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 Melissane Parm Schrems (bio) North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. By Jeffers Lennox. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 368 pages. $35.00 hardcover. In North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution, Jeffers Lennox contends that to understand the United States and its people, students of history must include the study of the Indigenous homelands and the British Provinces that later became Canada and how the American failure to get Canada to join them against Great Britain informed both the progress of the American Revolution and the creation of the United States. He supports his thesis using two related arguments: (1) the American Revolution was not exclusively American; and (2) the early national period was not a national period but a regional one (17). Just as historians have lengthened the American Revolutionary timeline to include the periods before 1775 and after 1783, Jeffers expands the Revolution's geographic focus to include Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Labrador, and the western expanse beyond settler towns and cities, thus widening the geography of the foundational event.1 Drawing on primary document collections, journal articles, and monographs, and defining the long American Revolution from the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763 to the Canadian Indian Act of 1876, Lennox adds to an ethnically and geographically more inclusive understanding of the American Revolution by examining the political, cultural, economic, and religious dimensions of relationships between Indigenous nations, the United States, and Canada. While New York City and New York State feature prominently in this informative, enjoyable, and at times surprising read, Lennox focuses much of his attention on the important relationship between the British North American colonies, those who rebelled and those who remained loyal. He uses each colonizing group's relationship with Indigenous nations, mostly the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)2 and Wabanaki Confederacies, to illustrate [End Page 436] the way the Canadian Provinces and the United States influenced each other in their geographic, economic, and political goals. There is much to appreciate about North of America. Lennox respects the agency and political goals of the English, French, and Native North Americans, never presenting Indigenous leaders and diplomats as naïve or willing to set their political goals aside for "worthier" European ones. He recognizes the importance of religion as an expression of Indigenous and European agency. For example, he uses Catholicism as a lens through which to understand the motives of French and Indigenous Catholics as well as Anti-Catholic New Englanders. Lennox shatters the July 4th myth in which American Patriot Founding Fathers gird their loins and, without any consideration for the future, step onto the world stage demanding independence from a tyrannical king. Lennox reveals more praiseworthy, determined, but cautious rebelling colonial leaders, very much aware of the unprecedented step they were taking by declaring war against England and desperately hoping for support from British Canadian (and Caribbean) colonies that did not come. Readers will be surprised at how important the acquisition of Quebec, Nova Scotia and Labrador were first to the rebelling colonies and later to the new republic. In chapter 4, "The National," Lennox introduces "late Patriots" as a counterbalance to historians' earlier discussions of late Loyalists. Late Loyalists (and Americans considering adopting late Loyalist status, Vermonters Ethan and Ira Allen, for instance) did not want to live under U.S. control, while late Patriots did not want to live under the political control of Great Britain in the Canadian Provinces. The social and political alternatives available just over the border in Canada provided a strong incentive for Americans not only to create a new nation but to create a nation that would be socially and politically attractive to many Americans. If the new nation hemorrhaged citizens, it could not hope to survive. Lennox reasons that the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 was as much a response to the Canadian option as it was a repudiation of the Articles of Confederation (134). Lennox presents evidence that at best may seem hypothetical...

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