Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country

Ian K. Steele has again produced one of the most important and deeply researched works on eighteenth-century European-Indian relations. Setting All the Captives Free is by no means a narrow study of captivity. Rather, Steele places captives “at the center” of a broader narrative of the Seven Years’ War in America usually driven by battles, sieges, diplomacy, and influential leaders (3). As his title suggests, Steele investigates literally all the captives—French Canadian, Indian, and British—who were taken between 1745 and 1765 in the Allegheny Country, which he roughly defines as a two-hundred-mile radius from Pittsburgh. Of the 6,131 people killed or captured in those two decades, 3,343 were killed and 2,788 were captured (xiv). Interestingly, only one Native warrior was ever captured in arms by the British army (73). Steele’s prodigious 112-page appendix, with capsule sketches of the 1,709 captives known by name, is destined to become an indispensable reference tool for generations to come. Steele’s exhaustive research in archives and libraries is a tribute to the historian’s craft and will greatly inform recent scholarship on Native peoples during the Seven Years’ War as well as studies of captivity and warfare in early America.Steele explores captivity and the origins of the Seven Years’ War through the volatile world of the Warriors’ Road, along which Natives and colonists were constantly at risk of being killed or taken prisoner. Steele’s influential essay “Shawnee Origins of Their Seven Years’ War”—published in the Fall 2006 issue of this journal—is just one example of captives’ disproportionate roles in shaping larger events. When six Shawnee warriors were imprisoned by South Carolina authorities in 1753, Shawnees declared “perpetual war” against the British and struck back against Carolina settlers as early as 1754 (27). By that year, of course, British traders had been increasingly taken as prisoners by either Natives or French authorities. Steele also offers fresh perspectives on the contested surrender protocols surrounding events such as George Washington’s ambush of Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville’s French party and his own subsequent capitulation to the French at Fort Necessity.Throughout the work Steele strongly argues for the centrality of captive taking to Native American warfare. With precise numbers of those killed and captured, Steele demonstrates that eighteenth-century border warfare in the Allegheny Country was far less lethal than what historians have often “inaccurately described as total war” (73). He notes that 75 percent of the 2,400 Europeans killed between 1755 and 1759 in the Allegheny Country were soldiers—not colonial settlers—and that 70 percent of those soldiers were killed in three disastrous battles alone: Braddock’s Defeat, Grant’s Defeat, and La Belle Famille (140). Native warriors did not indiscriminately attack the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia frontiers, and Steele takes great pains to demonstrate the tactical considerations behind the warriors’ decisions. He notes that the Shawnees, whom colonists particularly vilified, actually took three times as many captives as they killed (115). One of Steele’s more compelling arguments is that the Natives’ “preoccupation” with captives was especially revealed during Pontiac’s War (1763–65), when Indian warriors were “unencumbered by French or Canadian influence” (5). Steele finds that warriors during Pontiac’s War were actually more likely to take captives than to kill settlers, in comparison to the 1755–59 pattern.Although Steele minimizes the “total war” characterization of Indian attacks along the Allegheny frontier, he does not diminish the emotional trauma and suffering that captives as well as their families endured. The third section traces the captives’ process of conversion to Native life. Revisiting the seminal work of James Axtell, Steele finds that one of every twenty-six Allegheny captives became a “white Indian,” a greater rate than among New England captives. Steele uniquely examines the painful, protracted, and often unsuccessful efforts by family members to find and reunite with kin who had been adopted into Native communities. Very few of them, however, were recovered through prisoner exchanges, ransom, or private diplomacy, as was far more common among New England or New York captives. Most captives in the Allegheny Country were returned through force, such as Colonel Henry Bouquet’s 1764 expedition to the Muskingum River, after which Ohio Indians were forced to return 278 adoptees. Such incidents revealed that Europeans viewed the return of captives as a condition of peace, while Natives experienced it as humiliation. Steele details the postwar lives of many survivors, speculating that they experienced something akin to posttraumatic stress disorder after their return and readjustment (354). The work concludes with a literary analysis of the principal captivity narratives concerning the Allegheny Country. In contrast to that genre’s popularity in New England, only three Allegheny narratives were ever published concerning the wars of the 1740s through the 1760s. Yet works such as Mary Jemison’s narrative, as Steele argues, “helped build a white nativist identity” and cemented “a peculiarly American preoccupation with personal freedom” (433).

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