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Jane T. Merritt. At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2003. Pp. vi, 338. 

Review first appeared in American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (Feb. 2004), 175-176.

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At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763
Jane T. Merritt

Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney

As remembered by late nineteenth-century Scots-Irish communities of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, a Native American woman played an important role in welcoming their ancestors to what would become Craig's Settlement in 1728. By recounting their past in this way, they also embraced an Indian past and became heirs of the country in which they now lived, in the process shedding their status as immigrants and becoming truly American. Jane T. Merritt shows that not only was there a grain of truth in this peaceful remembering of past Euramerican-Native relations but that, equally, it erased the more horrific coming of age of another group of Scots-Irish. In 1763, the Paxton Boys, as they later became known, surrounded the Lancaster workhouse where a group of peaceful Conestoga Indians had taken refuge and killed and mutilated at least fourteen men, women, and children. In doing so, the Paxton Boys cast all Indians as racialized others at the same time that they criticized the provincial government and claimed full inclusion in the expanding British Empire. As illuminating as these stories are, they form only two ends of a spectrum of experiences in Merritt's insightful examination of interactions between Native Americans and whites in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, in which she further complicates our understanding of the "middle ground" in the mid-Atlantic region. Employing an innovative research methodology, including extensive research in German Moravian records, Merritt charts the complex relations between Natives and newcomers, among Natives themselves, and especially among particular groups within these sets: among, for example, the Delaware, Shawnee, and Iroquois Indians, Natives and missionaries, and new settlers. Natives, and provincial and imperial authorities. Through her examination of these shifting sands of renegotiated relationships, Merritt's main argument unfolds and mirrors the book's opening vignettes: the cooperation that marked early interactions between most groups, particularly in the Delaware and Susquehanna River valleys and the Indian mission towns of eastern Pennsylvania, gave way to growing conflict in the mid-eighteenth century—greatly exacerbated by the Seven Years' War—as nationalist identities emerged within both white and Indian communities and differences between the two were increasingly characterized in racial terms. In developing this argument, Merritt takes us along neglected paths to bring us to the many crossroads of her title, where most interactions between Natives and newcomers took place. In her carefully plotted opening chapters especially, she explores the social, cultural, economic, and political forces at play in the mission towns that helped bring Native Americans and Euramericans together in the first half of the eighteenth century. She pays particular attention to the roles played by gender relations, kinship and community networks, and religion and the Indian Great Awakening in building bridges between communities. Merritt is at her best in exploring the micro-world of Moravian mission towns, building up a picture of interdependence, adaptation, and the adoption of new, sometimes mutually beneficial strategies by diverse groups seeking to survive in a world in flux. Thus, in the 1730s and 1740s, Delawares, Nanticokes, and Shawnees found themselves in new alliances with English, Scots-Irish, and German settlers against the machinations of Pennsylvania's provincial government and the ever-present Iroquois Confederacy. But Merritt's wonderfully nuanced readings of pre Seven Years' War relations in eastern Pennsylvania also raise concerns about her postwar discussion. For example, Merritt seems to want to make the Seven Years' War a crucial turning point in relations between Natives and Euramericans. Yet her own evidence also points to growing fractures between Indian and white communities prior to the war and suggests that the conflict only accelerated a process that was perhaps inevitable as more and more Euramericans flooded into the region and the balance of power shifted between groups. However, Merritt's postwar discussion takes a step back from the details of life in the mission towns, as she shifts her focus to imperial relations, the languages of diplomacy, and analyses of ideas of race and nation. This treatment is no less insightful than the first half of the book, but it raises different questions. Although it is clear that Indians and whites were erecting cultural and even physical barriers between their communities by the 1760s, Merritt's own research suggests that some still traveled unseen roads to reach across these isolating walls. These are, of course, only minor questions of emphasis in a work that will stand as a rich contribution not only to several lively schools of work—on memory and history, gender, language. Native American syncretic religion, race, and nation—but also to the burgeoning body of innovative scholarly work on the middle ground of Native American relations with Euramericans in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley.

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