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WORK TITLE: Red Dreams, White Nightmares
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PSEUDONYM(S): Owens, Robert Martin
BIRTHDATE: 1974
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http://webs.wichita.edu/?u=history&p=/faculty/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1974.
EDUCATION:University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Ph.D., 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, professor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of the Early Republic, Indiana Magazine of History, Ohio Valley History, and American Indian Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Robert M. Owens is a professor at Wichita State University in Kansas. He teaches courses in early American history, including the colonial and revolutionary periods, and specializes in particular on the history of Indian Affairs in early America.
Mr. Jefferson's Hammer
Owens’s first book, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy, is what the author describes as a “cultural biography” of William Henry Harrison, who became the ninth president of the United States in 1841 and died of pneumonia in his thirty-first day in office. But Harrison’s earlier career, particularly as a military leader and governor of the Indiana Territory, is the chief focus of the book.
Owens begins with two chapters that discuss Harrison’s aristocratic upbringing in Virginia and his early military career on the western frontier. The author explains that the young Harrison absorbed the ideals of personal honor and “manly independence” that were essential to the genteel code of his native South. What is more, these values meshed easily with those of the Federalists and the Republicans, both of which “were committed to expansion, land acquisition, and the conviction that British influence in any form was corrupting and dangerous.” Owens argues that these views informed Harrison’s actions and policies during his many years in the Indiana Territory. Harrison bought land and built a lavish estate, going into debt to recreate the kind of genteel life he had known in his youth. As H-Net reviewer Jim Buss pointed out, the author sees Harrison as typical of other early American leaders who “blurred the line between personal gain and the public good, especially in the American West.” Among the issues with which Harrison was concerned during this time, and that were shaped by his personal ambitions, were Indian affairs and the admission of slavery into the new American territories.
As Owens shows, such issues were often extremely divisive. Despite his elite status and political connections, Harrison sometimes alienated his allies. His pro-slavery position failed, as did his attempt to challenge territorial division. His single true success was his handling of Indian affairs. At the Battle of Tippecanoe in1811, he led a military force against a Native American alliance led by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, which opposed white expansion into Indian territory. During the War of 1812, in which many Indian groups allied themselves with the British side, Harrison led U.S. forces that won several victories in the Indiana Territory and in Ohio. He went on to defeat the British at the Battle of the Thames, near Detroit, in 1813, during which Tecumseh was killed. Thereafter, Harrison played a key role in negotiating postwar treaties allowing further American expansion into Native territories.
Reviewing Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, John Bowes observed that the author’s focus on Indian affairs sometimes obscures the larger issue of slavery. Harrison strongly advocated for the admission of slavery into the Indiana Territory, but failed. In Bowes’s view, Owens treats this fact “an intriguing addition to, as opposed to a necessary aspect of, the assessment of Harrison’s career.” Despite this criticism, the Bowes praised the book as n accessible and “enlightening” work that “provides valuable insight into the ways in which federal policy worked on the ground through the filters of individual context and local politics. And in very important ways it fleshes out the life of a man who had a far greater impact on early American expansion than many realize.”
Red Dreams, White Nightmares
In Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815 Owens examines what H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Benjamin T. Resnick-Day described as “the Anglo-American existential fear of a general pan-Indian war,” and in particular the fear that European powers might foment uprisings among Native American and black slaves in order to destroy the American revolution. While such fears had some foundation in fact, Owens argues that an “abiding belief in conspiracies” was a key element. After the surprise Indian attack in 1763 known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, when tribes along the northwest frontier united in attacking forts and settlements in Native territory, American policymakers became obsessed with the possibility that Native Americans along the Ohio River and near the Great Lakes would similarly unite against whites in those regions. Fearing the consequences of any such alliance, American policymakers adopted policies that sought to create divisions among Indian nations and prevent the development of pan-Indian power.
“Owens encourages us to understand the very reality of pan-Indianism, and of the terrors of Indian mode of warfare, humanizing ‘Indian hating’ and Indian haters, and in the process understanding the role that fear played in justifying violent expansion and dispossession of native people in terms of ‘defense,'” said Resnick-Day. Though Resnick-Day observed that “Owens might have better integrated treatment of Anglo-American fears of slave rebellion, which makes frequent entrance into this narrative as a subordinate but associated concern” in Red Dreams, White Nightmares, the reviewer admired Owens’s thorough research and clarity of argument, and deemed the book certain to be “quite useful to anyone interested in this and related topics for some time to come.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Owens, Robert M., Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2007.
Owens, Robert M., Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2015.
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Daniel Ingram, review of Red Dreams, White Nightmares, 1763-1815, p. 659.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2008, review of Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer.
ONLINE
Anishinabek News, http://anishinabeknews.ca/ (October 15, 2016), Karl Hele, review of Red Dreams, White Nightmares.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/(March 25, 2017), Jim Buss, review of Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer; John Bowes, review of Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer; Benjamin T. Resnick-Day, review of Red Dreams, White Nightmares.
My Journey through the Best Presidential Biographies, https://bestpresidentialbios.com/ (December 12, 2013), Stephen Floyd, review of Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer.
Wichita State University Web Site, http://webs.wichita.edu/ (March 25, 2017), Owens faculty profile.*
Robert M. Owens: robert.owens@wichita.edu 978-7794 To hear an interview with Dr. Owens, click here
Professor: Colonial, Early U.S., Graduate Program Coordinator
Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 2003
Fall 2016 office hours: T 11-12, 2-3; Th 11-12
Dr. Owens specializes in Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early American History, particularly Indian Affairs. He has published articles in the Journal of the Early Republic, Indiana Magazine of History, Ohio Valley History, and the Journal of Illinois History. His first book, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy, was published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2007. His second book, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-Amerian Mind, 1763-1815, was published in 2015, also with University of Oklahoma Press. His current research project explores intercultural murder, crime, and conflict resolution in early America. His latest article, "'Between two Fires': Elusive Justice on the Cherokee/Tennessee Frontier, 1796-1814," appeared in the American Indian Quarterly, vol. 40 no. 1 (Winter 2016).
Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815
Daniel Ingram
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p659.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
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Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815. By Robert M. Owens. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 304. $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4646-1.)
Recent scholarly interest in violence, trauma, and fear as historical determinants has begun to reorient our understanding of colonial America and the early republic away from nationalist mythology and toward the rich realm of human experience. In this new book, Robert M. Owens, author of the excellent work Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman, Okla., 2007) asserts that long-established anxieties about trans-Appalachian pan-Indian alliances formed the foundations of early United States foreign and Indian policies. Not really a psychological exploration or a historical imagination study, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815 convincingly establishes the importance of fear, paranoia, rumor, and insecurity among the nation's early leaders as causes for wider nationalistic imperatives. Owens asserts that a general western pan-Indian alliance was the greatest fear faced (and used) by American expansionists, for reasons that emerged not out of contemporary circumstances but out of Anglo-Americans' colonial past.
Owens establishes this climate of fear in Part 1, which explains how Native leaders and colonial officials tried to hold together fragile, multicultural western strategies, only to have their schemes shattered in the chaos of the American Revolution. Owens's main argument is best expressed in Part 2, where he asserts that a general and growing fear of pan-Indian alliances is the key to understanding American/indigenous diplomacy. Moving the argument away from the local and specific concerns of individual states, regions, or Native groups, and into the arena of national policy making, highlights the importance of identifying fear as a determining factor. Policy makers needed to accommodate Native priorities and settler demands, while also dealing with constant suspicions that western Indian groups might put aside their differences and work together against the new American regime, either on their own or with the help of British, French, or Spanish competitors.
Even after the feasibility of a general pan-Indian alliance waned with the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, fears of wide-ranging intercultural cooperation dominated expansionist policies for decades. This was especially true in the southern states and their western borderlands, where the long-standing threat of Indian-slave alliances (in the aftermath of the Saint Domingue slave insurrection) seemed frightening and possible. William Henry Harrison's contests with Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the British-Indian alliances during the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson's violent actions against the Red Stick Creeks and Seminoles, and other such events demonstrate the centrality, and usefulness, of these fears in expansionist American policy. Both Tecumseh and his successor, Black Hawk, found pan-Indian alliance an attractive, but ultimately elusive, resistance policy. Persistent fears of imagined intercultural alliances proved to be more useful in motivating white expansionist plans than the reality of those alliances proved beneficial to the Native resisters.
Owens expertly establishes the necessity of seeing early United States Indian and military policies as anxiety-based and transregional. The book disappoints only a bit by not exploring what the title suggests: how pan-Indianism was understood in the "Anglo-American mind." Some of the policy makers' motivations seem like reasonable trepidation about alliances between European powers, adventurous individuals, Indians, and slaves rather than outright fear or paranoia. That quibble aside, Owens's thorough, profound research and crisp, witty prose should benefit scholars and please casual readers alike. Red Dreams, White Nightmares is an important and thoughtful addition to a growing body of work that illuminates the early United States' Indian policy as the creation of an aggressive and expansionist federal system that was, at its heart, still engaged in battles deriving from its colonial origins, with imagined demons in the western woods.
DANIEL INGRAM
Ball State University
Ingram, Daniel
Mr. Jefferson's hammer; William Henry Harrison and the origins of American Indian policy
Reference & Research Book News. 23.1 (Feb. 2008):
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Mr. Jefferson's hammer; William Henry Harrison and the origins of American Indian policy.
Owens, Robert M.
U. of Oklahoma Pr.
2007
311 pages
$34.95
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He must have felt his best years were on the frontier, where he was major power in the overwhelming attack that was western expansion in the early years of the republic. He had been especially useful to Jefferson, who wanted above all to eliminate Native American land titles, and had served well as both policy maker and administrator. He had seen to it that Native Americans did not stand in the way of white settlers, who took their political and cultural cues from the previous century's philosophy and their own status as the first generation of Americans after the revolution. Owens (history, Wichita State U.) examines Harrison's effects on US policy toward Native American within the contexts of his particular culture, tracing how his and their notions of progress and expansionism, based mostly on anxious ambition, started the downward spiral for the American indigenous.
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Resnick-Day on Owens, 'Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815'
Author:
Robert M. Owens
Reviewer:
Benjamin T. Resnick-Day
Robert M. Owens. Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. 320 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-4646-1.
Reviewed by Benjamin T. Resnick-Day (Rutgers University)
Published on H-AmIndian (October, 2015)
Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe
Revolutionary Dreams, Existential Fears, and Pan-Indian Alliances
In Red Dreams, White Nightmares Robert M. Owens explores the Anglo-American existential fear of a general pan-Indian war from the late colonial period through the period of the early republic (1763-1815). Particularly,Owens examines the fear that such a war might be supported by the intervention of a foreign European power and a simultaneous black slave insurrection. These fears were based loosely on a realistic appraisal of pan-Indian capabilities and intentions, and partly on what Owens, following Gordon Wood ("The Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," 1982), characterizes as "European and colonial consciousness in the eighteenth century [that] tended toward an abiding belief in conspiracies" derived from an Enlightenment mentality (p. 6). Pervasive fear of a general Indian conspiracy took root after Pontiac’s rebellion in 1763, when Indians along the British frontier suddenly launched a massive coordinated effort to destroy forts and settlements on Indian lands, after rumors warning of its impending explosion had been ignored by British commanders. The sudden, unexpected, and devastating nature of the war, coupled with the fatal error of ignoring the warning signs of such an eruption, gave credence to many future rumors of an impending “general Indian war,” whether true or false. From that point, fear of a similar conspiracy guided British, and subsequently American Indian policy. Policymakers voiced their nightmare that an even broader conspiracy than that of Pontiac's rebellion might unite the populous tribes south of the Ohio River with those tribes of the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes, where there was a precedent for militant confederation. The American Revolution crystallized the association of the British invasion, slave rebellion, and pan-Indian uprising, and fear of this combination.
Images of gruesome atrocities committed by Indians fed an American sense of victimhood and self-defense even as the nation violently expanded onto Indian lands, killing and dispossessing native people as it did so. Indeed, Owens encourages us to understand the very reality of pan-Indianism, and of the terrors of Indian mode of warfare, humanizing “Indian hating” and Indian haters, and in the process understanding the role that fear played in justifying violent expansion and dispossession of native people in terms of “defense” (building heavily on the work of Peter Silver's 2008 Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America). British commanders, for their part, continued to fear pan-Indianism in spite of their efforts to control it and to direct it against the United States, even as Americans persisted in the mistaken belief that the British were the masterminds of pan-Indian warfare against them. However, Anglo-American unity within the new United States and the expansion of that new nation came at the expense of the parallel dream of pan-Indianism. Pan-Indianism suffered from mistiming, never quite bringing the pan-Indian threat to fruition concurrently with a sincere British war effort against the United States and a major slave rebellion. Missed opportunities and near-misses abound in this narrative. While pan-Indianism had its greatest chances of success in the 1790s, Owens argues, it served as a bogeyman in the American imagination well past even the War of 1812, justifying both fears of Indians and their violent dispossession, while memory of pan-Indian uprisings likewise remained a motivating hope for native leaders, such as Blackhawk, in continued violent resistance past the point at which hopes for a general alliance were realistic.
Owens gleans evidence from newspapers and the communications of British and American generals, politicians, and Indian agents, drawing from a broad base of British and North American archives to build his narrative. He builds on the historiography of the role that “Indian hating” and the fear of Indians played in a developing white identity, and (relatedly) in American nation-building, particularly the work of Peter Silver, cited above, and Patrick Griffin's 2007 work American Leviathan: Empire, Nation and the Revolutionary Frontier. Owens relies on the insights of a historiography of Nativist pan-Indianism grounded in the work of Gregory Evans Dowd's 1992 work A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 to understand the independent agency of Indians in creating the pan-Indian movement. Owens follows this scholarship in rejecting the idea that their beliefs were merely reactive or traditional, or were manipulated and controlled by the British or other European powers.
Owens’s particular contribution is made in tackling a previously underexplored phenomenon over multiple generations, revealing the persistence and continuity of reactive American fears of pan-Indianism, demonstrating American readiness to believe rumors of imminent pan-Indian warfare and the role of fears of pan-Indianism in motivating American actions towards Indians and their potential European allies. Over an eighty-year period, American policymakers and commanders attempted to placate Indians, even to the point of restraining settler murders of Indians and risking the wrath of the states, and to sow divisions among and between Indian nations to prevent their confederation. Alternatively, US policymakers at times confronted the threat by launching aggressive preemptive strikes, such as the assault on the pan-Indian capital of Prophetstown in 1811, or by committing aggression against Spanish or British territory and persons that might serve to support pan-Indian war efforts. Whichever strategy the United States took, confronting and preventing this potential nightmare scenario guided American military and foreign policy towards Indians, and their real (or potential/imagined) European allies, throughout its infancy. The widespread perception of catastrophic threat, which has been touched on previously by other scholars, is comprehensively foregrounded and compellingly narrated by Owens. Accordingly, Owens’s material and themes are rich enough to be of interest to scholars beyond those focusing on colonial, early republican, or Native American history, since potential connections are manifold. For example, his work will resonate for scholars interested in the role that narratives of victimization, insecurity, and urgent threat play in justifying genocide in a settler-colonial context and beyond. (For example, there is a remarkable resonance between the dynamics in “Red Dreams” and the theory of genocide in Abdelwahhab El-Affendi's recent 2015 work, Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities).
There are weaknesses here as well. Though his writing is generally compelling and easy to follow, Owens has a consistent narrative habit of passing judgment on the actions of American politicians or military men as “wise” or “foolish.” Perhaps this is meant to be more of a military history than I took it to be, making such judgments relevant to the work of the book. Still, these judgments do not always appear to be concretely tied to his overall argument about fear of pan-Indian conspiracy, so that it is not clear why the reader should be invested in evaluating the wisdom or foolishness of the decisions of particular commanders or politicians.
Furthermore, though I assume that this is primarily meant to be a work in the genre of Native American history and the history of white perceptions of Native Americans, Owens might have better integrated treatment of Anglo-American fears of slave rebellion, which makes frequent entrance into this narrative as a subordinate but associated concern.
Finally, this book is on the lighter side in terms of theory, dispensing with it by brief reference to the work of others, which admittedly may leave some readers unsatisfied while leaving others relieved. Specifically, this book leaves undertheorized and underexplored the issue of how fears of pan-Indianism were passed on through the generations, beyond a general understanding that such fears were transmitted through media such as books and newspapers and bedtime stories. Relatedly, a fuller exploration of his chosen topic might have given the psychological theory of fear and its transmission a more thorough and serious treatment, rather than the cursory and general observations on the topic he makes in the introduction. (He points out, for example, that fear induces hypervigilance, fight or flight responses, and a “limited consideration of alternatives,” for instance, and discusses the idea that people can inherit fears modeled by their parents in a general sort of way, pp. 5-6.) Owens’s work is, after all, essentially a history of fear, and thus would be relevant to historians of emotions, who have here and there also been early Americanists (see for example Nicole Eustace's 2012 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism or her 2008 work Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution). Overall, Red Dreams is a very good, well-researched narrative survey of the persistence of fears of pan-Indian warfare in the Anglo-American world that will be quite useful to anyone interested in this and related topics for some time to come.
Book Review: Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind
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Posted on October 15, 2016 In Culture, News, Opinions
red-dreamsReviewed by Karl Hele
Robert Owens’ Red Dreams, White Nightmares adeptly examines Euro-American fears of an Indigenous to create a Pan-Indian alliance to oppose American territorial expansion. Additionally, Anglo-Americans especially believed that Indians were incapable of forming such forming such unions without foreign – French, British, or Spanish – influence and control. Yet, Red Dreams, White Nightmares does not undertake an in-depth analysis of Indigenous leaders and politics working for or against Pan-Indian movements. Owens does, however, briefly describe that various Pan-Indian movements were self-starting and aimed at protecting our sovereignties and territories. Nonetheless, this book is truly about how early Americans (a.k.a. Settlers) feared foreign influences threatening their peace, prosperity, and expansion by engaging and utilizing Indians and slaves. The monograph is about how these fears, mythical or actual, between 1763 and 1815, helped to create and shape the identity of the United States. According to Owens, this fear of Pan-Indian alliances that included slaves created and led by foreign – British – powers by 1815 had become part of the American national myth used “to unite and motivate the nation to fuel and rationalize territorial expansion” while allowing “Americans [to] continually re-embrace…their self-fashioned exceptionalism.”(pp.242-3). Simply, Americans saw Pan-Indianism (and its possible encouragement of slave revolts) as a threat to the Republic, its people (white), and its imperial ambitions on the continent.
Overall, Red Dreams, White Nightmares is a dense interesting read of American racial fears at their very origins. This is not a book about Indigenous ambitions, but it is a worthy read to understand the origin of American fears that continue to haunt the nation. As Owens notes, in the early 1800s it was far more likely that an Indian would die at the hands of a White than the reverse…(185).
Robert M. Owens, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.
Robert M. Owens. Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. xxx + 311 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-3842-8.
Reviewed by Jim Buss (Department of History, Oklahoma City University)
Published on H-Indiana (July, 2008)
A Son of Virginia/A Father of Indiana
The shelves of commercial bookstores are filled with hagiographies of dead white men. Most are written by popular authors, as academic historians since the 1960s and 1970s have moved away from the veneration of politicians and statesmen to complete the picture of America's past--a mosaic where the hands of white, African American, Native, and female actors color the American landscape. One may then wonder, why another biography of another dead president has been published? Robert M. Owens's Mr. Jefferson's Hammer is not just another presidential biography. But, then again, why would it be? William Henry Harrison's short presidency (partly a result of a grueling inaugural speech on a rainy and cold day) left little presidential material for scholars to write about. Owens, assistant professor of history at Wichita State University, has combed the primary sources related to Harrison and presents a detailed examination of Harrison's early years. He reminds us that Harrison lived a rich political and military life long before he became known as the president who "died in thirty days."
This new biography may not have been possible (or at least likely) a decade ago. In the 1990s, the Indiana Historical Society, under the guidance of general editor Douglas Clanin, collected close to 3,600 documents related to Harrison's early life in the Indiana Territory and published them as a collection that fills nearly ten microfilm reels. Owens used this massive collection to reexamine the life of Harrison, and most of Mr. Jefferson's Hammer explores Harrison's life between the years covered by the collection (1800-15). The first two chapters, though, attempt to place the man within the context of his Virginian upbringing and early western military career. How do we explain the apparent contradictions between Harrison's aristocratic youth and his later yeoman presidential run? Owens finds his answer in Virginia. He argues that "to appreciate William Henry Harrison's thinking in Indiana during the early nineteenth century, one must understand the Virginia gentry of the eighteenth" (p. xx).
The opening chapter, "A Son of Virginia," explains how Harrison's aristocratic Virginian upbringing embedded a deep sense of personal honor in a young man who believed that one's reputation depended on the republican ideal of "manly independence"--an independence that was as much economic as political or ideological. Thus, on the one hand, Harrison used his position as the son of a gentleman (his father had signed the Declaration of Independence and served as governor for the state of Virginia) to gain military commissions and political appointments; on the other hand, he became obsessed with financial solvency as an avenue for preserving aristocratic status. Halfway through the first chapter, Owens fulfills part of his promise by making the book more than a political biography. Instead, he delves into the world of early American Indian affairs and national politics to explain that both Federalists and Republicans "remained committed to expansion, land acquisition, and the conviction that British influence in any form was corrupting and dangerous"--a premise that drives his interpretation of Harrison's motives throughout the rest of the book (p. 27). The chapter provides background into the actions that led to a stalemate between whites and Indians in the lower Great Lakes that followed the Treaty of Greenville (1795).
By the second chapter, Owens argues that Harrison "wanted, he needed, to be among the sociopolitical elite.... [A]nything less would have constituted failure" (p. 41). Owens chronicles Harrison's early rise as territorial governor of the Indiana Territory (consisting of modern-day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota) and attempts to explain how a man overly concerned with financial solvency would mire himself in debt. He concludes that Harrison's acquisition of land and the two-year-long construction of the stately brick home, Grouseland, represented the ambitious attempts of a politician striving to reach a gentility learned from his Virginian plantation youth. Here, Owens demonstrates how a personal biography can act as a regional history. For Owens, Harrison represents a growing number of early American leaders who blurred the line between personal gain and the public good, especially in the American West. The central chapters of Mr. Jefferson's Hammer illustrate how Harrison's personal ambitions can serve as a window into the political divisions and critical issues that divided the region's inhabitants and included debates over Indian affairs, the admission of slavery into the territories, territorial division, and the role of political patronage. Indeed, Harrison sat at the center of dozens of debates that resonated beyond the territorial level. Owens is at his best when he contextualizes Harrison's personal position amid the backdrop of the local and national political landscape.
The remaining chapters detail the political divisions within the territory. Owens convincingly demonstrates how western issues divided settlers and officials in the region, often creating strange bedfellows as individuals who allied together on one issue, ended up disagreeing (sometimes vehemently) with one another over another. Using Harrison as a lens into period politics, Owens illustrates how political patronage did not always guarantee Harrison's good graces. For example, early in his career, Harrison called on former British soldier-turned-American ally William McIntosh to settle a personal land dispute. Harrison rewarded McIntosh by appointing him both treasurer of the territory and a militia officer. Yet, only a few years later, Harrison's ally Benjamin Parke, blasted McIntosh when the Scotsman opposed Harrison's proposal to move the territory to the second grade of government. As a reward for his loyalty, Harrison worked doggedly to have Parke become the congressional delegate of the Indiana Territory, ostracizing his former ally McIntosh.
The concluding chapters mostly recount Harrison's struggle with local Native leaders, particularly Tecumseh and Tenskawatawa (popularly known as the Shawnee Prophet). Here, Owens returns to the topic of the book's subtitle, William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (although a good portion of chapter 7 discusses the end of the slavery debate). After failing to secure political authority over the territory's populace, unsuccessfully challenging territorial division, and losing the proslavery debate, Harrison turned to the one continuously successful aspect of his civil and political career--Indian affairs. The penultimate chapter recounts Harrison's actions from the Battle of Tippecanoe to the end of the War of 1812 (in 1815). Owens tries to find balance in his interpretation of Harrison's actions, refusing to craft him as a ruthless Indian killer and refraining from excusing his actions completely. Throughout the bulk of Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, Owens goes to great lengths and great pains to present the viewpoint of Harrison's enemies and allies. But, one wonders why he does not provide Tecumseh or the Shawnee Prophet with the same treatment? Historian Gregory Evans Dowd presents an insightful interpretation of this indigenous movement in A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (1992). Owens clearly is aware of Dowd's work (Dowd's book is included in the bibliography), but he does not cite him in the notes to the chapter on the Shawnee brothers.
Despite its title and the focus of this review so far, do not be misled into thinking that Mr. Jefferson's Hammer is all about Harrison, or for that matter, all about Indian affairs. It is not. Although much of the information in the book probably will not surprise those who have read other histories of Indiana or Indian affairs, Owens breaks new ground by linking together the oft-separate issues of land acquisition, Indian policy, slavery, and territorial division. This is by far the greatest strength of Owens's book, but it can also be, at times, its greatest weakness. The ever-growing cast of historical actors can overwhelm. Owens bounces from issue to issue and year to year to emphasize the complex world of frontier politics. This tactic works well in the chapter titled, "1805: The Pivotal Year," as Owens grounds the chapter in a single year. In this powerful chapter, he demonstrates how Harrison "consolidated his hold on Indian negotiations and local politics, particularly slavery" (p. 127). This fresh interpretation, bringing debates over slavery in the West and Indian affairs together, adds significantly to the current historiography on both subjects. The chapter even facilitates Owens's habit of taking the reader on sidetracks, because they work to complement the story he is telling rather than distract from it. Yet, Owens's propensity to tell the story from all angles does not always work well.
In an otherwise well-ordered monograph, the sixth chapter, "A Frontier Society: Indiana, 1800-1812," appears out of place. In fact, it is the only chapter to include subheadings. Perhaps it was the author's attempt to provide too many outside connections. Or, perhaps it was an editor's decision to require more inclusive background information. Nonetheless, the chapter chronologically overlaps the preceding three chapters and the two that follow. In it, Owens attempts to discuss "everyday life in early Indiana" (the mysteriously appearing subtitled first section of the chapter) by weaving together the stories of the territory's only early newspaper, the daily lives of local settlers, instances of divorce and family life, and the role of women in early frontier society. At times, the connections to Harrison seem stretched and add little to the rest of Owens's argument. In one instance, Owens shares jokes printed in the local newspaper, but the inclusion of such jokes adds nothing to his argument. Instead, it distracts the reader from the main purpose of the book. Moreover, the chapter ends with an oddly placed section on dueling that includes the story of a duel between Harrison supporters and opponents--a story perhaps best suited as a part of the chapter that precedes it.
Still, Owens works tirelessly throughout the book to incorporate Harrison's narrative into a larger frontier saga about the fate of Native peoples and the debate about slavery and territorial division. Ultimately, Owens's biography of the ambitious young man, not the much older president, should be welcomed by scholars and the public alike. Still, readers may be surprised that the book is about far more than its title leads one to believe. Owens promises that Mr. Jefferson's Hammer is a "cultural biography"--one that places Harrison "within the context of his era" (p. xx). In actuality, Owens's work is really a story about early territorial Indiana with Harrison at the center of the story. "Warts and all," Owens explains, "William Henry Harrison was quintessentially American" (p. xvi). He is right. Harrison represented both the ambitious plans of many early national leaders and their anxieties about failing their fellow citizens and themselves. Readers interested in knowing more about early Indiana and its connections to larger early national issues will the find the book helpful and enjoyable. Owens has demonstrated successfully how cultural biographies can provide a reason for reviving the histories of dead white men.
Bowes on Owens, 'Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy'
Author:
Robert M. Owens
Reviewer:
John Bowes
Robert M. Owens. Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. xxx + 311 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-3842-8.
Reviewed by John Bowes
Published on H-SHEAR (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Caleb McDaniel
The Long Arm of Virginia
The person and policies of William Henry Harrison cast a long shadow over the history of Indiana Territory and the enactment of American Indian policy in the early nineteenth century. This is not necessarily the notion that comes to most people’s minds when considering the shorter-lived member of the well-known “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” presidential ticket of 1840. Even those who study American Indian history tend to view Harrison only through the lens of one or two of his more notorious treaties and know little about the man himself. In this focused biography from Robert M. Owens, however, the fundamental and far-reaching importance of Harrison during his time as territorial governor becomes clear. Just as important, Owens ably illustrates the manner in which Harrison’s Virginia upbringing and republican principles made him “quintessentially American” (p. xvi). Therefore, although the narrative does not always live up to the title of the book, this examination of Harrison’s career in Indiana performs a valuable service to those interested in Harrison as an individual as well as the legacy of his actions in the early 1800s.
This is, as Owens states in the introduction, a cultural biography of Harrison that places the man’s actions and opinions within the larger context of his Virginia upbringing and contemporary American society. But Virginia truly plays the lead role. Indeed the first sentence of the first chapter is repeated in the last sentence of the book, in which Owens writes simply, “William Henry Harrison was a son of Virginia” (p. 250). As that son, he was heir to all of the strengths and weaknesses shared by his father Benjamin, Thomas Jefferson, and other notables of the Revolutionary generation. William Henry was neither malevolent nor saintly. Instead, he was a Virginia gentleman who “saw his own interests and those of his country as one and the same, and he tried to advance them as best he could” (p. 250).
Rather than presenting a biography encompassing all facets of Harrison’s life, Owens focuses on the Indiana years because it was during that time that Harrison had “a much greater impact on American history” (p. xix). Nor is this solely related to the ways in which he, as territorial governor, negotiated numerous treaties and land cessions that paved the way for future expansion and settlement. Most notably, Harrison’s legacy also encompasses debates over slavery in the Northwest Territory and the constant dealings with the suspicion and fear of British influence in the region.
The narrative begins with a relatively brief examination of his road to becoming territorial governor. Born to a signer of the Declaration of Independence and bearing a surname that ranked with Lee and Randolph in Virginia politics and society, William Henry had a privileged upbringing. But having arrived in 1773, the young man also came of age at a time when his fortunes would not come through material inheritance and would no longer reside in his home state. Instead, William Henry, like many of his generation, turned his gaze west. At the age of eighteen he gave up the pursuits of medicine and enlisted in the army. His family connections procured him the appointment and his service in Ohio in the 1790s granted him the opportunity for advancement. By 1798 he was the secretary of the Northwest Territory, and in the summer of 1800 he received the appointment as governor of the newly created Indiana Territory.
Harrison served as the governor of Indiana Territory from 1800 to 1812, a period that encompassed a number of critical events. Perhaps most important in the eyes of Owens, however, is the fact that Harrison’s first eight years as governor coincided with the two terms of President Thomas Jefferson. According to Owens, the two men maintained a “synergistic relationship” during those two terms (p. 51). It is this relationship that rests behind the title of the book, for Harrison as governor did his very best to implement Jefferson’s principles as they related to the Indians and to western expansion. At their core, Jefferson’s intertwined policies depended on an acquisitive benevolence in which the fair treatment of Indians wrestled with an ardent nationalism. And over the course of less than a decade, Harrison displayed his mastery of Jefferson’s ideas through strategic negotiations with multiple Indian tribes that transferred millions of acres into American hands.
But Harrison did more than negotiate with Indian tribes over lands. He is also known for his dealings with Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the two Shawnee brothers who crafted a confederacy in Indiana Territory through diplomatic and religious means. The circumstances highlighted both the continuing concerns over possible conflicts with Indians and the influence of the British. Owens makes clear from the beginning that the British presence consistently looms over the life of Harrison in that he, like his father’s generation, saw British hands in all aspects of Indian resistance to American expansion.
It is when he discusses Harrison’s treatment of the Indians and the concerns over the British that Owens is at his strongest. Less seamless are the discussions over slavery. A less known and certifiable low-point of Harrison’s governorship rests in his attempts to bypass the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibition on slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River. Harrison lobbied hard to allow slavery to exist in Indiana Territory, but was never able to achieve that goal. It is a story that opens an important door into Harrison’s beliefs even as it illustrates Owen’s fine work with the available documents. But this thread does not always connect as well to the other elements of the narrative. Because of the emphasis on Indian affairs in both the title and, at times, in the book, the discussion of slavery often appears as an intriguing addition to, as opposed to a necessary aspect of, the assessment of Harrison’s career.
On the surface, it may seem like a petty comment to say that the book does not follow through on its title. At the same time, however, it would appear that the problem is that the title sells both this book and its namesake short. Harrison is eternally linked to events like the 1804 treaty with the Sauk Indians and the Battle of Tippecanoe. But even as Owens wants to emphasize that aspect of the governor’s career, the information provided illustrates that there was much more to this man and his time as the instrument of federal authority in Indiana Territory. Owens has given the reader a narrative that does more than focus on the origins of American Indian policy. This book paints Harrison as hoping to create in Indiana Territory a place that would be familiar and comfortable for a man of his Virginia roots. And that relates to far more than just Indian affairs.
All criticism aside, Owens presents a very readable and enlightening biography of William Henry Harrison. The material is well situated within the historiography and takes advantage of the Harrison papers painstakingly collected by the Indiana Historical Society. It provides valuable insight into the ways in which federal policy worked on the ground through the filters of individual context and local politics. And in very important ways it fleshes out the life of a man who had a far greater impact on early American expansion than many realize.
Review of “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison” by Robert Owens
12 Thursday Dec 2013
Posted by Steve in Book Reviews, President #09 - W H Harrison ≈ 4 Comments
TagsAmerican history, biographies, book reviews, presidential biographies, Presidents, Robert Owens, William Henry Harrison
“Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy” was authored by Robert Owens and published in 2007. Owens is an associate professor of history at Wichita State University specializing in Colonial, Revolutionary and Early American history (including Indian affairs). This is Owens’s first book, and he is currently working on a book on the Southern Indians.
Owens’s self-described “cultural biography” grew out of his 2003 PhD dissertation and was greatly aided by the Indiana Historical Society’s publication in 1999 of several thousand documents related to Harrison’s activities in the Indiana Territory. These offered a fresh, and more thorough, look at Harrison’s early years on the northwestern frontier and provided new insight into his evolution from army officer to frontier governor and, eventually, to President of the United States.
As others have pointed out, this is not really a presidential biography, but rather an examination of the issues faced by the frontier society in which Harrison lived and worked – as a member of the military and as Governor of the Indiana Territory. Owens provides an extremely insightful depiction of early American frontier life and how Harrison managed the two most potent issues of his day: Indian policy and slavery. The book is also a fascinating window into a man whose aristocratic Virginia upbringing stood in sharp contrast to the folksy, populist image he presented much later as a presidential candidate.
Unfortunately, only the two-dozen or so years Harrison served in the army and as Governor of the Indiana Territory are covered in any depth. Barely touched is Harrison’s childhood or his last twenty-eight years (everything following his resignation as commander of the Army of the Northwest). Only in the book’s last five pages do we learn Harrison later served in Congress, that he was the U.S. minister to Columbia or that he ever ran for president. And because the author’s focus is Harrison’s public life, we have little opportunity to get to know him or his family on a personal level.
Setting aside my disappointment that Owens’s work is not a complete biography, it is quickly evident that the aspects of Harrison’s life which the book does address are covered extremely well. From the author’s introductory remarks to the book’s final chapter I appreciated his clear, concise, analytical style. Owens reports the facts plainly and puts them into the context of the times. Not only does the reader learn what Harrison did at a particular moment, but also why.
But it is Owens’s extraordinary ability to connect Harrison’s actions to the cultural framework in which he operated that leaves me frustrated the author did not pursue his subject further. What more could I have learned about Harrison had the author followed him into Congress…or the White House? Just as I began to understand what made Harrison “tick” I was disappointed to find the book ending.
Overall, “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer” leaves me with mixed emotions. I strongly wish it had covered more ground in its study of Harrison’s life, but I thoroughly enjoyed the portion of his public service that it did review. Owens’s writing style perfectly suited my desire to understand what happened in young Harrison’s life, and why. As a presidential biography, this book is imperfect insofar as it is incomplete – but it provides an excellent foundation for understanding this little-known former president and the frontier society in which he lived for much of his life.
Overall rating: 4 stars