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

During a July 1791 treaty negotiation, Timothy Pickering, a key figure in the development of early U.S. food policy, misremembered past instances of Native and non-Native hunger while giving a history lesson. At this meeting on the Tioga River (which ran between present-day Pennsylvania and New York), Pickering met a group of Senecas, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. When the white people came to this Island, the Indians lived chiefly by hunting and fishing, he explained to Cornplanter, one of the Iroquois negotiators. On this island of North America, the white people immediately began to till the ground, to grow corn, wheat, and other grain and to raise abundance of cattle, sheep and hogs. In the past, Pickering explained, the Indians continued to follow hunting and fishing, growing only a little corn. They were often in want of food, and exposed to great hardships.

Pickering met Cornplanter and the other Senecas in the midst of a fight against hunger that began before colonists arrived in North America and ended in the 1810s. In 1791 Pickering was a newcomer to Iroquois diplomacy. He had only been working as a negotiator for a year, and the learning curve had been steep. He started his job during a momentous shift in relations between Natives and non-Natives, when the United States, after a decade of weakness and uncertainty, was trying to gain the upper hand in its dealings with Indians. As a result, his speech to Cornplanter conveyed an inaccurate historical picture.

Cornplanter, for his part, likely knew that Pickering was misinterpreting the actions of seventeenth-century English colonists, who had taken a while to become farmers. Their domesticated animals had died on the ships that traveled to North America. They had spent their first months in Virginia searching for inedible commodities, and in Virginia and New England they had turned into useless mouths dependent on Indians for farmed vegetables, gathered berries, and hunted venison. Contrary to Pickerings claims, it was the English colonists, not the Indians, who had struggled to overcome hunger. It was odd for Pickering to make this speech to Native treaty participants, especially to one named Cornplanter, because the Iroquois had grown corn in abundance long before encountering non-Natives.

The Seneca negotiator sitting across from Pickering was known by several names. To Indians he was Gyantwahia or Kaythwahkeh, which translates approximately to where it is planted. To non-Natives he was Cornplanter, John OBail, John Abeel, or John Abiel. Corn production was intrinsic to the Iroquois past and present.

Yet Pickerings account minimized the history of Iroquois farming and thus erased systematic Indian hunger prevention. Pickering shared his tale because the U.S. government wanted the Iroquois to become farmers. Cornplanter, as his name suggests, could already farm, but he listened to this lesson on the benefits of agriculture because he was trying to maneuver to retain land in his dealings with the new United States.

Hungers important role in Pickerings false history should be unsurprising, considering that people had long reckoned with it for various environmental and man-made reasons. In the early modern period, cities under siege could expect to be starved out, and they suffered more quickly during times of crop failure or unanticipated changes in the weather. Famine resulted from extended periods of hunger and was evident in instances of actual deaths, food riots, high prices, property crime, and rising migration. During the eighteenth century most British people suffered from hunger, but not famine. In North America, some European observers perceived Native Americans as ravenous, while others thought them better able to deal with dearth. At the same time, slave masters deprived enslaved people of food because they hoped to keep them weak and compliant.

No Useless Mouth is a book about how Native Americans, non-Natives, and people of African descent experienced hunger before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War (17751783). It historicizes efforts to create, avoid, and withstand hungriness so as to better understand the moments in time when Native Americans and formerly enslaved peoples gained enough power to shape food policies of hunger prevention and creation, rather than just suffering from the ill effects of new initiatives that men like Pickering envisioned. This books exploration of the many different contexts of hunger during the era of the American Revolution uncovers how these Native and black revolutionaries acquired so much powerand why they ultimately lost it.

Enduring, ignoring, creating, and preventing hunger were all ways to exercise power during the American Revolution. Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy. In North America, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), Miami, and Shawnee Indians grew and destroyed foodstuffs during the Revolutionary War, which forced their British and American allies to hunger with them, and to furnish provisions that accommodated Native tastes. By the 1810s the United States had learned how to prevent Indian hunger, to weaponize food aid, and to deny Indians the power gained by enduring and ignoring scarcity.

Indians won leverage during the Revolutionary War itself. People of African descent gained some power by creating white hunger during the Revolutionary War, but more so as formerly enslaved communities, primarily after leaving the new United States and migrating to British colonies in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. At the end of the war, British officials in North America chose to transport formerly enslaved refugees to Nova Scotia. In the country that is now called Canada these black colonists were relatively powerless, but they witnessed white colonists use of food laws to assert authority. Once abolitionists in England turned their attention toward ending the transatlantic slave trade by founding a self-governing black antislavery colony in Sierra Leone, and relocated black colonists from Nova Scotia to Africa, former slaves won the right to fight hunger directly. But after white officials in Sierra Leone realized that colonists hunger-prevention efforts gave them too much freedom, black colonists lost their hunger-preventing rights. Black revolutionaries managed for a short time to challenge the power regimes in place during the late eighteenth century.

This book similarly challenges how we think about the American Revolution. Its title comes from a 1780 letter by General Frederick Haldimand, the governor of Quebec, at a time when Britains Indian allies were living through a refugee crisis in British forts. When Haldimand wrote that no useless Mouth, which can possibly be sent away could be allowed to remain at these strongholds, he hoped that only Native warriors would spend the winter with British soldiers. Indians tested this assumption that only Native fighters were useful by supplying their own communities and refusing and destroying their allies provisions, and they proved their usefulness again by fostering the spread of hunger among enemy soldiers and civilians alike. Like Haldimand, historians are accustomed to thinking about white colonists as an increasingly powerful group, Natives as increasingly weak, and enslaved people as individuals with relatively little power.

The Revolutionary War was fought just as much on Indian terms as it was on British and American ones, and Indians continued to drive U.S. food policies after the conflict. Famine-deterrence initiatives evolved through U.S. cooperation with Native Americans, and similar efforts emerged among formerly enslaved communities as black men and women moved out of the United States and across the ocean once the war concluded. All parties were at various times producers, consumers, and destroyers of food, which means that a study of hunger offers an opportunity to understand not only the big moments of power shifts in land cessions and trade negotiations, but also the smaller day-to-day activities that engendered them. In other words, hunger exposes the contingency of power relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.