White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America

by Fintan O'Toole

Overview

William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Roman Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain's North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates. Serving as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy, he commanded British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755, and he created the first groups of "rangers," who fought like American Indians and led the way to the Patriots' victories in the Revolution.

As Fintan O'Toole's superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson's signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a "white savage." Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of American Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O'Toole's masterful use of the extraordinary documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and American Indian participants in Johnson's drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure's legendary career. It also suggests why Johnson's early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438427584
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	03/24/2009
Series:	Excelsior Editions
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,074,518
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Fintan O'Toole, columnist and drama critic for the Irish Times, is the author of many other books, including A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His work frequently appears in American magazines. He lives in Dublin.

Table of Contents

Preface
Maps

1. Tears, Throat, Heart

2. Spectres and Apparitions

3. Amphibians

4. ‘Most Onruly and Streperous’

5. An Outlandish Man

6. How the White Man Came to America

7. The Holy Well

8. Raw Head and Bloody Bones

9. The Power of Absence

10. Force, Motion and Equilibrium

11. The Late Emperor of Morocco

12. Master of Ceremonies

13. An Upstart of Yesterday

14. The Precarious Salvo of Applause

15. Unspeakable Perplexity

16. The Largest Pipe in America

17. Miss Molly

18. Rowing Against the Current

19. Sir William and His Myrmidons

20. Niagara Falls

21. Barbarians

22. Seeds Worth Sowing

23. ‘Intoxicated with Providential Success’

24. A Stop to Their Very Being

25. What the Great Turtle Said

26. Many Civil Things

27. An Imaginary Line

28. The Patriarch

29. Negroes’ Handcuffs

30. Irish Dreamtime

31. A Death Foretold

32. The End of the World

33. The Afterlife

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The narrative moves with the spirited pace that such a storied life deserves, but does not fall prey to the legend making found in other Johnson biographies. Because he has not attempted an exhaustive biography, O'Toole avoids exhausting the reader. He presents his tale in short, impressionistic chapters that move between Johnson's private and public lives." — H-Net Review (H-AmIndian)

"…O'Toole's prose pulls the reader along the journey of Johnson's life." — History

"O'Toole brings together great man history and real analytical rigor; this book should be a winner with academics and history hobbyists alike." — Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating account." — Bookli

"A biography that will enlighten specialists, especially those curious about the Irish roots of Johnson's comfort with split allegiances." — New York Times

From the Publisher

In the intriguing if flawed White Savage, Fintan O'Toole tracks Johnson's rise with a wealth of detail, much of it culled from his papers. Although he doesn't deliver on the overblown promise of his subtitle, O'Toole…gives us a finely nuanced portrait, always keeping Johnson's contradictions in view.
—The Washington Post

Matthew Price

At the center of drama critic O'Toole's new book is an Irishman who migrated to New York in the 1730s. William Johnson began to trade with nearby Indians and quickly became knowledgeable about and beloved by the Mohawks, who adopted him as a sachem. Johnson, who became a key figure in the coexistence between Mohawks and Europeans, emerges as charismatic, a tad vain and very libidinous. He took a paramour, a German servant girl named Catharine Weisenberg, with whom he had children and whom he may or may not have married. Before Catharine's death, Johnson took Mohawk lovers and fathered Mohawk children; after her death, he married an Indian woman, Molly Brant. O'Toole reads Johnson's 1774 death as a turning point in Anglo-Indian relations; within three years, the Mohawks were siding with Brits in the American Revolution. Johnson, O'Toole argues, embodied the colonists' fantasies about the Indians-i.e., that their barbarity could be civilized and diluted by contact with enlightened colonists. O'Toole (A Traitor's Kiss) brings together great man history and real analytical rigor; this book should be a winner with academics and history hobbyists alike. 8 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps, not seen by PW. Agent, Derek Johns of A.P. Watt. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In a masterly biography that reads like a novel, Irish literary and social critic O'Toole recounts the remarkable story-as exciting and suspenseful as it is historically significant-of America's first prominent political mediator and diplomat. After immigrating to New York in 1738, William Johnson rose to prominence as a landowner and a trader with neighboring Iroquois Indians, who embraced him as a friend and confidant. Hired as British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, he struggled throughout his life to promote peaceful relations between the British settlers and the American Indians. He was eventually named major general in the British army and, after recruiting Iroquois soldiers, achieved remarkable military success in the French and Indian War. But this is more than just an account of Johnson's copious political and military achievements; it also delves into the fascinating and surprising private life of a courageous, ambitious, intelligent, and compassionate public servant. This is a well-rounded and densely detailed biography worth reading and studying. Recommended for academic libraries.-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A displaced Irish Catholic dreams of home, but instead creates a Celtic homeland in the heart of Iroquois country. Building on recent studies of the Indian-white frontier (e.g., Shirley Christian's Before Lewis and Clark, 2004; and Jill Lepore's The Name of War, 1998) and the mixed society that formed in the margin between nations, Irish Times columnist O'Toole (A Traitor's Kiss, 1998, etc.) recounts the life of the soldier-adventurer William Johnson. The scion of a landowning family whose holdings had been badly reduced by the English conquest of Ireland, Johnson followed the example of his older cousin, a hero of the Royal Navy, and served the Crown, but always with qualifications, and always with one overarching imperative: to "get back the ancestral lands." Johnson found himself deep in the forests of northern New York, where, setting the stage for the French and Indian War, he negotiated alliances with the Iroquois nations and organized raids into French Canada. The war he and his rangers fought was much different from the stand-and-shoot model of European conflict. One young French officer, for instance, fought bravely but was killed when he asked for quarters; Johnson recorded that the young man's wounds were so bad that it was a mercy killing, but, writes O'Toole, "the pretence that killing him was an act of kindness does not alter the evident reality that his scalp was worth £10." So it was on the frontier, where ordinary laws did not apply and Johnson, in fact, was more or less free to set his own rules. And so he did, sometimes violating the directives of the Crown to his advantage. O'Toole capably recounts Johnson's achievements in making peace, however tenuous, on thefrontier, and making a refuge for displaced Catholic Scots and Irish-a place that would become an extraordinarily bloody battleground soon after Johnson's death, at the start of the Revolution. A welcome addition to the literature of the colonial frontier.

Kirkus Reviews