Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

THE DIVIDED GROUND: INDIANS, SETTLERS AND THE NORTHERN BORDERLAND OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION tells of an uncommon friendship between a Mohawk Indian boy and the son of a colonial clergyman. For fifty years they were first good friends, then bitter foes; their stormy relationship would change and mirror the face of changing relationships between Native American and white man, and makes the perfect foundation for an analysis of events in THE DIVIDED GROUND. From border issues and movements to settler rights, THE DIVIDED GROUND offers a key to understanding the influences behind Native/white man interactions and conflicts.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor

California Bookwatch

This book compiles a large amount of research on the topic of Iroquois-American relations. It emphasizes the gradual loss of Indian lands to Speculators, New York, the US, and British Canada. Unfortunately, it does not always tell a coherent story. For example, I thought the Brant-Kirkland relationship did not form a useful thread through the book as promised early on. It seems almost an editor's shot at repackaging. The book succeeds amazingly at blending personal human detail with the big picture. But too many people, roles, and details burden the reader. I could have really used an index of people with short bios to avoid paging back and forth. The bumpy chonological order also contributes to a ponderous read. The book offers a very rich view at the North American political scene 1783 to 1805, but it's clearly more academic than general interest.

Alan Taylor writes some very interesting books about the colonial period and early national period of American history. His "American Colonies: The Settling of North America" is one of the better surveys of American colonial History. "William Cooper's Town" is a fascinating study of James Fenimore Cooper's father and the mechanizations involving land deals in upstate New York in the early 1800s which were prototypical of the United States in the early national period, as well as the connections of James Fenimore Cooper to upstate NY and the characters in his Leatherstocking Tales. "The Divided Ground" is a fascinating study of the decline and fall of the Iroquois Confederacy as a result of the American Revolution. It's a little slow to begin with, but picks up steam about a quarter of the way into the book. The Iroquois - particularly Chief Joseph Brant - tried to maintain their independence in the face of encroaching white settlers. It is ultimately a book about failure.

Dr. Taylor's work on the northern American borderland invites the reader to reexamine our preconceptions about the consolidation of the American republic after the Revolution. "If we treatAmerican triumph as inevitable," Taylor (University of California-Davis) writes, "we obscure the fluid contingency of the 1780s and 1790s." Taylor sets out to unearth this dynamic world of contingent outcomes, ultimately resulting in the formation of distinct American and Canadian societies. Playing off the title of Richard White's extraordinarily influential work, _The Middle Ground_, Taylor argues that during the contentious two decades after American Independence the Six Nations of Iroquois saw a gradual erosion of their leverage as a broker between and among competing empires in America: French, British, and eventually American.
After the American Revolution, which severely burdened the Iroquois, newly Independent American and British officials in Canada attempted to recalibrate their Indian diplomacy in an effort to confront the diplomatic contingencies of the post-Revolutionary era. British colonial officials worried about a renewed fight with the Americans, particularly worrysome was the fact that Americans--ever expanding westward--greatly outnumbered the men available to defend Canana, a land many Americans would come to see as a natural acquisition for the new American republic. To counter the Americans, British officials hoped to keep the Convenient Chain of diplomacy alive and use the Iroquois as a buffer against the Americans. Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Indian, however hoped to achieve Iroquois unity at Grant River, in middle upper Canada (122). Brant's hybridity in diplomacy--emblematic in his vision for Grand River which would serve both British and native interests--would eventually be his downfall as British officials became more skeptical of his true intentions (341). Brant and his old classmate Samuel Kirkland (the other main historical actor in this work) were culturally hybrid individuals, which was reflected in their policymaking and diplomatic efforts.
Samuel Kirkland, a preacher and theologian, eventually fell from Grace with the Iroquois as he began to tack on land for himself along with other Americans. Kirkland, unable to preserve the significance of the hybrid Convenant Chain diplomacy between Iroquois and New York (eager to redeem value from western lands) succumbed to drink and further eroded his stance in the Native community. Closer to the end of his life he returned to his missionary responsibilities--but more out of the hope of achieving his own personal redemption. As native leadership tried desperately to retain traditional customs--especially in law and diplomacy such as in cross-cultural murders and crimes--American expansion and U.S.-British appeasement after 1794-5 gradually divided the northern borderland between the British Empire and the American Republic. Iroquois were forced to watch their diplomatic tools of leasing land, playing favorites, and create a cash flow from rents become irrelevant.
Tayor's research and use of language is nothing short of masterful, making it hard for one to critique. Taylor ultimately challenges us to think critically about the concept of liberty. While white New Yorkers prioritized possession of new lands above all else as a litmus for their liberty, Iroquois' cultural traditions such as the Covenant Chain, "Covering the graves" of the murdered, and respect for a cyclical sense of history all faded at the heels of "white" liberty, embodied in land dealings on either side of an increasingly "naturalized" border between Canada and the U.S. Taylor's work is useful in that it expands our historical vision of the early national period in a productive manner. In recent years a trend among early Americanists has been to tell the story of subaltern actors during the Revolution, somehow suggesting that there is no need to further investigate the policy aspect of the era. Taylor shows us the origins of a dramatic plundering of native sovereignty with dramatic consequences to come---in the War of 1812 this divided ground became a battle ground; a battle ground between those peoples who had been partitioned, which is the subject of his most recent book _The Civil War of 1812_ (2010).

I bought this book because I have been doing research on the Iroquois for a book of my own. At first I took it out from the library, but I realized that Alan Taylor's work was teeming with scholarship, which prevented my taking notes on it while I was reading. So I bought my own copy to mark up as I pleased. The more I read, the more I feel confident that most of the books and articles I will need to use are listed in the bibliography and notes, and that the facts and opinions being given in the body of the book are authoritative. For my purposes, I am well pleased with my purchase.

I haven't ever read anything by Alan Taylor before. I was aware of one of his previous books, William Cooper's Town, but I didn't read it. The Divided Ground has a subtitle that gives you the impression of a broader subject matter than the author actually contemplates. The book actually is a dual biography of Joseph Brant, a chief of the Mohawk tribe from upstate New York, and Samuel Kirkland, a classmate of his at Eleazer Wheelock's Indian School. Brant was there to be taught the ways of Western Civilization, while Kirkland was there to learn the language of Brant's tribe and the other members of the Six Nations, so that he could be a missionary among the Indians.

The book starts essentially just before the Revolution, when the school was operating, and proceeds from there. Wheelock, by the way, closed the school and eventually opened Dartmouth. He intended to educate Indians there, too, but for the most part failed, only having whites in his student body. Brant, meanwhile, returned to the tribe, sided with the British (more or less) during the Revolution, and wound up in Canada as a result. The Six Nations splintered into factions on each side of the border, and both factions tried to fend of land-hungry whites impinging on their increasingly dwindling lands, which eventually reduce to reservations.

The book then covers the period between then, and essentially the end of the century--say a period of about 20 years or so. The author spends a lot of time discussing the various ways that the governments attempted to, and more or less succeeded, in separating the Indians from their land. Basically, the Americans insisted that only the government could buy land from the Indians, that they (the government) would unilaterally set the price, and that if the Indians didn't take the deal, well there might be consequences, an implicit hint they might just unilaterally take what they wanted, without any compensation at all to the Indians. The British, in contrast, insisted that the Indians give the lands to the Crown outright, and in return they should trust the King to deal with them fairly. Neither situation worked out very well, and the spectacle of various government officials scheming to grow wealthy off of these land deals is the most fascinating part of the book, and at the same time the most revolting.

The author's writing style isn't the worst I've ever come across, but it's pretty scholarly and dry. There's a lot of information here, and he conveys it all clearly, but it does take him a while to get it all out on the page. If you're interested in the subject, this is probably the book for you; but it's not light reading for the casual interest.

This is a very detailed book that talks about that critical time in US history in the NY boarder lands - 1775-1800. I had hopes that maybe, just maybe it would give some unknown source or indication of sources for the settlement of the Genesee Country in the 1788-1792 period that I and a group of family researchers keeping hoping will give us that much needed "next clue" on a specific family of settlers in that area. Just The book provides very detailed discussions of the role of missionaries and utilizes the lives of Joseph Brant and his fellow school mate Samuel Kirkland as the reference points for providing extremely detailed information on the issue of where the boarder was, how land speculators had huge involvements in the development of that part of NY at the direct detriment to efforts by Brant and others to establish a separate boarder land Indian nation. It also provides a lot of information about the role of the various land companies, politicians, and merchants that provided the political and fiscal backing for the individual speculators. What is also very interesting is the very subtle diplomatic craftsmanship displayed by various tribal leaders of the Six Nations. Reading the book, one also gets a better understanding of the significant, and many times tragic, life of Joseph Brant in this arena. In the end, it was the Six Nations that was divided out of geo-political necessity between with the Old Empire and the New Republic. In that division, the Six Nations found that their "in-between" position really worked to their detriment with the State of New York many times showing its ability to play "hard ball" politics in spirt of federal Constitutional requirements and promises of support by the newly emerging federal sovereign of the United States. The book is really a good historical read on this specific topic.

I was reading it on hopes of finding a few clues to help track down specific records associated with the Spring 1789 period, Indian Ebenezer Allen's Mill Tract in what is now Rochester, and the death of one of those involved in building the mill. So, while I didn't find that elusive "best source," I did find the discussions and details truly fascinating and it helped me get some better understanding of the swirling politics involved in this period on both sides of what is today the border. The description of the Hungary Year, and its various causes, also helps explain a lot of things I had come across in my genealogical research as well. Taylor seems to make it pretty clear that Butler's involvement in land transactions in Western NY had little to do with National politics of the Empire wanting to secure that area for the Crown, and more to do with speculators of the UEL/Officers in Niagara. Though I wonder whether Butler may have hoped that by pushing settlers back along the area of the "old forts" he could force the Empire to argue for keeping those lands in the Empire - including the lakes, and future shipping ports thereon - which he and his partners would greatly benefit from. Worth the investment of time and money, regardless of the questions I still have.