Conclusion

No Useless Mouth is a study of hunger during the American Revolution in Indian country and the original thirteen colonies, with Atlantic World nodes that look outside the theater of war. In turning from Native Americans to formerly enslaved people, it follows the people whose participation in the conflict meant that they had to flee further afield if they wanted to survive. I have adopted this Atlantic perspective that includes Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone—what scholars would call a circum-Atlantic approach—because I think it helps us to see the War for Independence differently in terms of power relationships, to make comparisons between food policies, and to distinguish between people who benefited and people who suffered from hunger-prevention efforts in the British Atlantic World.¹

Scholarship on the Atlantic World has taught historians that they should look beyond the concept of the nation or state when assessing power relationships. The notion of nations was still developing in the eighteenth century, but questions about who sought, won, and lost power were much older. If readers are willing to move past the idea of the nation and its institutions as the foundations of power—as people at the time had to do—then it is hard to ignore the Native American polities that wielded power over Europeans during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This book is not the first to consider formerly enslaved people’s flight to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone alongside other events in the American Revolution or the Age of Revolutions more broadly—but it is the first to explore how the people who lived in this dynamic world experienced hunger. After the Revolutionary War it was not certain that the United States would last beyond a generation. This state of instability made the United States similar to precarious British colonies in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, not different from them.²

Adopting an Atlanticist approach to this period makes clear the similarities and differences between food policies that emerged before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. Both the British and American officials who distributed food aid during the War for Independence did so in a disorganized manner—Americans to a greater extent—and they did so in response to Native expectations that had cohered during the colonial period. During the postwar era U.S. food aid was preemptive, in British Nova Scotia it was reactive, and in Sierra Leone it was largely unnecessary after the colony’s first year. Native Americans intervened in the theorization of food policies earlier than black people, and for a more extended period of time, which encompassed centuries of Native sovereignty, diplomacy, and independent political and legal systems. During the later years considered in this book, however, white Indian agents privileged their food laws over Native practices, sometimes at the request of Indians themselves. Formerly enslaved colonists, by contrast, demanded the political rights to create their own legal frameworks to regulate the food system.

It is clear that some folks prevented hunger earlier than historians have claimed, but it is also apparent that hunger prevention was just one small battle in the fight against hunger; hunger endurance and creation often mattered more. Native women controlled the provisions necessary for war. Chickamauga Cherokees and Creeks fed themselves by stealing cattle and horses during the 1770s. When, in 1779, American soldiers invaded Iroquoia and set fire to huge amounts of Seneca and Cayuga corn, they created a period of starvation that no one could prevent but some could endure. Throughout the war self-liberated former slaves filled British stomachs by stealing grain and cattle, and occasionally lost their appetites. After the War for Independence, more people began to treat hunger as something avoidable. U.S. Indian officials set food prices and centralized markets to protect the corn, beef, and pork that Native Americans raised. Ex-bondpeople who escaped to present-day Canada and starved there, and then migrated to a new colony in Sierra Leone, created a government that allowed them to circumvent famine. The costs of trying to stop its deadly effects were sometimes too high.

Indians and formerly enslaved people lost the fight against hunger not because they became bad at stopping it but because imperial officials gathered enough information to circumscribe Native Americans’ and black colonists’ abilities to prevent hunger themselves. Knowledge acquisition gave these white officials a specific kind of power over Native and black revolutionaries: the power to reinterpret histories of hunger.

Before the American Revolution, Edinburgh doctors like William Robertson and British generals like Jeffery Amherst knew too little; during the colonial period non-Native observers could not with accuracy assess Indian hunger. Native Americans knew how to fight famine by drawing on deep reserves of the grain that Native women produced, relying on specific famine foods, and dispersing into small bands during long winters and years of crop failure. British and American officials never managed to interpret black and Native hunger accurately because discourses of hunger were ever changing. What mattered was that after the Revolutionary War, they gained the know-how to say that they could evaluate hunger and to argue that they were better placed to prevent it. British officials began learning these lessons before the Revolutionary War. American agents improved their knowledge during the 1790s because their power struggles with state officials over Native American affairs had forced them to work hard to practice food diplomacy. They had received education about Native appetites and how to satisfy and then manipulate those appetites as they implemented a policy of victual imperialism. Black colonists gained the power to prevent their own hunger through observation and knowledge acquisition: first, they watched white colonists draw on previous colonization attempts to learn how to pass food laws in Nova Scotia, and then they reproduced similar laws in Sierra Leone. Once white officials in Sierra Leone realized how much conflict those black colonists’ laws caused, they stopped black colonists from dealing with hunger on their own and then acted as if they had not in the past sanctioned the passage of similar legislation.

Government officials who delegitimized Native and black hunger-prevention efforts interfered with other people’s food sovereignty.³ They decided that Indians and formerly enslaved people were unqualified to decide what to grow, sell, cook, and eat, and they made it harder for those communities to feed themselves. Their actions ignored centuries of Native hunger prevention and erased a short decade of free black colonists’ efforts to act similarly. Though scholars should be cautious about drawing a solid line from the eighteenth century to the present, it is arresting that today, black women’s lifetime risk of being diagnosed with diabetes is over 50 percent, and Native Americans are much likelier than white Americans to develop diabetes and obesity.⁴ A historian cannot help but be informed and influenced by the contemporary issues unfolding as she writes.

In the opening pages to No Useless Mouth, I noted that my periodization for this book—taking a long view of the American Revolution and distinguishing the era from the military conflict itself—was a choice I made that was determined by the school where I teach.⁵ Having recently moved to Cardiff University, I am struck by the degree to which my colleagues think about history in practice. My predecessor edited an award-winning collection about teaching history, to which many of my colleagues contributed, and I inherited her team-taught class (or module, in British academia) that emerged alongside that volume.⁶ In the United Kingdom our teaching must be driven by our research. These observations are not meant to imply that other historians fail to consider how history is used, but to admit that I had not thought about our discipline as extensively as I might have done until I reached the final stages of revising this book. Revision is a never-ending process; historians come back to arguments they have made in decades past and adjust them, and other scholars challenge and reinterpret other historians’ earlier publications. I have made peace with the state of this book by drawing on the British meaning of the term revision, which my students invoke to mean that they are studying for final exams. This book is nearing its end, but I may never stop revising its subject matter.

No Useless Mouth concludes that white officials in the United States and the British Empire won the fight against hunger by seizing control of history to rewrite past and present representations of Native American and black hunger.⁷ History does affect practice, and practice will shape history.

This book began as a study of food, and its only argument was that food was important—often more important than other historians had conceded. Over time that argument changed as the focus shifted to hunger, or food’s absence, and how people characterized it before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. I set out to write an antideclension narrative because I thought that too many histories characterized the American Revolution as a disaster for Native American and enslaved communities, and my reading of food exchange and destruction during the war contradicted these interpretations.

Upon reflection, I realize that I have also written a declension narrative, but my history offers a different chronology of the shifts in Native American power, and finds parallels between these shifts and the gains and losses in power that formerly enslaved peoples experienced in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. This book thus recasts an Iroquois Civil War as a time when the Haudenosaunee retained and then expanded their power. It shows that the Revolution in Creek and Cherokee country was a period of immense confusion and disorganization that contributed to a fear of powerful, starving, and violent Indians. Black colonists had to wait until they had relocated to Africa to intervene in food policies, but once in Sierra Leone they enjoyed nearly a decade of political participation built on protective food legislation before losing the power that they too had gained.

This book takes as its starting point the conviction that the American Revolution cannot be limited to the years or the geography of the military conflict, nor can it be comprehensible without considering the enslaved people and Native Americans whose lives that conflict disrupted. No Useless Mouth’s expansive periodization and willingness to cross traditional national boundaries invites comparison of how Americans and Britons treated the peoples who had allied with them during the war. The British government supported and then failed its black allies, who would come to identify as British subjects. Lord Dunmore offered them freedom, but then other officials changed the state of affairs, first with inadequate wartime provisioning and protection, then in the government’s cessation of food aid during famine in Nova Scotia, and finally in the Sierra Leone Council’s revocation of rights that had given black colonists the ability to address these failures. Native Americans were not British subjects, and Britons tried harder to accommodate them—even if Indians required no such accommodation. At first blush it seems that the early years of the war did not substantively change Indian country; kinship networks, intertribal alliances, intratribal conflict, and negotiations with non-Natives from a position of strength remained the order of the day. But the four decades after the war witnessed foreign policy decisions that rearranged Native Americans’ relationships with the United States.

I have written this book for readers interested in food and in history. To food-studies scholars I have offered a study of Native American and black hunger during the American Revolution, which seemed to me to be absent from studies of food during the colonial period, the American Revolutionary War, and the Early Republic. I have also tried—by positioning food diplomacy, victual imperialism, and victual warfare on a scale from accommodating to violent behavior—to provide a model for understanding peaceful and violent food-related actions and events from the 1750s to the 1810s. I will refrain from claiming that I do not want people to use this model; I hope that people do begin to use these terms, but I also insist that they will require adjustment. My own research has shown that food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism were different across time and space. I want people to experiment with these terms in other regions of the Atlantic World, and perhaps beyond it, so that scholars can continue to think through ways of understanding how people dealt with scarcity.

In the hope that even more scholars will wish to write about histories of food and hunger, I would like to offer some suggestions for research and writing themes that I think worthy of pursuit. These include accommodation and violence, food policy, and the project of contextualizing hunger. Hunger prevention can involve cooperation, as when people at Thanksgiving sit down to share a family feast. But when hunger is not about cooperation, it is often about violence. The first Thanksgiving meal was a fraught affair between Pilgrims and Wampanoags.⁸ During the American Revolution people stole animals and burned crops when peaceful food exchanges failed, and some forms of food diplomacy themselves involved the wrecking of provisions. Hunger-prevention programs—which people portrayed as positive efforts—also enabled subtle and more overt forms of violence, from attempts to control what people could eat to distributions of debilitating foodstuffs.

Hunger prevention informed food policies, which also merit further comparisons and careful thinking. Such policies might be better understood by considering distributions of food aid, interventions in production methods, uses of the marketplace, and policy’s relationship with the legal system. Writers need to ask when food aid was distributed, who took charge of distribution, and who received the foodstuffs and under what conditions. They should know who won the authority to approve or reject production methods, and whether those declarations accompanied other initiatives, like landgrabs. Scholars should observe when governments, states, and cities centralized their marketplaces, but they should not assume the benevolence or malevolence of such centralization. If there were food laws about aid, production, or marketplace sales, then it is worth asking who was responsible for passing those laws, whom the laws helped, and who suffered under them.

Last and most important is the theme of contextualizing what hunger meant during different times around the Atlantic World. To contextualize hunger, writers must try to have a sense of the baseline state of being adequately fed for the periods and places that interest them. They should know what foods people ate on a normal day in a year of unremarkable weather, what provisions they consumed during leaner times, and how often they had to resort to this diet.⁹ It is acceptable for the baseline to be ineffable, but writers should talk about what makes it that way. They should investigate how people described hungriness: With exaggeration? In formal diplomatic settings? By referencing deaths by starvation? It is worth trying to separate peckishness, hunger, starvation, and famine. Writers must remain willing to see real hunger in the historical sources, but their first reading should be performed with a healthy level of skepticism, especially if the people whose hunger is described are not the same people writing the records. Authors should try as much as possible to cross-reference claims about hunger with the supposedly hungry people’s actions, with reports of the environment at the time, and with interdisciplinary research on the plants and animals that lived in those places.

Any discussion of hunger must contextualize what that state of being meant to the people who grappled with it, because without this context it is impossible to assess power relations between parties who negotiated over their right to food. During the American Revolution people used the three related behaviors of food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism in their preparations for and reactions to hunger, which allowed them to create food systems that everyone could—at varying times, and for different reasons—shape to claim power. Ideas about, countermeasures against, and reactions to deprivation all shaped food policies—from the settled Iroquois territory beneath Lake Ontario, to the mountains, rivers, swamps, and valleys of Creek and Cherokee country, to a field in the Ohio Valley where trees lay scattered by tornadoes, to the cold, rocky soils of Nova Scotia, and to the rain-soaked colony of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

What is so arresting about the American Revolution is that in the decades that followed the war, white officials working for the U.S. and British governments chose to act as if only their abilities to prevent hunger counted. U.S. Indian agents took one of many Native claims about hunger at face value and then imposed on Indians a static, unchanging notion of Native appetites that required more and more stringent intervention from the government. In Sierra Leone, British officials panicked about the freedom they had given to black legislators to deal with hunger. The Revolutionary War, the new country it created, and the exodus it encouraged were disruptive, and people wrote dishonestly about these events and institutions because the world was watching.

When Timothy Pickering told Cornplanter that early colonists thrived while Native Americans wanted food, when Andrew Pickens recalled a campaign against the Cherokees in which the Americans benevolently decided to refrain from destroying Cherokee corn, when federal officials elided Native women’s labor by pretending that Indians did not farm, and when the Sierra Leone Council characterized normal price-fixing behavior by black Loyalists as evidence of rebellion, these men were trying their best to control the historical narrative by misrepresenting hunger prevention in history. Pickering’s Englishmen were supposedly able husbandmen, Pickens’s soldiers were concerned about Cherokee abilities to provision themselves, U.S. officials were unable to recall an entire war in which the American army destroyed Native cornfields, and the black Loyalists’ decision to pass food legislation in 1800 was a rebellious deviation from past activities. These acts of willful forgetfulness or outright mendacity, call it what you will, turned out to be key pivot points in the telling of history and the courses of nations and peoples.

Historians are not fortune-tellers. We are incapable of predicting the future with any certainty, and our ability to assess the past with accuracy is a skill that we are constantly developing. But our capacity to write with confidence about the past is one of the best services we can offer in the interest of good citizenship. Until a country reckons with its history—recognizing that the birth of empires and nations involved conquest, colonization, contradictory trade policies, displacement, enslavement, land seizures, and refugee crises—its citizens cannot be good citizens because they labor under delusions about their country’s past benevolence. I therefore think it of the utmost importance to expose those moments in the histories of the United States and Great Britain when government agents actively worked to distort history. That is what they did after the American Revolution, and that is the story that No Useless Mouth tells.