Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast / Edition 1

by Guy Chet

Overview

A study of military tactics and strategy before the War of Independence, this book reexamines the conquest of the North American wilderness and its native peoples by colonial settlers. Historians have long believed that the peculiar conditions of the New World, coupled with the success of Indians tactics, forced the colonists to abandon traditional European methods of warfare and to develop a new "American" style of combat. By combining firearms with guerrilla-like native tactics, colonial commanders were able not only to subdue their Indian adversaries but eventually to prevail against more conventionally trained British forces during the American Revolution. Yet upon closer scrutiny, this common understanding of early American warfare turns out to be more myth than reality. As Guy Chet reveals, clashes between colonial and Indian forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of conventional military doctrine. On the contrary, the poor performance of the settlers during King Philip's War (1675--76) and King William's War (1689--1697) prompted colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their military forces through a greater reliance on British troops and imperial administrators. Thus, as the eighteenth century wore on, growing military success in the New England colonies reflected an increasing degree of British planning, administration, participation, and command. The colonies' military and political leadership, Chet argues, never rejected the time-tested principles of European warfare, and even during the American War of Independence, the republic's military leadership looked to Europe for guidance in the art of combat.

University of Massachusetts Press

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558493827
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	04/30/2003
Series:	Native Americans of the Northeast
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Guy Chet is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and author of The Ocean Is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

University of Massachusetts Press

What People are Saying About This

Kevin Sweeney

Chet's book presents a timely and convincing challenge to the deeply ingrained belief that colonial New England militiamen fought 'Indian style.' In reality, the Revolution's Minutemen embodied the culmination of a process by which the military tactics of the old world triumphed in the new.

Fred Anderson

Chet's enterprise is to explain the character and consequences of American war in its formative period, before the Revolution. He shows that it is not Americanized warfare, but the progressive Europeanization of war in America by professional British military and naval officers that ultimately overwhelms the poorer, less numerous, and less well-organized French-Indian axis of Canada and the West. Professionalism is the decisive factor, and it carries on into the Revolution and the early national period as an unsung but decisive influence on the creation of a new American empire.