Publisher's Weekly Review
Calloway (The Victory with No Name), a Dartmouth professor of history and Native American studies, uses George Washington's life as a lens for uncovering forgotten history in this detailed account of interactions between Native and white Americans during the latter half of the 18th century. Following Washington from his early days as a land surveyor to his colonial service in the French and Indian War and his later command of the Continental Army command, Calloway highlights the complex and often ambiguous relationship between indigenous politics and the young republic. In particular, the desire to buy and sell Native land with impunity shaped key moments in Washington's political life: a British proclamation limiting land purchases pushed him toward patriot resistance, and treaties forged under his presidency sought to expand the nation westward into Native territory. Calloway does not shy away from detailing Washington's violence toward Native communities, including an infamous command to torch Iroquois cornfields, and he includes the perspectives of Native Americans whenever possible. Even so, it's Washington who emerges as the most fully-formed character; the Native leaders Calloway mentions, however intriguing, receive less attention, suggesting another book awaits writing on the subject. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As a young man, George Washington regularly interacted with Indians, both on individual and tribal levels. As his military and political career blossomed, those relationships continued and intensified. Historian Calloway illustrates how those relationships, both in war and peace, played a critical role in the foundation and early development of the American republic. Before his public career, Washington surveyed, bought, and speculated on Indian lands along the foothills of the Appalachians, fully aware that their ancestral claims would eventually be sacrificed to whites who had formal title. During the French and Indian War and the War of Independence, Washington fought and formed alliances with Indians. As president, he again fought them but accepted their status as internal sovereign nations and generally treated Indian leaders with the respect due to foreign dignitaries. Yet he never wavered from his policy to expand the areas of white settlement, viewing Indians and their land claims as obstacles to be overcome. Calloway has written an important and original interpretation of critical years in the formation of federal policies toward the claims and rights of Native Americans.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2018 Booklist
Choice Review
The Indian World of George Washington is a major contribution to the literature on George Washington and Native American history. Calloway's deeply researched analysis, written in accessible prose, reveals the centrality of indigenous people in Washington's life and thinking. In 20 gripping chapters, Calloway (Dartmouth) presents a picture of Native Americans as strategically skillful and a Washington who was often, as the author writes in the introduction, "out of his depth in a complex world of rumors." Indeed, Washington struggled to grasp the nuances of indigenous diplomacy despite the fact that Native Americans, and their land, occupied so much of his mental energy. Land is a major theme in Calloway's analysis. Be it George Washington the land speculator, the military man the Iroquois knew as "Town Destroyer," or the president of a new republic who worried incessantly about the future of the US while it remained surrounded by sovereign Indian nations, battles over land were a constant in Washington's life. The Indian World of George Washington underscores that to truly understand the history of the early republic and the life of the nation's first president, one must grapple with the significance of Native American history. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Gregory D. Smithers, Virginia Commonwealth University
Kirkus Review
An expansive history of our first president and his interactions with Indian countries and how "the future he envisioned would be realized at the expense of the people who lived there."During George Washington's presidency, the bulk of the federal budget was spent on wars against Indians and their affairs. After beginning with this jolt, Calloway (History and Native American Studies/Dartmouth Coll. The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army, 2014) delivers a detailed, impressively researched history of white-Indian relations during Washington's lifetime. An ambitious young man in the 1750s, Washington already owned shares in the Ohio Company, which claimed immense tracts mostly in present-day Ohio. He made numerous official trips to assert his claims and those of the British, oppose the rival French, and recruit Indian support. All failed, culminating with Gen. Edward Braddock's disastrous defeat in 1755. Historians traditionally describe this as a painful education that contributed to Washington's later greatness, but Calloway maintains that ignorance of Indian culture and bad military advice bear major responsibility for the debacles. Many tribes sided with Britain during the Revolution, and Washington responded with cruel, almost genocidal campaigns that laid waste cities and farms and killed everyone in sight. Calloway concludes that "Washington spent a lifetime turning Indian homelands into real estate for himself and his nation," and as president, he worked hard to further this agenda. It involved several brutal frontier wars, described ably by Calloway; however, readers will also have to wade through tedious diplomacy, negotiations, treaties, and bickering. At his death, Washington owned tens of thousands of acres of former Indian land, and frontier tribes were in steady retreat. Calloway is no revisionist. Historians agree that Washington's treatment of Indians was marked by self-interest, ignorance, and racism, but they prefer to emphasize areas where he did better.Insightful and illuminating but relentlessly squirm-inducing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is "not another biography of -Washington," as Calloway (history, -Dartmouth Coll.; A Scratch of the Pen) writes in the introduction. In fact, it is much more important than that. Calloway masterfully executes a journey down a path through history that links George Washington's own military and presidential history with the Native tribes who were vital to his success, whose stories are rarely told. Calloway acknowledges that Washington can be both a paragon of Republican virtue and a man who knew that expanding America's frontier would come at the expense of Native lives. The author does not seek to separate those two images of Washington, but rather to combine them in a way that illuminates a more complete picture of early America as well as the untold story of Native leaders such as Shingas, Bloody Fellow, and Little Turtle, in addition to leaders from the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Creek, and Delaware tribes. VERDICT Essential reading in Native American studies, as well as for those seeking a deeper understanding of George Washington and the Native populations of the early republic.-Jessica Holland, Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
