The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution [Paperback]

Alan Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2007

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of William Cooper's Town comes a dramatic and illuminating portrait of white and Native American relations in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

The Divided Ground tells the story of two friends, a Mohawk Indian and the son of a colonial clergyman, whose relationship helped redefine North America. As one served American expansion by promoting Indian dispossession and religious conversion, and the other struggled to defend and strengthen Indian territories, the two friends became bitter enemies. Their battle over control of the Indian borderland, that divided ground between the British Empire and the nascent United States, would come to define nationhood in North America. Taylor tells a fascinating story of the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution and the struggle of American Indians to preserve a land of their own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The study of borderlands is hot; Pulitzer and Bancroft prize–winning historian Taylor (William Cooper's Town) offers a rich, sprawling history focusing on the Iroquois Six Nations of New York and Upper Canada during the era of the American Revolution. Taylor examines Indians' wise but unsuccessful attempts to hold onto their land as colonists encroached on it. One of Taylor's great insights is that historians have taken at face value what European settlers said about the "preemption rights" by which colonists and imperial governments claimed Indian territory. Taylor recovers Indians' reactions to those "rights." Many Indian leaders, recognizing that they couldn't reverse European settlement, tried to at least dictate how that settlement would unfold—they wished to lease, rather than sell, their land, and they hoped to pick their neighbors. Giving narrative shape to the depressing and potentially unwieldy saga is the tale of a 50-year relationship between Joseph Brant, a Mohawk who exploited his ability to shift "between European gentility and Indian culture" in an effort to preserve native land rights, and Samuel Kirkland, a pious Calvinist who was both an evangelist and government agent among the Indians. This complex history told by a master of the trade will repay close reading. 48 b&w illus., 4 maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Taylor's William Cooper's Town (1995) won American history's most prestigious prizes, the Pulitzer and the Bancroft. Interest will accordingly be elevated for his examination of settler-Indian relations in what became upstate New York and Ontario. Two figures weave through Taylor's meticulous history of five decades following 1760--Mohawk leader Joseph Brant and missionary Samuel Kirkland--but the germinal personality is William Johnson, the British Indian superintendent until his death in 1774. Johnson's diplomatic acumen with the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy was a remembered reference point at treaty councils over these decades. A protege of Johnson's, Brant and his sinuous life as a cross-cultural broker tie together Taylor's narrative, which exhaustively accounts the customs and results of these councils. Their invariable consequence was a further encroachment on Iroquois lands, and Taylor evenly explains how the Iroquois attempted to control white settlement through leases rather than outright cession or war. This frontier history will engage general readers with its acute portraiture and turbulent themes of acquisition and dispossession. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400077079
• ISBN-13: 978-1400077076
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #321,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this Book!!, March 24, 2006

By 

pj (Lagrangeville, ny USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Hardcover)

I'm a genuine Alan Taylor fan. I was blown away by his William Coopers Town, I think his American Colonies is a great synthetic text, and even though I didn't care for Liberty Men and Great Proprieters I was eagerly awaiting his new book. Divided Ground didn't disappoint. While not the masterpiece that William Coopers Town is Taylor returns to much the same ground, the New York frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Where William Coopers Town dealt with the settlement of one particular town, in this book Taylor discusses the fight between American, British, and Indians, for control of western New York. It's an impressive book that challenges some of our assumptions about how easily and neatly state power and state policy were formed. Taylor shows that there was an awful lot of contingency in the Early Republic. He shows how Indian policy was not only contested between the US and Great Britain but between the US and the government of New York. For my own particular interests this was the most impressive and important part of the book as Taylor catalogues the wheelings and dealings of early New York government as they attempt to secure the west for the settlement and exploitation of white New Yorkers. For people interested more in Indian history the book contains a lot about the politicla and diplomatic challenges faced by Indians in New York and the Old Northwest in the 18th and 19th centuries. If you're at all interested in Colonial history, New York history, the history of the Early Republic, or Indian history I recommend picking up this book.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A kaleidoscope of characters and conflicts, July 9, 2006

By 

Karen Sampson Hudson "Karen Sampson Hudson" (Reno, NV United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Hardcover)

I was intrigued when I saw historian Alan Taylor on BookTV talking about his newest book, "The Divided Ground." Massive in scope, filled with fascinating characters and decades of conflict, Taylor's book is a compelling account of the years surrounding the American Revolution. It makes a good companion volume to Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower," which I had just finished.

Taylor follows the lives of two contemporary figures, an Indian named Joseph Brant and a white evangelical minister called Samuel Kirkland, who were schoolmates in early life. He paints with a broad brush, and dozens of other people appear in these pages, accompanied by his succinct descriptions of who they were and what they did.

The reader will gain a much deeper understanding of the inevitable conflicts over land, and over boundaries once the Revolution had established a new country which bordered a British territory to the north and west. Also figuring prominently into the mix are the diametrically opposed attitudes of the native American tribes and the frontier farmer settlers toward the uses of land, the concept of private property, and even work/gender roles.

This book will take you into that distant time and open your eyes to its rich complexity. Highly recommended.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Detailed, and thus slow going, October 26, 2006

By 

Scholar "18th century student" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Hardcover)

Taylor has done his homework here, and when one reads this book it is obvious he knows his stuff. This is a detailed look at Indian relations with settlers in the post Revol War NY world, as well as a look at relations between Americans and the British in Canada, and between Americans as well. Unfort., Taylor has fallen into the trap (assisted by an editor) of not knowing what to leave OUT of his story. No pun intended, but there are far too many trees described to the point that it takes too long to see the forest. This is especially true in the first half of the book, in which he seems to give us EVERY scrap he could find about indian land leases and coalitions of settlers to try to get the land from the Indians by any means necessary. This has the effect of making for very tedious reading, as do the descriptions of negotiations between whites and Indians. The book is 400 pp long, so eliminating much of this dry, plodding text would have been a great service to the reader, without sacrificing Taylor's objective of telling a story.