M&D context: _Conquering the American Wilderness_

[pynchonoid]

[...] We Americans do love our myths. From Frederick
Jackson Turner's vision of the West as the driving
force in creating a distinctive national character to
the idea that early colonists were divinely inspired
to create a new nation, we steadfastly cling to the
idea that we must be special. That sense of uniqueness
has even permeated military history, where
nineteenth-century U.S. historians planted the notion
that American concepts of warfare were distinct from
those of the stodgy Old World. They insisted that
European strategic and tactical concepts were no match
for the American wilderness or Native Americans in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that
colonists adapted by embracing a new style of war
modeled on the indigenous peoples they sought to
subdue. Rather than fight in the open, the colonists
fought guerilla style, hiding behind trees and
conducting raids rather than clinging to outmoded
European drill, and in that manner were able to defeat
Native Americans and ultimately the British Army
during the American Revolution.

As Guy Chet convincingly proves in Conquering the
American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare
in the Colonial Northeast, however, there is no strong
evidence whatsoever to back up such a claim. Instead,
the record shows that European strategy and tactics
were almost uniformly successful in the colonial
northeast, and were instrumental in helping English
colonists and the British Army conquer Native
Americans and the French between 1620 and 1756.

This thesis is not entirely new. Military historians
have long known that colonial militia and irregular
units were seldom effective during the American
Revolution, and that the British Army played an
increasingly important role in defending Great
Britain's North American colonies as the quality of
colonial militia gradually declined. Indeed, Chet
builds upon the work of historians like Ian Kenneth
Steele, Stanly McCrory Pargellis, and Daniel J.
Beattie, each of whom has helped re-interpret our
understanding of early colonial warfare over the last
decade. What is original is Chet's concise synthesis
of the field to date, and his extension of the study
of European strategy and tactics all the way back to
the first English settlements in New England. By
taking this linear and long-term approach he is able
to show that orthodox European warfare was successful
from the very beginning in New England, and that there
was no re-evaluation of military doctrine by colonists
at any point prior to the Seven Years' War (1756-63)
as some historians have suggested. Moreover, he
demonstrates that Native Americans were not generally
superior in their tactics against either colonists or
European armies, that the success of irregular
colonial forces like Roger's Rangers was extremely
limited, and that British defeats (even Braddock's
famous debacle on the Monongahela in 1755) stemmed
from poor training, weak discipline, or bad leadership
rather than from any flaw in British or European
tactics and theory. [...]

...continues:

Guy Chet. Conquering the American Wilderness: The
Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xiii
+ 207 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00
(cloth), ISBN 1-55849-366-2; $18.95 (paper), ISBN
1-55849-382-4.

Reviewed by Lance Janda, Department of History and
Government, Cameron University.
Published by H-Atlantic (March, 2004)

<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=238711082188736>


	
		
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