Leonard Sadoskey, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
This review was originally published in The Historian 73, no. 3 (2011), pp. 580-581.
Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America
Leonard Sadoskey
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
In 1730, the Cherokee nation sent diplomats to London to negotiate a treaty with King George II and the Board of Trade. In 1830, the Cherokee hired a lawyer to protect their interests before the Supreme Court of the United States. Leonard J. Sadosky's fine new book is a bold attempt to explain the radically changed nature of polity relations in North America over this century that led to the deployment of such different strategies of negotiation. Along the way, he also adds an important new interpretive lens through which to view the events of the American Revolutionary era—a truly international history of early American statecraft. The genius of Sadosky's work lies in his fusion of several new important strands of historiography into one "extended interpretative essay," as he modestly calls it (5). Acknowledging the creative insights of scholars working on early Native American history, a recent spate of work on the political culture of the Revolutionary era, and calls for the internationalization of American history, Sadosky deftly recounts a diplomatic history that weaves back and forth between the often fraught negotiations in the courts of Europe, the provincial assemblies, and around council fires to tell an important story of the emergence of a new nation. Recapturing a moment when the colonies were weak and divided, Sadosky reminds the reader of their dependence on Britain and on maintaining good relations with at least some Native American powers. The act of declaring independence, then, was a particularly risky move given the relative weakness of the newly united states in the international arena even under the Articles of Confederation. European states, aspiring new American states, and sovereign Indian nations all jockeyed for position in the tumultuous years following independence. The revolutionary strategy adopted by leaders in the new states on the eastern seaboard was to assert their sovereignty and power simultaneously on two fronts, east and west. Thus while American diplomats fought a long-running—and often unsuccessful—war for equality with the sovereign powers of Europe, they also waged war of a more bloody kind against Indian nations to their west that was premised on defining the Cherokee and others as something less than sovereign nations. In doing battle on two fronts, of course, many American elites in the diverse new states confronted the stark reality of their abject weakness in the new international order and began rethinking their relations with fellow states. Only through a stronger union could the twin goals of diplomats and politicians be achieved. Yet even after the new federal Constitution was ratified, of course, it was a long, difficult, and contradictory road to full sovereignty. In the end, Sadosky reminds us that recognizing the inequalities inherent in the bloody origins of the American federal union, and its statecraft, might go a long way in explaining the very unequal ways in which American power has been asserted both within and outside its sovereign borders ever since.