Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors

The Pequot war was a bloody conflict that demonstrated the hatred and distrust between the the Puritans and the Pequot Tribe. Both sides were deeply suspicious of each other” (10). The Puritans viewed the Native Americans as “godless savages” (19) while the Native Americans viewed the Puritans as invaders. Rather than trying to coexist, the English firmly believed “there would be no assimilation of Indian culture” (24) which lead to even more tensions that eventually manifested in the form of the Pequot war.

The American Pageant, written by the AP authors David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, and Caleb’s Crossing, written by Geraldine Brooks, are two books that do an excellent job explaining the relationship between Native Americans and the European colonists. After the first settlement of Jamestown in 1607, Europeans would soon come over to the Americas in waves, colonizing all along the eastern coast. Conflicts with the natives over territory was inevitable, and the European colonist won almost every fight because of their more advanced weapons (guns) and because they were immune to Old World diseases that the Indians were not immune to. The textbook captures the violence between the Native Americans and the European colonists while Caleb’s Crossing rather focuses on the tensions amongst the two groups. Despite this difference however, both the textbook and Brooks’ novel show how big

Chapter 7 of Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions begins by describing the tense state of affairs between American Patriots and Native Indians in 1775. Both sides feared the other and were determined not to let their enemy defeat them. The Patriots were angry with the British for seeking alliance with the Indians, compromising their “racial solidarity”, in order to gain a military advantage. The Natives believed that American independence would be the catalyst for their downfall into slavery and landlessness. The author moves on to say that this was not the case with all tribes. For example, weak bands of Indians in the Carolinas allied with Patriots and fought in their army in hopes for protection after the war. However, the reality was that

The French and Indian War had an almost innumerable number of effects on the political, economic and ideological relations between Britain and the American colonies. The war touched the entirety of America’s diverse population; from the Native Americans to the soldiers. Some were gladdened by the invigorated ties to England while others were enraged by the economic situation. There is no doubt that the war truly altered and revolutionized the American colonies.

The relationship between the English and the Native Americans in 1600 to 1700 is one of the most fluctuating and the most profound relationships in American history. On the one side of the picture, the harmony between Wampanoag and Puritans even inspires them to celebrate “first Thanksgiving”; while, by contrast, the conflicts between the Pequots and the English urge them to antagonize each other, and even wage a war. In addition, the mystery of why the European settlers, including English, become the dominant power in American world, instead of the indigenous people, or Indians, can be solved from the examination of the relationship. In a variety of ways, the relationship drastically alters how people think about and relate to the aborigines. Politically, the relationship changes to establish the supremacy of the English; the English intends to obtain the land and rules over it. Socially, the relationship changes to present the majority of the English settlers; the dominating population is mostly the English settlers. Economically, the relationship changes to obtain the benefit of the English settlers; they gain profit from the massive resource in America. Therefore, the relationship does, in fact, change to foreshadow the discordance of the two groups of people.

In West of the Revolution, Saunt explores eight notable moments of interaction, and often first contact, between “old world” colonial powers and indigenous peoples in North America that were occurring simultaneously with the English colonists’ declarations of independence and armed revolt. By providing the reader with a broader perspective of what was happening throughout America in 1776, Saunt illustrates that our collective understanding of what constituted America at that time tends to be remarkably limited and that colonial struggles were multi-faceted, depicted here in a series of snapshots of our land’s history that challenge, complicate, and clarify our conception of what America was. What emerges from this mosaic is a pattern of European national, economic, and religious interests, arrogant and ignorant in equal measure, infiltrating into native lands with consequent uneasy alliances and outright hostilities

To better understand the conflict between the Europeans and the Native Americans, one must closely examine the state of Europe’s economy at the time. Europe struggled with difficult conditions. This included poverty, violence and diseases like typhus, smallpox, influenza and measles. There were widespread famines which caused the prices of products to vary and made life very difficult in Europe. Street crimes and violence were prevalent in cities: “Other eruption of bizarre torture, murder, and ritual cannibalism were not uncommon”.2 Europeans

By 1763, the French and Indian War had finally ended. The peace had resulted in the removal of the French threat from North America. The American colonists were proud of their contribution to this new political order and had every reason to believe that they were about to embark on a continued successful colonial relationship with the imperial government in London. No one on either side of the Atlantic could have imagined that within little over a decade, the two sides would be engaged in all-out war. How did this seemingly most durable of political and cultural relationships deteriorate during this period? What was the cause of this imperial crisis? Historians have debated this question for well over a century.

Tensions between two power-hungry, wealth-seeking, powerful countries were simmering as a desire for control of the New World consumed England and France. Minor conflicts between the American Indians and British colonists began to grow into hatred, but the final straw was both France and Britain claiming that they were going to settle the Ohio River Valley. This conflict between France, the Indians, and Britain became known as the French and Indian War. Though the end result was Britain taking nearly all of France’s territory, this war had several long-lasting impacts on the coming American Revolution. Of the impacts, the debt left from the war and the grudge of France against Britain were the most important.

During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European powers engaged in battles in both the European and North American continents. Part of this struggle was for the control of territory and trade in the Ohio Territory through the backcountry lands of the Eastern Seaboard and down into the Mississippi River Valley region. Consequently, some of the North American Indian tribes in these areas affiliated themselves with either the French or British troops. The relatively small population of the French relied on the manpower of their Indian allies in warfare. Even though the British had a larger population, they too depended on the Indians for support during battles. This intense competition for an alliance with different Indian tribes led to a complex relationship between the Indians and Europeans. The Indians aligned themselves with allies based on economic potentials and they also manipulated the rivalry between the Europeans, but by the beginning of the Revolutionary War the Indians were resentful of the struggles that arose from their involvement in the Imperial Wars.

The Pequot War was a salient event, as it influenced the political and economic landscape of the New World in a drastic way. The Pequot War was the first sustained conflict amongst Europeans and Native Americans. This event certainly wasn’t going to be the last of its kind; according to Schultz (2010), “The blood shed during the Pequot War foreshadowed the dark nature of Indian-colonist relations that was just over the horizon.” (Page. 41)

The French and Indian War, a colonial manifestation of the same forces and tensions that erupted in the European Seven Years' War, was, quite simply, a war about imperialism. The French and the English were competing for land and trading rights in North America; these strivings resulted in a great deal of disputed land, particularly that of the rich Ohio Valley. Each nation saw this territory as vital in its effort to increase its own power and wealth while simultaneously limiting the strength of its rival. Although the war itself therefore stemmed from a fairly simple motivation, its consequences were far- reaching. The English victory in the war decided the colonial fate of North America, and yet at the same time sowed the seeds of the eventual colonial revolution. After the war, the British ended their century-long policy of salutary neglect, attempting to keep the colonials under a more watchful eye. The British also raised taxes in an effort to pay for the war. Both of these postwar policies resulted in massive colonial discontent and added to the budding nationalism that eventually exploded in the Revolutionary War.

From the beginning of the formation of the United States the British and French have held different views on continental conquest as well the value of the Native Americans. The English sought to permanently acquire more land to enlarge the empire as well natural resources due to their lack of them. The French also, wanted to acquire more land and, embark on the fur trade within the America’s. However, unlike the British the French established temporary forts and valued the presence of the Native Americans and their teachings. They often intermarried with them to establish unions.

At a surface level, historical accounts of The French and Indian War and the American Revolution are presented as wars between two sides: The British versus the French and the British verus the Americans, respectively. In each war the aforementioned opposing sides held the most crucial roles in each battle that these wars lead to. However, in this essay I will argue the crucial role of allies of each victorious side and how they were incredbily useful to the defeats of the British in the wildnerness in 1755 during Braddock's defeat and in Yorktown, Virginia in 181 durng Cornwallis's defeat. Discussing the former, I will argue the importance of the Native American's as allies to France and with the latter, the significance of the French as allies to the Americans. The aim of this essay is not to argue that without their allies, the French and the Americans would not have won the battles but that because they did have these allies, their victories occured faster, easier and with less conflict that if they had fought without allies.

When the European settlers arrived to the “New World”, the lives of American Indians were reformed. These changes range from the cultural aspects held within tribes to all the aspects of which individual/groups traded with one another, market economy. European settlers had a significant impact on the market economy which was initially ran and governed by the Native Indians participating in the trades. With the involvement of European colonist in this new market economy, Native Americans actively tried to be engaged in the market economy; whether it was through a social standpoint or the economic standpoint of the negotiation. Throughout the course of this essay, there will be a clear distinction of the understanding of the economic exchange and social relations between the European colonist and the Native, the process that Native Americans went through to be put in the market economy, and how the market exchange changed the native involvement in the imperial struggle between the French and the British.