Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Back country: The Seven Years' War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Maps, photos, 329 pps., $34.95.
A sense of pride is irresistible when the author's acknowledgements begin, "In particular I would like to thank the staff at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pennsylvania . . . . " Matthew Ward, a Scotsman who studied at the College of William and Mary and who is now a lecturer in history at the University of Dundee in Scotland, has expressed amazement at the unique resources in the Society relevant to what we ex-colonials call the French and Indian War. He uses these resources and many others from four countries and from holdings great and small in offering a timely survey of a crucial aspect of the seventeenth century's world war. The 250'" anniversary of this war is upon us, and Ward's retelling of the story appropriately places Cumberland County and Pennsylvania front and center in those dramatic events.
While the Civil War of the nineteenth century has evolved into the grand opera of American history, the French and Indian War yet retains its intimate and personal feel, an intense stripped-down conflict that can come down to whether you may plow your field without being scalped or whether you may hunt for your village with confidence that it won't be a smoking ruin when you return. Children were kidnapped, forts were merely well-built log houses, and armies were at most a few thousand men, often less, with their support train of women and supplies in the dark Appalachian woods. The scale of the international conflict is staggering, from the public square in Carlisle to the plains of Abraham in Quebec to the islands of the Caribbean, from northern Germany to India to the Philippines in the South China Sea. This scale, however, recedes into the backdrop painting when the small stage drama shows young Mary Jemison realizing in the flickering firelight that the fresh bloody scalps before her are of her mother and father. The big world is set aside for a time when the surviving Moravians of Gnadenhutten near Allentown decide to dig the graves for the Christian Indians alongside those for the whites. What do kings and prime ministers matter to the parents who sent their children off to Enoch Brown's schoolhouse near Greencastle and would never, ever welcome them home again? The war is here before you, events tell us, the war is among you- certainly an unsettling relevance for our time.
Matthew Ward evokes this personal nature of the war by establishing the sociology of the frontier. He knows the statistics, the demographics, and the class relationships that make up the colonists and the British troops that attempt to defend them. Wisely, he keeps his focus away from the French and the bewildering complexity of Indian politics and society, for this would overwhelm his desire to analyze what happens to a frontier culture when it is bent, broken, and remade by war. He offers an intriguing analysis of provincial forces that suggests why they were often at odds with the farmers and townspeople they were mustered to protect. He details the selfish and narrow-minded politics that strangled effective response to Indian raids and that meant men and women died in the fields and woods of Cumberland Valley. He is fair to the hapless yet stubborn peacemakers, often Quakers, who "unlike many other Pennsylvanians, . . . saw the Delawares not as ... savages but as rational human beings." Through these efforts, Ward makes the backcountry real and three-dimensional to the reader, which makes the mayhem all the more visceral, exciting, and dismaying.
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