Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Abstract

reaction. There was something about pacifists that got under the patriots’ skin that went beyond their worries about Friends passing on information to British lines. This could have been explored further. Godbeer also highlights other ways Revolutionary Americans, particularly Quakers, understood peace that went beyond issues related to warfare and killing, what peace studies scholars call “positive peace” or I would call “right ordering”—that is, notions of ordering that proponents believed would create the best of all possible worlds, even if it took violent means to achieve it or even if it led to unintended violent outcomes. After the war, Henry got into the maple syrup business, which nearly ruined him, but it was driven by his vision of filling the backcountry with Quakers and other “respectable citizens” who would “build orderly farming communities and treat local Indian nations with respect” (215). Godbeer correctly ties this venture to antislavery—the maple syrup was intended to replace slave-produced Caribbean sugar. But this was also a profoundly complicated articulation of peace as well, one that contained within it the seeds of something more violent—the Federalist and Jeffersonian campaigns for Indian “civilization” and, later, Indian removal. Not coincidentally, even these violent programs were couched in the language of peace. Overall, this is a worthy book for readers interested in learning more about the everyday trauma of life in Revolutionary America. It has an obvious appeal for those interested in Quaker studies, but it deserves a wider reading. As a work of biography, it is exemplary and a repudiation of an older notion that historians should avoid this genre in favor of more traditional narrative forms. Godbeer succeeds in bringing to life the humanity of his protagonists. We see them as they were: imperfect, suffering, living as we do within a set of contradictions, and shaped by the context of their time.