Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

Abstract

Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. By Kathleen DuVal. (New York: Random House, 2015. Pp. xxvi, 435. Illustrations, maps, acknowledgments, notes, index. $28.00.)In this fascinating book, Kathleen DuVal uses the history of the Gulf Coast to forge a new interpretation of the American Revolution. Rather than ending empire and creating independence, DuVal's revolution ended interdependence and created a new North American empire. Though the region is often forgotten or elided in narratives of the Revolutionary War, the violence that began in 1775 nonetheless remade the map of the continent's southern coast. In addition, it upended the lives of the Indians, slaves, and colonists who uneasily shared the region. DuVal selects from this diverse crowd eight individuals whose lives she follows across time, allowing her to paint a rich picture of the complex societies that stretched from western Georgia to Louisiana. Foregrounding these men and women lets her demonstrate that the Revolution ended complicated patterns of interdependence within and among Gulf Coast communities, paving the way for an independent "empire of liberty" that "refused to share the continent" with others (p. xxiv).The life stories of these eight enable DuVal to deftly explain the complicated regional geopolitical relationships that had developed during the eighteenth century. Payamataha, a Chickasaw diplomat, responded to the devastation of the Seven Years' War by choosing peace. By the 1770s, his people began to reap the rewards of having become "more interdependent" with their British, Spanish, and Indian neighbors, just as the Patriot movement threatened those connections. Alexander McGillivray provides another view from Indian country. This member of the Creek Wind clan and son of a Scottish highlander grew enraged at the tactics of rebellious Georgians and threw in his lot with the British, demonstrating the personal interactions that shaped the choices of native peoples adjacent to the expanding white settlements of the East Coast. A pair of married Scots (James Bruce and Isabella Chrystie) give DuVal a chance to delve into the interests and loyalties of people in the new and growing British West Florida settlements. Petit Jean, an enslaved cattle driver in Mobile, lived under the French, British, and Spanish empires and used the upheaval of war to establish his own and his wife's freedom. Louisiana's complicated position, as a French-turned-Spanish colony that not only had multiple legal and illegal trading ties to British outposts, but also lay on the edge of several powerful indigenous polities, is illustrated through the lives of three people: a husband and wife team of Irish colonials, Oliver Pollock and Margaret O'Brien, and an Acadian exile named Amand Broussard, all of whom had plenty of reasons to loathe the British empire. …