Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 2002 by Estes, Todd

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814. Edited by David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. Xxvii 414 pp., maps. $49.95. ISBN 0-87013-569-4).

This book offers much more than its title implies. While the jacket illustration and title suggest military history, the volume's twenty essays range widely over social, political, economic, religious, and cultural history in addition to exploring questions of war. As such, it offers a rich investigation of the Great Lakes region and a variety of arguments for the wars' significance. Growing out of a 1998 conference at Bowling Green State University, these essays represent fresh and insightful approaches to the history of the region and the multifaceted wars that did so much to shape it.

With so many essays covering a diversity of themes and ideas, it is hard to fasten on a single idea as the central theme of the collection. But one unifying theme linking many of the best essays is the ambiguity and ambivalence of motive, purpose, and action of the many actors involved in the wars and their consequences. As David Curtis Skaggs writes in the Introduction, "these essays demonstrate that the Sixty Years' War was not a period of continuous conflict or preparation for war. Instead, we find people conducting daily lives without the knowledge that soon combat would break out. They sought a variety of solutions to the problems confronting them without knowing the outcome" (p. xxv). Elizabeth Perkins sheds light on what she calls "Ethical Extension," a process by which, through regular contact through battle, combatants gained a sense of their opponent's humanity, thus forging a murky but crucial inter-cultural relationship. Leonard Sadosky reexamines the 1782 Gnadenhutten Massacre and finds more than the usual saga of white violence and Indian victimization. What was at work, Sadosky argues, was a complex act of rebellion by backwoodsmen who, angered by the war effort and by fur-trading policies, lashed out at the Indians not merely as a demonstration of their antipathy toward natives but also as a means of expressing their resentment against both eastern elites and Continental army commanders. The massacre thus laid bare social and class dimensions on the frontier. Eric Hinderaker explores the relationship between liberty and power in the region and finds that only by turning state power against the native inhabitants could the Washington administration and Congress bring about order in the Ohio Valley. The use of that power opened up enormous liberty for white settlers but doomed Indians and their autonomy in the face of continued white expansion.

These themes are best elaborated in the gem that is Andrew R.L. Cayton's concluding essay. In a fascinating, far-ranging rumination, Cayton asks why historians-often echoing the lead of those involved in the events-have not emphasized these wars and suggests a two-fold answer. As long as the American Revolution remains the central organizing event, the Great Lakes Wars lack coherence. But if those wars are seen as part of a larger whole-a long struggle among empires and Indians-the Revolution loses its centrality and becomes itself one more episode in that contest. In short, these wars "do not fit the parameters of U.S. history. As long as historians write the history of a nation rather than the history of a continent," Cayton argues, the significance of the Great Lakes Wars will be lost (p. 381). The other dirty secret about these wars is that they were fundamentally wars of empire, as much concerned with power as with liberty. The rationale for the wars troubled many and produced a lingering sense that the new nation should be somehow better and less sordid than that. This sense led many at the time to pass over with little comment or celebration those actions which, while necessary and inevitable for a growing empire, were deemed shameful and hard to square with Americans' sense of themselves. In small, discreet ways, most of the essays here illuminate and provide evidence for Cayton's powerful interpretation.

Inevitably, as with any collection of essays, these are uneven in quality and significance. But taken together the essays pry open enough new paths for investigation that scholars will take away from this volume the collective message that the events and developments over time in the Great Lakes region are critical to a fuller understanding of the myriad of themes the chapters develop. As a stimulus to further thought and investigation, this collection succeeds admirably.

Todd Estes is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University.