New Projects

New and Future Projects:

A Renegades' History of the Revolutionary Frontier: Contesting Race and Nation on the Borderlands of the New United States (Tentative title)--

When General Anthony Wayne finally found the time to write back to his superiors eight days after his victory at Fallen Timbers, his expressions of triumph were mixed with consternation. Wayne’s American forces had prevailed against the Western Confederacy of Native peoples arrayed against them in the Ohio Country. But the American commander reported to Henry Knox that the field of battle was “strewn for a considerable distance with the dead bodies of [the Indians’] white auxiliaries.” In a contest that was supposed to be between the U.S. army and Indians, Wayne was perplexed at these white bodies littering the woods along the Maumee River. Who were they, what were they fighting for, and for what had they died?

Like Wayne, subsequent generations of historians have struggled to place where these white allies of the Indian Confederacy fit into the story of American conquest in the Ohio Country and beyond. This project seeks to amend that by carefully reconstructing the lives of some of the most prominent mixed-descent and white “renegades,” who cast their lot with Native peoples in the chaos of the Revolutionary borderlands. Taking Fallen Timbers as the entry point—where all these selected individuals found themselves in August of 1794—the project will retrace the backstory of these men and women who fit uneasily into the hardening divisions developing between white Americans and Indigenous communities during the Revolutionary era. The project will proceed on from Fallen Timbers as a watershed moment in U.S. hegemony in the Old Northwest, showing how these individuals survived and continued to subvert cultural boundaries, even as racial divisions became more entrenched through policy and practice during the early republic. The project seeks to understand the multifaceted motivations that led individuals to challenge the growing racial schisms in the early United States. The story of these renegades offers an important caveat to the growing trend in historiography that casts the American Revolution in the west as a zero-sum race war between white settlers and Indigenous peoples. As these individuals demonstrate, not everyone in the west entertained dreams of Native eradication and racial partition. At least a significant minority of frontier folk continued to defend—for a variety of reasons—their lived reality of a cross-cultural sphere of Indigenous and white interaction long after the American Revolution had vaulted U.S. power onto the continent.

While the project is in its earliest stages, I have begun to piece together the archival footprint of a number of these so-called "renegades" and their intertwined histories from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. I'm optimistic that this will make a compelling new book-length project that offers contributions to the history of the Revolutionary War in the West, Native American history as it relates to the Revolution, Loyalist Studies, and our understanding of race and belonging in society during the era of the early republic.