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American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier
The war that raged along America's frontier during the period of the American Revolution was longer, bloodier, and arguably more revolutionary than what transpired on the Atlantic coast.
Between 1763 and 1795 westerners not only participated in a War of Independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. On the frontier, the process of forging sovereignty and citizens was stripped down to its essence. Settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, disorder, and the frenzied competition to remake the fabric of society. In so doing, they were transformed from deferential subjects to self-sovereign citizens as the British Empire gave way to the American nation. But something more fundamental was at work. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement in which race and citizenship went hand in hand. The common people demanded as much, and the state delivered. As westerners contended in a Hobbesian world, they also created some of the myths that made America American.
Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials, vying with one another to remake the West during its most formative period.
Between 1763 and 1795 westerners not only participated in a War of Independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. On the frontier, the process of forging sovereignty and citizens was stripped down to its essence. Settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, disorder, and the frenzied competition to remake the fabric of society. In so doing, they were transformed from deferential subjects to self-sovereign citizens as the British Empire gave way to the American nation. But something more fundamental was at work. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement in which race and citizenship went hand in hand. The common people demanded as much, and the state delivered. As westerners contended in a Hobbesian world, they also created some of the myths that made America American.
Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials, vying with one another to remake the West during its most formative period.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published April 17, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 31, 2012
If you want to know where the US' distinctive flavor of anarchist/gun loving/hates the government but loves authority comes from, "American Leviathan" is a good place to start. The story of the "back settlers", folks who wanted Indian lands but were restrained by colonial authority, and their rage against that authority persists to the present day.
The ugliness of the formula-- unauthorized settlers move into Indian lands, pick a fight, then call for help when the Indians respond-- is something that was repeated across the entire continent over the following century, an evolved narrative and set of political and military responses that enabled the landgrab. While this is explicitly about the Ohio valley in the years leading up to the Revolution, one can see precisely the same patterns nearly a century later in the Oregon Territory.
Because history is nothing if not bitterly ironic, it's noteworthy that our contemporary "Tea Party" share very little with their namesakes (who after all adopted "no taxation without representation" as their slogan-- and in fact were largely content with taxes to which they'd acquiesced); our Tea Party's antecedents are the "back settlers" -- folks who want to make use of the assets of the nation when it suits them, and but are venomously hostile to government that might restrict them for the public good. The focus on gun rights also makes sense in the context of the back settlers -- as illegal settlers whose aim was to dispossess Indians, and couldn't look to authority for assistance (as their presence was often illegal), back settlers necessarily focused on "self help", both for defensive purposes and for provocative ones.
A really important book, surprisingly important insights into the character of political debate in 2012 can be acquired from the bitter battles of the 1760s.
The other interesting parallel is the extent to which the backsettlers look like South Africa's "voortrekkers", and the American Revolution looks like the Boer War. The author doesn't make the comparison, but its not hard to see the parallels in the revolts by the only two British colonies where Anglos rebelled . . .
The ugliness of the formula-- unauthorized settlers move into Indian lands, pick a fight, then call for help when the Indians respond-- is something that was repeated across the entire continent over the following century, an evolved narrative and set of political and military responses that enabled the landgrab. While this is explicitly about the Ohio valley in the years leading up to the Revolution, one can see precisely the same patterns nearly a century later in the Oregon Territory.
Because history is nothing if not bitterly ironic, it's noteworthy that our contemporary "Tea Party" share very little with their namesakes (who after all adopted "no taxation without representation" as their slogan-- and in fact were largely content with taxes to which they'd acquiesced); our Tea Party's antecedents are the "back settlers" -- folks who want to make use of the assets of the nation when it suits them, and but are venomously hostile to government that might restrict them for the public good. The focus on gun rights also makes sense in the context of the back settlers -- as illegal settlers whose aim was to dispossess Indians, and couldn't look to authority for assistance (as their presence was often illegal), back settlers necessarily focused on "self help", both for defensive purposes and for provocative ones.
A really important book, surprisingly important insights into the character of political debate in 2012 can be acquired from the bitter battles of the 1760s.
The other interesting parallel is the extent to which the backsettlers look like South Africa's "voortrekkers", and the American Revolution looks like the Boer War. The author doesn't make the comparison, but its not hard to see the parallels in the revolts by the only two British colonies where Anglos rebelled . . .
September 10, 2008
Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan examines the greater Ohio river valley from roughly 1760-1790. During this transitional period, pioneers and revolutionaries continually battled Indians. Settlers soon adopted a stadial concept of human hierarchy, one borne out of the Scottish enlightenment; some thought that Indians could be civilized, but over time most regarded these original Americans as savages beyond repute and nothing more. In these trying times, Hobbes’ famous work Leviathan acts as a corollary to the incipient frontier. Hobbes proposed that individuals pursued self-interest myopically, but this reality led to violence. Men needed a social contract, or a sovereign authority, to cohabitate peacefully. In the contested frontier, one populated by British, Indian and American peoples, pioneers acquiesced to this Hobbesian bargain. In time, otherwise anti-government minded pioneers reacted to continuing violence and ultimately bargained with eastern lawmakers and ultimately approved a strong national government, one that could successfully deal with the Indian problem. The result: a sway towards federalism on the frontier and a shift away from stadial hierarchies and towards unmoving racial divides.
Griffin looks upon the frontier not as a spatial boundary per se, but a temporal borderland as well. There was a great fluidity of proposed demarcations, most importantly the Proclimation line. The frontier was a temporal borderland, a crucible in which pioneers and revolutionaries settled on a strong national government to regulate lands of the west. These ideas had long standing impacts in American history—namely, a skeptical but remaining reliance on a national government and a deepening of racial identity. Griffins’ work, however, would have benefited from a more nuanced appreciation of new western history, especially Donald Worster’s “Western Paradox.”
Griffin looks upon the frontier not as a spatial boundary per se, but a temporal borderland as well. There was a great fluidity of proposed demarcations, most importantly the Proclimation line. The frontier was a temporal borderland, a crucible in which pioneers and revolutionaries settled on a strong national government to regulate lands of the west. These ideas had long standing impacts in American history—namely, a skeptical but remaining reliance on a national government and a deepening of racial identity. Griffins’ work, however, would have benefited from a more nuanced appreciation of new western history, especially Donald Worster’s “Western Paradox.”
September 5, 2011
Except for slavery, I find nothing as depressing in American history as reading about Native American history. I don't really understand Griffin's argument about why settlers turned from a stadial theory (where peoples move through stages to 'civilization') to an essentialist theory (wherein the Native Americans were irreversibly savage). It seemed like simple opportunism to me. Their presence was inconvenient and so the stadial theory got in the way of whole-hearted genocide.
May 16, 2019
Griffin connects the fight for the original western frontier with the birth of the United States as a viable nation. This land wasn't a frontier to the Indians who lived there; it was their home. The story of white Europeans conquering the lands of American Indians has been told before, but American Leviathan mines the theme of class for new insights. The lower classes of settlers, who were the pioneer vanguard on the frontier, hated Indians and wanted them removed from the land they felt should be there's to "improve" through European agriculture. The United States government choose a slower route, and to the squatters and other poor pioneers this was a failure of authority, or even worse; a racial betrayal. Not until the Algonquin-speaking Indians who controlled the territory, themselves likely refugees of pioneer encroachment of lands farther east, were definitively beaten at Fallen Timbers and their land opened for settlement via the subsequent Treaty of Greenville, did the common people of the frontier accept the United States government as a legitimate power.
June 3, 2019
This narrative history of the Ohio Valley from the end of the American part of the Seven Years' War to the Treaty of Greenville provides good insights into the transformation of that region socially and politically. The tone tilts heavily toward a revisionist view of American history that paints the Colonial powers France and Great Britain as benevolent overseers, and the revolutionary faction of the American colonies as dangerous, greedy racists, but that tilt doesn't mar the story much. The strength of this book is a solid historical narrative of what happened, but it fails to deliver the promised new interpretation of the events of the period. Aside from a heavy emphasis on stadial theory, there's nothing here that wasn't covered by earlier works. All the elements were familiar to me from reading G. M. Waller's history of the American Revolution in the West many years ago in college. With that qualification, I can recommend this study to anyone interested in the region or the period.
August 3, 2015
Griffin's history of war and settlement in the Ohio River Valley from the 1760's to the 1790's is one of the more well-argued books I have read lately. Griffin uses a consciously Hobbesian lens to chart the process of settlement, war, and state formation during this early wave of expansion. These settlers engaged lived in a "state of war" throughout this period in which they were utterly vulnerable to Indian attacks. Successive East Coast regimes both could not and would not expend the resources to safeguard these people, so they took self-protection into their own hands in the most Hobbesian way possible: massive violence against Native Americans. These Westerners also made interesting claims of citizens' rights towards the East Coast governments. They mainly claimed the right of protection, the most basic Hobbesian right, and argued that if the state could not or would not protect them then they had the right to do so themselves. Thus you ended up with an interesting set of core-periphery issues of sovereignty in which the East Coast colonists made citizens' rights claims on the British Empire while the Western settlers made a different set of citizens' rights claims on the East Coast colonists. Really, the whole Atlantic World was engaged in these core-periphery struggles at this time, as scholars like Thomas Bender and Kathleen Duval have pointed out. This was an arena of weak states, slow communication and movement, and desperate violence, so it was exceedingly common for the periphery to demand rights and resources of the core or break off if they don't receive help/recognition.
It was not until the 1780's and 1790's that the US government took effective efforts to organize and protect Western settlement (The Northwest Ordinance, The Wayne Expedition, the establishment of forts on the frontier). At this point, the state firmly jumped behind the settlers' wars against the Indians and started the long, sad process of pushing the Indians westward to open up a safety/opportunity valve for American settlers and capital to pour through.
This sums up the sovereignty issues in this book, but a key aspect of this process was the development of deep racial hatred on the frontier and the state's eventual sponsorship of this hatred. Griffin argues that most intellectuals at the time took an environmentalist/culturalist view of human behavior that said that human beings all have the same basic nature, divine origin, and capabilities. It's their environment and culture that shape them into "higher" and "lower" forms, as many Europeans saw it back then. Of course, after reading Winthrop Jordan I am skeptical of the prevalence of this belief, especially in regards to blacks, but let's move on anyways. The entire British imperial project, including the spreading of Christianity and the Proclamation Line of 1763, were based partially on the belief that Indians could become British and Christian. However, the constant and brutal violence of the frontier convinced settlers that Indians were inherently, even racially, inferior, violent, stupid, and savage. Settlers failed to differentiate between different tribes, killing some for the crimes of others. Crucially for Griffin's argument, they even assaulted Indians who had adopted Western dress, religion, language, and culture in episodes like the grisly Gnaddenhutten massacre in the early 1780's. This category of violence shows the hardening of white solidarity among the settlers and the spreading belief that all Indians were irredeemable enemies marked by inherent physical differences. There is no better word to describe this belief than racism. While the state often tried to be the neutral arbiter between Indians and white settlers, the whites had a legitimate claim as citizens that the state's responsibility (in a Hobbesian and Lockean sense) was to protect them first and foremost and favor their interests. This was a fatal problem in any attempt, however ethnocentric and flawed, for the American Leviathan to enforce an orderly Western expansion that could have been at least partially fair or inclusive of Indians.
Finally, this book offers an interesting and different route to the same conclusion of Gordon Wood's argument about the formation of a radically new democratic society in the early Republic. Clearly, the West had something to do with the formation of a more unique American character that was less attached to European culture. However, Wood focuses on the consequences/implications of American revolutionary ideology and the breaking of the monarchical, hierarchical society of the colonial era as the main origin of the democratic society. Griffin finds this change in a more concrete process of war, racial hatred, and Western demands that the Leviathan expand its reach to the frontier and beyond. Griffin's story is more about regional antagonism and the formation of a Western identity that was skeptical of Eastern interests and inattention. Griffin's argument is still complementary to Wood, but it emerges from a darker process.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Hobbes, the history of the West, and Native American history. It's a bit dense for the general reader, however. Although I didn't relish every page, I applaud Griffin's tight argumentation and fascinating application of Hobbes to this side of American history.
It was not until the 1780's and 1790's that the US government took effective efforts to organize and protect Western settlement (The Northwest Ordinance, The Wayne Expedition, the establishment of forts on the frontier). At this point, the state firmly jumped behind the settlers' wars against the Indians and started the long, sad process of pushing the Indians westward to open up a safety/opportunity valve for American settlers and capital to pour through.
This sums up the sovereignty issues in this book, but a key aspect of this process was the development of deep racial hatred on the frontier and the state's eventual sponsorship of this hatred. Griffin argues that most intellectuals at the time took an environmentalist/culturalist view of human behavior that said that human beings all have the same basic nature, divine origin, and capabilities. It's their environment and culture that shape them into "higher" and "lower" forms, as many Europeans saw it back then. Of course, after reading Winthrop Jordan I am skeptical of the prevalence of this belief, especially in regards to blacks, but let's move on anyways. The entire British imperial project, including the spreading of Christianity and the Proclamation Line of 1763, were based partially on the belief that Indians could become British and Christian. However, the constant and brutal violence of the frontier convinced settlers that Indians were inherently, even racially, inferior, violent, stupid, and savage. Settlers failed to differentiate between different tribes, killing some for the crimes of others. Crucially for Griffin's argument, they even assaulted Indians who had adopted Western dress, religion, language, and culture in episodes like the grisly Gnaddenhutten massacre in the early 1780's. This category of violence shows the hardening of white solidarity among the settlers and the spreading belief that all Indians were irredeemable enemies marked by inherent physical differences. There is no better word to describe this belief than racism. While the state often tried to be the neutral arbiter between Indians and white settlers, the whites had a legitimate claim as citizens that the state's responsibility (in a Hobbesian and Lockean sense) was to protect them first and foremost and favor their interests. This was a fatal problem in any attempt, however ethnocentric and flawed, for the American Leviathan to enforce an orderly Western expansion that could have been at least partially fair or inclusive of Indians.
Finally, this book offers an interesting and different route to the same conclusion of Gordon Wood's argument about the formation of a radically new democratic society in the early Republic. Clearly, the West had something to do with the formation of a more unique American character that was less attached to European culture. However, Wood focuses on the consequences/implications of American revolutionary ideology and the breaking of the monarchical, hierarchical society of the colonial era as the main origin of the democratic society. Griffin finds this change in a more concrete process of war, racial hatred, and Western demands that the Leviathan expand its reach to the frontier and beyond. Griffin's story is more about regional antagonism and the formation of a Western identity that was skeptical of Eastern interests and inattention. Griffin's argument is still complementary to Wood, but it emerges from a darker process.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Hobbes, the history of the West, and Native American history. It's a bit dense for the general reader, however. Although I didn't relish every page, I applaud Griffin's tight argumentation and fascinating application of Hobbes to this side of American history.
April 24, 2019
Not bad. Definitely a new look at the Revolution and American government origins
October 26, 2019
Interesting. Information I had not known about the Revolutionary War in the west.
July 9, 2024
Stunning. Crushing. Perfect.
October 10, 2021
One massive flaw: does not play almost any attention to the role of slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, etc. If one of this book's arguments is that cyclical and bloody chaos on the frontier inculcated among white Americans a new "modern" conception of race, it'd be critically important to analyze slavery's impact on that development.
July 12, 2016
Decently detailed and well argued saga about the vacuum of sovereign power among white settlers and native inhabitants in frontier Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 to 1794, when General "Mad" Anthony Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers and effectively drove out most Indians from these territories. In addition to being an all-against-all bloodbath during this era, the lack of order and protection from the British pre-Revolution and the Eastern eastablishment post-Revolution created an East-West divide that threatened civil war. Kind of an eye-opener of a book.
December 24, 2015
"Frontier settlers during periods of tension inhabited a murky world of meaning in which the cultural mingled often uncomfortably with the essential." (65)
Ideology is still at the heart of it...
I do find important the claim:
"Behavior no longer betokened human development or human worth. Color did. In 1763, the slaughter of innocents at least raised eyebrows in the West. By 1783, it did not." (153)
Ideology is still at the heart of it...
I do find important the claim:
"Behavior no longer betokened human development or human worth. Color did. In 1763, the slaughter of innocents at least raised eyebrows in the West. By 1783, it did not." (153)
November 4, 2008
This book was the forgotten history during the Revolution. It was so intersting to read about other parts of the nation that were rebelling and fighting but are forgotten with the bigger revolution of the time. It gives great insight to the western frontier and the ongoing war between natives and frontiersmen. I really enjoyed it because it was something new to read and learn about.
April 14, 2013
Well constructed and argued theoretical basis that white civilized elites used white savages (pioneers) to subdue native savages on the frontier. More balanced ideologically than most academic works, but still harsh in its judgements on settler culture.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews