====== Colonial-Native Relations - British Incitement Viewpoint ======

The British incitement viewpoint holds that indigenous violence against American colonists during the Revolutionary War era was not an autonomous or organic response to settler encroachment, but was systematically organized, funded, and directed by British imperial authorities as a deliberate military and political strategy. Holders of this view argue that the British Crown recruited, armed, supplied, and commanded native nations as proxy forces, and that without British instigation many of the most devastating frontier raids of the period would not have occurred on the scale or with the coordination they did. This viewpoint is held by a range of historians, particularly those working in the tradition of military and diplomatic history of the American founding era, as well as by descendants of frontier settlers and some conservative and libertarian commentators on the Revolution.

===== Core Arguments =====

**British strategic mobilization of native allies**

Proponents argue that British military commanders and Indian Department officials made a deliberate decision, beginning in 1775-1776, to employ native nations as an active arm of British military operations on the western and northern frontiers. They point to the role of figures such as Guy Johnson and John Butler, who coordinated Iroquois and other nations through the Indian Department in Canada, as evidence that indigenous raids were planned extensions of British strategy rather than spontaneous reactions to colonial pressure. The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779, ordered by George Washington precisely to destroy the Iroquois Confederacy's capacity to raid, is cited as confirmation that the Continental Congress understood native military activity as a British-directed threat.

**Armament and supply as evidence of direction**

Holders of this view emphasize that British forts - particularly Fort Niagara, Detroit, and Oswego - served as logistical bases from which native war parties were equipped, provisioned, and dispatched. They argue that the material dependency created by British supply chains gave crown officials substantial influence over when and where raids occurred. The presence of British rangers and officers, such as the Butler Rangers, operating alongside native forces in attacks like the Wyoming Valley massacre (1778) and the Cherry Valley massacre (1778) is taken as direct evidence of British command integration rather than mere alliance.

**Documentary record of incitement**

Advocates point to British correspondence, including letters from Governor Guy Carleton and Lord Germain, as evidence that London explicitly authorized the use of native forces against frontier settlements. The Declaration of Independence itself is cited in this context: its accusation that the king "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages" is read not as mere rhetoric but as a sincere political indictment reflecting a documented policy. Proponents note that contemporary colonists across the political spectrum understood British instigation as a factual grievance, not a propagandistic invention.

**Distinction between alliance and autonomous agency**

This viewpoint does not typically deny that native nations had their own interests and grievances. Rather, it argues that the scale, timing, and geographic targeting of frontier violence in 1777-1782 is explicable only when British direction is treated as a primary variable. Proponents contend that historians who emphasize native agency to the exclusion of British direction risk inadvertently obscuring a documented imperial policy and misattributing its consequences.

===== Historical Development of the Viewpoint =====

The British incitement interpretation is among the oldest continuous readings of the Revolutionary frontier. It was the dominant framing in early American historiography, reflected in works by contemporaries such as William Bradford and in later 19th-century historical syntheses. It receded somewhat during the 20th century as ethnohistory and indigenous-centered narratives gained prominence in academic history, shifting emphasis toward native decision-making and the long history of colonial land dispossession as explanatory frameworks.

A partial revival occurred among military historians and historians of the American founding in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, who argued that the pendulum had swung too far toward attributing all frontier conflict to settler-indigenous dynamics while underweighting the evidentiary record of British strategic planning. Scholars working in diplomatic and military history continued to treat British incitement as a central analytical category even as cultural and indigenous historians deprioritized it.

===== Notable Proponents =====

**Barbara Graymont** - Author of //The Iroquois in the American Revolution// (1972), Graymont provides a detailed account of British-Iroquois military coordination that, while sympathetic to Iroquois perspectives, documents the organizational role of the British Indian Department extensively.

**Max M. Mintz** - In //Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois// (1999), Mintz examines the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign and the British-native alliance it was designed to counter, treating British coordination as central to understanding the campaign's origins.

**Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin** - In //Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution// (2006), the authors document in detail the British mobilization of the Iroquois Confederacy's majority factions against American settlements, presenting the Indian Department's role as thoroughly documented and militarily decisive.

**John Ferling** - In various works on the Revolutionary War, Ferling addresses British frontier strategy as an integrated component of crown military planning, treating native raids as part of a deliberate two-front pressure campaign against the Continental cause.

===== Internal Debates =====

Proponents of the British incitement viewpoint disagree among themselves on several questions.

**Degree of native autonomy within the alliance**: Some holders of this view acknowledge substantial native agency in deciding whether and how to participate in British-directed operations, while others emphasize the degree to which material dependency and British organizational capacity effectively determined outcomes. The question of how much weight to assign to indigenous decision-making versus British strategic direction is genuinely contested within this interpretive tradition.

**Moral framing**: Some proponents draw sharp moral conclusions from the incitement argument - holding that British policy bore primary responsibility for frontier atrocities - while others resist moralizing the historical analysis and focus on causal explanation. There is also disagreement about whether the incitement framework should inform contemporary assessments of the Revolutionary War's legitimacy or remain purely a historical-analytical claim.

**Scope of the argument**: Some advocates apply the incitement framework primarily to the 1777-1783 period of active Revolutionary War operations, while others extend it backward to argue that British imperial policy had systematically cultivated native military dependence since at least the Seven Years' War, making the Revolutionary-era mobilization the culmination of a longer imperial strategy.

===== Related Pages =====

  * [[colonial-native-relations|Colonial-Native Relations]] - Main topic overview
  * [[colonial-native-relations-revolutionary-war-debate|Colonial-Native Relations in the Revolutionary War - Debate]]
  * [[colonial-native-relations-native-agency-viewpoint|Colonial-Native Relations - Native Agency Viewpoint]]
  * [[colonial-native-relations-settler-colonialism-viewpoint|Colonial-Native Relations - Settler Colonialism Viewpoint]]
  * [[revolutionary-war-history|Revolutionary War - History]]
  * [[sullivan-clinton-campaign-history|Sullivan-Clinton Campaign - History]]
  * [[iroquois-confederacy-history|Iroquois Confederacy - History]]

===== Footnotes =====

  - Graymont, Barbara. //The Iroquois in the American Revolution//. Syracuse University Press, 1972.
  - Mintz, Max M. //Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois//. New York University Press, 1999.
  - Glatthaar, Joseph T., and James Kirby Martin. //Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution//. Hill and Wang, 2006.
  - Fischer, Joseph R. //A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July-September 1779//. University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
  - Calloway, Colin G. //The American Revolution in Indian Country//. Cambridge University Press, 1995. (Calloway emphasizes native agency but documents British logistical and organizational roles extensively.)
  - Ferling, John. //Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence//. Oxford University Press, 2007.
  - Taylor, Alan. //The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution//. Knopf, 2006.
  - Jefferson, Thomas, et al. Declaration of Independence, 1776. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
  - Kelsay, Isabel Thompson. //Joseph Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds//. Syracuse University Press, 1984.