Book Review: Independence Lost

~ crossovercreativechaos

Independence Lost: Lives on the edge of the American Revolution, by Kathleen DuVal. I’m rating this history a flat 4 out of 5 for two specific reasons.

First, while all the chapters have notes in the back with their sources, there is no separate bibliography. Meaning if you saw an interesting fact and realize later you want to read its original source, you have to comb through the chapters and the notes and hope you recognize it. I find this a flaw in a history book.

Second… wow. Don’t read this when you’re already in a low mood. There are no heroes in this story, and the few decent people tend to have ruinous financial ends. The amount of backstabbing, extortion, and playing both sides (and more) against the middle can leave you ill in large doses. Make sure you have something lighter to read in between bits. Choushuu in the Meiji Revolution, say. Assassinations and all.

Right. Obligatory ick warning delivered.

That said, this book has a considerable amount of info on part of the American Revolution I never got in grade school; how the whole mess went down in British East and West Florida, the Spanish Gulf Coast, the local Indian tribes (including Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and many more), and various ethnicities of colonists and slaves.

(I distinctly recall my high school history book section on the Revolution only referring to Florida as a label on a map. No mention of two separate British colonies there, or that they weren’t interested in revolting, and definitely no mention of Spanish meddling.)

So if you want to know more about how Pensacola hot-potatoed between powers (hence the moniker, City of Five Flags), or why New Orleans was such a sought-after port, this will fill you in.

The author picked eight historical individuals, from all sides involved, and lays out the story in general, with its effects on these people in particular. This gives the history a much more personal and sobering touch, as you can see who thrives and who loses everything as the tides of war crash through.

…You also have to facepalm at the amount of raw opportunism going on all sides. Just about anyone who saw a way to make a buck, snatch a piece of land, or get something for nothing, went for it like iron filings to a magnet. This is especially egregious when you look at local Indian tribes, who made a habit of promising everything to everybody and following through on as little as they could get away with. Just one example – the Spanish paid the Chickasaws and Choctaws in goods, and paid them well, to watch the Mississippi for any American ships coming downstream. The first warning the Spanish had the Americans were there was when cities were already on fire.

On top of that apparently all the tribes would show up at Spanish/British/American treaty posts, demand feasts and expensive gifts, then turn around and go to the next group on their list and demand more.

(The Spanish governor of New Orleans was one of many people who itemized the very expensive lists of gifts given in his communications with the crown. Including details like, the hoes have to have heads at least five inches wide, the Indian women refuse anything less. And my own people are going hungry because we have to keep feeding new bands that show up. Help.)

And they’d demand more with the explicit (and many times recorded threat) of, we’ve been such good friends in the past, but these other guys gave us rich presents, and you don’t want us to think your leader is poor, do you? We’d have to ally with the other guys, then….

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call extortion.

Now take into account this was during the 1770s through 1780s. That means there would have been a small but not insignificant number of British, Spanish, and Americans with direct experience of this still alive when various Indian deportations happened in the 1820s and 1830s.

This is not a commentary on the morality, or lack thereof, of those events. This is merely an observation that many people loathe extortion even more than murder, and it tends to get passed down as family stories of “that guy Did Us Wrong”. And I would be very surprised indeed if the events of the Revolution didn’t affect how people chose to act, or not act, later.

So. Yes. Interesting, well-written, disturbing. I plan to take my notes and hopefully never need it again.

41 thoughts on “Book Review: Independence Lost”

  1. Ouuuuuuccchh. That explains, quite a bit about things like the Trail of Tears and the several sets of actions leading to the reservations.

    Several things that, wouldn’t you know, history classes just pass off as Evil White Man stealing the lands and resources of Poor Honest Natives.

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    1. I remember during with a discussion with my Dad on this topic, he mentioned a General who berated a Chief when the latter claimed his tribe were peaceful until the White Man showed up.

      Something along the lines of “Your people are as bad as we are. We’re just better at it.” Or something similar.

      Can’t remember who Dad said the quote was by, but it just goes to show people are people no matter the decade.

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      1. Most of the tribes were doing serious warfare, year after year. Usually it was for land (especially bottomland that was good for crops, or some prized resource) or for people (if you capture people, you can turn them into slaves, wives, adopted children to replace the dead, husbands for widows, and sources for magical ingredients if you kill them ritually).

        Very few tribes were peaceful, because they had non-peaceful tribes as neighbors, or within convenient raiding distance.

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  2. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call extortion.

    Now take into account this was during the 1770s through 1780s. That means there would have been a small but not insignificant number of British, Spanish, and Americans with direct experience of this still alive when various Indian deportations happened in the 1820s and 1830s.”

    Oof. That explains *a lot*. It also ties in with various present trends. The more things change….

    I’m currently taking a break from reading a North Korean defector’s book. She escaped to China – or rather, was sold there, and had to live with that for two years. Yesterday…I couldn’t read a story with human sacrifice mentioned in it because what she accepted at thirteen to have her buyer purchase/rescue her parents left me VERY salty and raw. It’s going to get worse because they don’t tell you about the sex trafficking of North Korean women into China (especially to the rural areas, where women are FEW) or the fact that these women are being sold for their organs, among other things, but she does because she had to help with the selling of women as part of her slavery.

    Yeah, it’s not light reading. Ugh.

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    2. I’ve read quite a few disturbing yet informative books, including The Rape of Nanking and Hungry Ghosts. Taking breaks is the only sane way to get through them.

      On a semi-related note the more I poke this era of history the less surprised I am Korea tried to shut out the whole world. Things weren’t good before Hideyoshi’s invasion, and after… well, the population loss was such that they had a hard time feeding people for centuries.

      I already knew Jason would be thinking on “ways to improve food production” once he gets his feet under him, just because “Little Ice Age = wrecked harvests”. But whoa, it’s going to be important….

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      1. According to Yeonmi Park, the famine(s) got bad and essentially came in waves in the North of Korea because the Soviet Union fell and stopped sending them fertilizer. Economic collapse followed, the black market – which was, of course, already there – got more and more open…. But if fortunes turned, like her family’s did, starvation was right there and *out* was what you wanted. She lived in Hyesan, so saw China just over the border all the time. Her family never wanted to go South and China’s lights were so tempting.

        Until they got there and realized they weren’t being smuggled to freedom. Her father died of cancer not long after they got him out, and he’d essentially bribed himself out of a reeducation camp (Park notes he was not the same after being in there). She managed to get herself and her mother out two years later, and I’m not sure how they found her older sister (wasn’t in the blurb) but they did.

        Yeah, breaks – breaks are good. :scrubs face: Can’t afford to throw up, can’t afford to put dents in walls. Breaks save a lot of trouble.

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      4. Also, one of the ways they made up for no fertilizer on farm land in the interior of NK while Park was young was with animal and human waste. Jason might want to find a way to avoid using the latter, if he can. :scrubs face again: Argh.

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  3. That certainly explains why we did what we did with the Trail of Tears.

    My highschool history teacher taught that part as if we were in the wrong for making them move. I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t worse…

    But no, the Indians did it to themselves!

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    1. Well, the Cherokee were doing a lot of stuff.

      Partly, they had valuable land, and they had adopted some modern farming techniques that made their land more valuable. They also had a ton of slaves, including black slaves, who were not considered part of their tribe. (They took their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears, and their slaves remained their slaves in Oklahoma for quite a while.)

      Partly… Andrew Jackson was a guy who had a lot of grudges, and wanted to get payback for every single one.

      And partly a lot of other stuff, because sometimes the Cherokee were not the nicest people in the world.

      I should remember more of this stuff, though.

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      1. The Cherokee were a lot more honest enemies; in the 1770-80s they tended to look at the various other tribes as, “Why are you still talking with these people?!?”

        So no, they weren’t nice at all, but they tended to avoid the extortion bit. Unfortunately gold showed up on their lands, so… yeah.

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      2. This just turned up in my YouTube feed and seems like it might be pertinent. It’s Thomas Sowell so while it may not be perfectly accurate it’s likely better researched than anything you’ve been taught in school.

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      4. ….and after listening to it it just glossed over the carp the natives got up to in favor of a mostly slanted narrative. I honestly expected better but he’s an economist not a historian so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

        And the economic lens he looked through does show a very lopsided picture. The difference in approaches between the settles and the natives and the natives own short sighted actions in trying to accrue riches and weapons from the settlers early own did come back to bite them. Hard.

        It just would’ve been nice to have had him actually talk about the deeper issues beyond a throw away line about the natives switching sides during conflicts between different groups of settlers.

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      5. :wry laugh: It’d take an entire series to get into it– because you’d have to start with “K, so, tribes don’t exactly exist, think of it more like a last name….” and then support it, with examples.

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    3. Lots of teachers use the narratives they are provided, and are not inclined to go much deeper than that.

      Some of the nominal scholars in modern history departments seem to be outright dishonest.

      This does not mean that the lies, if lies, are simple enough that they can be turned into truth by simply ‘flipping a bit’ or rotating an object in some way.

      Sometimes the simple bit to flip also results in a destructive untruth.

      What would I suggest?

      1. This was a long time ago. Two hundred years was around ten generations, and behaviors and customs have shifted significantly. I probably have a lot in common now, culturally, with folks on tribal rolls in my area. Looking back, we have several degrees of alien to understand. One, our society to each individual historical society. Two, that the ‘white’ and ‘indian’ groups were not two uniform homogenous blobs, and had potentially substantial ‘internal’ differences. Three, each society had its own oral and maybe written history, that informed what it expected from other groups.

      So, probably everyone then had notions of peace that were perhaps a bit violent compared to our modern moderns, and they were closer to bone, with memories of food stress, etc. Some of the ‘civilized’ whites came from pretty messy parts of Europe, and the settled urbanites in the cities did not consider those whites entirely civilized. (Andrew Jackson was Scots-Irish, which basically means one of the more combative of the white cultures.) Nobody had central control over the whites, and it would not have been possible for the whites to unilaterally offer an unconditional peace.

      2. The first generation colonists recalled their home countries, but a lot of the oral history that accumulated here had little to do with anywhere else. Very nearly blank slate conditions, but different from that. Who fought whom here would have been of major interest, and the indian wars seem to have been a bit preserved for a while. You may have heard the just so stories about how Russian culture is shaped by being invaded a bunch? Well, a lot of nations have been invaded. The American culture seems to have been shaped by an oral history that involved being stupidly lucky in having absurdly beneficial strategic situations. Because after a certain point, the indians did not have the fighting power to be a truly existential threat. Indians did not all love each other, and could not recruit a lot of replacement bodies from each other.

      Whites didn’t all love each other either, but there was always pressure driving people from Europe, and there was thus a potential wealth of replacement bodies. Even so, this might have not been useful, except that the white colonists somehow managed to mostly live at peace with one another. The Scots-Irish culture is also potentially to blame for this. (Walter Russel Meade’s four schools of US foreign policy may be of interest here.)

      3. Cherokee were considered a civilized tribe. What does that mean? Well, they were effectively a neighbor, and they might have been better at putting together armies.

      The Cherokee kept a wide range of slaves. This /might/ have allowed them some ability to assimilate outsiders. Potentially, of the at then neighbors, might have been a distant second after what we now call Canada in terms of being a future rival.

      If the Georgians were telling themselves even unsubstantiated rumors of Cherokee banditry, peace was probably not in the cards for the future. I understand that the stories about banditry by other tribes had truth to them.

      4. One, winnable fight ‘now’, versus a potentially uncertain, or more costly fight later. Two, there is an argument that a clear loss early saved more Cherokee lives than would have survived the likely alternative sequence of wars.

      Jackson would not have warred for the purpose of being kind to them. There’s also a fair amount of room for debate in terms of what the other downstream events were.

      It is a very classic example of a certain sentiment we see from Americans in war. War is expensive, so commit to fights only depending on when it makes sense according to how you have been treated. But, if you commit, fight it to the end, and win fast. While you are at war, you are not doing productive work, whch you need to return to quickly.

      The conflicting sentiments or views natural to the time might have believed instead that it was practical to deal with the Cherokee in some way. I dunno about that, the Cherokee were never one of the tribes I put much into studying.

      Jackson was a character, and his calculations would not have been shared by all of his peers.

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  4. Well, that explains more than it doesn’t. And such behavoir was considered allowable by the tribes, because the settlers were outsiders. Nasty culture clash, and both sides got bit.

    The tribes probably expected such things from each other, and their elders likely could have thrown the ‘allied tribesmen’ <i>further</i> than the tribe trusted them. But the settlers expected better, and were burned accordingly.

    There wasn’t much in the way of long term planning or critical thinking from the tribes, was there? But I guess long term for tribes was season to season, and in agricultural society long term is looking years, decades, and occasionally even centuries in advance.

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    1. Like as not they had the ability to look further into the future than that. There were a lot of native civilizations that had cities and permanent structures. That implies a level of foresight and coordination. It was just the natives being just as human as the settlers.

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      1. I mean, we see that sort of behavior today with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Identify people’s weak spots, such as generosity or compassion, and press those buttons accordingly to get them to do what you want. See “starvation protests.”

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      2. There were some, yes. But at that point, I’m not sure you could call them tribes anymore. And I’m not sure how many of the natives in what is now the US had permanent, long term settlements? But I’ll admit to having very little knowledge. I know vaguely of the Mayans, the Incas, and I think the Hopi. And the first two are much further south.

        I’m not saying they were incapable of long term thinking, but a nomadic lifestyle is a lot more in the moment. Everything is either temporary, to be discarded, or if it’s essential, capable of being carried with them. And by nature of light-weight construction, usually not the most durable.

        The Europeans built things to last generations if they could. They usually wanted to find a piece of territory and put down roots. You looked years ahead, even as you worked in the now. This will be passed on to my grandkids. This is how I improve the land for next year’s harvest. If I plant an orchard, my kids will benefit.

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      3. Why the Mound Builders had built up large chiefdoms. We know because the Spaniards who met them — and survived, they invariably lost in fights — said so. But though they didn’t come in strength enough to fight, they did come bearing disease.

        These tribes were the reformed societies after the population collapse made a chiefdom too complex a structure to maintain. Some of them (Cherokees, for instance) managed to remember that the mounds were built and by their ancestors. Others lost the knowledge that they were not just hills.

        I don’t think that was exactly a help.

        Like

      4. On the disease theory– there’s some major discussion because of the lack of expected evidence. There’s some locations where they can find disease related spikes in death, but the current theory is that the climate variation AKA “the little ice age” contributed a lot more than originally figured to “population stresses.”

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    2. One of the Chickasaw leaders in this book actually explicitly said that there were lots of these strangers, but very few Indians, so they shouldn’t risk their lives… but he died near the end of the 1780s, and apparently those who followed him didn’t make the mental leap of “there are so many more of Them than Us, maybe it’s not a good idea to give Them a grudge.”

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  5. I have heard that some of that history has been slightly preserved, maybe orally, in Georgia.

    But, it is possible that my source was just weird enough to trace down records somewhere.

    Anyway, been years since I heard the story, so I forget the details if he specified how and where he learned about it.

    It was a mixture of religions, cultures, customs, etc. No mystery that there might be points of disagreement, conflict, and so forth.

    My general view is that historical narratives which assume that as a matter of course peace was possible are in error. There are times and places in history where people did wage war for purely utilitarian and greedy reasons. But, there are also times and places where the circumstances for any sort of stable peace simply were not present.

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    1. In order to have peace, first and foremost, you have to have a shared definition of what peace is.

      If one side’s definition is “nobody shooting at each other”, while the other’s is “we send out the young bucks to go raise heck somewhere else so WE have peace”… yeah, no, that’s not gonna work.

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  6. Now take into account this was during the 1770s through 1780s. That means there would have been a small but not insignificant number of British, Spanish, and Americans with direct experience of this still alive when various Indian deportations happened in the 1820s and 1830s.

    And they didn’t stop.

    Even after the deportations. My godfather was about three months before birth when his father was killed by a roving criminal cult that happened to be Indian.

    So, Injun Bob down the road might look funny, but if he acts like he’s just the same as you, fine. (*waves in has some ancestors like that*)

    His cousin that lives in a tribe? You can never know if he’s going to show up with a gang. And they won’t be in the peaceful tribe…but they might go back, after they’ve done their wilding, especially if they bring back loot. And/or prisoners.

    (*waves in had some cousins like that; mostly suicided by stupid*)

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    1. :hugs on last point: Even now, if memory serves, the Indian Reservations are their own nations. Someone can literally commit murder in the same state as a Reservation, hightail it to the Res, and the Federales or state police *cannot go in and arrest him.* The Res police can, but that depends on if they want to do it or feel they have a reason to do it. Otherwise? The U.S. government can’t go in and get the guy. They have no jurisdiction there.

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      1. I’m pretty sure it might be a bit more complicated than that.

        After the war, a bunch of Democrats refused to admit that their leaders had screwed up, and they had lost on a bad hand. Thought it was all just a temporary set back.

        They took to banditry to fund the cause.

        Now, there were plenty of towns which would refuse to prosecute, but the Republicans had the Federal Marshal’s Service.

        But, hey, there was Indian Territory.

        Isaac Parker’s court in Fort Smith, Arkansas had jurisdiction, and he could authorize people to arrest white criminals in Indian Territory.

        I think the indian tribes in the area may have already had constabularies, but those could not arrest random white criminals.

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      2. Er, I was talking about the present day, not the past. In the present day, if you go to an Indian Reservation after committing a crime, the Federales cannot go in and get you, because you are no longer in their jurisdiction. It may be somewhat more complicated than that, but as I understand matters, that *is* standard operating procedure for Indian Reservations in the present day.

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      3. Generally, *sane* reservations work to have a good relationship with the guys nearby– and will have a “I’m chasting this guy” agreement, can’t remember the term.
        They also call on eachother for help.

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