George Washington's War on Native America (Native America: Yesterday and Today) Review

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George Washington's War on Native America (Native America: Yesterday and Today) ReviewThis Nativistic polemic centers on a fantasy that holds George Washington directly responsible for the 1782 murder of the Christian Delaware Indians at Gnadenhutten, Ohio. Dr. Mann frequently has repeated this canard without offering any proof. Now she presents a book-length defense of her "story," buttressed by indignant rhetoric and reiteration, with a jerry-built argument poorly dressed in a camouflage of footnotes and persiflage.
It is disturbing to see a contemporary Indian activist twist and select facts for political and psychological motives but, sadly, Mann's work is more vendetta than history, further tarnished by sloppy scholarship as she not only picks and chooses but distorts and misrepresents, denying or ignoring incontestable facts. Her more egregious factual errors are easily exposed by the documentary record, but heavy reliance on oral history is also suspect.
That Washington sent a "coded" order from Philadelphia to General Irvine ordering the Gnadenhutten expedition on the same day as the massacre is patently absurd. Neither Washington nor Irvine commanded the local militia conducting the raid, which was actually ordered by Washington County sheriff James Marshall--not Washington.
The footnotes vie with the text in terms of inaccuracy. Historian Charles Whittlesey is repeatedly called Charles Mutterly; Reverend Nathaniel Seiler is cited as the Reverend Nathaniel Bishop. Insisting Eurocentric concepts not be applied to Native American history, Mann nonetheless anachronistically uses "genocide" and "holocaust" interchangeably to describe the Gnadenhutten Massacre, even claiming that the term "holocaust" is of Iroquoian derivation!
Mann's Nativism is highlighted by sly claims that the Gnadenhutten martyrs' remains were buried in "a very traditional burial mound" by Delaware Indians returning after the massacre--utter fabrication and outrageous rewriting of history: the remains were still lying on the ground in 1797, not finally interred until 1799 by John Heckewelder and David Peter.
The immediate cause of the Gnadenhutten expedition (which Mann wrongly claims emanated from Fort Pitt) was the killing of Mrs. Wallace and her children, not a desire to steal Indian provisions. Mann's take on the Wallace murders is another example of her blasé distortion of history: "Finding illegal settlers in Ohio, the League had executed the trespassing family," she avers. The problem with this fantastical argument is that these Indian depredations were visited on settlers living EAST of the Ohio River, so that it was the Indians who were here violating the Fort Stanwix and Pittsburgh treaties!
Mann ignores Washington's statement to Congress, "I have only to observe that the late acts of cruelty... have not been committed under my direction or by any party of Continental troops nor have they been sanctioned by orders from me..." Washington correctly attributed the atrocities to "the approbation... if not by the authority of individual states... " He was revolted "at the idea of those wanton barbarities of which both sides have in too many instances been the unhappy witnesses."
Wallace (1958) wisely notes, "... there was a magnanimity exhibited towards their enemies by the principal participants in the Revolution," certainly true of Washington, whose mind and conscience were clear. Today he would have only contempt for anyone twisting historical facts for political ends. Racism at its most overt may range from hate crime to genocide, but it can be expressed more obliquely and insidiously, even in such academic subjects as history and literary criticism, as Mann's work attests.George Washington's War on Native America (Native America: Yesterday and Today) Overview

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