North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox (review)

Reviewed by: North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox Paul W. Mapp North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. By Jeffers Lennox. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022. 363 pages. Cloth, ebook. Despite the best efforts of recent and not-so-recent historians, it remains a fair bet that most citizens of the United States probably think of the American revolutionary era as a matter largely concerned with the thirteen colonies between Massachusetts and Georgia and with the republic they became. This may result less from provincialism than from overstuffed curricula. Even the best-intentioned historians, valiantly trying to include Reconstruction in the first half of the U.S. history survey or prudently trying not to throw too much complexity at floundering undergraduates, may find themselves ignoring Nova Scotia and the Saint Lawrence Valley in favor of Boston and Philadelphia. Citizens of Canada are, I suspect, less likely to see North American history in quite so compartmentalized a fashion. They are also more likely to recognize how much of post-1783 North America remained part of the British Empire and how much more might have become part of it, and more likely to recall how many Native peoples were allies of the French and British Empires before they became "domestic dependent nations" of the United States.1 Jeffers Lennox's North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution is an antidote to the tendency to see U.S. history as separate from that of the empires and territories to which it was thoroughly connected or as distinct from the histories of Indigenous peoples and homelands on both sides of what is now the Canadian border. Focusing on the period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the War of 1812, Lennox offers a precise, lucid, abundantly documented, and judiciously selected narrative of relations among the Euro-American and Indigenous peoples in what became the United States and Canada, as well as a meditation on how the British and Indigenous presence in Canada and its hinterlands shaped the development and identity of the United States. North of America offers a good starting point for readers interested in an overview of or a foundation for research into late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century U.S.-Canadian history. The book will fit nicely on a shelf alongside other recent distinguished works with comparably wide-ranging approaches to the period such as Lawrence B. A. Hatter's Citizens of Convenience, Caitlin Fitz's Our Sister Republics, Kathleen [End Page 202] DuVal's Independence Lost, Claudio Saunt's West of the Revolution, and Alan Taylor's numerous volumes.2 Lennox views the American Revolution and the early republic within a continental and multinational frame encompassing the lands north of the United States that comprise modern Canada, as well as territories from the Appalachians to the Pacific that were connected to the French or British Empires but that ended up as part of the United States. He examines how citizens of the revolutionary and early republican United States viewed their Indigenous, Franco-American, and loyal British American neighbors, as well as how peoples of the United States defined their identities and strategies in response to threats from and opportunities in greater Canada. As he explains, "the loyal British provinces were instrumental in the creation of the United States and the character of its citizens" (17). Lennox develops this argument about Canada making the United States in seven chronologically ordered chapters. Three of them treat American revolutionary topics such as the 1775 patriot expedition against Quebec, the divided loyalties of the Indigenous and Anglo-American inhabitants of Nova Scotia, and the U.S. desire to acquire Canada in the treaties that ended the war. Three others analyze Canada's place among the challenges facing the young United States after the ratification of the Constitution. Lennox examines, for example, U.S. officials' realization that rather than treating Native peoples as negligible hindrances to western expansion, they would often have to negotiate with Ohio Valley peoples, as their...

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