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7 - Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Richard White
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Summary

We know them now to be a very jealous people, and to have the highest notions of Liberty of any people on Earth, and a people, who will never Consider Consequences when they think their Liberty likely to be invaded, tho' it may End in their Ruin.

George Croghan to the Lords of Trade, 8 June 1764

The Six Nations, Western Indians &c. having never been conquered, Either by the English or French, nor subject to the Laws, consider themselves as a free people.

William Johnson to the Lords of Trade, 8 October 1764

The chief crazy enough to dream not so much of the abuse of a power he does not possess, as of the use of power, the chief who tries to act the chief, is abandoned.

Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State

The events of Pontiac's Rebellion are well known. In 1763, Indians from the Senecas west to the Illinois and from the Chippe was south to the Delawares attacked the recently occupied British posts in the pays d'en haut and, with the exceptions of Niagara, Detroit, and Fort Pitt, took them all. By the end of the year, British reinforcements raised the sieges of the surviving forts. They did not crush the rebellion but stymied it, and it slowed to an inconclusive halt. It was from these events that the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman created his History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac.

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The Middle Ground
Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815
 , pp. 269 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

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