 55-74.

39 Ibid., 53.

40 Ibid., 53-54.

41 Ibid., 56.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 13

triumph in the struggle.”42 Elkins explains that singing “encouraged group solidarity and commitment to the Mau Mau cause.”43 Hymn singing certainly encouraged Mau Mau members in their efforts and greatly sustained their overall morale and willpower.

The second way in which Mau Mau sustained morale was through regularly holding intense rituals with religious and traditional Kikuyu allusions. The rituals used symbolic Kikuyu materials such as gourds, beer, and millet, but were also accompanied by Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer, which Clough explains had the effect of “intensifying the commitment of individuals and strengthening group solidarity.”44 These daily reminders “spoke to the Mau Mau condition and to their ultimate redemption.”45 They had great impact in motivating and encouraging Mau Mau members.

The third way Mau Mau sustained its members’ morale was through its resourceful interpretation of the Kenyan colonial government’s propaganda, which, Osborne suggests, was actually an inversion of the propaganda’s intended message that served to encourage the Mau Mau community. When British propaganda publicized the atrocities committed by Mau Mau, Mau Mau used this to “inspire a quite extraordinary level of fear among their opponents.”46 When British propaganda attempted to vilify Mau Mau leaders it “succeeded in achieving little more than spreading their fame throughout the colony.”47 When British propaganda was used to pressure the movement’s members to surrender, Karari Njama, a Mau Mau fighter, reasoned “that the Government had been unable to defeat us. . . . We held that if we did not surrender, then the Government would definitely surrender.”48

42

Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 156.

Ibid.

44 Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 142-143.

45 Ibid.,145.

46 Osborne, “Propoganda and the Mau Mau,” 8.

47 Ibid., 12.

48 Ibid., 10.

43

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 14

III. The Military Aspect Another factor that maintained Mau Mau’s morale and, more importantly, justified its militant existence was its strategic and tactical battlefield successes. The Mau Mau militant wing, masters of jungle warfare, effectively combated the British military and the colonial government’s police and militia. Clough explains that Mau Mau “were superb forest fighters, able to travel considerable distances through the forest in short period of time, able to double back on their paths to confuse pursuit, able to lie absolutely still in ambush until the enemy had come close enough to kill.”49 Even General Sir George Erskine of World War II notability conceded that Mau Mau warriors were “master[s] in field craft and concealment.”50 Similarly, Ian Henderson, the celebrated British police officer, stated, “The bushcraft of these survivors [Mau Mau] had reached a superlative standard.”51 Mau Mau took advantage of their jungle combat knowhow by eliminating Kikuyu opposition and staging bold raids against fortified prisons, police stations, and militia bases.52 After these daring attacks they would effectively melt back into the jungle and sometimes ambush the British pursuit.

Mau Mau were perfectly adapted to fight in the forests, unlike the British military, who felt the terrain was rugged and impenetrable. Kendall Jackson estimates that some Mau Mau warriors “could cover 70 miles a day, whereas the initial [British] patrols, carrying lots of equipment, could cover only 500 yd per hour and sometimes sank to their waist in bamboo.”53 Through Mau Mau’s early efforts, they decisively struck military and civilian targets. The effect of these attacks both strengthened Mau Mau’s morale and deteriorated loyalist resolve.54 Mau Mau’s competent military strategy and tactics “enabled

49

Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 151.

Ibid.

51 Jackson, “Survival Craft in the Mau Mau,” 183.

52 Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 152-153.

53 Jackson, “Survival Craft in the Mau Mau,” 184.

54 Branch, “The Enemy Within,” 300-302.

50

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 15

Mau Mau forces to rival a superior military establishment. To compete with and periodically outperform their rivals [sic].”55 The British military and the Kenyan colonial government were slow in establishing strong leadership and an effective strategy to deter Mau Mau and protect Kikuyu loyalists. Concerning conflicts related to the Mau Mau war, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery stated, “We must have a plan. Secondly, we must have a man. When we have a plan and a man, we shall succeed: not otherwise.”56 This line of thinking unfolded sluggishly in Britain’s attempt to regain control of the Mau Mau war, and the Kenyan colonial government was thus criticized “for lacking a clear strategy, [and] reacting in a frantic and ad hoc manner to the Mau Mau.”57 The British military already knew how to defeat Mau Mau from their experiences in the Malayan Emergency, but when General Sir John Harding arrived in Kenya in 1953, he distressed that none of “the lessons of Malaya seemed to have been learned or indeed even been heard of.”58 The “Malaya Plan” was a counter insurgency strategy that intended to separate the insurgents from their support bases.59 It was not until June, 1953 that the military would have their man on the ground: General George Erskine. However, the military was still slow to adapt to the situation as Mau Mau tied together a string of significant and symbolic victories through 1953 and 1954.60 It would not be until after this time that the British military was able to protect loyalists from violent incursions and separate Mau Mau from its civilian base.

A second way in which the British military failed to deter Mau Mau was its inability to put physical pressure on its militant wing. The military struggled to even locate and bring Mau Mau warriors 55

Jackson, “Survival Craft in the Mau Mau,” 179.

Randall W. Heather, “Of Men and Plans: the Kenya Campaign as part of the British Counterinsurgency Experience,” Conflict Quarterly 11 (1993): 17.

57 Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 11-13.

58 Aaron Edwards, Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 94.

59 Edwards, Defending the Realm, 98-99.

60 Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, 153.

56

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 16

to battle in the dense forests of Kenya. As late as 1953, Erskine admitted that he possessed “no detailed information as to the location, strength, armament, determination or method of maintenance of [Mau Mau],” except that they were “numerous and aggressive.”61 Erskine labored to change this dimension.

He demanded that his officers “cultivate an offensive spirit against Mau Mau” and that they should be “determined to kill [all enemies] . . . you must wipe the floor with Mau Mau.”62 Despite this “offensive spirit,” the British military was grossly unprepared to effectively combat Mau Mau in Kenya’s forest terrain; Erskine’s army units are initially described as “a damned nuisance in the Jungles of Kenya,” “impractical,” and “highly inefficient” due to their size and lack of jungle combat experience.63 One colonial military report lamented that “on a recent [forest] patrol, the noise of our movement was just like a heard of Elephant on the march,” which is in contrast with Mau Mau’s “noiseless poise.”64 Even Major General William Hinde condescendingly compared the military’s combat operations to “grouse shoots.”65 It would not be until 1955 that this dynamic began to change with the creation of the “forest warfare school” alongside the reorganization of “Army units into Forest Operating Companies and Tracker/Combat Teams.”66 Only when the British military was able to pressure Mau Mau’s fighting bands in the forests did the tide of the war change, as Mau Mau were pushed farther away from their supply base and thus left dangerously exposed. *** The early success of Mau Mau stemmed from its strategy and tactics and by failures of the British colonial system. Mau Mau’s ability to garner civilian support, build and sustain morale, and effectively combat government forces was significant. By usurping certain aspects of the KAU, as well as 61

Edwards, Defending the Realm, 97.

Ibid., 97-98.

63 William W. Baldwin, Mau Mau Man-hunt: The Adventures of the Only American Who Has Fought the Terrorists in Kenya (New York: Dutton, 1957), 165-166.

64 Jackson, “Survival Craft in the Mau Mau,” 184.

65 Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 17.

66 Edwards, Defending the Realm, 112.

62

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 17

establishing their own propaganda and oaths, Mau Mau created an extensive support base. With reconstructed hymns, symbolic rituals, and reinterpreted British propaganda, they sustained this support.

Through Mau Mau’s forest knowhow, they were able to confound the British military and eliminate Kikuyu opposition. Success can also be attributed to blunders committed by the Kenyan colonial government and the British military; this included most notably a failure to implement sound policies, establish competent leadership on the ground, protect loyalists, conduct decisive combat operations in the jungle, and separate Mau Mau from its support base. Mau Mau achieved brilliant success early in the war against all odds because of these factors.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 18

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baldwin, William W. Mau Mau Man-hunt: The Adventures of the Only American Who Has Fought the Terrorists in Kenya. New York: Dutton, 1957.

Bennett, Huw. Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Berman, Bruce and John Lonsdale. “Louis Leakey’s Mau Mau.” History and Anthropology 5 (1991): 143-205.

Branch, Daniel. “The Enemy Within: Loyalists and the War against Mau Mau in Kenya.” Journal of African History 48 (2007): 291-315.

Clough, Marshall S. Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, & Politics. London: Lynne Rienner, 1998.

Eatman, Robert M. Strategic Assessment of the Mau-Mau Rebellion. Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 2007.

Edwards, Aaron. Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

Furedi, Frank. The Mau Mau War in Perspective. London: James Currey, 1989.

Heather, Randall W. “Of Men and Plans: The Kenya Campaign as Part of the British Counterinsurgency Experience.” Conflict Quarterly 11 (1993): 17-25.

Jackson, Jr., Kennel. “‘Impossible to Ignore their Greatness’ Survival Craft in the Mau Mau Forest Movement.” In Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority, & Narration, edited by E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, 176-190. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003.

Leakey, Louis S.B. Defeating Mau Mau. London: Methuen, 1954.

Maloba, Wunyabari O. Mau Mau and Kenya: Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Osborne, Myles. “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau War.” The Journal of African History, 56 (2015): 77-97. doi:10.1017/S002185371400067X. Throup, David. Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-1953. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1988.

Tse-tung, Mao. On Guerrilla Warfare. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1961.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 19

Moralizer and Profiteer: Dual British Roles in Imperial India

By Ryan Lanham As the British Empire spread across South Asia, official policy sought to regulate and control the use of intoxicants among its Indian inhabitants. East India Company rhetoric—and later, that of the Crown—discouraged the consumption of a number of mind-altering drugs. From a position of selfimposed moral superiority, British chastised Indians who turned to intoxicants, thereby experiencing their “deleterious effects.” This role as moralizer was deeply embedded in the British imperial psyche.

Viewing disparate peoples through the lens of a civilized hierarchy—those from the Occident attaining the highest positions—British regarded most South Asian subjects as needing their guidance. Irrespective of Indian sentiment, the British adopted this role and issued policies containing language which reflected their position as “moral leaders.” Despite the self-righteous wording of many rules concerning Indians and their usage of intoxicants, most official drug and liquor policies accomplished another unspoken goal: profiting from those Indians who did use intoxicants. During their reign, British officials attempted to balance the opposing roles of moralizer and profiteer. The result, however, was a steady rise in the number of Indians turning to drugs and liquor—disregarding British rhetoric, yet filling British pocketbooks.

The consumption of intoxicants in India predated British rule by millennia. Dating back to antiquity, Indian texts—including the Rig-Veda—contain various accounts of wine being produced and

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 20

consumed.67 The degree to which the general population drank alcohol was often reflective of the prevailing religious tolerance of the time. Ancient Vedic texts describe the worship of Soma—the Moon God—as incorporating vast amounts of alcoholic rituals.68 Later Vedic texts—particularly, those regarding the age of Manu—describe how drinking spirituous liquors became a mortal sin, resulting in the drinker receiving a brand on the forehead of a wine cup.69 Although alcohol eventually regained its legitimacy within Hindu dogma, Buddhism emerged around the 6th century BCE and denounced its consumption and effects.70 Likewise, with the rise of Islam, Muslim rulers strictly forbade the consumption of alcohol.71 The overall effect of mounting religious intolerance towards alcohol was to drive consumption out of public view and into the home—that is, until British rule.

Before exploring how alcohol consumption increased in British India, another flourishing drug should be mentioned: opium. Much like alcohol, opium production in India existed for nearly one thousand years prior to British rule.72 Arab traders brought poppy seeds to India’s fertile soils, and independent farmers began to cultivate and produce the drug. A monopoly eventually formed under sixteenth-century Mughal rule, as poppy cultivation and trade became regulated.73 As the Mughal Empire declined, non-contracted farmers seized the opportunity to cultivate poppy with less fear of reprisal.

67

Badrul Hassan, The Drink and Drug Evil in India (Madras: Ganesh & Co, 1922): 1-2: For the sake of convenience, the words intoxicants and drugs will include various alcoholic forms as well.

68 Ibid., 3-4.

69 Ibid., 8.

70 Ibid., 16-20.

71 Ibid., 28-29.

72 J.T. Richards, “The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 61.

73 James B. Lyall, “Note on the History of Opium in India and of the Trade in it with China,” First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium (1895): 11.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 21

Independent and unregulated opium-producing factions continued to produce the drug on a small scale until 1773, when Governor-General of Bengal Warren Hastings reestablished a monopoly under British rule.74 The effect, again, was an increase in Indian consumption.

These two drugs, alcohol and opium, are the focus of Badrul Hassan’s The Drink and Drug Evil in India. The foreword, by Gandhi, states that “it will be no defence to urge that the vice [of opium and alcohol] has existed in India from times immemorial. No one organized the vice as the present [British] Government has for purposes of revenue.”75 After a brief background concerning the history of intoxicants in India, Hassan spends the remainder of his book expounding upon Gandhi’s assertion that British policy aimed to increase Indian drug use, thereby increasing profits. Summarizing his claim, Hassan states that the East India Company “in its insatiable passion for money . . . began to encourage the drinking habits of the people, and devised ways and means for enhancing this revenue regardless of the baneful effects that such a policy would entail.”76 Expounding upon this thesis, Hassan’s book details the methods in which British policy successfully accrued vast wealth.

Hassan’s account provides one perspective of British roles regarding intoxicants—namely, that of ruthless profiteer. Conversely, East India Company official Henry St. George Tucker assumes the role of moralizer in his report A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824. In the section titled “The Opium Monopoly,” Tucker asserts, “We scarcely can be said to do them injury by

74

The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal, Printed for J. Debrett, opposite BurlingtonHouse, Piccadilly; and Vernor and Hood, Birchin-Lane, Cornhill, 1796: 241.

75 Hassan, Drink and Drug Evil, vi.

76 Ibid., 35.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 22

raising the price, so as to discourage the use of a drug, which, however excellent as a medicine, cannot be used habitually, or in excess, without injury to the individual who indulges in the habit.”77 Perhaps unwitting readers in England accepted this benevolent motive without question; but to many others it certainly appeared dubious.

The Oriental Herald, a British journal from the same time period, provides a running commentary on Tucker’s report. It criticizes Tucker’s motives in often scathing terms: “What are we to think of a moralizer [Tucker], who tells people they have done wrong, and then exhorts them to be consistent in wickedness!”78 Touting an anti-imperialist and anti-opium agenda, The Oriental Herald provides yet another perspective in the tangled web of British rule and its impact on India drug use. To gain a clearer—and ideally, less biased—perspective, one must apprehend the facts. What proof is there that drug use increased? And, which “moralistic” policies were ultimately revenue creators, rather than intoxicant deterrents?

To begin, it is important to understand how the British attempted to regulate Indian drug consumption. In 1790, Bengal Regulation XXXIII was passed under the guidance of Governor-General of India Charles Cornwallis.79 This directive sought to organize and regulate the mismanaged abkarry tax collection system already in place.80 An additional reform took place three years later, as Bengal

77

Henry St. George Tucker, A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824 (London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1825): 61.

78 “Sources of Revenue,” The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature VI (1825): 25.

79 Nancy Gardner Cassels, “The East India Company’s Abkarry and Pilgrim Taxes Questions of Public Order and Morality or Revenue,” Swedish South Asian Studies Network, Lund University, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.sasnet.lu.se/EASASpapers /22NancyGardner.pdf. 1.

80 Abkarry was the Persian-derived name given to the tax on intoxicating drugs and spirituous liquors.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 23

Regulation XXVII further clarified the British position regarding intoxicants: “The Governor General in Council, with a view to prevent the perpetration of crimes [intoxicant usage], and at the same time to augment the public revenue, passed certain rules on the 16th of April 1790 and subsequent dates.”81 This goal of accruing revenue while purportedly encouraging temperance became a recurring theme in British policy.

Several decades later, after the abkarry had undergone still further revisions, Tucker’s report examined the efficacy of taxation as a means of reducing intoxicant consumption among Indians. As background he notes, “The abkarry was established by us upon a regular footing, partly with a view to objects of police, and partly for the purpose of drawing a revenue, at the same time that we discouraged and checked the bad habits of our native subjects.”82 Despite this attempt at a win-win approach— increasing profit, decreasing consumption—Tucker concedes that “the use of spirituous liquors and drugs by the natives has increased, and is still increasing, and with it, I apprehend, their vices.”83 While postulating various solutions to the rampant drug problem—including the wholesale abolition of the abkarry system—Tucker acknowledges, “We might have refrained from supplying (as we have done lately) a large quantity of opium for our domestic consumption.”84 This last statement requires closer inspection, as it deviates from the path of moralizer into purely profiteer.

81

Cassels, “The East India Company’s,” 2: emphasis added.

Tucker, A Review, 73: emphasis added.

83 Ibid., 74.

84 Ibid., 76.

82

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 24

When the opium monopoly was first established Indian consumption was prohibited—except for a small personal amount for the growers. Beginning in 1773, under direction of Warren Hastings, the monopoly sought to control all of India’s poppy cultivation and opium exportation. By tightly regulating the burgeoning industry, British officials were able to maximize profits and minimize loss. One means of achieving this goal was to restrict Indians from consuming opium, resulting in more product available for exportation abroad. Exported opium was sold high above market value, and profits from the trade steadily increased. What Tucker mentions above is a change in policy that turned Indians into consumers.

With this new policy in place the balance shifted, and British roles fell more heavily on the side of profiteer.

Excluding foreign drug trade, which was an immensely profitable business, Indian consumption of intoxicants also proved a valuable source of revenue. The following chart provides data from 18991918 in approximately five-year intervals:85 Year 1899-00

Shops (vending drugs) 101,883

Excise Revenue (in Rupees)* 57,899,125

1904-05

113,116

80,301,306

1909-10

96,516

98,067,802

1914-15

74,422

132,853,214

1918-19

69,835

173,552,770

*Does not include customs duty on foreign liquors or spirits.

85

Hassan, Drink and Drug Evil, Appendix E. C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 25

Over the twenty-year span, the number of shops selling intoxicants decreased while the tax revenue increased dramatically. This was a result of British determination to corner the domestic drug trade, enacting stricter excise policies and amassing bigger returns.86 The threefold increase in excise revenue was a result of several factors, including more stringent taxation policies, more types of intoxicant-bearing goods being taxed, and a concerted effort to minimize the sale and production of black market drugs. Taxation policies were often enacted by district, and analyzing each separately would prove too lengthy for this paper. An examination of excise policy in Bombay is worth exploring, however, as it is representative of overall British taxation strategies. The Bombay Abkari87 Act of 1878, as scholar Indra Munshi Saldanha notes, was “the British liquor policy [guided] . . . by the twin objects of generating revenue . . . and checking intemperance among people towards safeguarding their morality.”88 Nearly a century after the initial Bengal Regulations, the official rhetoric still proclaimed moralistic reasons for taxing intoxicants.

Unlike taxes on opium, a drug which many felt did more harm than good, the Bombay Abkari Act placed restrictions on palm trees and Bassia latifolia, or the flowers of mahua trees.89 Palm trees were tapped, and their fermented juices produced a popular toddy. Similarly, mahua flowers were collected and left to ferment, producing a popular drink among the poor. The Abkari Act sought to control

86

Ibid., 76.

A variation of the spelling abkarry.

88 Indra Munshi Saldanha, “On Drinking and ‘Drunkeness’: History of Liquor in Colonial India,” Economic and Political Weekly 30: 37 (1995): 2323.

89 Ibid.

87

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 26

this market: a license was required to tap a tree, and a license was required to sell the liquor.90 In addition, licenses were auctioned to the highest bidder, ensuring British agencies reaped the largest possible reward in each transaction. In 1892 the Mhowra Act III, an extension of the Bombay Abkari Act, was passed in an attempt to eliminate mahua liquor all together; the result of which placed undue hardship on the poor, who relied on the mahua flowers as a source of food for themselves and their cattle in times of scarcity.91 The Mhowra Act was not well received by local Indians, who claimed that the government was placing unfair restrictions on a valuable source of food and medicine. To resolve the situation, a committee, consisting of three Bombay revenue officials, was appointed to review the facts.

Unsurprisingly, they ruled in favor of the government. Their findings concluded “that mahua was not a staple article of food of the people, neither was it generally given, to any appreciable extent, to cattle.”92 The balance tipped once again in favor of profiteer. The British claimed moralistic motives in taxing various liquors, but forbidding the collection of a well-known food source—in hopes of monopolizing a market—was far from benevolent.

The Abkari and Mhowra Acts reflect the British attempt to control all aspects of the intoxicant trade, whether through licensing, taxation, or minimizing illicit liquor production by prohibiting the collection of certain flowers. Enacted a century after than the initial abkarry tax, these policies demonstrated a continued shift in political motivation—or rather, a lapse in rhetoric aligning with policy.

90

Ibid., 2324.

Ibid., 2326.

92 Ibid.

91

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 27

Mahua flowers were eaten by the poor during times of famine, and used in medicines and fodder for cattle. To deprive the lower class of sustenance, in order to prevent illicit liquor production, was surely motivated by the desire to enhance profits. Governmental authorities who claimed to have the interests of the people at heart, while contributing to conditions of food scarcity, can hardly be called moralistic.

Despite these inconsistencies, the British continued to declare public concern as a primary motivating factor when enacting new policies and regulations.

Due to the rising number of British-regulated drug shops, more detailed accounts of Indian liquor consumption emerged nearing the turn of the twentieth century. In Saldana’s article “On Drinking and ‘Drunkeness’: History of Liquor in Colonial India,” revenue figures from the Maharashtra State Archive reveal a steady increase in Indian liquor consumption: In 1881-82 the consumption per head was reported to be 19 drams, in 1883-84 it was 22.8 drams . . . (One dram is 1/48 of a gallon.) The consumption rose to 23.4 drams in 1893-94, 25.3 drams in 1898-99, and dropped to 20.8 drams per head in 1899-90 as a result of the effects of famine in the district. It rose again to 23.9 drams in 1903-04 and further to 26.7 drams in 1904-05, the highest on record and was attributed to the "return of prosperity.”93 Year

93

1881-82

Consumption (per person)* 19

1883-84

22.8

1893-34

23.4

1898-99

25.3

1899-1900

20.8

Ibid., 2327.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 28

1903-04

23.9

1904-05

26.7

*Average drams per person (one dram = 1/48 of gallon)

While these records certainly indicate more alcohol was purchased by Indians, it may not be concluded from these facts alone that more alcohol was consumed. Illicit distilleries had always existed in subversion of British law, and one may argue that the above figures simply reflect better policing measures by the British, forcing more liquor to be purchased legally—and thus, trackable.

Looking at static figures without contextualization, one may infer any number of disparate conclusions. Documents exist, however, from both the British and Indian perspective that suggest the above numbers are reflective of Indians purchasing and consuming more alcohol. Tucker, of the EIC, provides anecdotal evidence supporting this conjecture: “In the Hindoo Zemindary of Nuddeah I have heard that not a single shop existed until we licensed the vend of spirituous liquors and drugs; and at the present not a village in it could be pointed out, in which such a shop would not be found.”94 Tucker continues, stating that men had undoubtedly consumed spirits before, but that it had been done in private and “the evil did not extend so far.”95 Clearly, British policy had driven liquor consumption and sales into public view, though Tucker fails to acknowledge the irony of licensing and vending “evil” while condemning it simultaneously.

94 95

Tucker, A Review, 75.

Ibid.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 29

From an Indian perspective, Hassan argues that British policy sought the maximum taxation possible without spurring a rise in illicit drug trade. He also notes that “no express principle of reducing consumption is laid down, whereas the importance given to increasing the taxation and revenue cannot be mistaken.”96 In other words, British policy making did not reflect the rhetoric concerning the “evilness” of drug use. Public condemnation of intoxicants did allow the British to take a position of moral superiority, but their actions betrayed other intentions—namely, profiting from the newly streamlined and legalized drug trade.

From a modern perspective, during an era in which the “War on Drugs” has remained a contentious political issue, official public rhetoric is similar to that of British India: drugs are dangerous and should be controlled. In the U.S., various intoxicating drugs are ostensibly classified according to their potential danger and made illegal across the board, with few exceptions. This type of policy—as opposed to open profiteering—is more emblematic of a government’s desire to eradicate drug use among its citizenry. Of course, one may argue the War on Drugs has other revenue-boosting qualities—such as increased spending on domestic and international policing, more private contracts including prisons, asset seizures during drug raids—but, in terms of direct action, modern drug policy advocates for penal punishment over monetary gain, or taxation.

The opium monopoly in India is another glaring example of how British imperial policy differs dramatically from contemporary anti-drug campaigns. By participating in the drug trade—and profiting

96

Hassan, Drink and Drug Evil, 46: emphasis in text.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 30

handsomely—the benevolent language used by British officials never quite matched their actions. In addition, as purveyors of opium—first to the Chinese, then to Indians as well—any British claim of a moralistic agenda during price hikes may be viewed as dubious at best. Still, this is what Tucker claimed as motivation in his 1825 report: British raised opium prices to deter drug use.97 Further discrediting the official British policy line was the devastating effects the opium monopoly had on the non-drug using populace. Opium trade proved so profitable that subsistence farmers in Bengal were forced or coerced into converting their lands into poppy fields.98 This decision to turn food-producing lands into drugproducing lands would prove catastrophic, as famine conditions in India were exacerbated by a lack of food-bearing farms.99 In conclusion, the British were unable to strike an equal balance between the dual roles of moralizer and profiteer. Official policy lines and dogmatic assertions of moral superiority—particularly, in chastising Indian use of intoxicants—stood in stark contrast to the thinly veiled policies aimed at generating greater profits. Furthermore, the moralistic rhetoric of British drug policy lost credibility when the opium monopoly profiteers began peddling their drugs to Indians. This was a move driven purely by a desire to expand the market and boost revenue, and no amount of public shaming could disguise the true motivation. Likewise, the calamitous effects of repurposing food farms for poppy cultivation may be traced back to the ever-present British objective of generating more money.

97

Tucker, A Review, 61.

Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal (Dehli: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1999).

99 Frederick Storrs Turner, British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Riving, 1876): 156-157.

98

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 31

The numerous taxes on intoxicants were also designed to increase revenue. Ironically, had these policies had the intended effect of discouraging drug use, the amount of revenue would have fallen.

Instead, as with the opium trade, the British pushed for larger markets; markets whose licensing and vending privileges were exclusively under British control. As more Indians consumed British-controlled intoxicants, profits rose accordingly. Throughout the years of imperial British rule, this system was refined a number of times to produce greater financial reward. As profiteer, the effectiveness was remarkable. During this same time period, however, the number of Indians consuming drugs also increased. As moralizer, then, the British proved largely ineffective, even provoking the opposite response. Ultimately, the balancing act required to maintain both roles proved too much. The British finally settled into their role as profiteer, and it was the Indians who paid the price—with their lives, health, and wealth.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 32

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, E.N. “The Opium Industry.” The Economic Journal 6 (1896): 114-122. doi:10.2307/2956785.

Bose, Kailas Chunder. “Cocaine Intoxication and Its Demoralizing Effects.” British Medical Journal 2 (1902): 1020-1022.

Burke, Edmund. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in Twelve Volumes: Volume the Eighth. London: John C. Nimmo, 1887.

Cassels, Nancy Gardner. “The East India Company’s Abkarry and Pilgrim Taxes Questions of Public Order and Morality or Revenue,” Swedish South Asian Studies Network, Lund University.

Accessed March 3, 2015. http://www.sasnet.lu.se/EASASpapers/22NancyGardner.pdf.

Chaudhury, Sushil. From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal. Dehli: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1999.

Chopra, R.N. and G.S. Chopra. “Cocaine Habit in India.” Indian Journal of Medical Research 18 (1931): 1013-1046.

"Cocainism in Calcutta.” British Medical Journal 1 (1902): 1041-42.

Deming, Sarah. “The Economic Importance of Indian Opium and Trade with China on Britain’s Economy, 1843-1890.” Economic Working Papers 25 (2011): 1-17.

Ewens, G.F.W. Insanity in India: Its Symptoms and Diagnosis. Calcutta: Thacker & Spink, 1908.

Farooqui, Amar. “Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as Historical Factor.”

Social Scientist 32 (2004): 21-31, doi: 10.2307/3517991.

———. Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants, and the Politics of Opium 1790-1843.

New York: Lexington Books, 2005.

Hassan, Badrul. The Drink and Drug Evil in India. Madras: Ganesh & Co, 1922.

The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal. Printed for J. Debrett, Opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly; and Vernor and Hood, Birchin-Lane, Cornhill, 1796.

Lyall, James B. “Note on the History of Opium in India and of the Trade in it with China.” First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1895.

Mills, James H. “Drugs, Consumption, and Supply in Asia: The Case of Cocaine in Colonial India, c.

1900-c. 1930.” The Journal of Asian Studies 66 (2007): 345-362.

Richards, J.T. “The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 59-82.

———. “Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895.” Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 375-420.

Saldanha, Indra Munshi. “On Drinking and ‘Drunkeness’: History of Liquor in Colonial India.”

Economic and Political Weekly 30: 37 (1995): 2323.

Siraj, Ahmed. “The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India.” Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 33

“Sources of Revenue.” The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature VI. London: Sanford Arnot, 33 Old Bond Street, 1825.

Trocki, Carl A. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750-1950. London: Routledge, 1999.

Tucker, Henry St. George. A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824. London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1825.

Turner, Frederick Storrs. British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Riving, 1876.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 34

John Dickinson’s Dilemma

By Adam Blatt When John Dickinson joined the First Continental Congress in October 1774, he enjoyed a reputation among delegates from every colony as the preeminent champion of resistance against Britain’s post-1763 attempts at imperial restructuring. Two years later, that reputation was tarnished, for he had argued against ratifying the Declaration of Independence. Dickinson’s fame derived from his widely read Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which he published in 1767 and 1768 to encourage American resistance to the Townshend Acts. According to historian Pauline Maier, the letters “more than any other source defined guidelines for the Americans’ subsequent opposition to Britain,” and by popularizing a program of organized resistance through petitions and non-importation, the letters contributed to the partial repeal of the Townshend Acts.100 When the subsequent, and more egregious, Coercive Acts were passed by Parliament, the colonists felt that they could advocate for repeal by sending delegates to a Continental Congress to create an even more vigorous inter-colonial boycott of British imports and issue petitions that would present Parliament with a unified message on behalf of all the colonies. Dickinson was chosen as the primary author or co-author of many of these petitions and exercised strong influence over Congress’s response to what he perceived as a British constitutional crisis. By engaging in this program, the delegates did not

100

Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, (New York: Knopf, 1972), 114.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 35

envision independence, but rather saw themselves as loyal Englishmen engaging in a long-established tradition of employing extralegal means to restore the proper constitutional balance of power.

However, the notion that they could remain loyal Englishmen was made less tenable when the ministry refused to accept Congress’s legitimacy or its interpretation of the relationship between Parliament, which the ministry controlled through patronage, and the colonies. Prime Minister Frederick North responded in January 1775 by instructing General Thomas Gage to capture prominent congressional leaders. Gage’s attempts to carry out his duties resulted in bloodshed at Lexington and Concord.101 Dickinson responded to this outrage by drafting the final version of the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms on behalf of Congress. In the Declaration, ratified unanimously on July 6, 1775, he declared that the colonies had no choice but to resist through armed force. However, despite his steadfast refusal to concede Parliamentary supremacy over colonial legislatures, Dickinson did not believe that war severed ties between the colonies and the crown. He subsequently led Congress to adopt his Olive Branch Petition, which assured George III that the colonies remained loyal to his majesty.

This paradox of resistance and loyalty infuriated men like John Adams who believed that independence from Great Britain was inevitable. When combined with Dickinson’s arguments against the Declaration of Independence a year later, it has vexed many historians, as well; Dickinson himself had previously argued that the bond between a King and his subjects could be dissolved. To understand

101

David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: The American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774, (Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1974), 136.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 36

Dickinson, we must understand not only his ideology of orderly resistance, but also his consistent emphasis that inter-colonial unity was inseparable from the cause of liberty. His reluctance to definitively cut ties with the crown in July 1775 was not a rejection of war against Britain or a sign of loyalism, but rather reflected his recognition that the colonies did not yet constitute a true nation and that there were no guarantees of continued inter-colonial cooperation in the absence of shared allegiance to the crown.

In the Townshend Act Crisis, Dickinson’s letters emphasized that unified resistance to any Parliamentary overreach was absolutely essential to the preservation of liberty. His assertive rejections of Parliamentary supremacy over provincial legislatures coexisted with an intense pride in British citizenship and reverence for an unwritten British constitution. Dickinson, like others, saw in the Stamp Act, Quartering Act, and Townshend Acts what Bernard Bailyn has described as a “deliberate ‘design’ . . . to overthrow the British constitution” and its guarantees that the commons had rights and protections from the designs of tyrants and power-hungry ministers.102 Influenced by prominent British political writers such as Gordon, Trenchard, and Hutcheson who had long warned that “robinarch” ministers constantly sought to subvert these rights and claim excess power, Dickinson warned that the colonists could not abide Parliament’s imposition of even the most minor taxes, because these taxes were a “dangerous innovation” that was “founded on the destruction of this constitutional security” and set a “precedent” that also allowed unlimited taxation and coercion of the colonies.103 If they accepted the

102 103

Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 11.

John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, (New York: Klaus Reprint Co, 1970), LIX. C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 37

Townshend Acts, Dickinson warned, the colonists would become “as abject slaves, as France and Poland can shew in wooden shoes, and with uncombed hair.”104 Dickinson and the rest of the colonial opposition, as Bailyn describes, understood Britain as “a beacon in a world of deepening gloom,” surrounded by such examples of powerless and uncivilized citizenry as Poland and France. Because of the constitutional balance struck in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, even the colonial opposition felt, “England stood almost completely alone in the old world,” but Dickinson strongly believed that the unparalleled liberties enjoyed by British subjects were fragile and depended on their constant extra-legal resistance to ministerial designs to claim unconstitutional powers.105 Furthermore, the very possibility of effecting change through protest was what distinguished citizens of Britain from those of France. Therefore, he understood his staunch resistance not as revolution, but as part of his loyal duty to uphold the principles of what Pauline Maier has described as “an idealized version of the British regime.”106 Dickinson initially stressed the importance of inter-colonial unity in the Letters from a Farmer as a means to more effectively resist Parliamentary intrusions into what he and most colonists perceived as the sole right of colonial legislatures to levy taxes. In Letter 1, he denounced Parliament’s action in suspending the New York provincial assembly after it refused to provide supplies for British troops as mandated by the Quartering Act. The suspension, he argued, “is a Parliamentary assertion of the supreme

104

Ibid., 25.

Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 150-152.

106 Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 28.

105

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 38

authority of the British legislature over these colonies in the part of taxation; and is intended to compel New York unto a submission of to that authority.”107 Dickinson warned the other colonies that ignoring the grab for New York’s complete submission was foolish, for Parliament was reserving the right to compel any of the colonies on any issue in the future and “mutual inattention to the interest of each other” would only encourage Parliament to do so.

“To divide, and thus to destroy, is the first political maxim in attacking those who are powerful by their union,” he argued, and thus “the cause of one is the cause of all.”108 Dickinson had already attempted to put this principle into practice by participating in the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, which brought together delegates from many of the colonies (with the notable absence of Virginia) to discuss coordinated opposition to the Stamp Act to little practical effect.109 By addressing the Farmers Letters to the inhabitants of all the colonies, Dickinson was now attempting to create a broadly shared understanding of the constitutional issues at stake in the Townshend Act crisis and propose guidelines for an effective response.

This response, Dickinson felt, had to follow an orderly path beginning with petitions and escalating to non-importation schemes and other economic pressures, but the potential for war always laid at the end of this path. Dickinson recognized in 1767 that the preservation of British liberty had previously depended on violent resistance against schemes to “annihilate the liberty of the governed”, but he argued that war was only justifiable when the governed were “FULLY CONVINCED [sic] that 107

Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer, 10.

Ibid., 11.

109 Ibid. 31-33.

108

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 39

any further submission will be destructive to their happiness.” While Dickinson also warned that the calamities that would attend war could be worse than the initial grievances, he nonetheless legitimized civil war as a method to restore the constitutional balance at some future point. Furthermore, Dickinson distinguished between illegitimate warfare against Great Britain’s continually functioning form of balanced government and war to remove tyrants such as the Stuarts who upset that balance.110 Therefore, the Declaration on Taking Arms was perfectly legitimate if Dickinson’s favored methods of petitions and non-importation failed. However, Dickinson believed that the British constitution would once again offer its traditional protections, and until 1770, most resistance leaders understood their ultimate aim in protesting was to influence the formation of a new, friendly, government in Britain; their fellow Englishmen would inevitably share their love of liberty.111 The thought of actually separating from Great Britain was abhorrent to Dickinson in 1767; he warned that the colonies “must bleed at every vein” if they separated themselves from Britain, and despaired of any new form of government that could replace the pre-1763 system of autonomous provincial governments united by loyalty to the king.112 From 1767 to the Declaration on Taking Arms, Dickinson’s positions on the proper balance between provincial assemblies and Parliament remained the same, but the Coercive Acts pushed the colonies to adjust their tactics and establish a more formally unified system of resistance. Pre-1774

110

Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 218.

Jane Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 218-222.

112 Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer, 31-33.

111

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 40

arguments for resistance, steeped in the ideology of British opposition, only feared that Parliament had established precedents legitimizing the future use of absolute power to subjugate them. However, when Britain dissolved the Massachusetts government and replaced it with its own officers, in the process closing Boston’s port, they threated the livelihoods of thousands, providing the colonists with clear proof of Parliament’s assertion of absolute Parliamentary supremacy. This provided them with a greater sense of urgency than ever before.113 In the midst of discord between Philadelphia’s numerous Quakers and its radicals, who promoted a vigorous response, Dickinson used his considerable stature to appease both sides by calling for temperate, cautious opposition. He then organized a broad-based committee of Pennsylvanians to draft instructions for the colony’s delegates to an inter-colonial gathering.114 By the middle of the summer, the twelve largest colonies had agreed to send delegates to an inter-colonial conference, an idea that only a few radical patriot leaders had supported in 1773.115 British actions forced the colonies to cooperate to a degree that had previously been impossible, but few delegates approached the Congress with the goal of forming a new American government. Rather, they understood the Congress as analogous to the extralegal conventions that led to constitutional changes such as the Magna Carta or the settlements of 1660 and 1688, and then disbanded.116

113

Ammerman, Common Cause, 145.

Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism, 225-226.

115 Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 29-31.

116 Jerilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress. The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774-1776, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 81.

114

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 41

The delegates were guided by the same sense of unity that Dickinson demanded in the Farmer’s Letters, in large part because they correctly suspected that Britain was relying on the other colonies to abandon Boston. While many had disagreed with the aggressive tactics that the Massachusetts opposition had previously taken, historian David Ammerman emphasizes that even moderate and conservative delegates stood resolutely with them throughout the Congress in order to convince the ministry of the difficulty it would face in coercing the unified colonies.117 In response to fears in Massachusetts that General Gage could attack at any moment, the delegates unanimously promised to come to Massachusetts’s aid in the case of war, partly to prevent them from launching war themselves.118 The delegates crafted petitions to the British people, colonists, and the king, alleging the existence of a “systematic plan” to subject the colonists to arbitrary and unlimited power.

The delegates continued by overcoming disagreements and crafting an unprecedented nonimportation agreement that, unlike previous efforts, applied to every colonist rather than only merchants.

They assured Parliament and the British people that they would continue their boycott until the Coercive Acts were repealed.119 Despite their sincere wishes to remain loyal to the empire, they did not offer any new concessions to Parliament, only demands. Dickinson, who raised no serious objections to Congress’s final program, remarked at the end, “The colonists have now taken such grounds that Great Britain must

117

Ammerman, Common Cause, 147.

Ibid., 77.

119 Richard Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776, (New York: Perseus, 2013), 185-189.

118

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 42

relax, or inevitably involve herself in a Civil War.”120 The delegates had adopted such strong measures with the expectation that Britain would once again retreat to preserve harmony; when the ministry chose instead to coerce them by force, their own arguments about precedents would compel them to meet force with force.

The Second Continental Congress, which convened in May of 1775, immediately had to react to the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. Dickinson insisted that the colonies issue entreaties for peace while simultaneously preparing for war. Dickinson’s Declaration on Taking Arms carefully listed the colonists’ unsuccessful efforts to redress their grievances through petitions and boycotts in order to prove that they had cautiously followed a constitutional path of peaceful resistance until reaching the point where taking arms was legitimate under the constitution. “We for ten years incessantly and ineffectually besieged the throne as supplicants,” he protested, but Parliament was still focused on “enslaving these colonies by violence” to attain its goal of holding “an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over” the colonists. As the heirs of liberty, he continued, they could not choose “unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers” and then resign their children to “hereditary bondage”; they would fight until Britain relented.121 The Declaration was thus a highly articulate and concise rehashing of the same arguments he made in the Farmer’s Letters and that other leaders had been making for years. Once again, Dickinson denied that they fought for independence and proclaimed a desire for reconciliation. By invoking the 120

John Ferling, "Compromise or Conflict: The Rejection of the Galloway Alternative to Rebellion." Pennsylvania History 43, no.

1 (1976): 14-15.

121 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Arms.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 43

“harmonious intercourse” between the colonies and Great Britain before and during the Seven Years War as well as the wealth and triumphs over France it had produced, he revealed his desire to return to the time when British officials left the charter governments to their own devices. He would grasp at even the slightest possibility of returning to this world that he knew before accepting a plunge into the unknown.

For this reason, he clung to the hope that the king would intervene on the colonists’ behalf. He was not altogether unconvincing, working with the other delegates of Congress to begin by pleading loyalty in an attempt to negotiate for peace even while actively prepared for war.

At the outbreak of war, colonists such as Dickinson were unable to expressly reject the king’s authority even when many now suspected that that he must be complicit in the ministry’s program: they had no ideological model or recent historical examples of a different form of government or constitution that could replace the king’s authority. Whig ideology, according to Jerrilyn G. Marston, placed enormous importance on the British king’s role as the ultimate source of authority to maintain order, unite his people, and prevent total anarchy; liberty, they understood, required restraint or else it would simply collapse into demagoguery and warfare. The king was the symbol of a balanced, stable government.122 They could not know that the U.S. Constitution would soon offer a more effective balance; they could only see the shining beacon of Britain surrounded by autocratic or chaotic states and look to the long-collapsed republican governments of the ancient world. Their ideology held that it was the king’s responsibility to intervene in disputes and correct his ministers’ abuse of power.

122

Marston, King and Congress, 6, 27-28.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 44

In Congress’s first petition to the king in 1774, Dickinson wrote, “Your title to the crown is thus founded on the title of your people to liberty,” and after noting the colonists fears of becoming enslaved by the ministry’s program, he called upon the king to restrain the “designing and dangerous men” who they assumed to be misleading him.123 The king’s failure to prevent the colonists’ “enslavement”, it theoretically followed, would render his claim to authority illegitimate and dissolve the bond, just as had happened with King James II. King George III’s legitimacy was similarly slipping; Maier argues that by 1774, “when allegiance to the king was still declared, it was often qualified in ways that made the pledge no longer binding.”124 To retain the colonists’ loyalty for long, the king would have to accept a solution to the constitutional crisis on their terms. However, in July 1775, the war had barely touched the colonies and they had little practical reason to abandon a system they held so close to their hearts.

Dickinson’s insistence on another attempt at reconciliation with the king was entirely compatible with the Declaration on Taking Arms. The Olive Branch Petition, as more radical delegates called his second petition to the king, did nothing to retard Congress’s or the colonies’ preparations for war. The existing extralegal militias of Connecticut and Massachusetts captured Fort Ticonderoga in the name of the Continental Congress and inflicted heavy casualties on the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill even before Congress ratified the Declaration; simultaneously, the New Hampshire legislature issued plans to raise 2,000 more troops. Congress absorbed these militias into the newly established Continental Army and appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief.

123 124

Petition to the King, 1774.

Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 239.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 45

For the rest of the year, congressional committees studied the requirements for raising and funding an army, authorized the outfitting of seventeen merchant ships to form the basis of the American Navy, and even planned and executed an unsuccessful invasion of Canada.125 Dickinson declared before Congress that the colonies needed to show Britain that they would defend colonial rights by force if Britain sent an army to enforce its will, but he knew that the ensuing war with Great Britain would devastate the economy and tear apart families and communities.126 In writing the Olive Branch Petition, he only sought to avoid total commitment to years of war and hardship. For the time being, Dickinson’s petition merely defined any battles that did take place as being part of a civil war rather than a revolutionary war.

The Olive Branch Petition was ultimately useful in clarifying the king’s position, which the colonists were then forced to confront. While Dickinson’s position that reconciliation was still possible seemed idealistic, and to some even absurd, to independence-minded men like John Adams, Dickinson was far from alone in Congress. The leaders of New York were reluctant to fully embrace Congress’s program of resistance on multiple fronts. After refusing to officially endorse the resolutions of Congress as the other participating colonies had done, the New York legislature sent separate petitions to the king and Parliament in which it conceded a higher degree of Parliamentary authority than had Congress.

Even in the early summer of 1775, its provincial legislature was significantly more reluctant than its neighbors to raise troops.127 The two most prominent delegates from New York, James Duane and 125

Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, 259-270.

Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 77.

127 Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, 182-3, 222-223.

126

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 46

John Jay, stood vociferously behind Dickinson’s petition, and such support motivated skeptics to oblige Dickinson in order to preserve their remarkable achievement of unified colonial action. “Discord and total Disunion…would be the certain effect of a resolute refusal to petition and negotiate,” remarked Adams, and Jefferson commented that Congress had illustrated its “great desire not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body” by unanimously ratifying the Olive Branch Petition.128 Their recognition that they could not successfully resist Britain without New York’s assistance placed sharp limits on their actions.

However, these restraints on discussing independence began to fall in early January of 1776 when the colonists learned that not only had the king refused to look at their petition, but he had also given a speech before Parliament in which he declared the colonies to be in rebellion for the sake of independence, reaffirmed their subordination to Parliament, and offered clemency only upon total submission to his terms.129 This speech constituted the first definitive proof of the king’s full support for Britain’s program of coercion and revealed that it would be impossible for the colonists to reach reconciliation with the King while still maintaining their long-held constitutional principles. Dickinson, Jay and Duane would still resist independence, but they could no longer put forth measures for reconciliation.

Around this time, Dickinson drafted a proposal to send envoys to King George to once again reassure him of their loyal intentions and negotiate a way to remain in the empire while preserving their

128 129

Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, 253; Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 76.

Ibid.,, 81.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 47

rights, but he never introduced it to Congress, probably having realized that the delegates would immediately reject it after the publication of the king’s response.130 The speech pushed a reluctant population to finally abandon their attachment to the king, especially as it was published within weeks of Thomas Paine’s wildly popular Common Sense, which denounced the institution of monarchy. John Adams and his camp were not necessarily upset at how long this move away from reconciliation had taken, declaring on July 3rd that “the delay of the declaration . . . has many great advantages attending it,” serving to “cement the union.”131 Since the colonies were in no condition for independence in July 1775, Dickinson’s stubborn resistance to considering independence provided time for ordinary colonists to gradually come to terms with the end of empire and reduced the divisions within the country that would have threatened the war effort if a large enough proportion of given communities felt Congress was abandoning the empire too hastily.

While Dickinson’s delaying tactics did allow support for independence (if not formal union) to coalesce, Dickinson was still not convinced that the colonies were capable of maintaining any sort of union for long. In the spring of 1776, he predicted the colonies would embroil themselves in civil war without the “counterpoise of monarchy.” His fears were not ungrounded. The colonies had never worked in concert until the requirements of resisting the extraordinary provocation of the Coercive Acts compelled them to do so. During King George’s War, for example, Massachusetts nearly bankrupted itself to capture the Fortress of Louisbourg for the crown, while their neighbors in New York profited by

130 131

Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, 302-303.

Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism, 146.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 48

trading with France through Iroquois intermediaries. Although it was far from a majority opinion, certain southerners worried that militant Massachusetts would even seek to conquer the rest of the colonies after the war with Britain, and a general suspicion of New England would continue to pervade Congress.132 The colonies were economic competitors and culturally different, and while Dickinson may have taken an overly pessimistic view, maintaining a union would in fact become an enormous challenge during the first decades of the United States of America.

Dickinson therefore began to search for a replacement to the king’s authority to hold the colonies together and despaired that Congress declared independence before a solution could be found. He turned to Benjamin Franklin’s loose proposal for drafting Articles of Confederation and largely took over Congress’s committee on drafting articles. Since Franklin’s proposal in July 1775, Dickinson had opposed even discussing the establishment of a formal confederacy because he feared it would inevitably wreck chances for reconciliation. After the king’s response to the Olive Branch petition made independence appear inevitable, Marston argues, he soon “began to view confederation not as a precursor of independence but as a necessary precondition.”133 Dickinson’s Articles of Confederation were specifically designed to establish a national government as a strong source of authority to prevent disunion. “Implicit in his conception of confederation,” suggests Jack Rakove, “was the premise that the states were incapable of entirely regulating their activities in the best interest of union, and that any plan of confederation would have to impose restraints on their sphere of action.”134 However, Congress moved 132

Marston, King and Congress, 184-186.

Ibid., 182-186, 194.

134 Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 152-58.

133

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 49

to vote on independence only shortly after Dickinson’s committee began its work. As he argued against declaring independence on July 1st, he insisted that they needed to first “know on what grounds we are to stand with regard to one another” and create a solid legal basis for cooperation. The declaration, he argued, was not necessary for a successful war, and it would only encourage Britain to fight more vigorously before the colonists had time to prepare. Given what he saw as tremendous uncertainties about the war, such as whether France would come the aid of thirteen separate independent states or perhaps even support Britain in exchange for the return of Canada, he felt it was simply too soon to permanently abandon their place in the empire.135 However, he accepted that his fellow delegates had chosen independence and he abstained from voting on the Declaration to avoid inaugurating his new country with a display of discord and disunion.

Dickinson is typically hailed as an early leader of resistance who was later too conservative, confused, and perhaps delusional to accept the inevitability of independence in the face of British aggression. Richard Beeman, for example, describes Dickinson in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord as “engaged not only in an argument with those ‘extremists’ advocating more radical action, but also in an argument with himself.”136 However, he was consistent over the course of the decade

135

J.H. Powell, Speech of John Dickinson Opposing the Declaration of Independence, 1 July, 1776, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 4 (1941), 479. https://journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/view/29725.

136 Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, 206.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 50

leading to independence in his fear of disunion. His attachment to the monarchy was based not on blind loyalty, but on his sincere fear that anarchy and turmoil would pervade independent colonies. The Declaration on Taking Arms, and the assumption of military coordination by the Second Continental Congress, followed logically from his long held beliefs about resistance.

However, moving away from the theory of an ideal British empire to an independent United States, many were not entirely sure how to envision a future without Britain. Dickinson sought reconciliation until it was no longer possible because the eventual success of the American Revolution was not only based on military success but also political success, which was far from assured. Still, history would prove him wrong in some ways: the United States overcame all of the challenges of which he warned the Continental Congress, but only when it abandoned its weak Articles of Confederation and adopted the more nationalistic Constitution, which he helped to craft. By understanding the thirteen colonies’ path from resistance to revolution, from Dickinson’s perspective, we restore contingency to a remarkable event, and we can better appreciate the eventual triumph of the American Constitution.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 51

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ammerman, David. In the Common Cause: The American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774.

Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1974.

Bailyn, Bernard. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1967.

Beeman, Richard. Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776. New York: Perseus, 2013.

Boyd, Julian P. "The Disputed Authorship of the Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, 1775." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 74, no. 1 (1950): 51-73.

Breen, T.H. American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

Calvert, Jane. Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Dickinson, John. Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. New York: Kraus Reprint Co, 1970.

Ferling, John. "Compromise or Conflict: The Rejection of the Galloway Alternative to Rebellion."

Pennsylvania History 43, no. 1 (1976): 4-20.

Knollenberg, Bernhard. "John Dickinson vs. John Adams: 1774-1776." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107, no. 2 (1963): 138-44.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution. New York: Knopf. 1972.

Marston, Jerrilyn G. King and Congress. The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774-1776, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Powell, J.H. Speech of John Dickinson Opposing the Declaration of Independence, 1 July, 1776.

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 4 (1941). 479. https://journals.psu.edu /pmhb/article/view/29725.

Rakove, Jack N. The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

York, Neil L. "The First Continental Congress and the Problem of American Rights." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 122, no. 4 (1998): 353-83.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 52

A Foreign Battleground: The Diplomatic Struggle between Ambassador Wilson and Minister Hintze in La Decena Trágica

By Jesse Van Divier As with any good drama, the revolutionary event known as La Decena Trágica of 1913 Mexico is a story with a cast of intriguing characters. Early historians of the period often misrepresented these characters, whether intentionally or unintentionally, as paragons of virtue and vice. Although the most evident purveyor of this paradigm was General Victoriano Huerta, the “ignorant opportunist,” and his treacherous betrayal, the sentiment of heroes and villains became a decisive motif in the remembrance of nearly all actors involved in the Mexican Revolution in 1913.137 This pattern of memorialization in the extreme—the lionizing or vilification of political characters—extended to the figures that represented foreign powers at the time and has muddled the details surrounding foreign influence, plaguing historians attempting to discern which nations were successful in their manipulation of Mexico.

Two actors embodied this muddled history above all else: the American and German envoys to Mexico during February, 1913. The American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, is a pervasive character in La Decena Trágica whose shady motivations suggest a desire for personal power, as much as stability, in America’s southern neighbor.138 The German Minister, Rear Admiral Paul von Hintze, is lesser known but still cited in the literature, especially by German historians such as Friedrich Katz. It is difficult to

137

George J. Rausch, Jr., “The Early Career of Victoriano Huerta,” The Americas Vol. 21, No. 2 (Oct. 1964): 145.

Raymond L. Shoemaker, “Henry Lane Wilson and Republican Policy towards Mexico,” Indiana Magazine of History Vol. 76, No. 2 (June 1980): 106.

138

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 53

ignore the massive impact these two figures had on Mexican politics between February 9 and February 18, 1913. Both were trusted by their respective governments, who gave them nearly total freedom in representing their countries, and both arrived with national and personal interests that far exceeded that of other countries in the “Diplomatic Corps.” While the Spanish minister was functioning as a manipulable middle man and the British ambassador seemed at times to be unsure of exactly which side of the argument he fell on, the American Ambassador Wilson and the German Minister Hintze were engaged in a diplomatic chess match.139 Many historians that have identified this strategic conflict between the two have examined it through the lens of Mexican government and public relations, and have therefore been led to ambiguous conclusions as to which diplomat “won,” and what exactly that meant. This view is ultimately shortsighted. It presents stability in the Mexican government, which would lead to political and economic success abroad for the U.S. and Germany, as the only plausible motive driving Wilson and Hintze’s actions. This paper will contend that a broader perspective is necessary, one that acknowledges a conflict not merely between Madero and revolutionaries but also between Germany and the United States. This view suggests that the foreign governments could not have been merely interested in imposing a political and economic adherent at the pinnacle of Mexican government, but that the Mexican government and public were the very chess pieces of the metaphorical game between Wilson and Hintze. Mexico served

139

Henry Lane Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes in Mexico, Belgium, and Chile (New York: Kennikat Press, 1927), 263–264; William Bayard Hale, “Report by William Bayard Hale” (Mexico City: 1913), 540. See also Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 104.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 54

as a pre-war battleground for the two diplomats, and their battle can be interpreted as a jockeying for position in a strategically located nation by two major imperial powers—more than just the instillation of a favorable puppet, as historians have typically examined. It was a conflict that would find Wilson and Hintze so deeply entrenched in Mexican politics that their removal from the scene would have drastic consequences on the nation’s political sphere.

Historians seeking a “definitive” perspective on the events and motivations of La Decena Trágica have often turned to Friedrich Katz’ The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution. This work is largely an expansion of Katz’ 1964 research documenting German involvement in the Mexican Revolution, and despite the broader focus beyond February 1913, it is a reservoir of American, German, and other government sources. Katz concludes that Wilson would have preferred Felix Diaz as a Presidential candidate over the authoritarian Huerta, but that ultimately, either could function as a puppet for the American government. Diplomatically, Katz suggests, La Decena Tragica was a win for the United States, as they were placed at the forefront position of Mexican politics.140 Four decades prior to Katz’ work, Henry Lane Wilson’s 1927 memoir, Diplomatic Episodes in Mexico, Chile, and Belgium provided the basis for such discussions on foreign influence in Mexico.

While historians have been quick to decry the account’s historical bias, the elements Wilson chooses to emphasize, such as his meeting with Huerta and Diaz, are telling. Wilson suggests that the coup

140

Katz, The Secret War, 103-109.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 55

ultimately represented a win not for America, as Katz suggested, but a purely personal victory. This was due to a combination of his cunning and patriotism, demonstrated, for example, by his use of the American embassy in Mexico City to provide a safe haven for both Americans and foreigners during the violence of La Decena Tragica; Wilson was able to curry public favor while also strategically defending whomever he needed to at the time. Wilson’s account is useful, however, as it provides specific details surrounding correspondence between the envoys.141 The emergence of another source on German intervention, the 2012 biography In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfield, Spymaster in Mexico 1908 to 1914, by Heribert von Feilitzsch, is a crucial piece on the reality of a Hintze-Wilson conflict. Feilitzsch contradicts many of Katz’ assertions, which historians for generations have accepted. This includes the notion that the Germans fully supported Huerta while the Americans unilaterally backed Diaz, which Feilitzsch calls an oversimplification.

Hintze, according to the biographer, realized (and recorded in his diary) that a supplanted Madero would have been free to challenge any revolutionary in a coming election, and making this promise to the soonto-be-ousted President was a way Hintze could simultaneously curry favor with the incumbent Mexican President and whoever replaced him. Feilitzsch argues that the diplomatic scenario initially unfolded as a win for Germany, as the inability of Wilson to impose Diaz represented the American ideal being thwarted.142

141

Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes, 279-282.

Heribert Von Feilitzsch, In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfield, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908 to 1914 (Virginia: Henselstone Verlag, 2012), 247-249.

142

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 56

A proper examination of these three sources puts the beginning of the narrative not in February of 1913 but in 1909, with Wilson’s appointment as Ambassador. In President Taft’s eyes, Wilson was experienced Latin American diplomat America could have had, and the Department of State clearly enumerated its comfort by allowing Wilson to exercise his best judgment over the course of the next few years.143 One year later, Rear Admiral Paul von Hintze was appointed as the German minister to Mexico.

The trust his government placed in him was earned rather than granted. Hintze almost immediately became a German hero for his “relentless pursuit” of Mexican officials, seeking justice for the four German casualties as a result of revolutionaries in what became known as the Covadonga Killings. Due to Hintze’s efforts, Germany was the only state granted reparations for the bloody event.144 Ostensibly, it was blunders by the Madero government in failing to minimize crossfire that gave foreign interests the pretext to diplomatically intervene in Mexico. Thus began the pattern of both envoys utilizing these blunders as their trump card. As the diplomats reported to their government that innocent lives were being lost, the threat of military intervention in Mexico grew, and the diplomats would accordingly be granted with more of the nation’s diplomatic power due to Mexico’s growing relevance to perceived threat upon their countrymen’s lives..145 The problems with examining Mexico as an isolated entity, geographically and temporally, become truly apparent by examining the global context later in 1911. Making this assumption is what

143

Shoemaker, “Henry Lane Wilson,” 105; “The Secretary of State to the American Ambassador,” Feb 17, 1913, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS], 719.

144 Von Feilitzsch, In Plain Sight, 139. See also David G. LaFrance, “Germany, Nationalism, and the Downfall of President Francisco I. Madero: The Covadanga Killings,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 2, No 1 (Winter, 1986), 61.

145 Ibid., 240.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 57

led Katz to his incorrect conclusions that “Hintze and Wilson had been in complete accord” as to their opposition of Madero well into La Decena Trágica. While Wilson indeed praised Hintze’s “unswerving courage” in public, the united front taken by the Diplomatic Corps should not be understood as a singleinterest foreign partnership.146 Later in 1911, ideological tensions were heightening in Europe just as revolutionary unease grew in Mexico. Mexico seemed to be a pivotal battleground in which two destinies could emerge. In the case of a revolutionary government that trusted America, a united front in the far west could remain neutral in the case of European war. Alternatively, a pro-German Mexico could become a hotbed from which a belligerent Japan could shell America, and this side is made evident by the German propaganda to incite Japanese-American conflict, well documented by Katz.147 The two sides, Germany and the United States, each saw the importance of controlling Mexican public sentiment, and each nation had but a single vehicle to do so: Hintze and Wilson, respectively.

Scattered revolutionary violence continued to proliferate through 1912, and Wilson continued to exaggerate instances of danger to American civilians. However, it appears that this now had a new purpose: to scare Hintze into providing military intervention before the Americans did.148 While President Taft had clearly promised no military aid for Wilson’s schemes, occupation by a German military would have likely transformed the distaste many Mexicans held towards America into antiGerman sentiment. However, Hintze saw through the maneuver and Wilson’s plot failed, leading to the first of an embarrassing pattern of rebukes Wilson would face at the hands of President Taft and the 146

Katz, The Secret War, 98-100.

Ibid., 78.

148 Von Feilitzsch, In Plain Sight, 228.

147

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 58

Secretary of State Knox.149 The political jockeying had transformed into a personal rivalry that would decisively shape Mexican politics for the coming years.

This personal rivalry led to Wilson taking a lead role after the outbreak of what historians since have called “phony war” within La Decena Trágica. While many historians critique the melodramatic nature of Wilson’s correspondence with the Department of State, especially during January and early February of 1913, he suggested that his “pessimistic” views were quickly vindicated.150 War broke out on the morning of February 9 with the release of Felix Diaz and Bernardo Reyes from prison by revolutionaries. Miscommunication led to the swift death of Reyes, which, when combined with the tiny force Diaz commanded (about 1500), should have meant a quick Madero victory. Instead, a bloody offensive onto Diaz’s citadel, in which Madero’s head general Lauro Villar was incapacitated proved otherwise, at the cost of thousands of army members and civilians alike.151 The maneuver, which seems to have been a Madero miscalculation yet was so accurately predicted by the conspirators, left Madero on the defensive in Mexico City and had been the spark the revolutionaries had hoped for. Overall, Reyes was a small price to pay in return for the predictable installation of General Huerta at the head of the federal army. What was supposed to be a prompt silencing of the rebels turned into prolonged days of Huerta sending waves of soldiers into Diaz’s onslaught of machine gun fire, also compromising civilian sanitation and safety.152 Unfortunately, losing

149

Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes, 247.

The American Ambassador to the Secretary of State, Jan 7, Feb 4 1913, FRUS, 692-699; Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes, 251.

151 Katz, The Secret War, 96; Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes, 256.

152 Von Feilitzsch, In Plain Sight, 242.

150

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 59

American or German lives had serious potential to hurt each nation’s trust in their respective representative, and the Diplomatic Corps led primarily by Wilson, began to move into action. Although Wilson denies any correspondence with Huerta prior to the conclusion of the events, he was openly in discussions with President Madero and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Lascurain and, by his account, was chosen by the other nations to represent foreign interest in Mexico.153 With nothing to suggest that the warzone in Mexico City would be safe anytime soon, the disgruntled diplomats Wilson and Hintze, along with the Spanish minister, paid a visit to Madero on February 12 to persuade him to forfeit the presidency. The task of saving foreign lives had become a political mission to supplant Madero. After their fruitless efforts at the palace concluded, they went to negotiate with Diaz, and Hintze observed that Wilson clearly favored him to take over the government.

At this point Wilson’s actions began to be muddled with self-interest: for the first time, his correspondence with the Department of State becomes blatantly false rather than hyperbolic (the Austrian minister did not support the pro-Diaz stance, nor did he accompany Wilson in confronting Madero to step down as he cabled to Secretary Knox).154 Taft clearly had his suspicions and the same day denied Wilson’s request to release a threat of “menacing character” towards the Madero government.155 As an armistice was reached on February 16, Wilson continued to be dishonest in communication with his government, in a desperate attempt to keep the scare tactic of American intervention alive.156

153

Wilson, Diplomatic Episodes, 254-262.

The American Ambassador to the Secretary of State, Feb 12, FRUS, 706.

155 Ibid., 707.

156 Katz, The Secret War, 102.

154

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 60

Hintze saw an opening for a new tactic: using Huerta to create dissonance within the government.

If he had not known of it yet (and his diary shows that he was at the very least suspicious), the announcement of the Wilson / Huerta ceasefire alerted the German Minister to their complicity. Huerta, a man who historically had refused any sort of compromise and now commanded the most powerful military in the region, was the perfect candidate to upset American plans of instituting Diaz. Madero, perhaps by the German agent and head of Secret Service, Felix A. Sommerfield, was tipped off by the end of the day on September 16 that Huerta was part of a revolutionary plot, likely an attempt by Hintze to create governmental chaos. The bold move almost backfired when General Huerta vehemently denied the accusations leveled against him by Madero on September 17.157 President Madero foolishly believed Huerta and turned against those suspicious of the General, including his own brother and the Germans, represented by Hintze. Wilson again had the upper hand, and let events unfold quietly: this arrest, and the following dropped accusation against Huerta, is absent from both his communications with the Department of State and his memoir. His silence on the subject, and Huerta’s continual sacrifice of federal troops to maintain a semblance of war, meant he was perfectly set up: the deeply divided and suspicious Madero government could not survive and would be replaced

by Diaz. A Diaz government that was a beneficiary of Wilson’s scheming meant almost unilateral American control in Mexico and was out of the question for Hintze. Hintze realized it was time for a radically different maneuver, and for the first time, visited Madero without Wilson accompanying him.

157

Von Feilitzsch, In Plain Sight, 246.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 61

In a feat that was diplomatically more impressive than any other negotiations during La Decena Trágica, Hintze and Madero settled on a deal in which he would secure Madero’s safety should he step down rather than be shot down.158 The ingenuity of this move would not be evident until the assassination of Madero. Hintze, by now a hero to the entire Madero family, had worked so hard for their safety, and the assassination of former Madero by Huerta allowed for accusations of Wilson’s complicity. Through this lens, one sees Hintze’s correspondence with Wilson, that “[Madero’s assassination] would represent . . . a blemish upon his activity in this revolution” not as a warning, but as a taunt. While Wilson had no major desire to protect former President Madero, his execution was all but inevitable anyways; the Huerta regime was not going to allow him to escape the country and begin making plans to topple the dictator in the same way he had Porifirio Diaz a few short years before.159 It is important to note that throughout all of this, foreign intervention was far from the public’s knowledge. Nowhere was this more evident than in the American press, which, even after the coup was over, would cite Huerta’s ability to negotiate between factions as the “last chance of the Mexicans to save their country’s autonomy.”160 Wilson’s guilt in the overthrow of Madero was not even a predominant accusation until the beginning of 1914, and even the incoming President Woodrow Wilson was not aware

158

Ibid., 247; Katz, The Secret War, 105.

Katz, The Secret War, 109.

160 “Huerta Placates Chiefs of Factions: Mexico Much Calmer Under His Policy of Restoring Peace at All Hazards,” New York Times (New York, NY), Feb 23, 1913.

159

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 62

of his role until the report of his advisor, William Bayard Hale.161 Similar feelings were represented in the British press, which saw the installation of Huerta not as a product of foreign interest but as the nation itself, in reality deeply divided, as collectively turning against an “un-Mexican” Madero.”162 A logical explanation why the world did not probe the role of diplomats in the coup d’état was that the rest of the world did not understand the gravity of politics in Mexico. The oil industry in Mexico was indeed worth noting by this point, but if the foreign interest in Mexico was primarily economic, we would expect greater participation by the British ambassador, who represented the great oil interest in Mexico alongside America. Furthermore, the German role is still unexplained by economic or petroleum interests. The protection of foreigners in Mexico is also a concept that is mysteriously absent from interdiplomat communication and, as mentioned previously, was instead a tool wielded by Wilson and Hintze to gain clout with their governments. Any real interest in Mexico was abstract, characterized by a similarly abstract conflict: the institution of a new president who was principled more in realpolitik than democracy, and Hintze’s at times open challenges to the Monroe Doctrine.

With the assassination of Madero four days after the conclusion of La Decena Trágica, both the coup and Wilson’s and Hintze’s chess match had ended. It was one played away from the public eye and government scrutiny, and therefore did not leave either government in a beneficial position in Mexican politics. While the inhumane assassination would eventually leave Wilson’s reputation smeared, the

161

“Says H.L. Wilson is Guilty with Huerta: Ex-Ambassador Helped to Plot President Madero's Overthrow, Ramon Prida Tells Diners,” New York Times (New York, NY), Jan 10, 1914; Hale, “Report,” 550.

162 Dennis R. Hidalgo, “The Evolution of History and the Informal Empire: La Decena Trágica in the British Press,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2007), 326.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 63

timely transition to the Woodrow Wilson presidency allowed the American government to recall the ambassador and distance themselves from the coup. Minister Hintze would similarly be recalled from Mexico for most of 1913, citing health reasons, and would later be reassigned to China at the beginning of World War I.163 Paradoxically, the two were so determined to outwit their opponent that the resulting president was one that would prove problematic for both nations. Huerta would wreak havoc across Mexico for another year until the alliance of General Obregon and Pancho Villa would be enough to oust the dictator.

However, all foreign relations between Mexico and the other two nations lay in shambles due to how deeply entrenched in Mexican politics each envoy was. The removal of these ambassadors left confusion and disarray, embodied for the Americans in the 1914 occupation of Veracruz and later for the Germans with the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917. While Huerta was capable of ending a phony war that was entirely his doing, he was not capable of settling widespread unrest around the nation. Wilson and Hintze, who were too concerned with their own country’s role in a volatile Mexico, were not inclined to fight for stability, as so many historians have tried to argue. This prioritization of diplomatic sabotage over meaningful pacification would have consequences for both nations for years to come.

163

Paul Von Hintze, “Letter to Ambassador Wilson,” March 8, 1913.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hale, William Bayard. “Report by William Bayard Hale.” Mexico City: 1913.

Hidalgo, Dennis R. “The Evolution of History and the Informal Empire: La Decena Trágica in the British Press.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 23 No. 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 317-354.

“Huerta Placates Chiefs of Factions: Mexico Much Calmer Under His Policy of Restoring Peace at All Hazards.” New York Times, February 23, 1913.

Katz, Friedrich. The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

LaFrance, David G. “Germany, Nationalism, and the Downfall of President Francisco I. Madero: The Covadanga Killings.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 2, No 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 5982.

Rausch Jr., George J. “The Early Career of Victoriano Huerta.” The Americas, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Oct. 1964), pp. 136-145.

“Says H.L. Wilson is Guilty with Huerta: Ex-Ambassador Helped to Plot President Madero's Overthrow, Ramon Prida Tells Diners.” New York Times, January 10, 1914.

Shoemaker, Raymond L. “Henry Lane Wilson and Republican Policy towards Mexico.” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (June 1980), pp. 103-122.

U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1913, pp. 692719.

Von Feilitzsch, Heribert. In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfield, Spymaster in Mexico, 1908 to 1914.

Virginia: Henselstone Verlag, 2012.

Von Hintze, Paul. “Letter to Ambassador Wilson.” March 8, 1913.

Wilson, Henry Lane. Diplomatic Episodes in Mexico, Belgium, and Chile. New York: Kennikat Press, 1927.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 65

Symbols and Savages: White Indians, Anti-Indian Sentiment, and the Boston Tea Party

By Marina Goggin In 1763 in central Pennsylvania, the Paxton Boys massacred the Conestoga Indians, who had lived peacefully alongside settlers until that point. This massacre came as part of an enormous wave of anti-Indian sentiment, accompanied by a number of other unprovoked attacks and organized settler mobs, which occurred as a result of events in the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion. Ten years later, in 1773, colonists dressed as Indians in order to dump tea into the Boston Harbor in a protest against imperial policy, which would spark the Revolutionary War. This, too, was part of a long-standing trend in which colonists tended to dress up as Indians in order to express discontent, assert their natural rights, and give voice to a developing identity as Americans. These two events seem to represent a bizarre contradiction in the perception of Indians: on the one hand, as dangerous savages that posed a brutal threat to defenseless settlers, and on the other, as a symbol of American identity and American claims to natural rights. American use of Indians as symbols of freedom prior to and during the Revolutionary War differed greatly from their perceptions of real Indians, who were still regarded as savage and dangerous.

This seeming contradiction shows the assumption of a new American identity which established American settlers as replacements for Indians.

Anti-Indian sentiment was powerful and dangerous in the years that followed the Seven Years’ War. As Peter Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors shows, the Indians who allied with the French during the Seven Years’ War fought their war in ways specifically calculated to induce terror and panic. They left C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 66

deliberately horrific scenes for soldiers to find, leaving mangled bodies in conspicuous positions, arranging the scene once the killing was over in order to produce a heightened emotional response in anyone who came across it.164 This created—indeed, it was intended to create—a feeling among frontier settlers that “a horrible death could come to them at almost any time and from any direction.”165 Indians used this terroristic form of warfare because their small war parties were outnumbered; these tactics helped protect their own soldiers while inducing panic in their enemy’s.166 However, the panic quickly spread out of control as newspapers and other forms of media caught fire with it, creating an “anti-Indian sublime” that used common images of bloody violence and helplessness in the face of Indian savagery for everything from art to politics.167 Surrounded by both the reality and the gory depictions of this terror-based warfare, frontier settlers began to perceive all Indians as equivalent to the ones who had done the killing, and frequently responded, long after the war had ended, with violence. As shown by the Paxton rioters, whose Indian victims were all “conspicuously, heartbreakingly nonbelligerent,” this violence was frequently perpetrated against Indians who never had anything to do with the war.168 Silver also notes that antiIndian violence frequently appeared in acts of “opportunistic greed” that were merely enabled by antiIndian sentiment, as Indians were robbed and murdered.169

164

Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton and Company, 2008), 41-43.

165 Ibid., 46.

166 Ibid., 45.

167 Ibid., 73-94.

168 Ibid., 179.

169 Ibid., 148-149.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 67

Even as these sentiments circulated in Pennsylvania, however, Americans were also already dressing up as Indians in order to engage in mischief in a Carnival tradition that venerated a folkloric Indian figure, Tammany. Tamenend was a Lenni Lanape chief who participated in the cessation of land to William Penn in 1683; he passed into white folklore as Tammany, a figure of great wisdom who supposedly died by phoenix-like self-immolation.170 In 1765, after the passage of the Stamp Act, “increasingly resistant colonists gleefully promoted Tammany from king to ‘tutular [sic] saint of America.”171 The May Day tradition that surrounded Tammany was already well in place before then, however, created by members of the Schuylkill Fishing Company of Pennsylvania, who claimed that their fishing and hunting grounds had belonged to Tammany. Other, similar groups sprang up and adopted the tradition.172 In the spirit of European Carnival traditions, which represented a chaotic confusion of social and hierarchical boundaries, the Tammany celebrations included drunken, disruptive, Indian-costumed revelers.173 This tradition does not seem to have been negatively impacted by the antiIndian sentiment that flourished after the Seven Years’ War, and this tradition existed in the same state and at the same time as incidents like the Paxton rioters. We can infer, then, that there was already a separation between symbolic Indians and real Indians in the minds of the colonists.

Colonists also dressed up as Indians to engage in more political forms of mischief. New Englanders, in particular, tended to dress as Indians in order to resist British interference in local systems.

170

Martin Walsh, “May Games and Noble Savages: the Native American in Early Celebrations of the Tammany Society,” Folklore 108 (1997), 84-85.

171 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 13.

172 Ibid., 12-13.

173 Walsh, “May Games and Noble Savages,” 85.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 68

In one incident in 1734, they attacked a party of men who had been sent to enforce the Mast Tree Law and harassed the men into fleeing—in a boat that had already been sabotaged. A similar incident occurred in 1768.174 Most instances of this behavior occur closer to the Revolution, during or after it, but these few earlier incidents show that Indian identity was already proving useful to those who wished to resist British rule.

The use of Indian clothing to engage in altered or “savage” behavior reflects the deep importance that clothing held to identity in colonial society, which belonged to the tangible world as much as to the symbolic one. In a very real way, altering one’s clothing served as a justification and explanation for altered behavior, and made certain that others would expect altered behavior from the individual as well.

“Clothing,” notes the historian Ann Little, “was . . . central to the discourse of status, power, and identity on the frontier.”175 In colonial society, clothing marked “gender, age, rank, and status,” as well as ethnicity. In this way, it was a fundamental part of identity. This meant that clothing had vital importance to the way people were perceived. Little remarks that the wrong clothing could easily cause one to be mistaken for an escaped servant, and to be treated accordingly.176 As a result, it had transformative power.

English captivity narratives, which centered on the experience of being taken captive and usually adopted by Indians, emphasized the experience of being stripped of their European clothing and dressed or adorned as Indians in order to become Indians.177 The process was repeated in reverse if they returned

174

Deloria, Playing Indian, 10-11.

Ann Little, “‘Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an Englishman’s Coat On!’: Cultural Cross-Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” New England Quarterly 74 (2001), 269.

176 Ibid., 242.

177 Ibid., 253-255.

175

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 69

to European society, as they removed their Indian garments and put on English ones.178 Loss of clothing “could challenge one’s fundamental sense of self,” and the adoption of clothing also meant the adoption of an identity—to the extent that settlers “feared that Indians might claim the privilege of Englishness if they but dressed and performed the part.”179 Alteration of clothing was also an alteration of identity, which could be taken advantage of in different contexts, and contributed significantly to both the use of Indians as symbols and to the antiIndian sentiment that became so dangerous to real Indians. The vital importance of clothing to identity, for instance, made the Indian wartime practice of stripping the English dead of their clothing all the more horrifying. “Naked bodies,” Little explains, “were bodies out of context, bodies stripped of their Englishness.” This stripping of identity “never lost its power to dismay” the survivors, and was viewed as horrific.180 The horror of having one’s identity stripped, even in death, undoubtedly contributed to the anti-Indian sentiment that remained in the wake of the war.

On the other hand, when white Englishmen dressed as Indians in festivals or instances of mob justice, they were taking on a different identity, one that allowed them greater freedom of behavior than their English clothing did. According to Alan Taylor, “by donning Indian costumes, settlers doffed their inhibitions; as Indians they could engage in violence inappropriate to white men; taking off their costumes, insurgents became peaceable settlers once again, shorn . . . of responsibility for what they had

178

Wendy Castro, “Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives,” Early American Studies 6 (2008), 133.

Little, “Cultural Cross-Dressing,” 269.

180 Ibid., 262.

179

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 70

done as Indians.”181 By taking on a savage identity, colonists were able to engage in mischief—whether through May Day festivals or political mob action—that would otherwise be closed to them.

It is not surprising, then, that traditions of Indian-garbed mischief came into play for revolutionary matters as well; the Boston Tea Party is the most prominent example of this, but it is not the only one. “Colonial crowds,” Philip Deloria states, “often acted out their political and economic discontent in Indian disguise.”182 “White Indians” attacked other tea ships outside of the Boston Tea party. The same Old World traditions of violent crowds and mischief in blackface disguise that gave rise to the Tammany festivals also provided an outlet for revolutionary tendencies in New England. Colonists also took on Indian identities in print, writing editorials, proclamations, and handbills, decrying the drinking of tea from an ostensibly Mohawk perspective.183 Martin Walsh adds that during the revolutionary period itself, “‘Sons of Tammany’ are not to be distinguished from ‘Sons of Liberty,’” as Philadelphia was occupied by British troops and the festival was disrupted by the war.184 The revolution made use of preexisting tactics for unrest and mischief, and Indian disguises were already established as part of those traditions. Symbolic Indianness became a vehicle for social and political unrest.

The Boston Tea Party provides a well-known and well-documented example of this use of Indian symbolism, especially the way that perceived “savagery” intersected with the aims of the Sons of Liberty.

181

Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: the Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 189. The incident that Taylor discusses here occurred after the Revolution, but the seeds of this mindset can be seen in the earlier incidents of “white Indians” rebelling against government control which I have discussed, as well as during the Revolution itself in incidents like the Boston Tea Party.

182 Deloria, Playing Indian, 12.

183 Ibid.

184 Walsh, “May Games and Noble Savages,” 87.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 71

The Boston Gazette published an account signed “An Impartial Observer” (although impartiality seems unlikely, given the obviously pro-Bostonian leanings of the account) which took care to note the organized civility of the protesters who gathered prior to the Tea Party: I was most agreeably, and I hope that I shall be forgiven by the People if I say so unexpectedly, entertained and instructed by the regular, reasonable and sensible conduct and expression of the People there collected, that I should rather have entertained an idea of being transported to the British senate than to an adventurous and promiscuous assembly of People of a remote Colony, were I not convinced by the genuine and uncorrupted integrity and manly hardihood of the Rhetoricians of that assembly that they were not yet corrupted by venality or debauched by luxury.185 Civilization and civility—arguably the opposites of savagery—seem to have been an enormous concern for the writer. He also took care to note that the circumstances were extenuating: “the body of the People determined the Tea should not be landed; the determination was deliberate, was judicious; the sacrifice of their Rights, of the Union of all the Colonies, would have been the effect had they conducted with less resolution.”186 Having shown that they were both justified and civil in the way that they proceeded, he explained that, by going through official or civilized channels, they “had taken every step prudence and patriotism could suggest, to effect the desirable purpose, but were defeated.”187 The writer seems to have indicated that the protesters were decent men who took drastic action because no other solutions were available.

185

“An Impartial Observer,” Boston Gazette, December 20, 1773, 2.

Ibid., 2.

187 Ibid.

186

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 72

It is at this constructed breaking point of the civilized process that the writer brought the false Indians into the story. The writer did not admit to the falseness of the “savages” who descended on the ship, referring to them as “persons, supposed to be the Aboriginal Natives from their complection [sic].”188 He did, however, take pains to note that their behavior, too, was civilized: A watch, as I am informed, was stationed to prevent embezzlement and not a single ounce of Teas was suffered to be purloined by the populace. One or two persons being detected in endeavoring to pocket a small quantity were stripped of their acquisitions and very roughly handled. It is worthy remark that, although a considerable quantity of goods of different kinds were still remaining on board the vessels, no injury was sustained; such attention to private property was observed that a small padlock belonging to the Captain of one of the ships being broke another was procured and sent to him.189 Benjamin Carp notes that the Indian disguises were functionally useless: many of the disguises were laughably thin, and some men weren’t disguised at all. In a town the size of Boston, it would have been highly unlikely for neighbors to fail to recognize each other under these conditions.190 Accordingly, it is unlikely that the writer’s audience was not perfectly aware of the identities of the savages. Even as savages, he seems to have suggested, the mob was as civilized as English gentlemen would be.

This insistence on the appearance of civilization would have seemed necessary, as anti-Indian sentiment was alive and well: the British frequently degraded or insulted the colonists by associating them with Indians. According to Deloria, British cartoonists frequently used Indians to represent America

188

Ibid.

Ibid.

190 Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: the Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (London: Yale University Press, 2010) 142-143.

189

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 73

as a whole—specifically, “to symbolize the colonies as alien and uncivilized and therefore needful of (and deserving) the rule of the empire.”191 Portraying America as an Indian in illustrations—darkskinned, half-naked, and surrounded by symbols of savagery—made colonists seem less British.

Colonists themselves “reacted violently to British implications that the colonies . . . were an alien place outside the boundaries of British society,” and quickly began portraying America as a lighter-skinned, more civilized Indian in their cartoons, twisting the image into one that suggested vulnerability, freedom, and abuse by the British.192 By dressing as Indians to dump tea in the harbor, colonists were continuing this appropriation of original British imagery, but also opening themselves to rhetorical attack. Many British writers felt that the Indian disguises indicated that “the Bostonians were no longer faithful Britons, but now enemies of the mother country.”193 The Americans were performing otherness, and many Britons were quite willing to take them at their word. Once again, the vital importance of clothing to identity comes into play: “It was the Rule of Faction,” a Loyalist said, “to make their Agents first look like the Devil, in Order to make them Act like the Devil.”194 Silver notes that “most Britons made their own leap, over the course of the war, from seeing Americans as turbulent fellow subjects to seeing them as foreigners.”195 Despite the appropriation of the Indian image to the revolutionary cause, colonists frequently used British alliances with Indians in their anti-British propaganda. Silver notes that “once an association

191

Deloria, Playing Indian, 29.

Ibid., 30-31.

193 Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 160.

194 Ibid., 142.

195 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 321.

192

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 74

between the British and Indians had really begun to be made, it proved to have incredible propagandistic power—so much so that it could affect political debate even within Britain.”196 The familiar images of Indian-style violence and mutilation were quickly used to describe the kind of war the British were ostensibly unleashing on the Americans. Montgomery’s failure at Quebec, for instance, was reimagined as a failed defense, meant to prevent the British from unleashing the horrors of Indian warfare, and Montgomery himself was made into a martyr similar to the martyrs of Indian violence in the Seven Years’ War.197 Although the Americans had Indian allies too, and the British made some attempts to show the rebels as savages as a result of it, “most public attention and disapproval in Britain over the course of the war” was directed at the British Indian alliances.198 The image of Americans victimized by Indians had been made iconic during the Seven Years’ War, and the rhetoric of American victimhood was both polished and convincing.199 Desperate for troops and support, the Americans employed some of the most powerful images they had, and those were the images of Indian savagery—images that directly conflicted with their own use of Indians as symbols for themselves.

Why, then, did Boston revolutionaries dress as Indians in order to make their statement about tea and taxes? Although it is true that taking on the guise of savages loosened inhibitions, as Carp and the folklorist Rayna Green point out, that is only the beginning of the reasons why an Indian guise was

196

Ibid., 230.

Ibid., 232-242.

198 Ibid., 243.

199 Ibid.

197

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 75

useful.200 It is also true that by dressing as Indians, they were turning the imagery that the British used against them—the image of America as a land of savages—into something that supported their own purposes. “If Great Britain was going to treat the colonists like Indians,” Carp observes, “then the colonists were prepared to fight like Indians.”201 There were more complex factors at play, however.

American rebels were in the process of creating a new identity. If they were no longer British, then necessarily they were something else, something new.

According to Deloria, the identity that they constructed sat between two poles— British and Indian—and relied on both for meaning. They had characteristics of both—the freedom of the Indians and the civilization of the British—but they belonged to neither.202 Indians and the New World evoked ideas of natural rights, freedom, and authenticity for both the British and the Americans: “The pure, primitive image of the Indian provided a basis for criticizing decadent, tyrannical Europe: according to this view, Americans of all colors were natural natives with natural rights.”203 “Playing Indian” allowed them to construct an identity that was separate from the British, and to set themselves apart and lay claim to the freedom represented by the conceptually purer New World.204 It seems strange, then, that Americans could use Indians to construct their own identity while simultaneously reviling the British for allying with Indians in the war. According to Carp, “Even as

200

Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 142; Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore 99 (1988), 32.

201 Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 157.

202 Deloria, Playing Indian, 36.

203 Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 150-151.

204 Ibid., 157.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 76

Americans used the supposed savagery and barbarity of the Indian as justification for targeting real Indians . . . they also admired and applauded a different set of stereotypes when they thought of Indians in the abstract.”205 In contemporary American minds, there was a very pronounced difference between real Indians, who were to be feared and detested, and symbolic abstract Indians, who were symbols of purity and freedom. The answer to this contradiction lies in the idea that colonists made better Indians than the Indians themselves did. The Tammany celebrations are an excellent example of this thinking: by celebrating the death of an aged Indian ‘saint’, they also celebrated “his heir apparent— themselves.”206 The celebrations and use of Indian dress established Americans as native themselves, successors to the disappearing Indians.207 The use of the symbolic Indian, then, relied on the idea that Indians would inevitably disappear.

According to Green, the performance of playing Indian, “purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon, ‘Indian hating.’”208 Attitudes toward real Indians as savages allowed colonists to envision a future in which they were the natives, with native rights to the land. According to Carp, “the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party legitimized the colonists as ‘new and improved’ Indians who deserved America for themselves.”209 This performance, however, required the absence of real Indians.210 In this way, passionate anti-Indian

205

Ibid., 150.

Deloria, Playing Indian, 17-18.

207 Ibid., 18.

208 Green, “Tribe Called Wannabee,” 31.

209 Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 157.

210 Green, “Tribe Called Wannabee,” 31.

206

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 77

sentiment actually fueled the symbolism that members of the Boston Tea Party engaged in when they dressed as Mohawks to begin the American Revolution.

The use of Indians as symbols during the Revolution at first seems to completely contradict the potent anti-Indian sentiment that pervaded colonial society after the Seven Years’ War and during the revolutionary period. Colonists regarded Indians with such fear and hatred that rioters like the Paxton Boys would kill innocent Indians who had never fought against the colonies. Both the British and the Americans used identification with Indians against each other during the Revolutionary War; Americans turned the British alliances with Indians against them in propaganda, while the British had long-standing traditions of depicting the colonies as an (uncivilized, savage, foreign) Indian in order to keep them separate from British society. At the same time, Americans were developing a proud tradition of playing Indian in order to behave mischievously and express political dissatisfaction, in carnival traditions like the Tammany festival and in mob scenarios like the Boston Tea Party. They even used symbolic Indians to help construct their new non-British identity, drawing on the civilization of Britishness and the freedom and aboriginal rights of the Indians. These two conflicting viewpoints were able to coexist because the symbolic use of Indians to construct a new native identity for colonists relied on the idea that real Indians would disappear and leave the land to their more civilized and white American heirs.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 78

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carp, Benjamin. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.

London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Castro, Wendy Lucas. “Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives.� Early American Studies 6 (2008): 104-136.

Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Green, Rayna. "The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe." Folklore 99, no.

1 (1988): 30-55.

Little, Ann. "'Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an Englishman's Coat On!': Cultural Cross Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760." The New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 238-73.

Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Walsh, Martin. "May Games and Noble Savages: The Native American in Early Celebrations of the Tammany Society." Folklore 108 (1997): 83-91.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 79

Lacrosse in Diplomacy and Conflict at MidEighteenth Century: The Tragedy at Fort Michilimackinac

By Jhelene Shaw An excited cacophony cut through the warm summer air of a temperate Great Lakes afternoon.

Dozens of warriors yawped enthusiastically. Some smashed lacrosse sticks against the ground, against opponents’ sticks, and against opponents’ flesh. Others splashed violently into the water after a wayward ball. White spectators laughed, cheered, and bickered over wagers. Native women too squabbled over their bets, as their squealing children and crying babies lent their voices to the happy ruckus. And then all at once, furious war cries rang out and panicked shrieks replaced merry commotion. The massacre had begun.

On 2 June 1763, eighty Chippewa and Sauk warriors, aided by over one hundred native women, instantaneously turned a native game of skill and endurance into a weapon of war and then used it successfully against the world’s largest and most profitable empire. Two dozen British casualties resulted, without a single native injury. This regional episode, an important chapter of Pontiac’s Rebellion, demonstrates the successful, inter-tribal pursuit of native interests to discipline and extract concessions from their ostensible ally in the British Empire – an empire that should have been enjoying the pinnacle of its eighteenth-century success, but had instead unwittingly commenced its precipitous decline on the North American continent.

The use of lacrosse epitomizes the successful implementation of a native cultural practice as a C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 80

weapon of war and diplomacy to extract concessions from an imperial power. The massacre at Ft. Michilimackinac represents a microcosm of the clashing interests on the Great Lakes frontier during Pontiac’s Rebellion. By synthesizing the experiences of three individuals – one native, one British, and one Métis French-Canadian – the massacre appears more complicated, more human, and more faithful to the tragic truth of the massacre than ever before revealed in the limited historiography.

Many traditional narratives of the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion treat the 2 June 1763 massacre at Ft. Michilimackinac as a unique anecdote or an intriguing footnote. It is often depicted as a clever ploy by deceptive natives, a diabolically resourceful moment within an insidious rebellion.

However, some recent scholarship treats it with a more analytical eye and a sincerer interest. The brief but important assertions about Michilimackinac from Crucible of War by Fred Anderson and War under Heaven by Gregory Evans Dowd depart from the traditional narrative, treating the incident with more than just anecdotal interest. Thomas Vennum’s two excellent in-depth analyses of Indian lacrosse – American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War and Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans – illustrate the cultural significance of such a choice – a choice that in reality involved weeks of careful planning and manipulation. Anthony Aveni’s 2010 article “The Indian Origins of Lacrosse” further elucidates the game’s cultural significance.

These sources, synthesized along a theoretical axis not previously used in the historiography of Pontiac’s Rebellion, suggest how natives of the upper Great Lakes were able to use lacrosse to translate a shared sense of grievance into a common plan of action, and why they then could utilize it with devastating effect against the soldiers and traders of Fort Michilimackinac. This article hopes to C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 81

demonstrate that this lacrosse match represented an intentional and powerful expression of native opposition to Britain’s overreach and duplicity in the period following the Seven Years’ War. Understood in this way, the massacre at Michilimackinac—often depicted by empathetic writers in starkly biased, black-and-white terms—emerges as an event of halftones and human tragedy. The best primary source available—the memoirs of captured British trader Alexander Henry—presents the perspective of the apparent British victim without any thought to Indian motivations beyond bloodlust or to French-Canadian motivations beyond spite. Vennum’s careful take on the tragedy, on the other hand, presents the murderers in a way that overstates Indian social and economic justifications for such a heinous act, and like all other secondary accounts, relegates the French-Canadians present to the role of passively resentful spectators. In the hopes of correcting this biased historiography, this article reinterprets this complicated event as the result more of fear and human limitation than of bloodlust, spite, or vengeance, by examining the experiences of three individuals present at the massacre: one Chippewa, one British, and one Métis French-Ottawa.

The Native Americans who played lacrosse in the several centuries immediately preceding European colonization of the eastern United States and Canada “had no written language” and transmitted the history, rules, and legends of early native lacrosse exclusively “by memory through oral tradition.”211 Thus, the game’s early history remains exceptionally murky: “We probably will never know the origin of lacrosse.”212 Thus, the game’s early history remains exceptionally murky: “We probably

211 212

Thomas Vennum, Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 1.

Ibid.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 82

will never know the origin of lacrosse.”2 However, it is certain that many tribes east of the Mississippi River played a version of the game by the fifteenth century. Several tribes claimed to be the first recipients of the game as a gift from the spirit world. Many, including the Ottawa, Cherokee, and Potawatomie trace the game’s origins to trickster spirits; for instance, the Anishinabe tribes credited Nanabush, the mischievous trickster, with its invention, and thus celebrated the game and its creator simultaneously at Festivals of the Dead.213 According to Vennum, “Lacrosse was also played as part of funeral and memorial ceremonies,” as well as during more jovial gatherings.214 He also notes the game even played a role in spiritual medicine: “The Huron used lacrosse to cure sickness; the Potawatomie engaged in the sport to prevent it.”215

By the time of the first recorded European interaction with lacrosse in 1612, its enjoyment was “widespread, testimony to the intimate trade contact over large distances between native peoples.”216 Thus, Indian lacrosse was well-established and somewhat uniform by the time English settler William Strachey observed Powhatan warriors playing a stickball/field hockey hybrid he likened to English Bandy in his 1612 Historie of Travel into Virginia Britanica.217 Later in the century, John Cayton was the first European to record at least a basic understanding of the game’s cultural significance to natives.

In his 1689 An Account of the Indians in Virginia, Cayton documents Powhatan games including lacrosse,

213

Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17.

Thomas Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 35.

215 Ibid., 33.

216 Anthony Aveni, “The Indian Origins of Lacrosse,” The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Journal 32, no. 1. (Winter 2010): 3, accessed February 12, 2015, http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter10/lacrosse.cfm.

217 Ibid., 3.

214

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 83

wrestling, foot-racing, and dice-throwing in the same passages with assessments of native medicine, burials, spiritual life, and tobacco-growing.218 Its widespread popularity and importance to native spirituality solidified, lacrosse entered its eighteenth-century heyday as the undisputed favorite pastime of the natives of eastern North America.

Eighteenth-century Indian lacrosse featured centrally in tribal culture. Played by adult males, lacrosse reached out to women and the elderly through spectatorship and to young boys through reverent mimicry and fervent training. Boys shagged wayward lacrosse balls, caddied sticks, and performed necessary but menial tasks for their warrior idols. Through these practices, lacrosse played a vital role in male coming-of-age processes and masculinizing rites. The best warriors were usually the best lacrosse players because of the athleticism and endurance required in both violent endeavors. In fact, a combattested warrior could meet a violent end not on the battlefield, but on the lacrosse pitch. Played at highintensity for long periods, the most heated games involved arguments, tussles, injuries, and, on occasion, maiming and death.219 This was made possible by the recklessly unstructured nature of native lacrosse. “There were few rules,� with no defined offensive or defensive positions, and non-standard fields and equipment.220 Lineups averaged a couple dozen players per side, but ranged from a handful of players to several hundred. For example, at Ft. Michilimackinac, forty Chippewas challenged forty Sauks.221 Fields could

218

Ibid. 2.

Ibid., 4.

220 Ibid., 5.

221 Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 93.

219

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 84

extend up to a mile long, with uneven terrain and vegetation. Sticks varied regionally in size from two to five feet. In fact, the stick’s iconic curve and netting would represent one of the only aspects of Indian lacrosse a modern fan would recognize. Sticks provided weapons to every player but the ball-handler.

Lacrosse balls could be as small as tennis balls or as large as softballs, and they were made of animal hair encased in leather.

Trees and saplings represented goalposts and the objective might be to either hurl the ball between the goals as in modern lacrosse or actually hit one of the trees directly. Informal goaltenders monitored these rough end zones, but most players chased the ball, with small knots of players engaged in frequent physical altercations at midfield. In this way, the Chippewas and the Sauks managed a handful of injuries in the ostensibly precisely orchestrated game at Ft. Michilimackinac. Before the massacre even began, “some were already bloodied from being hit with sticks or bruised from falls; several had to be replaced during the previous inning, one with a broken arm, others limping off the field.”222 However, this apparently senseless violence actually served an important social role in distinguishing the bravest and toughest men of the tribe. Social hierarchies depended on violence as a form of determining the most capable and strong-minded leaders. Violence was also a function of the often high economic stakes within the gambling culture of native society.223 Players fought fiercely to defend their honor as well as win bets on everything from kettles, pelts, and knives, to entire wigwams and their contents. “Some,” Vennum explains, “would not hesitate to wager their wives, children, and

222 223

Ibid., 99.

Aveni, “Indian Origins of Lacrosse,” 4.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 85

themselves into servitude.”224 In the most extreme examples, men stoically sliced off their own fingers right on the lacrosse pitch after losing a particularly intense grudge-match – performing the removal “without sign of pain, dishonor, or shame.”225 However repellent such zeal might sound to a modern reader, eighteenth-century natives found the gambling side of lacrosse socio-economically beneficial, within the tribe and beyond. According to Aveni, “Though a seeming vice, gambling in these cultures was a social leveler. When people wagered, they aided in the redistribution of material wealth,” both within a community and between linked but competitive neighboring communities.226 In fact, lacrosse and gambling proved co-dependent and selfsustaining. Aveni explains that, “the more gambling thrived, the lower the odds that anyone would accumulate too much personal property, so long as the game was played frequently.”227 This actually diffused resentment, as lacrosse was universally acknowledged as a fair gauge of skill and worth, and the results universally respected.

Gambling as well as ritualized play unified friendly tribes. According to Aveni, “Indian confederacies arranged to contest one another at convenient times in the seasonal calendar.”228 It also stood in for more destructive forms of conflict between rival native groups. Aveni explains, “Lacrosse was a way to settle arguments, a diplomatic tool.”229 It could diffuse discord, especially between two

224

Ibid., 5.

Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 24.

226 Aveni, “Indian Origins of Lacrosse,” 4.

227 Ibid.

228 Ibid., 5.

229 Ibid., 4.

225

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 86

tribes on the brink of violence, and the results were regarded just as conclusively as the results of battle.

Lacrosse served as a socializing ritual as well as a rite of passage, and provided an outlet for competitive impulses within and between tribes that otherwise would have proved destructive or disastrous for social cohesion and the viability of inter-tribal alliances. Lacrosse channeled aggression and competitive impulses into a conclusive and unifying medium.

For better or worse, gambling on the game provided an economic and cultural bridge not only between tribes but also between Europeans and natives. Whites, captivated and intimidated by the skill and violence of the game, included this perception of native athleticism and endurance in the nebulous conception of the “noble savage.” Europeans mythologized lacrosse as the ruthless game of brave savages, impervious to fatigue and relentlessly determined. Later, this racism extended through the white appropriation of lacrosse in the nineteenth century and into modern times in the form of mascots with racially problematic names like the Braves and Redskins.230 However, at the time, the main concern of whites was direct profiteering on the game. In an ironic twist of fate, gambling directly backfired on its British participants at Ft. Michilimackinac: “So focused on play were the troops that they were not aware that Indian women had been sneaking weapons into the fort and up toward the ring of spectators. All of a sudden, the Indians dropped their sticks, grabbed their weapons, and massacred the foreign soldiers.”231 To accomplish such carnage, the Sauks and especially the Chippewas spent the fortnight leading up to the massacre convincing the British soldiers and traders of Ft. Michilimackinac to watch and wager

230 231

Ibid., 5.

Ibid.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 87

on the game. Precariously balancing necessary weapons acquisitions with trying not to excite British suspicions, Chippewa men bought up small, cheap tomahawks and knives to supplement their standing armaments, telling traders the weapons were for wagering on the game.232 In fact, Makoons, the warrior chosen to “accidentally” throw the ball through the fort’s open gate – the signal for the massacre to begin – led a small party of Chippewas into the showroom of British trader Alexander Henry for last-minute supplies a few days before the game. According to Aveni, Makoons “realized the importance of enticing as many English as possible to leave the protection of the fort to watch the game” and struck up a conversation with Henry and his clerks about the big event: “Makoons stressed the agility and speed of the Ojibwe players and urged the trader to bet on the game; he would have an opportunity to make big winnings” and to watch the native women bet items purchased in his storefront against one another.233 Henry even gave Makoons a small knife and told him to bet it on himself, unaware that Makoons would use it to attack and kill Henry’s friends and neighbors.234 Makoons further cajoled Henry, telling him that, “he should follow the example of the fort’s commandant, who had already announced his intentions of betting on the Ojibwe team.”235 Another elite Chippewa warrior named Weniway also coaxed Henry, asking him to wager his freedom on the game.

If the Chippewas lost, Weniway would do Henry’s shop chores for three days. If the Chippewas won, Henry would move into Weniway’s wigwam to haul water and gut deer for three days. Henry declined.236

232

Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 91-92.

Ibid., 92.

234 Ibid.

235 Ibid.

236 Ibid., 93.

233

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 88

These persuasions, however, proved very effective overall. Many British soldiers, from Commandant George Etherington down, placed bets on the game beforehand. Enraptured by the spectacle, they ventured further and further outside the fort during the game, unwittingly sealing their own fate.

To further ensure the success of their endeavor, the Chippewas spent three weeks preparing for the game spiritually and logistically on top of their reconnaissance inside the fort. Once word reached the area around Michilimackinac that the Ottawa under Pontiac had attacked Detroit in the first week of May, planning for the attack on Ft. Michilimackinac began immediately. Buoyed by their newfound postSeven Years’ War inter-tribal spiritual and racial unity under the prophet Neolin, natives throughout the area took up the mantle of war against the interloping British.237 Natives engaged in rebellion “to prevent their social and political degradation” under British purview, interpreting a nefarious British “intention to master them” in the poor British imperial conduct following the Seven Years’ War.238 Economic grievances against the notoriously stingy British included their refusal to sell gunpowder and alcohol to natives, as well as their failure to provide traditional trade gifts. Natives valued equal trade partnerships, which they had enjoyed under French jurisdiction, and thus the British compared highly unfavorably to the Indians’ French allies, whom they hoped would return upon a successful revolt against the British.239 The man who was to instigate the massacre himself cited very specific grievances against the British which motivated his pivotal participation. Invited from the island of Mooningwanekaaning for his superior lacrosse talents, Makoons brought a special hatred of the British along with his trade goods

237

Dowd, War under Heaven.

Ibid., 70, 63.

239 Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 94.

238

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 89

and his pregnant wife Boodoonh in his canoe that day in May of 1763. The British had “demanded that the Indians change their trading pattern, and dictated a new set of price lists for skins at a rate less than half what the French had been paying.”240 Vennum explains that when Mooningwanekaaning’s chief White Bird protested, “The great chief had been replaced by the British with a younger Ojibwe, more to their liking.”241 Makoons and Boodoonh boarded with a neighboring Ottawa family and spent two weeks preparing for the game, with Boodoonh cooking and boiling white ash for six new lacrosse sticks while Makoons practiced the vital maneuver that would send the ball flying into the fort. A “collision” with the Sauk warrior Bad Sky would provide the signal. Makoons, in possession of the ball and holding his stick vertically, would charge Bad Sky, who would be holding his stick horizontally, waiting to brace himself against Makoons’s “attack.” The collision of their sticks would send the ball flying through the gates of the fort behind Bad Sky. Both would then give chase, grabbing weapons from the waiting women on their way into the fort.242 The pivotal procedure perfected, Makoons and Bad Sky met with six other players, the local chiefs, and interpreters the night before the game to finalize strategy and perform pre-game rituals.243 Forced to forgo the noisier rites – including the chanting and drumming of the war dance – in order to avoid alerting the British, the Indians smoked tobacco in the Sauk chief’s ceremonial pipe and drew up

240

Ibid., 86.

Ibid.

242 Ibid., 83-84.

243 Ibid., 87.

241

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 90

important plays in the dirt with small wooden pegs Bad Sky had whittled.244 The chiefs implemented a very precise game plan. Although the game would officially be played to four goals, the massacre would actually commence at three apiece: “After their first goal, the Ojibwe [Chippewa] would be allowed to score again. The Ozaagii [Sauk] would score twice in a row to tie the game at 2-2; then the Ojibwe would score, making it 3-2. The Ozaagii would score quickly once again, tying it at 3-3. This would be the signal for all to prepare for the attack.”245 In fact, native preparations were impressively meticulous. They oriented the field’s boundaries to locate the Chippewa goal directly in front of the fort’s gates to maximize British interest. At midday, the area around the gates where the women waited would be in shadow, helpfully concealing “any unusual protrusions or lumps under their blankets and shawls, where the tomahawks, knives, and war clubs would be hidden.”246 With the battle plan in place, individual ceremonial preparations then began.

Medicine men rubbed vermillion onto the lacrosse sticks and balls as well as the scalping knives and tomahawks.247 All eighty players engaged in the requisite ritual purification, including fasting, abstaining from sex, and hour-long stints in madoodiswanan (sweat huts).248 Eighty warriors then passed a restless night anticipating the glory of battle.

Meanwhile, British soldiers and traders also passed a night full of anticipation for the merriment of the King’s birthday celebration. The Indians had chosen the day and the hour of the game to maximize

244

Ibid.

Ibid., 95.

246 Ibid., 88.

247 Ibid., 96.

248 Ibid.

245

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 91

British distraction. Sated and lethargic from an unusually large noon meal, the British would wander out to spectate, dropping their guard in the name of high spirits and excitement. The natives even calculated British attention spans. Vennum explains, “It was decided that an hour of play would be about right and that the score would be kept close throughout to sustain interest in the game.”249 The Indians even planned an exciting, splashing, “accidental” foray into the lake after an errant pass to draw the British further away from the fort’s gates.

Flanking those gates would be more than one hundred native women engaged in apparent loitering. On the day of the massacre, native women arrived at the fort, loaded down with pelts and beads to make fake wagers among themselves to distract and incite the British to also wager more. In native tradition, the two items involved in each wager were tied together and placed in a pile with all the other material goods being wagered. On the day of the massacre, the pile against the fort wall towered with pelts, kettles, cloth, and beaded goods.250 The British underestimated native women in particular and paid the price when the women they had carelessly allowed to wander into the fort pulled scalping knives and tomahawks from under their skirts. A combination of sexism and feelings of racial and cultural superiority caused the British to underestimate the Chippewa men and especially women involved in the massacre.

As it turned out, the British stood no chance against meticulous native planning fueled by collective grievance. In fact, Ft. Michilimackinac was vulnerable on a normal day, let alone on a feast

249 250

Ibid., 94.

Ibid., 98.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 92

day. The British had only occupied the fort for a year and a half following the French defeat in the Seven Years’ War. The fort had been allocated a complement of only about thirty British soldiers, plus about a dozen British traders and their clerks.251 The French-Canadian civilians in and around the fort vastly outnumbered the British following the recently-concluded, century-long French occupation of the site.

The original wooden French fort at Michilimackinac was built on the site of a 1671 mission established

by Father Marquette. Expanded many times, the respectable French fort now sheltered the incompetent and arrogant British and stood as a physical reminder to both the natives and the French-Canadians in the area of their recent defeat and their unsatisfactory new confinement under British control.

It was in this tinderbox of post-war resentment that twenty-three-year-old Alexander Henry conducted business. He translated his Seven Years’ War success supplying British troops in New York into a fur-trade pass from Thomas Gage, arriving at the fort in the fall of 1761. Sensing hostility to the British, “Henry disguised himself as a French trader, but the stratagem was unsuccessful.”252 In fact, it was nearly fatal, as sixty local Chippewas forcibly called his bluff, “each with his tomahawk in one hand, and scalping-knife in the other.”253 Fortunately for Henry, Chief Minweweh offered friendship, and a shaky but profitable alliance was struck between the intrepid trader and his local native clients.

Unaware of the subterfuge of natives like Makoons and Bad Sky, Henry conducted a good business in May of 1763. Henry’s adopted brother Wawatam unsuccessfully tried to convince Henry to

251

Ibid., 89.

David A. Armour, “Henry, Alexander (1739-1824),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6 (University of Toronto/Université Laval: 2003): 1, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/henry_alexander_1739_1824_6E.html.

253 Ibid., 1.

252

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 93

leave the area in the days preceding the massacre, and Henry was arbitrarily spared when he decided to stay inside and catch up on correspondence and journal-writing during the game.254 According to his harrowing memoirs, Henry pleaded with his French- Canadian neighbor M. Charles Langlade for sanctuary and was stoically rebuffed. However, Langlade’s Indian slave – a “Pani woman” – hid Henry in the attic, where he escaped detection by mere inches when Makoons and three other warriors searched the garret, missing Henry’s huddled form beneath some sap-collecting barrels.255 Henry was eventually captured the following morning when Langlade betrayed his location to some suspicious Chippewa warriors, fearing retribution against his wife and children.

Taken captive, Henry experienced another brush with death at the hands of an unhappy and indebted customer.256 Despite Wawatam’s absence during the massacre and his reputation as “a weakling, an outcast, and a loner,” overly sympathetic to the British interlopers, his adopted brother Henry was spared due to his intervention. Henry ultimately joined other British survivors including George Etherington and William Leslye.257 Upon Wawatam’s return on June 7th, Henry was released to his custody, where he remained relatively content for over a year, travelling and hunting as a member of the family until he was released to resume his profitable trading.258 Despite the trauma of June 1763, Henry lived to the ripe old age of 84, representing the interests of such notorious figures as Robert Rogers and

254

Alexander Henry, Travels & Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, 1760-1776, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1901): 79, accessed April 3, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t34172n5m.

255 Ibid., 81, 84.

256 Ibid., 89.

257 Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 90; Paul Trap, “Mouet de Langlade, Charles-Michel,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4 (University of Toronto/Université Laval: 2003): 1, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mouet_de _langlade_charles_michel_4E.html.

258 Amour, “Henry,” 2.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 94

returning many times over to Michilimackinac in the succeeding decades.259 Their life-or-death disagreement at Michilimackinac notwithstanding, Alexander Henry and his neighbor M. Langlade actually shared somewhat similar and similarly historic lives on the Great Lakes frontier. Born Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade in 1729 to a prominent French trader father named Augustin and a prominent Ottawa woman named Domitilde, Langlade was the Métis nephew of chief Nissowaquet. At age ten, he accompanied Nissowaquet on a successful raid of the Chickasaws and was deemed a good luck charm for the Ottawas – they believed “a special protecting spirit” dwelt within him.260 Langlade married the daughter of the successful French fur-trader Bourassa and had two daughters of his own. He participated in the successful French raid on the British at Pickawillany in 1752, and during the Seven Years’ War he fought for France. During his storied service, he planned the raid that led to General Edward Braddock’s defeat at Duquense in 1755 and successfully ambushed Robert Rogers in January 1757 near Ft. Carillon. Later, Langlade served under the Marquis de Montcalm at Ft. William Henry and became second-in-command at Michilimackinac in 1757. Toward the end of the war, he fought at Quebec and planned what likely would have been a successful maneuver against General James Wolfe had reinforcements arrived in time.261 Following the French defeat, Langlade set up as a trader at Ft. Michilimackinac. He undoubtedly shared the post-war resentments of the French-Canadians in the area and felt the sting of defeat as powerfully as any French loyalist. The unfavorable regional adjustments – the loss of forts, military

259

Ibid., 2-5.

Trap, “Langlade,” 1.

261 Ibid., 1-4.

260

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 95

protection, economic autonomy, and even nationhood – came to a head at Michilimackinac in June of 1763. The French-Canadians present stood passively, yet somewhat smugly on the sidelines, declining to join the natives in carrying out violence but also refusing aid to British victims of the slaughter.262 As passive participants they would let the Indians grind their axe against the British for them, a conclusion the Indians accurately reached in their planning of the massacre. Vennum explains “The Canadians, who hated the English as much as the Indians did, could definitely be counted on merely to stand by and watch the slaughter.”263 The M. Langlade of Alexander Henry’s narrative appears alongside the Indian murderers as the villain who denied Henry shelter, supplies, and sanctuary. However, this portrayal of Langlade bears only passing resemblance to reality. With his Indian connections, Langlade had heard about the planned attack and warned Commandant George Etherington, who didn’t believe him. During the attack, he and his family watched the slaughter from their windows, and he did indeed deny Henry entry into his home.

However, Langlade negotiated leniency when the Chippewas came for Henry, and he also negotiated the release of Etherington and William Leslye.264 In the interim between the attack and the reestablishment of British control a year and a half later, Langlade took command of the fort. He later became a captain in the Indian department, fought for the British during the Revolution, and reportedly fought in ninety-nine battles throughout his life – although embellishing stories became a late-in-life hobby. He lived and worked in and around Michilimackinac 262

Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse, 89.

Ibid.

264 Trap, “Langlade,” 2; Henry, Adventures, 83.

263

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 96

until his death in 1800.265 Langlade literally held down the fort as Pontiac’s War raged for the next two years. Although total Indian casualties were enormous, natives battled the British to stalemate, negotiation, and concession. As Gregory Evans Dowd concludes, Pontiac’s Rebellion “forced even the highest levels of the British government to consider, if only briefly and inconclusively, the place of Indians in the empire.”266 Even taken merely as an interlude between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, this massacre and its larger Pontiac’s War context represent a key moment in the decline of the British Empire in North America. Immediately on the heels of victory in a world war, the British were implausibly stalemated by a few thousand Great Lakes Indians in an uprising that such a powerful empire ought to have squelched easily. Instead, natives forced imperial re-evaluation – even capitulation – and exposed the weaknesses of an indebted and over-extended colonizer. American colonists would soon more decisively expose and exploit these weaknesses, but the episode at Ft. Michilimackinac not only helps explain the seemingly improbably rapid decline of the British Empire between wars, it also illustrates native ability to comprehend and adapt to changing imperial circumstances.

The lacrosse game at Michilimackinac is emblematic of the inter-tribal cultural unifiers and antiBritish unifying grievances of Pontiac’s War in the Great Lakes region. Informed by Gregory Evans Dowd's analysis of the role of native spirituality in the conflict, this synthesis further challenges the traditional Parkman-esque narrative of Pontiac’s Rebellion. By utilizing a game that carried such cultural

265 266

Trap, “Langlade,” 3; Henry, Adventures, 80.

Dowd, War under Heaven, 275.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 97

and spiritual significance, natives displayed a remarkable sense of self-awareness and self-preservation, using their unreciprocated cultural understanding of the British against their imperial oppressors. Natives displayed their comprehension of the ills of British imperialism that extended far beyond affronts like trade inequality. The massacre and its lead-up reveal that Pontiac’s Rebellion was more than a frantic reaction based on a native perception of post-Seven Years’ War British betrayal.

Meticulously planned and executed, the massacre was rather a vehicle of native cultural selfvalidation used to notify the British that Indians sensed their urge to overrun and exploit – and could not tolerate it. The massacre further demonstrates that despite the arrogant British superiority complex concerning cultural differences, cultural ignorance was not mutual. Natives understood the British and were able to exploit not only this superior understanding but also British arrogance. In letting their guard down to wager on a native game and in treating this native cultural staple as spectacle, the British committed a fatal error. The mastery and complexity of native strategy in Pontiac’s Rebellion reached its pinnacle at Michilimackinac, when a unified group of Great Lakes Indians halted trade and diplomacy.

They violently asserted their rights and expectations using the vehicle of a native spiritual and cultural staple which was fatally misunderstood by representatives of that exploitative and arrogant empire as a mere hobby. The use of lacrosse is shrewd, elegant, and meaningful. The spiritual awakening and unification of native peoples during Pontiac’s Rebellion paired well with a shrewd self-awareness and a deftly analytical sense of their ostensible alliance with the British.

As natives came to see the victorious post-Seven Years’ War British as a threat, not only to their continuing economic stability and spiritual and cultural viability, but also to their physical survival on C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 98

their own lands, Native Americans lashed out swiftly and effectively at the British along the frontier.

They forced the British to make a powerful, if temporary, reevaluation of their own attitudes and diplomacy. Although Native Americans ultimately failed to translate their mid-century expertise in coping with imperialism to fruitful dealings with the newly-created American Empire, the success of the massacre at Ft. Michilimackinac and the compromises forced by Pontiac’s Rebellion demonstrate the power of inter-tribal unity to undermine colonization and extract concessions during the imperial conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 99

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Armour, David A., “Henry, Alexander (1739-1824),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6.

University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. Accessed April 7, 2015. http://www.biographi.ca /en/bio/henry_alexander_1739_1824_6E.html.

Aveni, Anthony. "The Indian Origins of Lacrosse." The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Winter 2010.

Accessed February 12, 2015.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Drimmer, Frederick. Scalps and Tomahawks: Narratives of Indian Captivity. New York: CowardMcCann, 1961.

Fisher, Donald M. Lacrosse: A History of the Game. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Henry, Alexander. Travels & Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, 1760-1776. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1901. Accessed April 3, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2027 /uiuo.ark:/13960/t34172n5m.

Trap, Paul. “Mouet de Langlade, Charles-Michel,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. Accessed April 4, 2015. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio /mouet_de_langlade_charles_michel_4E.html.

Vennum, Thomas. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

———. Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 100

C o l o r a d o H i s t o r i a n | 101