Army and Empire: British Soldiers on the American Frontier, 1758–1775

Abstract

In this follow-up to A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples (1992), Michael N. McConnell moves away from ethnohistory to study the experiences of British soldiers occupying frontier garrisons in North America between the end of the Seven Years' War and the start of the American Revolution. It is a worthy pursuit, given that these thin garrisons endured the daunting task of keeping a fragile peace between Native populations determined to maintain their territories and increasingly aggressive American colonists bent on settling the same lands. As McConnell is quick to note, Army and Empire has less to do with war than with peace, less to do with the details of tactics and military organization than with what might be called the “housekeeping” associated with occupying and maintaining strong points on the outer limits of empire. (p. xix) The book is primarily a social history of the small, disorganized communities formed by British soldiers and their families in the varied and widely scattered frontier posts in North America. While McConnell gives due credence to the role these garrisons played as bastions of authority along a largely unregulated frontier, he is more concerned with domestic life at these military posts. Central themes in the book include the tremendous distances separating the frontier posts from established settlements along the Atlantic coast, the great variations in climate and geography along a frontier stretching from Florida to the Great Lakes, the general disrepair and unmilitary state of forts both large and small, and the hardscrabble daily existence faced by garrison soldiers, burdened by filth, shortages, tasking manual labor, poor health, and loneliness. His discussion of the influence of the consumer revolution of the mid-eighteenth century upon the frontier forts—and by extension, frontier life in general—is particularly enlightening. McConnell clearly has immersed himself in the material culture of the period and spent a great deal of time analyzing the frontier posts not just as military fortifications but as homes and communities. His assertion that “the most striking thing about the [British] army in the West is how thoroughly domesticated it became, less a network of armed garrisons than a collection of frontier settlements” (pp. 149–50) is thoroughly convincing.