American History Hit - Pontiac's Rebellion

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

In 1763, Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region began fighting British expansion and rule in their territory, attacking forts and settlements. They were led by the Odawa war chief, Pontiac. The conflicts, which continued over the course of 3 years, forced the British to re-examine their policies towards Native Americans, banning settlements west of the Appalachians. Ned Blackhawk, professor of History and American Studies at Yale, explains how this fuelled the colonists’ desire for independence from Britain.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!For your chance to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books (including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History), please fill out this short survey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1763, we are witnessing an attack by Native Americans on Fort Venango, a British fort in western Pennsylvania, one of a series of attacks by Native Americans on British forts and settlements in the Great Lakes region. Fighters from a tribe of Seneca people overwhelm the British soldiers guarding Fort Venango, take the fort's commander captive and force him to write a letter naming the Indians' grievances against the British crown.

These attacks are collectively known as Pontiac's Rebellion, named after the Native American War Chief, who led the fight over the course of three years. Native peoples from many disparate groups fought the British occupation of their territory after the British won it from the French in the French and Indian War. The British expansion began an era of hostility,

an increase in settlements and military presence. Pontiac's Rebellion forced the British to re-examine their policies toward Native Americans. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbid any settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. This so discontent among those who felt the crown was denying their right to expand into territories ceded to the British as a result of the French and Indian War, a sentiment that contributed to the yearning for independence declared a decade later. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit.

Welcome to the podcast. The popular study of American history has, for so many years, largely, excluded Native American history as an autonomous narrative, distinct from European colonization and settlement, that whole story. Well, in recent decades, this has finally begun to change, and in no small part, thanks to the writings and teachings of Dr. Ned Blackhawk, who is my guest today to discuss Pontiac's rebellion. Ned is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University and author of the seminal book, Violence Over the Land, Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Dr. Ned Blackhawk, welcome to American History Hit. It's my pleasure to be here. Having said what I just said, we are talking about something called Pontiac's Rebellion,

a Native American event, again, defined by European colonization and settlement, and in this case, warfare. Ironic, I suppose. Tell me who Pontiac was, a chieftain of the Ottawa tribe, right? Yes, often also known as the Odawa. In Algonquin, speaking, community located in. around the Great Lakes region in central eastern North America. Right.

The northern Great Lakes. I'm always refreshed when I look at these continental maps of the time and see these massive amounts of this continent, what we call today, Canada, United States and Mexico, are also divided, are at the time divided into enormous regions of tribal lands, of whole nations of tribes. That's the mindset we must put ourselves in to really tell this story properly. That's correct.

And to tell this story properly also helps us see the origins of the American Revolution and thus the United States differently. In what way? Well, there's been a wave of academic scholarship over the past generation that has exposed the centrality of these interior regions to the growing revolutionary practices of the British colonists in North America. So Pontiac's rebellion or Pontiac's war, which erupted in 1763 and lasted for several years thereafter, is in many ways one of the opening chapters or theaters in the larger revolutionary struggle. Tell me who Pontiac was. Pontiac was born roughly around 1720 in the interior portions of what was then New France, at the heart of the center components of a great imperial colony that stretched across much of

eastern North America. At the heart of New France were relationships between indigenous peoples and French settlers, traders, missionaries, and officials in a region that the French called the high country of the Great Lakes. They called the high country because even though we don't think of it as very elevated, the two great eastern rivers or waterways of North America, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, both the drain from the five Great Lakes region. And so this region of the Great Lakes is at the heart of the not just French Empire of North America throughout the 16 and 1700s, but really is

the central theater in the struggle between Britain and France initially during the seven years war, which ends in 1763, and also becomes a central theater. Central Theater, the Great Lakes, for the revolutionary struggle between Britain and its colonists. And so scholars have really exposed a vast, new kind of historical world that has been largely separated or excluded from studies of this formative period of American history. And I have a chapter in a forthcoming book about this region that I'm excited to share because it brings together many of these newer studies. When Pontiac's Rebellion, Pontiac's War, Pontiac's conspiracy, I mean, there's a load of names for this event.

Pretty much whoever's telling the story uses their own angle on this. When this happens, we're talking about 1763 in this part of the world, the French have been in charge, but for a war that just recently happened. We Americans call it the French and Indian War. It was really an extension of the Seven Years' War, which was a superpower conflict over in Europe that spread over to this new continent, these new settlements, and they were really battling out the French and the British what was going to happen with New France and how the expansion on the continent was going to happen. The British won this war. There was a treaty called the Treaty of Paris, which renamed them as the sort of sovereign power in their minds of this Great Lakes region, among other areas. What was the effect that this had on those Native American tribes who were very used to another power in charge, or at least influencing their lives?

Well, this great transition that occurs at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 is in many ways one of the most transformative moments in early American history. The French Empire was founded in the early 1600s, based largely along the St. Lawrence throughout the early decades. of the 1600s, but eventually spreads into the Great Lakes, largely by missionary activities, but eventually comes to form this great vast arc or perimeter that stretches really from New Orleans to the Atlantic at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. And even though Pontiac's war rebellion, however one wants to frame it, is associated with Pontiac, he really is part of a new generation of Native American political and military leaders who are incredibly dissatisfied

with the transformations that are occurring in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. And even though the Seven Years' War is an extension in part of pre-existing Franco and Anglophone tensions in Europe, its earliest theater is, in fact, in North America. It involves George Washington's first fateful kind of campaign into the interior in 1754 in an effort by Virginia and British colonial leaders to prevent the French from fortifying the Ohio River's headwaters at a fort that the French called Duquesne

and eventually the British will call Fort Pitt following the British seizure of that interior region during the Seven Years' War. So that's really the first theater of a war that will erupt in the interior of North America and spread broadly across Europe, the Mediterranean, even across South Asia, there'll be battles in the Philippines because Spain will be dragged into this on the side of the French. And the broad, like just seismic redefinition of American territorial geography is occurring in certain kind of imperial forms. But that new kind of imperial claim that the British exert over the former French Empire, because France has ceded its entire North American colonial territorial claims to the English.

who have inherited then the entire, at least claims to Eastern North America, including Canada. So all of a sudden, the British Empire has just mushroomed into this behemoth that spans much of now for really the first time of the North American continent. And the indigenous peoples who are at the heart of that pre-existing French Empire are incredibly dissatisfied with the new policies that the British imposed, the new regulations that they are trying to establish. the new economic practices and diplomatic accords and various initiatives that the British are essentially trying to dictate for the first time in these regions. The French were such differential kind of imperial power than the British initially because the French came to realize partly through their own limited power that indigenous peoples were necessary allies, important trading partners, military co-combatants, and dedicated, often

followers, both of their spiritual as well as political practices. The French had operated for a long time in these lands up near the Great Lakes and so forth in a way that turned out to be quite different than the British after them. Talk about the differences. The great kind of paradox of Pontiac's legacy is that he intended to try to drive out in military and political form British imperial rule. He lay siege to forts like Detroit, Michel Mackinah, allies seized other forts in the Illinois country, Iroquoian allies in New York States attempted to seize Niagara.

And there was a great kind of confederation that he kind of is associated with. The great paradox is they attempted to do something that ultimately yielded an alternative solution. They wanted the French imperial practices reestablished. They hoped the French would return, which they didn't quite realize was not going to happen, despite the presence of several thousand French settlers already across this region in places like Detroit or Illinois country. But the paradox is the British came to realize, and that's like the ultimate historical significance that we can begin to kind of underline, is that the British came to realize that they could not afford another conflict in this great, continent and its interior region. The previous war, which erupted in 1754, spread across

North America into the Caribbean, as we mentioned across Europe, cost millions of British pounds. It employed a force of over 100,000 British soldiers conscripted and or compensated salary warriors and sailors, had been an unprecedented logistical, administrative, and military undertaking. The British emerged the sole kind of imperial power for the first time across both Western European and North American and even the Caribbean kind of geopolitical world. They were a singular superpower at the end of this war, which had started because of the interior tensions between the French, the English and Indian peoples in North America. So at the end of this war, they could not enter into another military campaign.

with indigenous populations and thus came to a certain detente with them. And it's that detent that will ultimately begin to drive the colonists away from the crown and begin sparking revolutionary practices and tendencies. Wow, the whole thing is rooted in very much in this particular struggle. The aftermath of our French and Indian War, our term for it, is the beginning of really the move towards independence, isn't it? That's what I would like to kind of draw attention to, the potential for seeing this revolutionary origin story differently,

to think not of coastal towns like Philadelphia or Boston or various kind of familiar imposition of taxes therein, or even rethink some of our kind of founding revolutionary figures, to see particularly these backcountry, anglophone, traders and settlers who are increasingly upset that the British have agreed to terms of peace, essentially, or have prepared particularly economic and military supply gifts or various types of diplomatic promises or accords with native communities. And that's essentially what the French had previously done. And scholars have kind of established the kind

of fact that the French empire was economically essentially subsidizing indigenous peoples far more than they were profiting from trading with them. And that those kind of alliances were essential to the maintenance of empire. And so the British begin assuming what had been previous forms of French diplomatic and military assistance. And it begins upsetting their settler communities right away. And there's a series of massacres, for example, or several that begin in the aftermath of Pontiac's rebellion, where settler communities in places like Western Pennsylvania or outside of Philadelphia are so upset and enrage that the Crown is doing this, that they begin targeting Native peoples kind of indiscriminately, massacring, missionized Indian communities,

even chasing sympathetic, Quaker, or other kind of missionary sympathizers of Native peoples out of office or away from various places, a kind of hostility, a kind of racial animus, a whole range of deep-seated hatreds essentially begin forming because the previous war, the Seven Years War, that long struggle from 54 to 60 in North America, this nearly decade-long kind of conflict had been so disruptive, so violent, so costly. Several thousand settlers had been captured, many more on both sides, the Francophone and as well as Anglophone sides. Many more had been killed. Epic battles had occurred at places like Quebec and Montreal. The largest military conflicts in North American history before the Civil War

occurred, not during the Revolution, but in the Seven Years' War in earlier times. So the colonists had seen this happen. Even though they were initially kind of enthusiastic and, you know, delighted that the French had been expelled, they had seen what warfare in the interior looked like and felt like. And they did not want another war essentially to come. And that's what Pontiacs revolt or rebellion or war kind of signaled, another war in the interior that could potentially be equally disruptive. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Let's talk about the man himself. Was he a chief of his tribe to begin with, or was this something that developed for him over his lifetime? He held political and military standing within his community that was recognized by others as well.

He was also very closely associated with the religious teachings of a newcomer or a relatively new community of indigenous practitioners. An individual known as the Delaware Prophet or Neolin was in many ways the kind of religious or cultural inspiration for the military practice. that Pontiac himself was initiating. And these Delaware Indians, it's pretty complicated for a potential first-time encounter with this subject, but there are a series of indigenous peoples who have migrated away from English settlement throughout the colonial era. People like the Delaware, the Mohegan, Stockbridge communities, other eastern indigenous communities who share in linguistic or cultural practices with trans-appalachian interior communities,

many have migrated away from those communities and brought with them a series of stories, experiences, even religious understandings that speak kind of ill of the British and their settler communities. So there's a kind of millennialistic kind of cultural revival that's occurring also among these communities that Pontiac himself is also a part of that tries to disassociate itself with a reliance on British or European disruptive influences like alcohol. there's a sense that certain cultural practices need to be reestablished, that people have grown too dependent on European material goods. There's a kind of elemental kind of cultural loss that has

occurred. And so many of these kind of military practices of Native American communities, both then and later on, are often kind of associated with various other types of cultural revitalizations that are occurring. You're describing essentially a societal inflection point for these Native American tribes. What has gone before, which was very much defined by the French, is suddenly changing in response to the British, but it's also more, also an internal, almost psychological and religious revival that's happening, that we now need to change in our response to these people. And out of this comes a conflict, a literal war. That's correct. In many ways, also a bookend to a later revival that will occur during the

War of 1812, when another confederated Algonquin speaking leader named Ticomsa will try to do something similar that Pontiac was attempting to drive out external, disruptive, anglophone, settler populations, and doing so in concert with another prophet known as the Shawnee Prophet or Tenskwatawa. And so in 1812 and in 1763, there are two great confederations that have emerged to try to stem the tide of disruptive settler influences among these interior native peoples of the Ohio River in Great Lakes region. So talk to me about the literal rebellion of the war. And what was the strategy that Pontiac came up with and talk me through how this was preceded? Well, it's interesting because if we think of 1763 as a formative year in American history, among the most revolutionary

and transformative, I believe, we would begin by recognizing that the Treaty of Paris, it's is signed and disseminated early in the year. King George III has been recently placed onto the crown, and it makes the beginning of the year seem like this triumphant it is, a kind of triumphant moment in the ascendancy of the English imperial world. But challenges start erupting shortly thereafter. The arrival of British commanders had already begun in the interior. The real end of the war is of the French and Indian War, as people call it, the Seven Years' War. The Seven Years' War really ends in North America in 1760 with the fall eventually of Montreal and then the surrender of Detroit, which is the largest western fort in the French Empire. And nearly a thousand people turn out in

the cold winter months of December of 1760 to watch the French surrender and the arrival of new British commanders. Many of them have been at Fort Pritt and have been part of the sieges that the English lay to both Quebec and later Montreal. And these interior English leaders are really quite disdainful of the former Indian allies of the French. The French have been defeated, but the Indians have not. The French have surrendered claims to the lands, but their allies haven't. And everywhere the Indian allies look, they still see signs of the former French world and their settlers. And they believe quite rightly that they are not to be.

dominated by Anglophone rulers. And so when the British start imposing laws and regulations that limit the, particularly the trade and ammunition and various forms of gun technologies and repairs, they get upset. And there's a whole kind of series of percolating tensions throughout 1762. And Pontiac has already begun kind of organizing the region's indigenous communities. They sit at conferences and diplomatic meetings with Anglophone rulers, but are coming up with another strategy. Some would call it, that's a Francis Parkman calls it the conspiracy. But it's really a concerted campaign by regional indigenous leaders to drive the British out. And the British inherit

13 forts from the French after the war. And they begin stationing leaders and soldiers there. And it's these forts that Pontiac and his allies begin targeting. This was Pontiac's strategy to seize the forts that had become the primary establishment of French and then British settlements, right? Correct. It seems kind of strange and a kind of contemporary sense to think of these isolated fortifications as central nodes of authority and power. But that's really what they were. And it's not just because they were stationed on various respective lands, but because they also help control the seas or the waters. And if you can control the rivers and lakes of North America, you can control their future, as Jefferson and later American presidents came to realize. So they do lay siege to these forests. They seize nine of them, but they're unable to fully dislodge, particularly Detroit.

And so they, they themselves, indigenous warriors lay siege to Detroit throughout summer and fall of 1763. They use subterfuge in various ways to kind of gain access to the forts and try to access their armories in particular. But what this does, and so, you know, there's a kind of a military history to this that can be sketched. But what this does most notably in terms of the ultimate legacies is it sends signals to the backcountry settlers who are there, those who live near the forts, but also who are kind of stationed along various roads that have been established or expanded. Because as the French are driven from North America following the seven years war, British settlements just mushroom all across the Trans-Appalachian frontier, particularly on like the roads between Philadelphia and Fort Pitt, which is like a 300-mile kind of lengthy journey of sorts. And those settlements start getting really concerned by what's happening.

And they start fleeing. Many remember their time during the previous wars. Many had been imprisoned or kind of held hostage by French and Indian forces. And they don't want this to happen again. And this is the kind of ultimate legacy of this. conflict is that they try to convince the British to do different things, and the British respond with the thing they hate the most, which is saying by the end of 1763, we are going to keep you from going there. We're going to set up a broad proclamation or demarcation line that will keep

our settlers east of the Appalachians largely and recognize the indigenous peoples of the interior as at least the temporary, if not kind of rightful possessors of the interior. And there's a lot of debate about this, but it clearly upsets the people at the time. It's called the Royal Proclamation of 1763, am I right? Correct, and this is in the October or the fall of the year. So with the year that started so great had the summer rebellion by Pontiac that lasts for a couple of years, by the end of 1763, the British Crown is already essentially capitulating and trying to come up with a policy to keep the interior,

essentially at peace rather than at war. And they're not only going to keep the settlers out, which is the kind of vision of cultural revitalization and purification that Paniac and Neolan have articulated, they're going to continue to supply Indians with trade goods, because it's the trade goods that can allow the fur trade and other types of commercial economies to maintain. And what do you think the settlers think when the British, having just fought this monumental war to drive the French and their Indians out, how do you think if the settlers respond, by this new declaration that not only can't they go into the interior, but the British are going to help essentially militarize or continue to militarize the region. Bitter resentment would be a

lightweight term for it. Correct. And it's that resentment that ultimately sparks larger fractures between the crown and the settlers. And so I think really the, we might call them the indigenous origins of the American Revolution are really found in this aftermath of the Seven Years' War. And it's particularly interesting because this is, you know, unique. There are these kinds of dramas playing out all across the frontier of America, wherever this might have been per year. But different tribes, different peoples, react differently to those colonizations, those attempts of colonizations. And the reactions very much vary from region to region and tribe to tribe. This is a complexity of these interactions that most Americans

today do not recognize. Certainly anyone who was watching the westerns of the early 20th century, this was all painted with a wildly broadstroke brush. And finally, we're beginning to realize that they are sophisticated and intricate negotiations going on all around this. But top of the heap is Pontiac's Rebellion. Yes, and part of the reason that's so distinctive is because the interior indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes had these pre-existing relationships with the French in ways that southern Indians like the Cherokee, the creek, the Choctaw, they had different types of imperial relationships. So there was less of an expectation among those communities.

of a restored new former order. It's not incoincidental that the Declaration of Independence mentions these things. It's been lost on historians and American citizens for a very long time, that the concerns of the frontier regions were concerns of the revolution. And the claim that Jefferson writes about the king kind of inciting rebellion from, or violence from what Jefferson terms in the Declaration. merciless Indian savages has only recently kind of generated some degree of attention, but it should be noted that that concern is also addressed alongside the concern

that these incited raids are occurring along what becomes known as the frontier. And the word frontier starts appearing really for the first time in American colonial discourse in this period. It becomes incorporated into the declaration. This vision of Indians as merciless Indian savages, having been kind of incited by the king as proxies to raid along the frontier, those are the words of the interior speaking to the revolutionary moment in ways that scholars sadly have not been sufficiently attuned to. Interesting. There is no real specific end to this rebellion. It sort of fades out because of divisions and tribes and allegiance.

and so forth. But it really can be termed as a win for Native Americans at that time because of this proclamation, because of this switch, this shift by the British. Am I right? There is some degree of achievement that we can clearly register with Pontiac's revolt from 1763 that leads to a transformation of British imperial policy very quickly and a restoration of various forms of diplomatic and economic assistance that the Interior Tribes have long dependent upon. We can't really call it a win because the violence that itself spills continues thereafter and it generates more interior resentments and eventual conflict from various settler militia groups that are starting to form in the interior. So by 1765 in the spring,

there are groups of interior southern communities who are taking kind of vigilante practices into their own hands in very sustained form, and they're doing so outside of the kind of purview of imperial and colonial and colonial legislative authorities. And the governors of places like Pennsylvania and Virginia essentially just concede their inability to control the interior. And that militarized kind of settler, militia identity and sets of kind of ideological practices basically starts hardening in the years to come and forms eventually the arrowtip

of a larger initiative to dispossess the entire region. It's a terrible thing to do, but the speculative idea of, you know, had the English maintained their domain, relations with Native American tribes obviously would have been much different because the seeds had really been planted for a whole different kind of relationship than what happened because of westward expansion for Americas. That's correct.

There would be a very different history, obviously, of North America, had the British been able to enforce the proclamation of 70, and limited the capacity of interior anglophone settlers to disrupt and disregard British imperial authority. There's a sad ending for Chief Pontiac. How long after the war does this come about? The war kind of peters out throughout 165 and into 1766, and he's killed a Peoria Indian in the Illinois country shortly thereafter. People claim he was murdered.

He could have been targeted as a kind of failed political leader whose efforts brought bloodshed rather than resolution. So his kind of legacy is really sadly tragic, both in his own life and thereafter, because even though the uprising changed and transformed certain aspects of imperial policy, there really was never any achieved peace at the end of this uprising. I said at the outset of the show that there was a shift coming for Americans as to their perception of Native American history and standing alone. Do you sense this in your work? Is this happening in our time? It's happening. There is a kind of great redefinition of American history occurring. There have been several prominent academic and popular publications in the field. There's been a new academic association around Native American and indigenous studies that has formed in the recent. a decade and a half. There are new programs, professorships, and other kind of signs of

intellectual and academic achievement occurring. That kind of great redefinition has not generated as much kind of public awareness as it could. And it's encountered certain degrees of kind of reactive or kind of entrenched perspectives that aren't necessarily discounting the work. They're just sometimes ignoring it. It's sad that the great kind of American presidential historian David McCullough kind of concluded his writing career with a book called The Pioneers about the Ohio country, the settlement of Ohio that is really completely out of touch with contemporary academic scholarship. But even a scholar like Jill Lepore at Harvard, who recently wrote a book called These Truths, A History of the United States, is also writing a kind of overview of American history that is not informed

by a very deep generation of scholarly achievement. It is a chronic problem in American history, certainly in my lifetime and certainly before that as well. But you and a few others are doing yeoman's work, changing that story. What's new on your horizon? What can we look forward to in your scholarship? Well, thank you for that recognition. There is a pretty broad generation of Native American historians

doing this type of work that I'm a part of. I'm excited that I have been able to teach and work in the field for quite some time now. And I finally completed my own kind of interpretive overview of the field called the Rediscovery of America, or Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. history, that overviews and chronicles nearly five centuries of indigenous imperial and indigenous white relations that attempts to bring together a generation of scholarship in a new and singular form. Dr. Ned Blackhawk, it's an honor to meet you, and thank you for being on American History Hit.

I really enjoyed my time with you. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.