By the 1820s and 30s, Americans were acutely aware of the passing
of the Revolutionary generation. The pantheon of elite heroes was firmly
established, but federal pension legislation offered veterans who served
as common soldiers a chance to tell their stories. Oral depositions were
given in courts where the spectators were welcome. These public recollections
of the American Revolution closely related to emerging constructions of
national identity. Many veterans who applied for pensions had never fought
with the main armies against the British. For men from the greater Pennsylvania
backcountry (upon whom this paper focuses), their war was a struggle over
the future of the Trans-Allegheny West. Their narratives reveal that the
frontier war produced an American identity predicated on an increasingly
biologically-oriented notion of "whiteness." This concept created unity
among diverse backcountry settlers and implicated Indians as "non-white."
The development of white racial consciousness grew haltingly during the
colonial wars of the 1750s and 60s. By the War for Independence, however,
concepts of race became central to defining "Americaness." Revolutionaries
were then able to adapt Indian culture, especially methods of warfare,
with no peril to their belief in their superiority. "Otherness" on the
Pennsylvania frontier was no longer defined by cultural differences, but
according to perceptions of skin color. [1]
The veterans' understandings of the Revolution and national identity helped solidify the early republic's equation of white manhood with citizenship. With property ownership largely vanishing from suffrage requirements, early Americans placed a greater emphasis on gender- and race-based notions of exclusion in defining the body politic. This of course helped mitigate potential class conflict in the political arena among whites. Historians have already noted how in the Revolution's aftermath racism became a way to formally deny rights to African Americans, both slave and free. I would argue that Pennsylvania backcountry veterans' pension depositions reveal a significant parallel process in which Indians, no matter how culturally assimilated, could never be accepted in the Republic by virtue of their lack of "whiteness." The perceived skin color of European Americans was, therefore, crucial to the construction of national identity in the early United States. [2]
Before this process unfolded, however, Colonial Pennsylvanians primarily understood Indians as culturally distinct prior to the imperial wars of the mid-eighteenth century. Early settlers tended to believe Indians to be inferior for a number of reasons, none of which were explicitly related to skin color. Initially, the most significant apparent cultural difference was that Indians did not have conceptions comparable to European ideas of individual land ownership. Indian land use was also considered backward because of the lack of European-style agriculture and livestock use. Moreover, Pennsylvanians, as did other British colonists, remarked on Indians' gendered division of labor. Indian women were viewed as unfeminine for working the fields. Men were seen as lazy for spending their time in pursuit of hunting, an activity considered primarily a pastime of aristocrats in Europe. Settlers and Indians also noted differences among each other in terms of standards of cleanliness, diet, rituals of hospitality and clothing. [3]
These general cultural boundaries are well-known to historians and of course were not impermeable. In fact, Indians and settlers engaged in significant levels of cultural exchange in early colonial Pennsylvania history. Negotiators, traders, and missionaries in particular took the time to learn Indian languages, religions, and customs of diplomacy. Numerous colonists and Indians adapted elements of each others' dress, economies, and ways of living. Nonetheless, even these "cultural brokers" were well aware of the dangers of too much exchange: the loss of identity. Those who moved comfortably between colonial and Indian worlds, ultimately identified with one group or the other. Even so, negotiators were often regarded with profound suspicion because their ambiguous cultural (not racial) identities. During this early period of relatively peaceful relations with Indians in colonial Pennsylvania, culture remained the essential element of how ordinary settlers defined themselves and their native neighbors. [4]
What began to change American identity on the Pennsylvania frontier was the outbreak of significant warfare in the period circa 1755-1785. Ironically, settler concepts of "whiteness" grew out of an unprecedented cultural exchange: shared methods of war which developed out of a violent mid-eighteenth century "collision of military cultures." Because Pennsylvanians had been spared large-scale frontier conflict until this point, most were unaccustomed to the war between entire societies that were earlier fought in other British colonies. The bulk of settlers, however, quickly learned and adapted to frontier combat. For many, warfare was one of their first encounters with Indian cultures. In contrast to negotiators, missionaries, traders, and long hunters, many new immigrants to the Pennsylvania backcountry in this period were unfamiliar with Indian ways. The mid-eighteenth century's great influx of settlers to the province's hinterland from Europe and the Eastern regions of British America created a large population of farmers who had little desire to associate with Indian neighbors but who did covet their lands. Many based their perceptions of Indians on secondary sources, especially captivity narratives. These tales stressed the supposed brutality of Indian war, especially the treatment of women and children. Additionally, by the mid-eighteenth century, the popular narratives of frontier war justified land appropriation by any means necessary including using Indian methods of war. Such messages assuaged the consciences of land-hungry farmers by positing Indians as a hostile race deserving no quarter. They also helped prepare settlers to see Indians and themselves as distinct racial groups. [5]
White identity in the greater Pennsylvania backcountry developed slowly but surely during the French and Indian, Pontiac's, and Dunmore's Wars. Major fighting racked the Pennsylvania hinterland for the first time. Fueled by nativist religion and the careful playing of European powers off against each other, large numbers of Indians united intermittently over the period to fight against land hungry settlers. Pennsylvanians only managed one raid of consequence on their own. In 1756, militiamen surprised a group of Delawares at Kittanning and burnt the town, killed close to forty Indians, and destroyed property. In short, the colonists had executed an "Indian-style" raid against their native enemies and raised an ideological dilemma. If Indians were "savage" in the minds of these Pennsylvanians primarily because of their methods of warfare, settlers needed a way of justifying their use of such tactics. Beginning to view all Indians as a single hostile and distinct group would be necessary. A provincial scalp bounty facilitated this process and resulted in many hinterland residents attacking any Indians regardless of their wartime sympathies. Although financial gain was one motive, indiscriminate scalping by settlers also reaffirmed the notion that all Indians were somehow the same. The penultimate demonstration of the incipient racism on the Pennsylvania frontier, however, was the massacre of peaceful Anglicized Conestoga Indians by the Paxton Boys in 1763. In response to attacks by hostile Indians, the Paxton settlers believed retaliation against any Indian group would serve vengeance. This and other murders of non-belligerent Indians received widespread support from other backcountry settlers. The coalescing of such attitudes in the 1750s and 60s would have profound effects upon the American Revolution. [6]
Still, whiteness was not yet a pervasive part of American identity. The Revolution involved a far more extensive military cultural exchange and need for biological definitions of difference. In the war that created the United States, such concepts of identity would be central for creating citizenship. When hostilities broke out in the greater Pennsylvania backcountry in 1777, many of the young men who went to war remembered doing so with a notion that they were fighting all Indians, despite the fact that many groups were neutral or some, such as numerous Oneida, Tuscarora, and Delaware, were actively allied with the Revolutionaries. A few soldiers were motivated by deeds from earlier colonial wars which they attributed to Indians in general. William Jones fought in the Revolution because his "father was killed by the Indians when he was a boy, after which time, he became their settled enemy." Henry Dugan linked his service in the War for Independence to vengeance for his "wife and three children who were killed by Indians" during Dunmore's War. Other veterans articulated their reasons for fighting as responses to Indian violence during the Revolution. Peter Keister fought to avenge "individual murders and burnings [by] the Indians of our men." More ominously, John Dougherty recalled his motives:
There are several reasons for why the veterans referred to their own skin color. First, it allowed soldiers to have an intellectual rationale for full assimilation of frontier warfare without degeneration into cultural "savagery." In other words, frontier troops could fight much like Indians did and were able to laud their own deeds while decrying those of their opponents. Both sides carried out guerilla raids on each others' settlements. When Indians carried out hit-and-run attacks against backcountry settlements, veterans recalled them as cowardly and unmanly. William Elliott, for example, recalled how the Indians "frequently came down upon the defenseless settlers and on one occasion killed nine out of one family." Yet Pennsylvania frontier soldiers proudly recounted their comparable actions as heroic. Joseph Keefer, recalled how his unit "had a skirmish with the Indians and burnt and destroyed their town." George Reem stated that he assisted in "destroying the cornfields and burning the Indian villages." In these sorts of battles, soldiers used tactics similar to the Indian ones they called unfair. William Campbell explained how his patrol "discovered a light, three of us went to see what it was and found four Indians encamped. We f[e]ll on them and killed them all without firing a shot, they being asleep." Similarly, John Hutson recalled how he and his comrades "espied the Indians kindling a fire . . . then retired . . . and stayed there until they . . . would be in their first sleep." Both sides also scalped and killed prisoners and non-combatants. Not surprisingly, such actions when committed by Indians were denounced, in the words of John Struthers, as "barbarities." Yet Revolutionaries extolled own ability to do the same. On the so-called "Squaw Campaign" of 1778, militiamen competed with each other to kill Indian civilians. Samuel Murphy recalled how "a small Indian boy . . . was discovered and killed and several claimed the honor." Murphy also recounted how a militiaman scalped an elderly Indian woman. In 1779, in a common duty, Revolutionaries sortied out as a "scalping party toward the Mingo towns." [8]
The veterans skillfully employed linguistic strategies to shape their audiences' perceptions of this apparent double standard of military conduct. They stated that they manfully "killed" their Indian enemies. Native warriors, in contrast, committed "murder." Christian Acker was careful to note that Indians were "murdering the inhabitants." Peter Wolf accused Indians of "murdering" in battle. John Miller denounced "the cruelties of the Indians who...committed murders." Thomas Rees decried the "great number of murders by the Indians." That Indians' killing of civilians and soldiers was regarded as murder by frontier troops is significant. During the eighteenth century, narratives of murder in America were changing. No longer was the perpetrators' culpability due to the human condition deriving from original sin. Murderers came to be seen as "something other than human;" as violent creatures lacking morals. The ominous dubbing of Indians as murderers underscored the frontier soldiers' belief that Native Americans were subhuman and biologically different. [9]
Soldiers were therefore able to assimilate elements of Indian warfare without fear of being seen as "savage" because race rather than culture was becoming the definitive boundary between European Americans and Indians during the Revolution. Thus, in the minds of the veterans, they did not believe that they were hypocritical when they critiqued Indian violence and praised their own. As "whites," they saw themselves as incapable of "savagery," while the characteristic was innate to Indians. They were the Indian-haters who fought as Indians did and this very attribute made them Americans. These men were whites who were using elements of new world military culture in the service of "civilization." They saw themselves as biologically superior to Indians and, by implication, culturally superior to Europeans. This "Indianized" Indian-hater prototype amongst Revolutionary soldiers also embodied one of the contradictory elements of an emerging American national identity: a simultaneous loathing of and desire for the Indian other. By employing the term "white," the longing for cultural similarity could be fulfilled because arbitrarily constructed biological difference created racial hierarchy. [10]
The other major factor that made the construction of "whiteness" vital was the need for a common identity for an ethnically diverse European-American frontier population. "Whiteness" was an intellectual construct that encapsulated the shared European heritage of hinterland residents as a physical characteristic. Given the cultural heterogeneity and local conflicts among groups of backcountry Pennsylvanians, such unity was both relatively new and necessary. Different groups fought in the Revolution for various reasons, but were united by their perceived skin color. In fact, this may have been one of the few things that large numbers of Americans in this region shared at all: opposition as "whites" to Indians as a race. Soldiers were also beginning to make an important connection between whiteness and the Revolutionary cause. Significantly, if being white was a prerequisite for being a patriot, it could also perhaps become the basis of citizenship in the new republic. [11]
Class analysis further highlights the importance of whiteness in expanding the boundaries of public manhood in America. As opposed to enlisted men, officers explicitly referred to Indian skin color. Typical of educated Anglo-American elites of the late eighteenth century, these men did not remark on their own group identity, but rather the perceived physical characteristics of Indians. Colonel Daniel Brodhead referred to Indians variously as "yellow" and "black." William Rogers saw Indians as "tawny." Michael Huffnagle referred to native warriors as "blacks." In contrast to common soldiers from the backcountry, officers were not defining a self-identity in terms of "whiteness." Rather, as property owners already secure in their status as full republican citizens, their racist constructs revolved around the perceived appearance of Indians. Soldiers, coming largely from the ranks of the poor and politically disenfranchised, were creating a new white American identity that they hoped would supercede the virtuous freeholder as the model of citizenship. [12]
In terms of a negative reference point, self-identification among ordinary settlers as "white" made Indians inferior not because of their own complexions, but rather by virtue of being "non-white." Thus, they could never be "Americans." Underscoring this belief, frontier soldiers' proclivity to kill neutral and friendly Indians as well as hostile ones was pronounced during the Revolution. As early as 1777, George Morgan, an official at Fort Pitt worried that local inhabitants were intent on killing Indians friendly to the Revolutionaries. Later that year, backcountry militia murdered the Shawnee leader Cornstalk, a proponent of neutrality, in response to hostile Indian raids. In the following year, the friendly neutralist Coshocton Delaware leader, White Eyes, was killed by the militia while carrying intelligence for the Revolutionaries. These neutral Delawares were further alienated from the "patriots" in 1781 following a bloody raid by Continental forces upon their settlements. Backcountry soldiers simply refused for the most part to differentiate between Indian factions and this in turn contributed to growing native opposition to the Revolutionaries. [13]
Conversely, while the actions of settlers facilitated Indian solidarity, it appears that growing Pan-Indian unity strengthened the construction of whiteness. As Gregory Evans Dowd argues, the American Revolution may well have been the high point of Indian opposition to land hungry Anglo Americans. An alliance of spiritually-inspired nativists and pro-British accomodationists created a formidable group of frontier opponents to the Revolutionaries. Nativist leaders among the Indian peoples of the region also began to discuss their self-conception in almost biological terms. As Dowd points out, nativists "taught that all Indians were a single people, separately created." Although significant numbers of settlers fought with the Indians against the Revolutionaries, there is evidence that some Indians viewed all Anglo-Americans as a single race of enemies. In Bedford County in 1778, a group of loyalists set out to join the attacks on the Revolutionaries but "the Indians suspecting some design in the white people," killed one leader and forced the other Tories to flee. Such accounts disseminated by frontier Revolutionaries served to bolster the image of race war. The above report was worded by a patriot militia official to suggest that even Indians were aware of the unity of all settlers as whites. [14]
Near the end of the Revolution in 1782, the pervasiveness of white American identity in the backcountry was demonstrated by Pennsylvania militiamen who carried out the infamous "Gnaddenhutten Massacre." The soldiers slaughtered a group of neutral pacifist Moravian Delawares. The fact that the Indians at Gnaddenhutten were not only Christian, but also Anglicized in terms of clothing, farming, and land-use did not mitigate their fate. Using skin color to define themselves, the militia distinguished these Indians as not "white" and their cultural similarity was rendered irrelevant. The militiamen dismissed European goods used by the Delawares as "things as were made use of by white people and not by Indians." Thus, even if Indians did live like Anglo-Americans and even use their implements, they could never be white and, hence, they deserved no quarter. Thus, material culture as a frontier signifyer was superceded by race. [15]
There are important reasons for why this concept of whiteness defined in opposition to Indians figured so prominently in the veterans' retrospective accounts of the American Revolution. As Gordon Wood has argued, the American Revolution paved the way for the then radical notion of universal white manhood suffrage in the early-nineteenth century. Soldiers were aware that their service in the military during the Revolution was a firm basis to claim full citizenship. Since their sacrifices helped found the republic, many believed that they should be enfranchised. Clearly, the most important change in U.S. national identity from the end of the Revolution to the 1830s was the profound shift from an economic basis of citizenship to a largely biological one. White manhood replaced property-holding as the basic prerequisite for participation in the formal public sphere. Not surprisingly, veterans gave depositions that proudly recounted their claims to political inclusion by emphasizing the "white race" in contrast to Indians. Their service as soldiers also highlighted their manliness. [16]
Plainly then, while these soldiers' recollections tell us much about the Revolution, they also reveal the culture of the early Republic as well. From the perspective of the 1830s, the depositions were a celebration of the new nation's collective memory of its War for Independence. Historians had already shaped how early Americans viewed the Revolution. Despite significant variations in interpretation, most histories tended to emphasize a united struggle among the colonists on behalf of liberty against the tyranny of the British Empire. Popular celebrations of the Revolution reinforced this image of a unified national effort for independence from the crown. Not surprisingly, the courts that heard the deposition expected some reference to the war against the redcoats. Veterans who understood the conflict primarily as one of whites against Indians carefully crafted their stories to elucidate their contribution to the republic. They used the discourse of race to portray their actions as a defense of the "whiteness" upon which the United States was based. Peter Keister, for instance, could not led by the court into a discussion of the war with the British. The manner of his military service yielded no familiarity with great leaders or battles. Keister explained that, "such was the nature of [my] service that [I] cannot remember any prominent fact which entered into the history of the country." He then went on to discuss the frontier war in terms of whites versus Indians as did his comrades. [17]
These discussions of race were superfluous to the requirements of the pension, but obviously important to the deponents. The critical issue that resonated with audiences in the absence of discussion of the war against the British was the fundamental importance of whiteness to citizenship. Listeners could conceive of the Revolution as a defense of the white race and, hence, the United States against non-whites as did the speakers. While deponents had the satisfaction of recounting how they came to see themselves as Americans, the biological roots of citizenship were publically reaffirmed. Additionally, the veterans' emphasis on self-identity explains the initially puzzling absence of reference to Indians' skin color being "red." Despite the widely popular use of this color to describe Indian complexions in the early-nineteenth century, pension applicants refused to employ the term. [18]
The veterans' descriptions of a seeming double standard of combat behavior was designed to strike a responsive chord among listeners as well. Those hearing the pension applications would concur with the veterans that one thing that made Americans distinct from Europeans was adaptation to the American environment. The frontiersman who mixed elements of Indian and European culture, especially methods of warfare, was a staple of literature and popular culture in the early republic. While audiences in the courts might have wished for stories of George Washington, they certainly would have recognized a truly American element in the frontier war. Like the veterans, they would have been untroubled by the contradiction of lauding patriot backcountry military culture while characterizing like Indian acts as "savagery." "Whites" biologically were as incapable of savagery as Indians were of civilization. Whites who adopted some Indian ways were symbolic of the new nation and its separation from Europe. The Indianized white was then the apotheosis of the new national identity: biologically superior to Indians, culturally superior to Europeans. Backcountry Revolutionary War veterans were valued as cultural archetypes precisely because their tales spoke so directly to national identity. [19]
The attitudes of ex-soldiers who came largely from the lower and middling ranks of society also helps explain the support of many ordinary Americans for actions against Indians such as Cherokee Removal. Those Cherokees who had republican government, Christianity, farming, livestock, European gender roles, and a written language could no more be entitled to the rights of whites than had the Moravian Delawares at Gnaddenhutten. Thus, the veterans' understanding of Indian otherness helps explain the subsequent development of the American West. Despite a variety of Indian strategies to preserve their independence including assimilation, accommodation, and armed resistance, U.S. imperial expansion could always be justified racially. For the most part, few Indians desired full incorporation into the U.S. body politic, but their theoretical racial exclusion had sweeping consequences. Numbers of another group defined as racial others, African Americans, did in fact actively seek citizenship. The denial of Indian fitness to be American undoubtedly helped inform a general assumption among most whites that blacks were not qualified to be citizens because of perceived biological difference. [20]
Revolutionary soldiers' constructions of "whiteness"were a vital component of the sweeping redefinition of American identity that took place in the early republic. Universal white manhood suffrage led to race and gender superceding class status in claims to citizenship. The veterans helped create a common understanding of what constituted being white by defining Indians as non-white. In conjunction with a growing racism toward African Americans, belief in Indian racial inferiority helped further a pervasive construct of a biologically-based American national identity. Among widely disparate groups of European American males, the perception of "whiteness" was one of the few characteristics that they shared. The extent of opposition to movements meant to expand the rights of women, Indians, or African Americans attested to the centrality of the white male as the de facto quintessential American. The veterans' accounts suggest that much of our Revolutionary and early national heritage is predicated upon exclusion. The very expansion of political participation extolled by certain historians as radical and liberating for propertyless white males could not have effectively been defined as it was without explicit negative reference to outsiders. Class conflict was successfully obfuscated in America by institutionalizing constructed physical characteristics as requirements for citizenship. White male supremacy was and in many cases remains at the very heart of American national identity. [21]
2. On national subjectivity based on the white male and in opposition to "others" (African Americans, Indians, and middle class white women in particular) see Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786-1789," Journal of American History 79 (1992), 841-873. On the growth of racism toward African Americans in the wake of the American Revolution, see Sylvia R. Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 206-242. On the consolidation of racism in the wake of Post-Revolutionary Northern emancipation, see Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 246-279.
3. On the general early English colonial tendency to comment on Indian cultural differences rather than skin color, see Alden T. Vaughan, "From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo American Perceptions of the American Indian," in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 7-11. On the clash of Indian and colonial Anglo-American ideas about individual private property in general, see Colin Calloway, New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, 1997), 22-23. On ways colonists othered Indians based on their gendered division of labor see Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), 42-74 and Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky From Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996), 8-10. On cultural differences in hygiene, dress, hospitality, and food, see James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, 1999), 128-140.
4. On cultural exchange on the early colonial frontier, see Merrell, Into the American Woods and Jane T. Merritt, "Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier," in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds, Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 60-87. On the suspicion of the cultural identities of negotiators, Merrell, Into the American Woods, 54-155. On early relatively peaceful Pennsylvania relations with Indians: Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio (Pittsburgh, 1989), 18, and Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The People of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992), 273-276. For an account of colonial Pennsylvania dealings with Indians that reveals the European Americans' duplicity even though they were not forced to wage war to attain their goals, see Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988), 3-45. On Quakers' relations with Indians, see Robert Daiutolo, "The Early Quaker Perception of the Indian," Quaker History, 72 (1983): 103-119
5. On wartime cultural exchange between Indians and colonists, see Adam Hirsch, "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of American History 74 (1988): 1187-1212 and Calloway, New Worlds For All, 92-114. On migration to the Pennsylvania frontier, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 633-639, R. Eugene Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 1770-1800 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1991), 17-57, Mark Haberlien, "German Migrants in Colonial Pennsylvania: Resources, Opportunities, and Experience." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. (July 1993): 555-574, and Marianne S. Wokeck, "A Tide of Alien Tongues: The Flow and Ebb of German Immigration to Pennsylvania, 1683-1775," (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1983), 110, 245, 314-315. On the decline of cultural contact as the new farmers superseded earlier Indian traders, see Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 69-93. For the movement of new settlers to the Pennsylvania backcountry from the settled regions of the state following Pontiac's War, see Theodore Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740-1776 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1953), 127. On how captivity narratives emphasized Indian misdeeds toward civilians, particularly women, see Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 28-34. For an example of the captivity narrative genre, see Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston, Mass., 1930). Rowlandson's tale was among the most popular and, significantly for the Revolutionary War generation, was republished twice in 1773. On the "Land Imperative" narrative of the mid-eighteenth century, see James Levernier and Hennig Cohen, eds., The Indians and Their Captives (Westport, Conn., 1977), xii.
6. On the colonial wars on the Pennsylvania frontier, see Downes, Council Fires, 80-120, 168-169; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 200-202, 371-404, 439-453; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774 (Lincoln, Neb., 1992) ,274-279, and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Empires, Indians, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991), 361-365.On Indian unity during these wars, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore, 1992)23-46. On the Kittanning raid, Solon J. and Elizabeth H. Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1995, orig. ed. 1939), 85. See McConnell, A Country Between, 124 on Pennsylvania's scalp bounty and how it encouraged the killing of both friendly and hostile Indians. On the Paxton Boys, see Alden Vaughan, "Frontier Banditti and the Indians: The Paxton Boys' Legacy," Pennsylvania History 51 (1984): 1-29.
7. Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Files, National Archives, Washington, D.C., M804, file W 2124 (hereafter cited as RWPF); Auditor General, Revolutionary War Pension File, Record Group 2, Pennsylvania State Archives, microfilm, reel 155, frame 78;
8. RWPF files R5819 and S12779. RWPF files S16378; R5815; R8633; R1638; Dann, The Revolution Remembered, 266-267; Ibid., 254; "Recollections of Samuel Murphy," in Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio, 1777-1778, (Madison, Wis., 1912), 219-220; 229. Daniel Brodhead to General Washington, June 5, 1779, Pennsylvania Archives, ser. 1, vol 12, p. 127.
9. RWPF files S22073; S7963; R7207; S7377. On the shift in eighteenth-century conceptions of murder, see Karen Halttunnen, "Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror," in Richard Wrightman Fox and Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago, Ill., 1993), 67-101, quote on 85.
10. On the "Indianized" Indian hater, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973) and White, Middle Ground, 368-375. On Indianized Americaness as a statement of identity and opposition to Europe in general and Britain in particular, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 10-37. On the role of race and simultaneous and contradictory desire and repulsion toward the Other in the construction of national subjectivity, see Smith-Rosenberg, "Dis-Covering the Subject," 843-848.
11. On the ethnic, religious, and local disputes that divided European Americans in the Pennsylvania backcountry both before and during the Revolution, see John B. Frantz and William Pencak, eds., Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the Pennsylvania Hinterland (University Park, Pa., 1998), Liam Riordan, "Identity and Revolution: Everyday Life and Crisis in Three Delaware River Towns," Pennsylvania History 64 (1997): 56-101, and Gregory T. Knouff, "The Common People’s Revolution: Class, Race, Masculinity, and Locale in Pennsylvania, 1775-1783," (Ph.D. Diss., Rutgers University, 1996), 314-325.
12. Daniel Brodhead to Captain Samuel Morehead, May 8, 1779, Order Book of Daniel Brodhead, Darlington Memorial Library, University of Pittsburgh; Brodhead to Lieutenant Nielly, April 30, 1779, ibid.; Daniel Brodhead to Nathanael Greene, September 6, 1780, Woods Collection of Western Pennsylvania Documents, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Journal of Reverend William Rogers, Pennsylvania Archives, series 2, vol. 15, p.278; Michael Huffnagle to President Moore, July [?], 1782, Records of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Governments, Record Group 54, Pennsylvania State Archives, microfilm reel 19, frame 930. On the tendency of late eighteenth-century North American elites to define Indians in terms of their perceived physical characteristics, Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Col., 1993), 178-179. Alden Vaughan points out in "From White," 27-28, that the perception of Indians as "red" was not as widespread in use even among eighteenth-century elites as it would be in the following century. Vaughan finds other early American descriptions of Native Americans as "olive," "tawny," "yellow," and "brown." All of these characterizations of Native skin color were consistent with Revolutionary officers' statements.
13. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 75-89.
14. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 47-89, quote on xiii; Lieutenant John Piper to President Wharton, May 4, 1778, Records of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Governments, reel 12, frame 1286.
15. Paul A.W. Wallace, ed., Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1958), 193.
16. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.(New York, 1991), 6-8, 294-295
17. On the imagery of nineteenth century "sons" attempting to live up to deeds of the nations (founding) fathers who achieved independence from the British see Stephen Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America (Baltimore, 1989), 162-163. David G. Pugh shows how the memory of the Revolutionary War was seen as mature national "sons of liberty" coming of age and breaking with a tyrannical father (King George III) to the construction of nineteenth century masculinity in Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn, 1983), 6-7. For examples of various histories of the Revolution that focus primarily upon the war with the British, see David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (New York, 1968, original edition, 1789), 2 vols.; Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis, Ind., 1988, original edition, 1805), 2 vols.. On versions of the American Revolution offered by George Bancroft and Jared Sparks that focused on united efforts for independence from Britain, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 26. On popular celebrations of the Revolution focusing on the war against Britain, see G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, D.C., 1995), 10-12 and Knouff, "The Common People’s Revolution, 338-345; RWPF file R5819;
18. The pension applications were given in the 1820s and 1830s, a period which according to Alden Vaughan in "From White Man to Redskin,"30-33, that the term "red" was used to describe Indians. The veterans preferred to infer that Indians were non-white rather than any specific color of their own.
19. On the pervasiveness of Indianized white as an emblem of "Americaness" in literature and popular culture in the early nineteenth century, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 313-516 and Jill Lepore, "Remembering American Frontiers: King Philip’s War and the American Imagination" in Contact Points, 327-360.
20. On Cherokee Removal, see Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (1993) and Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 1995). On the use of racism and exclusion as a rationale for continuing conquest and removal in the early republic, see John Mack Faragher, "More Motley than Mackinaw: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783-1833" in Contact Points, 304-326. On the growing racism toward and exclusion of even free blacks in the wake of the American Revolution, see Larry E. Tise, The American Counter Revolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783-1800 (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1998), 453-480 and Nash, Forging Freedom, 246-279.
21. On the importance of the exclusion of Indians to definitions of citizenship in the early republic, see Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 3-14 and 151.