Unlike in Europe, indigenous leaders seldom wielded formal authority; they depended on persuading others to adopt their visions.
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The Revolution in America unfolded on Indigenous lands.
That statement can be understood in two respects. First, the scorched earth and wooded terrain of the war—the fields and groves where troops pressed forward and fought—were crafted by the continent’s original inhabitants. Second, and more crucial, the mental map of the Revolution, from its earliest clashes to its military methods to the Founders’ notions of liberty and the purpose of government, was likewise shaped by those same native peoples.
Before Europeans arrived, New England had seen human occupation for at least 11,000 years. The first inhabitants disliked biting insects, tangled brush, and poisonous plants; they liked berries, nuts, and tubers. Controlled burns of the low growth by Native communities kept the landscape open and tended toward what a later-era observer would describe as parklike. They set fires in spring or autumn, when humid air made flames easier to handle. Over centuries, those practices opened vast tracts of eastern forests into a mosaic of open spaces that John Smith could gallop through with ease.
Villages of Indigenous peoples clustered along New England’s many rivers. Fields of corn and tended gardens lined the riverbanks and extended into a patchwork of berry patches and orchards. Interwoven through this productive landscape ran a network of routes—though the word “trails” scarcely captures roadways that could be up to ten feet wide and stretch for many miles.
The arrival of the British brought with them contagious diseases, especially smallpox, which decimated many Indigenous villages. Warfare further cleared land. Settlers built new homes atop old settlements, their fields occupying lands already prepared for farming. The first fifty colonial settlements in New England rose on sites that had once been native settlements, and the roads among them were laid upon Indigenous pathways.
The Revolution’s battleground was laid out on ground that had been shaped long before by Native peoples, much as Europeans later found themselves fighting in a space created by others. When Gen. Benedict Arnold moved to seize Fort Ticonderoga, he trod along an ancient Indigenous trade route connecting Massachusetts Bay to the upper Hudson Valley. Today this route is Route 2, the Mohawk Trail, the principal corridor across northern Massachusetts. For the final victorious march to Yorktown, Washington’s and Rochambeau’s forces traveled along the King’s Highway, a network of widened Indigenous roads linking the colonies. Yorktown itself had once been a center of Tsenacommacah, the Powhatan Confederacy that English colonists encountered at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And the pattern continued.
In a reality difficult for modern minds to imagine, Indigenous peoples and newcomers lived in close proximity during the colonial era. Settlers in New England smoked tobacco, grew maize, traded wampum, wore moccasins and deer hides for travel, and fished from canoes rather than worked from makeshift boats. Indigenous people cooked with steel tools and bowls, used European axes to chop wood, and sometimes embraced Christianity. Cultural borrowing moved rapidly in both directions.
As decades passed, mingling often gave way to strife, though mutual influence persisted. When clashes occurred, Indigenous combatants sometimes used European weapons but fought in their own ways, launching surprise raids by small groups that melted back into the trees—what the missionary John Eliot called “the skulking way of war.” In the Pequot War of 1636–38, colonial forces, shocked by Indigenous victories, began to adopt many of their adversaries’ methods. “God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode,” Eliot lamented. Fifty years later came King Philip’s War (1675–78), in which the English fought in Indigenous fashion—and prevailed decisively.
The Revolution inherited some of these lessons. “They did not resist us as a regular army, merely as savages, hidden behind trees and walls,” one British soldier complained after the opening fight at Lexington and Concord. The colonists, he added, were “as bad as the Indians.” After the conflict, British Lt. Thomas Anburey grudgingly noted that rebels, influenced by “the Indian’s idea of war,” preferred stealth and ambush to “any genius or science in the art military.”
Both sides sought to recruit the powerful Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to their cause. In May 1775, the colonial commander Ethan Allen urged them to “Join with me and my Warriors”—the Green Mountain Boys—into a guerrilla campaign. “I know how to shoot and lay in ambush just like an Indian, and I want your fighters to come and see me and help me fight Regulars. You know they stand all along close Together Rank and file and my men fight as so as Indians Do.” The Haudenosaunee, a federation of six nations, were wary of taking part in what they viewed as another country’s civil conflict. Yet individuals from among them joined sides on both factions, fracturing the alliance. About a dozen additional native societies also joined the struggle.
The extent of native tactics—and Native participants’ contributions—to the Revolution should not be overstated. Washington remained cautious about Native groups and their methods. Throughout the war, he preferred European-style engagements with large armies clashing in open fields, though he did occasionally seek soldiers who, in his words, were “accustomed to the irregular kind of wood-fighting practiced by the Indians.” Over time he grew more comfortable with employing such allies as the Iswa (Catawba) and Lënapeyok (Lenape) for specialized roles—scouting, espionage, and frontier protection—rather than deploying them as infantry in formal battles.
Even if Indigenous warfare had only a limited impact on the battlefields, their influence on the war’s origins—political and intellectual—was vast.
A decisive moment arrived in 1763. In January, European powers concluded the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France (and their allies). Already weary of ongoing hostilities, the British government faced Pontiac’s Rebellion, a months-long, wide-ranging assault by a coalition of Native nations against British forces in Michigan and the Ohio Valley. (“Pontiac” is the English name for Obwaandi’eyaag, who led the Odawa in Michigan.)
NATIVE LANDS ESTABLISHED BY PROCLAMATION OF 1763
In October, aiming to ease a protracted and expensive clash, King George III prohibited settlers from moving beyond the Appalachians. The royal proclamation granted Indigenous nations permanent title to what had once been part of France’s American domain—roughly the land from the Mississippi to the crest of the Appalachians, plus portions of Georgia, Florida, and a sizeable area of Canada. It effectively blocked about 600,000 square miles from settlement.
Setting aside Indigenous anger over being “granted” ownership of lands they had inhabited for generations, colonists responded with fury. From their perspective, the king was reclaiming the free lands they had quit their homelands for during the Seven Years’ War, and he was handing them to “savages.”
There was particular outrage in Pennsylvania, where many migrants hoped to settle in the fertile Ohio Valley. Even as Pontiac’s war raged on, tensions rose between Pennsylvania’s settlers and Philadelphia’s government. Residents harassed soldiers tasked with enforcing the proclamation. Benjamin Franklin warned that Pennsylvania’s legislature was under siege by an armed mob.
British General Thomas Gage and Pennsylvania Governor John Penn began peace talks with Pontiac in March 1765. The talks concluded with a caravan of more than eighty packhorses bearing goods as guarantees of London’s good faith. Seeing the negotiations as a betrayal, a frontier militia known as the “Black Boys” raided the supply train, assaulted English forts, and abducted soldiers. Penn then called a grand jury to indict them, but the jurors refused to do so.
Buoyed by that outcome, the Black Boys seized much of western Pennsylvania, controlling traffic, assaulting British forces, and issuing their own passports. The conflict endured until July 1776, when Pennsylvania—after a constitutional convention dominated by the Black Boys—became the first colony to form an independent government, an experiment meant to reflect the will of the people. It stood as the first major rebellion against British authority, a miniature dress rehearsal for the larger Revolution to come.
Anger over Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763 fed into the Declaration of Independence. When the Declaration condemns the King’s support for “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,” it is referring to his attempts to broker a settlement with the Ohio Valley Native coalition. And when it attacks measures to “prevent the population of these States” by “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands,” it is a reference to the Proclamation.
Yet the Revolution had roots beyond the Proclamation: taxation, trade restrictions, compulsory quartering of troops, and so on. Among the most significant origins was something less tangible—the rebels’ beliefs about liberty, rights, and how government should function. These convictions were themselves deeply intertwined with North America’s Indigenous history.
The earliest European forays into North America occurred as Enlightenment thinkers—John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire—were challenging Europe’s absolute monarchies, state churches, and rigid class structures. All of these thinkers were captivated by the surprisingly visible presence of Native American societies, living as full participants in social, political, and spiritual orders very different from Europe’s. They did not treat Indigenous peoples as neutral subjects but as central to their inquiries.
None of these philosophers were ethnographers in the modern sense. The “natives” who populate their writings function more as devices to illustrate ideas than as fully fleshed communities. Take Voltaire’s popular tale L’Ingénu (1767): a naive youth, half-French and half-Wendat (Huron), who serves less as a character than as a vehicle for critiquing French hypocrisy and corruption. Locke, examining the origins of human society, used Indigenous peoples as examples of early social development, almost as if placed in amber. (“In the beginning,” he wrote, “the world was America.”) Rousseau shared similar interests. The difference lay in Locke’s dismissive view of “primitive” societies and Rousseau’s admiration for them.
Meanwhile, other Europeans studied Indigenous life more earnestly and drew practical lessons from it. Repeatedly, travelers to New England and to Quebec observed that Indigenous communities enjoyed far greater personal autonomy and freedom than their European counterparts. “They imagine that by birthright they should enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, paying no homage to anyone,” wrote Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in New France from 1632 to 1649. “They have reproached me many times because we fear our Captains [nobles and kings], while they laugh at and outshine theirs.”
Contrary to Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke, Le Jeune’s understanding of Indigenous life was essentially accurate. He noted that Haudenosaunee leaders, for instance, possessed limited formal authority and had to win broad support for their plans. The Grand Council was made up of male chiefs from the six nations, with a Tadadaho presiding—a role that was largely a lifetime appointment, akin to a speaker who sets the agenda but cannot act without backing from the rest of the council. Even so, the Tadadaho’s power depended on the consent of the entire body and, crucially, on the assent of a second council of clan mothers composed of elder women.
Unlike European monarchs and nobles, Haudenosaunee leaders could be deposed if the people lost faith in them (though such removals were rare). They needed the governed’s consent and worked hard to retain it. Were the rebels inspired by these ideas when they declared independence from King George and formed a republic? Not in any direct, explicit sense. Yet it seems clear that those colonists on the Atlantic seaboard developed a concept of freedom that differed markedly from their ancestors’ and that they connected that concept with Indigenous life.
At the time, many Europeans subscribed to the “Great Chain of Being,” a view in which society was divinely ordered into a strict hierarchy. At the pinnacle stood the king, whose authority came from God; beneath him were the nobles, whose blood conferred superiority over merchants and peasants. The social ladder was so sacrosanct that European nations passed sumptuary laws, preventing commoners from imitating the attire of the upper classes; in England, for example, only the nobility could wear beaver-hat items. Failing to defer to those of higher status was deemed a violation of the divine order, a sinful and unnatural transgression.
The Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and other northeastern Indigenous groups rejected that whole scheme, and they did not hesitate to tell Europeans so. The Baron de Lahontan, who spent nine years in French Canada, recorded how Indigenous leaders labeled them as enslaved under a king’s authority, arguing that their own people enjoyed a degree of liberty their rulers lacked. Lahontan’s writings, translated into several languages, include a 1703 dialogue with Kondiaronk, a Wendat leader who mocked European pretensions. “I have the absolute disposal of myself; I do what I please,” Kondiaronk told the baron, who replied that he was a fool for preferring “to be a French slave than a free Huron.”
The allure of native freedom resonated with many people. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm spent three years in the Northeast and later wrote a best-selling account of colonial life, noting that when Indigenous communities captured settlers, most did not want to return; they preferred the Indigenous way of life’s independence to that of Europeans. Similar sentiments were raised by Benjamin Franklin. By the Revolution, the aristocratic settler John Hector St. John observed that “thousands” of Europeans had joined Indigenous societies, and there were no examples of any Aborigines choosing European life willingly.
A deep-seated aversion to excessive hierarchy is a cornerstone of American character. Some of that stems from settlers’ preexisting discontent with European society, yet it is also reinforced by witnessing other forms of life up close and choosing to imitate what they viewed as greater freedom.
When the crowds flooded Boston’s docks for the Boston Tea Party, they ignited a call for liberty that would culminate in the Revolution. How did those colonists signal their quest for freedom? They chose to dress as Indigenous people.
