The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway Timothy J. Shannon (bio) The Indian World of George Washington. By Colin G. Calloway. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 621. $34.95 cloth) Among the founders, George Washington had the most extensive experience with Native Americans. As a young man, he relied on them as allies and guides in the Ohio country, and he fought alongside and against them during the Seven Years' War. He engaged with them as allies and enemies again during the American Revolution, and as the first president of the United States, he conducted diplomacy with them that laid the foundations of federal Indian policy. For Washington, Indians were neither the "merciless Indian Savages" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence nor the archetypal inhabitants of an Enlightenment philosopher's state of nature. They were individual human beings who participated with him in the events that created the United States. [End Page 332] Colin Calloway sets out to recapture that shared experience in this important new book, the first biography of Washington to give Native Americans equal billing. An indication of that purpose is a list in the opening pages that names more than one hundred individual Indians whose own stories shape the narrative than follows. Calloway divides that story into three sections. The first covers Washington's trial by fire as a public figure in the Seven Years' War. The second part covers the Revolutionary War, when Washington once again found himself entangled in the world of Native American warfare and diplomacy. In the final part, Calloway reconstructs Washington's relations with Native Americans during the 1790s, when as president, he dealt with warfare on the nation's borderlands and initiated the federal government's Indian relations. Of course, there is no shortage of Washington biographies or histories of Native Americans in the Revolutionary era, so what is gained by weaving these two familiar topics together? Calloway presents several good answers. First, he reminds us that Indians were a constant presence in the long course of Washington's public life, and as such, they played a more complicated and influential role in the creation of the United States than is typically acknowledged. Second, Calloway's analysis reminds us that among the founders, proximity to Indians did not equal intimacy with them. Yes, Washington knew many individual Indians by name and often called them friends and brothers in diplomatic councils, but we also know that in no sense of the phrase did he ever "go native" as a result of these encounters. In this long book, there is no evidence that Washington ever came to see the world through Indian eyes. Calloway's last lesson concerns another kind of barrier that separated Native and colonial peoples in North America: land. From Washington's early days as a surveyor to his financial dealings in retirement, he tried to turn Indian homelands into real estate, and like many of his peers, he never realized the profits he anticipated. At various points in his life, Washington speculated in lands in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. All of these [End Page 333] ventures were premised on the dispossession of Native Americans. Even Washington's efforts to secure peaceful coexistence with Indians in the new nation assumed that diplomacy was a more effective means than war for securing title to Indian lands. This book succeeds in putting Indians back into the story of Washington's life. The frustration readers may feel in the end is that for all they have learned about Washington's interactions with Indians, they still know very little about what he thought of them. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Washington was not prone to writing about Indians in a reflective way. He may have known more Indians by name than any of his peers, but the tragedy in this story is that the leader indispensable to the founding of the nation never clearly articulated for better or worse the place he saw for Indians within it. Timothy J. Shannon TIMOTHY J. SHANNON is a professor of history at Gettysburg College. His most recent book is Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter...