The War that Made America

Fred Anderson. The War that Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War.

New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Anderson has written a longer work on the French and Indian War, Crucible of War, which is considered an important work on the subject. Anderson has become such an acknowledged expert on the subject that he was brought in as an adviser for a PBS special. This book serves as a companion to that special; it might also double as a de facto 'abridged' version of his award-winning work.

As a stand-alone volume, this book is a fine addition to the literature aimed at the general reader. Anderson writes well and entertainingly, and the volume is richly illustrated and includes an ample number of useful maps. Brevity does not mean incompleteness; this is no mere chronological recitation of battles and diplomatic intrigue.

The locus of the war is found not in London or Paris, or even in colonial capitals, but in the world of the Indians of the West who will be more detrimentally affected by the outcome of what would end up being a world war. The concept of the Middle Ground, and the centrality of Iroquois diplomacy in colonial conflicts, are no longer novel in historical circles but for many general readers this is still eye-opening and unexpected information.

Anderson has a great eye for character; he brings many of the participants alive with empathy, humor, and an appreciation for the shared humanity of Indian, Euro-American, British, and French participants. 

In short, there are more complete versions of this story available, but not necessarily more well-informed; and at any rate this one is as readable and enjoyable as a reader could hope. 

The Middle Ground

Richard White. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

This book is the history of a time and place that, while bounded geographically and temporally as indicated in the subtitle, was also defined by a complex web of social, cultural, political, and economic relationships between Indian and European societies which met in this "middle ground".

The author refers to it as a "circular story" (ix) in which Indians and whites began the period regarding each other as strange, alien "others" to be regarded from a distance; in the end, the triumphant Americans would re-impose this perception on the former middle ground, but in the intervening decades, there had been a complex world of ever-shifting negotiation and compromise. The Middle Ground could be--and often was--a dangerous and violent place, but it was also a place in which accommodation and compromise were possible.

White often refers to the region by the name given by early French explorers and colonists: the pays d'en haut. This is appropriate, as the relationship between French and Algonquian established much of the initial template for the middle ground; later generations of Indians would often look back to the era in which the "French Fathers" had been the primary Euro-American power with nostalgia and longing. The initial alliance that French and Indian individuals and groups painstakingly negotiated had a lasting effect on the history of subsequent Spanish, British, and American involvement in the region.

This book covers a long time period across a wide area, and while White's analysis pays a great deal of attention to the ambiguity and shifting realities of the topic, the book itself is largely structured in a straightforwardly chronological framework. This is welcome, as a more thematic approach would have lost any narrative connection, as White deliberately leaves the center of most commonly-studied events of the period (particularly the wars: French-Indian; American Revolution; and the War of 1812) off-stage. He locates the center of his story firmly within the pays d'en haut. 

This book is a valuable study of Indian'white relations and Indian history, but it also adds a new dimension to the study of colonial and Early American history. This is a view from what most standard American histories of the era consider the hinterlands or the "back country." As White explains, most students of American history know how this story ends--with the new nation committed to rigid racial hierarchies, and a complete dispossession of the western Indians. But that history was not inevitable, nor was it the logical consequence of what preceded it. White restores the history of a world that was lost when America "conquered" the West.