Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (review)

Abstract

Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and Fate of British Empire in North America. By David Dixon. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 284. Cloth, $34.95.)David Dixon's new monograph joins William R. Nester's Haughty Conquerors (2000) and Gregory Dowd's War under Heaven (2002) in growing body of new scholarship on Pontiac's War. Impatient with what he describes as largely works more concerned with perspective than the British and American military, political, and social experiences (xi), Dixon sets out to provide corrective that integrates this Native American conflict into broader context of late colonial and revolutionary America. While Dixon succeeds in providing detailed, thoroughly researched, and coherent narrative of Pontiac's War, his interpretive analysis of war's significance is unconvincing.Dixon begins his account of Pontiac's War in 1758, when British secured withdrawal of many Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Algonquian Native American warriors from active support of French by means of promise to depart from trans-Appalachian region after conquest of Fort Duquesne. The failure of British to keep that promise sowed seeds of an Indian war that witnessed fifteen months of active hostilities between 1763 and 1764, eliminated or forced abandonment of nine interior forts, and cost lives of an estimated two thousand Anglo-American settlers and four hundred British soldiers. Dixon reiterates standard contemporary interpretation of several factors underlying development of conflict between 1758 and 1763: land encroachment, indigenous revitalization movements calling for pan-national unity and action, and British Commander in Chief Jeffery Amherst's decision to cut off diplomatic presents to allied Native American peoples in peacetime. While author eschews an explicit attempt to assess relative significance of these respective causes, he does overstate rapaciousness (72) of British for Indian land prior to 1763. The military takings he describes (such as Niagara portage) tended to be targeted specifically for strategic purposes. The interior forts established during this period were thinly garrisoned and left light footprints. With exceptions of Detroit and Fort Pitt, these wooden outposts were as much hostages to Native American communities surrounding them as they were symbols of British occupation. The initial influx of settlers into Susquehanna Valley, while matter of great concern for region's Native American people, did not amount by 1763 to a suffering press of English attempting to root themselves in land that tribes (72).Considered in light of scholarship published in last twenty years, Dixon breaks no significant new archival ground in his study, but his extended accounts of key battles, such as Bushy Run (184-98) are well crafted and valuable. The author is also unusually attentive to complex role of French settlers in conflict, detailing their multiple and shifting collaborations with Native Americans and British at different times. Some shortcomings with narrative remain, however. Stereotypical descriptions of Native American warriors are regrettably common in this book. When not lurking (145), Indians are often found prowling (108, 139, 163) or swooping down (3, 23, 202) on their unsuspecting enemies. Additionally, author misapprehends role of Iroquois Confederacy in conflict, accepting as historical fact Sir William Johnson's claimed successes in employing them as his personal goon squad to bring Ohio Valley nations to heel (218-20). Finally, Dixon's claims that Pontiac's War was unprecedented for its awful violence and that both Native American peoples and British engaged in it were intoxicated with genocidal fanaticism (xiii) are inconsistent with his own portrayals of kindness shown by some Ohio Valley Native Americans to certain settlers during early months of conflict (140) and of almost bloodless punitive expeditions of John Bradstreet and Henry Bouquet in 1764 (227-42). …