No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution by Rachel B. Herrmann

Reviewed by: No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution by Rachel B. Herrmann Lauren Lyons (bio) No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution By Rachel B. Herrmann. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 308 pages, 6" × 9", 5 b&w illus. $27.95 paperback, open access e-book. Rachel B. Herrmann's No Useless Mouth explores perceptions of hunger in the years preceding, during, and after the American Revolution. She provides us with a new understanding of hunger and power, specifically the power of Native Americans and the formerly enslaved. Herrmann pushes back against the traditional idea that the Revolutionary era was a time of declining power for both populations. She begins with a geographic focus on the United States while also taking an Atlantic approach to include experiences of hunger in Canadian Nova Scotia and African Sierra Leone. Herrmann "[takes] a long view of the revolutionary period" (5) beginning with the Seven Years' War and concluding with the 1810s to better incorporate the experiences of these groups. [End Page 414] Hermann argues that Native Americans actually gained power throughout the war due to conflicting white understandings of Native hunger and traditions. After the Revolution, Native Americans began to lose this power, and state and federal governments gained the upper hand. Herrmann has a different understanding of Black hunger. Her analysis covers the experiences of freemen, formerly enslaved, and the enslaved. These groups started out in a very limited position and gained a small amount of power due to the limited freedom of movement granted by the Dunmore Proclamation. Following the war, Black Loyalists who migrated to Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia experienced an initial increase in power, acquiring control over food prices and production, but they soon lost that power to government oversight and legislation. Herrmann divides her book into three parts; Power Rising, Power in Flux, and Power Waning. These sections track changes in power and the characteristics of hunger practices that accompanied these transitions. To better follow the power dynamics, she introduces readers to three behaviors: food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism. Food diplomacy is "the sharing of or collective abstention from [food] … to create or maintain alliances" (9). Both the British and the American military strategically provided food to Native Americans to cement military aid. Victual warfare "entails stealing, withholding, or destroying grain or animals … to create hunger, instability, and chaos" (10). The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign is a key example of victual warfare. The final behavior is victual imperialism, or "the use of hunger prevention policies … to seize land or to disrupt and transform trade" (10). To illustrate this behavior Herrmann includes information about federal land grabs and price fixing, particularly in Sierra Leone. Those interested in New York history will find chapter 2 the most valuable. This chapter focuses primarily on British and American relationships with the Iroquois, particularly in relation to the destructive Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. Herrmann examines the consequences of the campaign on British forts. Displaced Iroquois sought refuge with British allies and expected to be fed by the British. The risk of not providing refuge was the loss of their Native allies, so the British complied with this expectation. The Iroquois were thus able to increase the food aid they received and the power they held in the sphere of food diplomacy. The book is full of other New York–centric contributions, including from the Genesee, Hudson, and Mohawk Valleys, as well as from Niagara, New York City, and the North Country. Herrmann opens with, and frequently revisits, an account of the Seneca leader, Cornplanter, being told a false history of Native hunger and European success by Timothy Pickering while in New York. What is most impressive about this work is Herrmann's ability to utilize the available archives to tell the story of those who historically have been left out. She masterfully puts Native American and enslaved men and women front and center by reading between the lines of the archival records. She acknowledges that "times of confusion were difficult times to preserve accurate records of the past" (85), particularly when it comes to the demographic this book focuses on...

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