Introduction

During a July 1791 treaty negotiation, Timothy Pickering, a key figure in the development of early U.S. food policy, misremembered past instances of Native and non-Native hunger while giving a “history lesson.” At this meeting on the Tioga River (which ran between present-day Pennsylvania and New York), Pickering met a group of Senecas, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. “When the white people came to this Island, the Indians lived chiefly by hunting and fishing,” he explained to Cornplanter, one of the Iroquois negotiators. On this “island” of North America, “the white people immediately began to till the ground, to grow corn, wheat, and other grain … and to raise abundance of cattle, sheep and hogs.” In the past, Pickering explained, “the Indians continued to follow hunting and fishing, growing only a little corn. They were often in want of food,” and “exposed to great hardships.”¹

Pickering met Cornplanter and the other Senecas in the midst of a fight against hunger that began before colonists arrived in North America and ended in the 1810s. In 1791 Pickering was a newcomer to Iroquois diplomacy. He had only been working as a negotiator for a year, and the learning curve had been steep.² He started his job during a momentous shift in relations between Natives and non-Natives, when the United States, after a decade of weakness and uncertainty, was trying to gain the upper hand in its dealings with Indians. As a result, his speech to Cornplanter conveyed an inaccurate historical picture.

Cornplanter, for his part, likely knew that Pickering was misinterpreting the actions of seventeenth-century English colonists, who had taken a while to become farmers. Their domesticated animals had died on the ships that traveled to North America. They had spent their first months in Virginia searching for inedible commodities, and in Virginia and New England they had turned into useless mouths dependent on Indians for farmed vegetables, gathered berries, and hunted venison. Contrary to Pickering’s claims, it was the English colonists, not the Indians, who had struggled to overcome hunger. It was odd for Pickering to make this speech to Native treaty participants, especially to one named Cornplanter, because the Iroquois had grown corn in abundance long before encountering non-Natives.³

The Seneca negotiator sitting across from Pickering was known by several names. To Indians he was Gyantwahia or Kayéthwahkeh, which translates approximately to “where it is planted.” To non-Natives he was Cornplanter, John O’Bail, John Abeel, or John Abiel.⁴ He had a reputation for effective speechmaking and would have been familiar with his tribe’s spoken history. These contemporary creation stories described the fall of Sky Woman onto the back of a turtle and told of how, with the help of other animals, she had constructed an island on the turtle’s back. Sky Woman had a daughter. Some Iroquois said the daughter’s son, Thaluhyawaku, learned to plant corn. Others said that, while still in the womb, Thaluhyawaku’s twin brother, Tawiskalu, maliciously decided to leave his mother’s body through her side. This birth killed Sky Woman’s daughter, but her early death yielded unexpected bounty in the corn, beans, and squash that sprang forth from the grave.⁵ Corn production was intrinsic to the Iroquois past and present.

Yet Pickering’s account minimized the history of Iroquois farming and thus erased systematic Indian hunger prevention. Pickering shared his tale because the U.S. government wanted the Iroquois to become farmers. Cornplanter, as his name suggests, could already farm, but he listened to this lesson on the benefits of agriculture because he was trying to maneuver to retain land in his dealings with the new United States.

Hunger’s important role in Pickering’s false history should be unsurprising, considering that people had long reckoned with it for various environmental and man-made reasons. In the early modern period, cities under siege could expect to be starved out, and they suffered more quickly during times of crop failure or unanticipated changes in the weather. Famine resulted from extended periods of hunger and was evident in instances of actual deaths, food riots, high prices, property crime, and rising migration.⁶ During the eighteenth century most British people suffered from hunger, but not famine. In North America, some European observers perceived Native Americans as ravenous, while others thought them better able to deal with dearth. At the same time, slave masters deprived enslaved people of food because they hoped to keep them weak and compliant.

No Useless Mouth is a book about how Native Americans, non-Natives, and people of African descent experienced hunger before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). It historicizes efforts to create, avoid, and withstand hungriness so as to better understand the moments in time when Native Americans and formerly enslaved peoples gained enough power to shape food policies of hunger prevention and creation, rather than just suffering from the ill effects of new initiatives that men like Pickering envisioned. This book’s exploration of the many different contexts of hunger during the era of the American Revolution uncovers how these Native and black revolutionaries acquired so much power—and why they ultimately lost it.

Enduring, ignoring, creating, and preventing hunger were all ways to exercise power during the American Revolution. Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy. In North America, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Miami, and Shawnee Indians grew and destroyed foodstuffs during the Revolutionary War, which forced their British and American allies to hunger with them, and to furnish provisions that accommodated Native tastes. By the 1810s the United States had learned how to prevent Indian hunger, to weaponize food aid, and to deny Indians the power gained by enduring and ignoring scarcity.

Indians won leverage during the Revolutionary War itself. People of African descent gained some power by creating white hunger during the Revolutionary War, but more so as formerly enslaved communities, primarily after leaving the new United States and migrating to British colonies in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. At the end of the war, British officials in North America chose to transport formerly enslaved refugees to Nova Scotia. In the country that is now called Canada these black colonists were relatively powerless, but they witnessed white colonists’ use of food laws to assert authority. Once abolitionists in England turned their attention toward ending the transatlantic slave trade by founding a self-governing black antislavery colony in Sierra Leone, and relocated black colonists from Nova Scotia to Africa, former slaves won the right to fight hunger directly. But after white officials in Sierra Leone realized that colonists’ hunger-prevention efforts gave them too much freedom, black colonists lost their hunger-preventing rights. Black revolutionaries managed for a short time to challenge the power regimes in place during the late eighteenth century.

This book similarly challenges how we think about the American Revolution. Its title comes from a 1780 letter by General Frederick Haldimand, the governor of Quebec, at a time when Britain’s Indian allies were living through a refugee crisis in British forts. When Haldimand wrote that “no useless Mouth, which can possibly be sent away” could be allowed to remain at these strongholds, he hoped that only Native warriors would spend the winter with British soldiers. Indians tested this assumption that only Native fighters were useful by supplying their own communities and refusing and destroying their allies’ provisions, and they proved their usefulness again by fostering the spread of hunger among enemy soldiers and civilians alike. Like Haldimand, historians are accustomed to thinking about white colonists as an increasingly powerful group, Natives as increasingly weak, and enslaved people as individuals with relatively little power.⁷ No Useless Mouth turns these narratives on their heads. It instead finds more rather than less power in Indian communities from the 1770s to the 1790s. It offers a new chronology of the eventual decline in Native power against the U.S. government. I highlight a more condensed but strikingly similar chronology of power relations for formerly enslaved people. And I trace myriad, useful efforts to fight hunger before the more widely studied humanitarian initiatives of the nineteenth century.⁸

The Revolutionary War was fought just as much on Indian terms as it was on British and American ones, and Indians continued to drive U.S. food policies after the conflict. Famine-deterrence initiatives evolved through U.S. cooperation with Native Americans, and similar efforts emerged among formerly enslaved communities as black men and women moved out of the United States and across the ocean once the war concluded. All parties were at various times producers, consumers, and destroyers of food, which means that a study of hunger offers an opportunity to understand not only the big moments of power shifts in land cessions and trade negotiations, but also the smaller day-to-day activities that engendered them. In other words, hunger exposes the contingency of power relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

“I hope you will have taken effectual methods to secure you an abundant supply of provisions. That seems to be the pivot upon which all your operations turn.” Secretary of War Henry Knox sent this advice to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne in 1794, near the end of a decade-long war between the United States and a confederated force of Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee Indians—but he might have urged similar preparations during the Revolutionary War. The conflict between the new United States and these Indians was a direct result of the Revolutionary War, in which both Knox and Wayne also fought. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, all military considerations turned on the quest for food and the consequences of its absence, hunger. The position of all negotiating parties during times of war and peace cannot be understood without knowing whether they were hungry and to what degree. If Native Americans were less hungry than historians have admitted, for example, or if formerly enslaved black colonists were legally empowered to fight hunger themselves, then both groups possessed more authority than scholars have supposed. The American Revolution becomes an era characterized at various points by resilience, resistance, conflict, continuity, and change.⁹

This reinterpretation requires taking a long view of the revolutionary period. Beginning it in the late 1750s, during the Seven Years’ War, and ending it in the 1810s encompasses a sixty-year period when diplomatic practices were most in flux. Such disruption allowed Native Americans during the Revolutionary War to emphasize and shape food-related negotiations, while enabling them—now joined by formerly enslaved Africans—to participate in the animal theft and crop destruction that had characterized the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This narrative continues through the 1780s and 1790s because Native Americans and U.S. officials worked together to formulate U.S. hunger-prevention strategies, and because it was also during the 1790s when ex-bondpeople earned the political and legal right to fight hunger on their own terms. By the 1810s, however, Indians and formerly enslaved people had lost their battles against hunger.

My periodization has been driven by my teaching on the American Revolution in a system of higher education that does not require both halves of the undergraduate U.S. history survey (which usually runs from 1492 to 1865 or 1877, and then from 1865 or 1877 to the present).¹⁰ I differentiate the Revolutionary War from the American Revolution. The former stretched from 1775 or 1776 (depending on whether the start of the war begins at Lexington and Concord or with the Declaration of Independence) to 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by Great Britain and the United States. The longer timescale of the American Revolution assumes that to appreciate the full effects of the war, scholars must look back to the 1750s and forward to the 1830s. After all, the war’s chronological boundaries were largely irrelevant to the Indians and enslaved peoples who participated in it. And the end of the war was just the beginning of newly emancipated black colonists’ struggle for political rights in the British Empire.

This periodization also addresses several interpretive problems that need to be solved in retelling the history of Native Americans’ and enslaved peoples’ involvement in the American Revolution. These problems appear in histories of food and hunger, U.S. foreign relations, and the American empire. Historians of foreign relations have omitted Native Americans, jumped from covering Indian affairs in the 1790s to discussing Indian affairs in the 1830s, or missed the continuities between British and American Indian policies because they privilege the history of the United States after the end of the Revolutionary War.¹¹

This elision has meant that power relations between the 1780s and 1810s, centered around food and hunger, have been either misinterpreted or omitted entirely.¹² Such a decision risks assuming that Indians possessed little leverage against the United States, and misses important continuities and changes in British and then American interactions with Native Americans from the 1750s through the 1820s. U.S. officials persuaded Native Americans to attend treaties by working hard to replicate colonial-era British diplomacy, but they did so during a time when food diplomacy had grown indispensable, and when mistakes in practicing it invited major consequences. Federal U.S. Indian agents agonized about the violent insecurity that arose during times of famine in Indian towns and villages, and warned that if the federal government could not provide food aid, it needed to prepare for war. In No Useless Mouth I make clear that colonial and postrevolutionary Indian affairs must be analyzed as foreign affairs, and that diplomats’ efforts to address Native hunger informed these daily interactions between Natives and non-Natives from the 1750s to the 1810s. Reexamining these food-related negotiations has the effect of exposing the untenable position of the United States during the 1780s and 1790s, and explaining the steps it took to intervene in Native hunger-prevention efforts from the 1790s onward.

In addition to histories of U.S. foreign relations is the scholarship on the American empire during this period, which blames settler colonists for expanding that empire by seizing land from Native Americans—as Americans did in 1779 when they moved into Iroquois houses after John Sullivan’s summer campaign against them.¹³ Studies of the American Revolution agree that after the war, the U.S. government quickly constituted its own “Empire of Liberty.” Historians disagree about whether this decision was radical or not, and they struggle to assign responsibility for the American empire’s consolidation. They concur that squatters, unscrupulous traders, and individuals in the interior of the continent drove the formulation of policy at the federal level, such as the government’s decision in 1787 to create the Northwest Ordinance for organizing new territory beyond the Appalachian Mountains.¹⁴ But they have yet to fully describe the federal and Native negotiations that enabled these settler colonial land grabs. This book makes clear that Indians could not lose their land to settler colonists until they had lost the fight against hunger with the federal government.¹⁵

As a concept, settler colonialism is deficient in several respects: first, because the idea of settlement should not be used to describe exclusively non-Native behavior; second, because Indian affairs were foreign affairs; third, because Natives actively shaped U.S. policies; and finally, because scholars have not yet clarified whether their definitions of eighteenth-century settler colonialism describe a staggered process of land seizures or a daily milieu of oppression. Indians, like non-Natives, were settled folks; they produced corn, pork, and beef on land to which they periodically returned, hunted for game in predictable patterns and locations, and did not recognize the government’s right to sell their territory.¹⁶ Using the word settler to critique non-Native behavior thus creates a false dichotomy between Indians and non-Indians, and reproduces the language of eighteenth-century land grabbers.

Further, in a structure of settler colonialism, the colony is separate from but still tied to the mother country; internally rather than internationally focused; the behavior of settler colonists dictates policy back in the metropole; and colonialism is something that happens to indigenous peoples. After the Revolutionary War, however, the federal government had severed relations with Great Britain, viewed Indians as separate nations with whom it conducted foreign policy, and responded to and anticipated the behavior of its land-hungry non-Native inhabitants.¹⁷ Native Americans did not passively experience these policies and landgrabs; they intervened to shape policy and critiqued illegal land cessions. It was inaccurate ideas about Native crop and meat production and anxiety about the results of Native hunger that gave rise to the fiction that Indians improperly used their land and therefore required less of it. During the 1790s, U.S. officials—including Timothy Pickering—mischaracterized Native hunger-prevention efforts with the explicit purpose of legitimizing a food policy that facilitated the federal government’s acquisition of Native land. In this book, settler colonialism consolidated the territory of the American empire while, simultaneously, the U.S. government enacted a federal Indian food policy that met the expectations of Native Americans and its settler colonists.

No Useless Mouth’s exploration of the relationship between empire, Native American history, and U.S. foreign relations also requires a reconsideration of the political economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before the Revolutionary War, the mercantilism of the British Empire had restricted North American colonists’ abilities to trade outside of established British imperial networks. Freedom to trade after the war enabled the United States to make trade agreements with other nations, including Indian nations. However, tensions remained between those who wanted unrestrained foreign and domestic exchange, and economic nationalists who believed that the U.S. government had to intervene in the economy by fixing prices and wages and enacting trade barriers through protectionist legislation. This debate over trade policy colored U.S.-Indian commercial relations as it became less clear where Indian nations fell within the U.S. commercial orbit. Native Americans in North America wanted the ability to practice unrestricted trade with the United States, but also with British, French, and Spanish officials in North America. They also asked the U.S. government to fix prices for the deerskins they sold in a rapidly evolving fur trade; powerful Indians pushed for economic policies that allowed them to trade freely while enjoying the benefits of protectionism.¹⁸

To understand how these histories of empire and foreign relations fit together with histories of slavery, scholars must reexamine how enslaved and formerly enslaved people traded, produced, stole, transported, and regulated foodstuffs. The historians who have recognized that the institution of slavery (and its expansion) contradicted eighteenth-century authors’ claims that the Empire of Liberty was a peaceful empire have been less invested in tracking the contradictions of black imperialism abroad.¹⁹ Others have not considered the importance of black runaways in shaping foreign policy between British and American officials during the war itself. When British forces invited enslaved Africans to run away and join them in the fight against rebel American colonists, and to then steal food from the plantations of former masters, they initiated a chain of events that would lead some British military leaders to reinterpret retaliatory food deprivation as American acts of war against Britain. When the war ended, the exodus of former slaves from the United States to present-day Canada caused considerable disagreement between British and American military leaders. When formerly enslaved people tried to fight hunger in Sierra Leone, they did so by enacting protectionist legislation that elevated their foodstuffs over those grown and prepared by Africans. The white Sierra Leone Council failed to anticipate the tensions that black colonists’ antihunger regulations would create between colonists and Africans—whom black politicians characterized as foreigners whose buying practices merited different pricing policies.

This broad reinterpretation of hunger-prevention initiatives as domestic and foreign policy tells a very different story from histories of single food commodities, which explain how these commodities changed history.²⁰ Scholars have undertaken important work on food and power, but the era of the American Revolution remains largely unexplored. Histories of food from the sixteenth to the twentieth century have also been less interested in hunger.²¹ General surveys of hunger pay insufficient attention to North America, or argue that hunger became preventable only during the mid-nineteenth century onward. It would be easy to assume that state hunger prevention was an achievement only of the mid-nineteenth or even twentieth century.²² U.S. officials, Native Americans, British officials, and formerly enslaved black colonists clearly tried to prevent hunger in the late eighteenth century, demonstrating that although many of the tactics for fighting hunger remained the same as the colonial period’s, the composition of the groups who battled scarcity and the power they lost and gained changed significantly.

Three key behaviors changed and were, in turn, changed by evolving ideas about hunger. Detailing these behaviors should help readers understand how the American Revolution both fostered continuity and changed hunger-prevention initiatives, consequently destabilizing power relationships. These modes of behavior—food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism—exist on a spectrum between accommodation and violence because it is impossible to talk about hunger without considering peaceful and aggressive food exchange and destruction. Depending on context, some degree of accommodation and some degree of violence was possible. Diplomacy usually accompanies discussions of war, and, indeed, eighteenth-century diplomats often undertook negotiations to prevent past violence from spiraling into cycles of revenge. They also understood that diplomacy was crucial in stopping future conflicts.

On the more peaceful end of this scale, then, is food diplomacy, defined as the sharing of, or collective abstention from, grain, meat, or alcohol in order to create or maintain alliances. In this book I characterize food diplomacy so as to include a shared experience of hunger because Native Americans attached so many meanings to the idea of starvation and because the absence of food thus informed food-sharing activities.²³ Various terms describe similar pursuits: gastrodiplomacy, culinary diplomacy, political gastronomy, and food aid. Food diplomacy is the best option for the revolutionary period. Gastrodiplomacy conjures images of statesmen negotiating over grand meals, and misses the ordinary people who participated in the Revolutionary War. Gastronomy is about delicate eating, while the word culinary references kitchens.²⁴ Food aid is distributed to civilians in reaction to a crisis, so it was part of revolutionary customs, but the phrase is not broad enough to describe all forms of cooperative exchange, such as distributions of rations to Indian warriors.²⁵ Food diplomacy encompasses the political culture of eighteenth-century diplomacy that extended beyond protocol and court etiquette, such as the alliance-making of government officials, the forest diplomacy of Native war and peace chiefs, and the maneuvering of traders. It includes the reactive nature of British and American food aid, as well as the Indians who in turn gave food gifts to non-Natives. And it applies to the wartime men and women who ate unsavory fare of salt pork, boiled beef, cornmeal mush, and moldy bread far away from kitchens. The inclusion of alcohol in definitions of food diplomacy also poses challenges, given its separate historiography and the ramifications of alcohol use in Native communities.²⁶ This history deals with drink only when people connected alcohol disbursement to food or hunger.

Hunger brought people together, but it also divided them. The most belligerent form of food-related behavior was victual (pronounced “vittle”) warfare. It often occurred when food diplomacy failed, though the two customs did sometimes take place at the same time. Victual warfare entailed stealing, withholding, or destroying grain or animals (or threatening to do so) with one of two outcomes in mind: to create hunger, instability, and chaos; or to prevent one’s own hunger or the hunger of one’s allies. Victual warfare has gone by various names: the feedfight, warfare against vegetables, scorched-earth campaigns, and total war.²⁷ But victual warfare is preferable to its precursors because the word victual can be used as a noun or a verb, so that the meaning includes the crops, animals, and salted meat that people destroyed, as well as attacks against forms of production and supply.

The last of these practices, victual imperialism, is an idea unique to this book. Victual imperialism could be collaborative or antagonistic, depending on the time and context. It was the use of hunger-prevention food policies—including the circumscription of hunting habits, institution of price-fixing food laws, and introduction of “civilization” programs—either to seize land or to disrupt and transform trade. Its land-related results thus refer to behaviors classed as formal imperialism, while its trade-related results fall under the remit of informal imperialism.²⁸ Victual imperialism was designed to preempt warfare and stop hunger; often, it had the effect of reducing food aid or negatively affecting another group’s freedom to produce, market, or eat what and how they wished. Though this book does not suggest that historians should abandon settler colonialism as a concept of analysis, adding victual imperialism to this discussion reveals the more conscious choices that Indians made to cooperate with non-Native government officials as they chose from several less than ideal survival strategies.

These terms naturally raise questions about the value of imposing them on the historical narrative, when the people who practiced food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism did not use them in the eighteenth century. I recognize the complications that such terms invite, while asserting that the historian’s job is to make the past more comprehensible to present-day readers, using words that she has carefully considered. I am not suggesting that people in the eighteenth century used these terms, nor am I arguing that they would have recognized terms like food aid or food relief. I have applied these terms because they facilitate understanding of hunger’s ever-changing contexts. In theorizing them, it is important to insist that they existed in practice if not in name before the late eighteenth century, that they changed before then, too, and that they are specific to period and place.

Some antecedent for each of these activities might be traced to different times and places in early modern British history, and in some cases even earlier; these examples are most relevant because this imperial power interacted the most with the groups discussed in this book. Food diplomacy changed before the revolutionary period and was not applicable to everyone in Britain or North America. English men and women of all classes gave edible gifts during the medieval period, though not all gifts served diplomatic purposes.²⁹ Food diplomacy with Native Americans before the Revolutionary War involved distributing food aid, sharing meals, hosting feasts at treaty gatherings, and providing rations to broker alliances with Native Americans. Powerful Indians expected non-Natives to learn and replicate these practices even when Indians did not need food. These conventions became crucial during the Revolutionary War because other types of diplomacy, such as trade diplomacy, became less effective. Revolutionary food diplomacy copied and then added to colonial customs. British and Patriot officials who needed the assistance of Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois allies tried harder to accommodate Native tastes and etiquette. In rare cases, allies hungered together—sometimes deliberately, by destroying each other’s food supplies—to strengthen military coalitions. Food diplomacy was not pertinent to enslaved people during the colonial period or the Revolutionary War. Between the 1780s and the 1790s, federal agents labored to reproduce these cooperative, revolutionary food customs during their work in U.S. Indian affairs, but confusion flourished because officials for the states sought an advantage over the federal government, and because federal and state officials had learned to associate Native hunger with outbreaks of violence. By the late 1790s, when the U.S. government’s Indian food policy won out against the states’ policies, its food diplomacy entailed reducing alcohol distributions and trying to cut food aid while limiting the use (and cost) of military campaigns against Indians.

In the early modern period it was Englishmen who were victual warriors, and the strategic aims of war determined the permissibility of destroying crops. Englishmen during sixteenth-century campaigns in Ireland targeted crops because they wanted the Irish to submit but not starve. By the mid-seventeenth century, crop eradication was designed to starve and annihilate Irish noncombatants, but by the end of the century civilian deaths again became unacceptable, even as attacks against crops continued. In the Americas, the English regularly waged scorched-earth campaigns against Native Americans (and, sometimes, other civilian populations). Indians also committed victual warfare: once they came to know how highly Europeans valued their domesticated animals, they aimed their violence at cows and pigs.³⁰ When Europeans convinced Indians to fight alongside them, Indians avoided the use of victual warfare against other Indians—even their enemies. Revolutionary victual warfare increased in scale in terms of the people who carried it out and the people who bore the brunt of it. American forces executed unprecedented, wide-reaching operations against the Iroquois and Cherokees, and Indians became likelier to attack other Indians’ cattle and grain fields. Formerly enslaved peoples developed a striking relationship with victual warfare. During the war, Britons encouraged bondpeople to run away from rebel masters, fostering the rise of victual warriors who attacked former masters’ systems of food production. After the Revolutionary War, the types of victual warfare did not change, but some of the practitioners did. Maroon communities of runaway slaves persisted in their raids on white plantations. Britons and Americans no longer attacked each other’s crops and cattle. Soldiers continued to incinerate Native fields and gardens throughout the 1790s in some places, such as the Ohio Valley, but in the northern and southern regions non-Native civilians replaced military victual warriors and often engaged in unsanctioned violence against Indian foodstuffs because they wanted land that did not belong to them.

Of these three behaviors, victual imperialism represents the most significant change because it was only during the late eighteenth century that hunger-prevention initiatives and land seizures began occurring simultaneously. During the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, governments in England and Scotland tried to restructure land use, which then altered crop-, dairy-, and meat-production methods and prompted price-fixing initiatives. Seventeenth-century Englishmen transplanted depictions of nonfarming barbarians to the New World so they could falsely claim that Native Americans misused their lands, which helped colonists to justify taking territory. Invaders enjoyed some success convincing Indians to raise domesticated animals—some cattle, but predominantly pigs—but they did not introduce these animals in concert with land seizures.³¹ Native Americans did not take non-Native land, and when Indians took land from or ceded it on behalf of other Indians before the Revolutionary War—as in the case of the Iroquois-Delaware relationship—they did not interfere with food choices.³²

During the war, British and American officials knew they had to try to avoid offending their Native allies. This knowledge had limited their victual imperialism. By contrast, in the new United States, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone, reformers tried to change land use and the agriculture and animal husbandry that yielded grains and meat. In the former American colonies, U.S. officials became the victual imperialists. Formerly enslaved people encountered victual imperialism in Nova Scotia, where white Loyalist refugees (American colonists who had sided with the British during the war) passed food laws that kept ex-bondpeople from making use of land. It was when self-liberated black men and women entered a wider Atlantic World in West Africa that they, too, realized how to become victual imperialists. They practiced victual imperialism by creating food laws that bore striking resemblance to the laws under which they had suffered in Nova Scotia. It was in Sierra Leone that victual imperialism transformed from land- to trade-related behavior. Free black colonists began passing food laws while trying to take African land, but over time the focus shifted to trying to change trade.

In the era of the American Revolution, food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism explain how enslaved peoples and Native Americans waged and lost their fights against hunger, and thus how they won and lost power. Misunderstandings between Natives and non-Natives during the colonial period drove British efforts to adhere to Native negotiating rituals, including food diplomacy. No one enjoyed a clear advantage, and so the British did not try to distinguish between the many conflicting interpretations of Indian appetites, while Indians did not depend on non-Natives to prevent famine. During the Revolutionary War, American Patriots tried to gain an edge with protracted strikes of victual warfare against Britain’s Indian allies, destroying their vegetables and prompting refugee crises. They miscalculated. Iroquois Indians won more authority by expanding food diplomacy to include the acts of fighting hunger, and creating and then coenduring it. Creeks and Cherokees, meanwhile, fostered confusion by destroying provisions and fed themselves by stealing domesticated animals. Blundering British and American officials who tried to control quantities of rations distributions instead found themselves apologizing for stinginess. Enslaved people, meanwhile, earned some power by allying with the British and fighting white hunger with stolen crops and animals, and to a limited extent by avoiding hunger through theft, migration, and labor. Mostly, they struggled, because they expected to endure dearth.

After the war, Native Americans continued to gain power during the 1780s and mid-1790s. As the nascent United States struggled to form a government and as a pan-Indian confederacy rose in the northwest, wrong-headed ideas about violent, famished Indians motivated American officials to generously distribute food at meetings and as aid because they feared the results of not doing so: victual warfare. Non-Native federal agents became better able to intervene in conversations about hunger deterrence because their diplomacy outdid that of state officials; they had studied Native appetites.

U.S. federal agents began to claim more knowledge about Native hunger during the mid-1790s, as Timothy Pickering did in his meeting with Cornplanter. This new authority, in concert with U.S. military victories and growing pressure from white settler colonists, motivated the federal government to bid for power by crafting a foreign policy that misrepresented Native agriculture and Native hunger. By the early 1810s, the federal government no longer cared about establishing whether or not Indians truly were hungry, and so it de-emphasized the customs of cooperation that addressed Native famine. Federal officials now conflated diplomacy with hunger prevention, which in turn allowed them to use food aid that fostered diseases, thus providing a cheap, destructive alternative to military campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court may have declared Indians domestic and uncivilized in the 1820s and 1830s, but U.S. officials had started that precedent from the 1790s onward.³³ The government’s food diplomacy had become victual imperialism.

Victual imperialism’s relationship to power was slightly more ambiguous with respect to how formerly enslaved people encountered it. Black colonists in Nova Scotia suffered as white Loyalist refugees blocked their access to land while also curtailing their access to food. Hunger endurance rather than avoidance remained the norm. Former bondpeople finally gained power in Sierra Leone, after a series of negotiations with white officials granted them the right to enact their own food laws that forestalled hunger. These laws were temporarily successful, until they also targeted African peoples’ trade in foodstuffs—particular that of the Susu and Temne. This victual imperialism was unsuccessful, because in the late 1790s Susu and Temne began to practice victual warfare against black colonists. White colonists grew unwilling to authorize black colonists’ antihunger legislation, because they were reluctant to destabilize the Sierra Leone Colony’s position of encouraging Africans’ trade in legitimate commerce, and so they removed black colonists from power by deeming them rebellious in 1800. By portraying black colonists’ food laws as illegal, white British officials elided history in much the same way as Timothy Pickering did in his conversation with Cornplanter. Memories of hunger-prevention initiatives were subject to all sorts of manipulation.

No Useless Mouth is structured around three overlapping periods of shifting power dynamics, because food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism created systems of power relationships that everyone had a chance to work, with different degrees of power, in their interests. The book’s first section describes the baseline notions of hunger that food diplomacy and victual warfare helped create during the colonial period. Then it explains how the bonds between Natives and non-Natives changed during the Revolutionary War as Iroquois Indians gained power using food diplomacy and Creeks and Cherokees practiced victual warfare with similar results. Power relationships fluctuate in the second section of the book. During the war, self-liberated slaves earned freedom and became victual warriors but felt almost as if they were re-enslaved after fleeing to Nova Scotia and encountering white victual imperialists. Cherokee, Creek, and Iroquois Indians continued to use food diplomacy and victual warfare to improve their bargaining positions with the United States during the 1780s and 1790s, but Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee Indians won and then lost control in a final campaign against a new U.S. army. In the final section of the book, Native Americans and black colonists struggle. Indians started to lose the battle against hunger when the new United States hijacked hunger prevention initiatives in the 1790s, 1800s, and 1810s. Black colonists won several victories in the fight against hunger in Sierra Leone, beginning in 1792, but they lost the war, which lasted less than a decade.

Historians cannot understand the American or British position in the American Revolution without reckoning with histories of enslaved peoples and Native Americans because those groups’ power struggles were so entwined with British and American foreign affairs. From the 1770s to the 1810s, food diplomacy and victual warfare respectively granted Native and black revolutionaries the most leverage, but both groups suffered when white officials introduced victual imperialism. Native Americans held enormous influence over British and American officials before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, which in many respects was merely a blip in Indians’ longer history of negotiating and fighting with non-Natives. Black colonists’ efforts to win political and legal power were no less remarkable, not least because their situations changed so much in the space of a generation.

Any history of bondpeople and Native Americans must wrangle with the problem of sources: most documentation about enslaved people and Indians comes from Europeans. Accounts produced by Europeans observed Indians’ actions but not their thoughts. This challenge offers readers at least three solutions: they can read those documents with skepticism and accept or reject assessments of Indians depending on the existence of corroborating evidence; they can claim that historians will never uncover the true story of what happened, but that these sources give us some sense of the time period under consideration; or they can use Indian sources to create an Indian-centered narrative. This book offers a fourth option: hunger-related actions become an additional base of information about people who left behind too few written records in comparison to their white contemporaries. By reading documents skeptically and cross-referencing assertions about Indian and black hunger with food-related actions, historians can try to discern the intentions of Native Americans and enslaved peoples through their responses to and preparations against hunger.³⁴

In the pages that follow, readers will note the reliance on archival sources based mostly on twenty-one archives in eighteen towns and cities. I have focused on these sources despite the preponderance of edited document collections on the American Revolution. There is little reason to think that editors of these decades-old collections were concerned with food, enslaved people, or Indians, because only recently has it become commonplace to acknowledge that the War for Independence shaped, and was shaped by, the actions of these folks. Moreover it is only recently that it has become acceptable to write seriously about food and hunger. Military sources—letters of commanding officers, soldiers’ diaries, papers relating to Indian affairs, and miscellaneous letterbooks—proved the most revealing in retelling the story of revolutionary hunger. The daily necessity of feeding thousands of mouths pushed the men in charge to write a lot about burning, butchering, farming, preserving, rationing, spoiling, and stealing. In this book I concentrate on the peoples for whom food seemed most important, and I confine its discussion primarily to land action, addressing the British Navy only when its movements affected those onshore—in large part because other authors have ably addressed this topic.³⁵

No Useless Mouth considers a wide range of peoples: Indians, including the Six Nations Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy (mostly Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee) peoples; free black colonists; enslaved Africans; rebel American Patriots; and Britons. At various points these groups separated into more factions, and it grows challenging to describe their identities. The Cherokees broke into blocs of neutral and Chickamauga Cherokees, and the Iroquois also divided. Hessians fought for the British, as did the Irish and Scottish who at times were considered British and at other times claimed more regional identities for themselves. Loyalties shifted, particularly for the self-liberated bondpeople who allied with Britons and Americans, and who fought more for freedom than they did for patriotism.

Historians have gone back and forth about proper terminology for indigenous peoples. In keeping with current accepted practices, this book uses Indian, Native American, Native, and indigenous peoples, but refers to specific tribes when the sources made it possible to identify them. No Useless Mouth uses Iroquois and Six Nations interchangeably because they were the most commonly utilized titles of the time, though these people would today refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee. In this book I employ the plural when talking about Indians: Creeks, rather than Creek, for example (and Creek, rather than Muskogee), because using the singular obscures the fact that tribes were often divided. Because Indians were so divided, I avoid using the word Loyalist to refer to them; many Indians offered military assistance not because they felt a sense of allegiance to non-Natives, but because doing so served their own interests. British-allied or American-allied are better phrases.³⁶

The book’s terminology follows similar conventions when discussing enslaved people. Although the term enslaved is preferable to the term slave because it grants enslaved peoples greater agency, switching between enslaved Africans, bondpeople, and slaves provides variability in the text. In this book I try to note when someone was free or not, and to provide a name when the documentary sources have revealed one. I do not use the word Loyalist to refer to self-liberated black people during the American Revolution, nor do I do so when discussing the time period when these former bondpeople lived in Nova Scotia. After the war, people became black Loyalists (which in this book is synonymous with Nova Scotians) as they emigrated out of Canada and forged new identities in Sierra Leone as British subjects.³⁷ This monograph does not use the term African American because the black Loyalists did not conceive of themselves as such; they tried to set themselves apart from Africans as well as from American colonists.

Before the American Revolution, people expected to encounter hunger; during the early modern period, crops failed, famine ensued, people died, and others survived. Black and Native American revolutionaries, by contrast, fought hunger, even if their successes were fleeting. The men and women whose actions are chronicled here were not hungry, useless mouths; they sometimes refused food, sometimes ignored hunger, sometimes created it, and sometimes defeated it. Their fights mattered because they were so different from those that preceded and followed them, and because U.S. and British officials misrepresented those battles. Those false histories created pernicious precedents. This book exposes them.

No Useless Mouth’s baseline for understanding hunger starts with conflicting information. This story begins before the Revolutionary War, when a man named George Croghan was trying to teach British officials about Native appetites. Native Americans did not require support from non-Natives to survive, but colonists and British officials depended a great deal on Indians. Two centuries of food diplomacy and victual warfare had taught Englishmen precious little about Indian methods of dealing with hungriness, and so their perceptions were riddled with misunderstandings that require unraveling.