Book Review : Civil War in America: The First One

God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War by Bil Gilbert (Atheneum: $21.95, 356 pages)

On July 4, 1776, two Declarations of Independence were proclaimed by the peoples of North America. The more familiar one was signed by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia. The other was uttered, on approximately the same day, by a Shawnee chief called Cornstalk at a war council on the Tennessee River near Muscle Shoals:

“It is better for red men to die like warriors than to diminish away by inches,” the chief said to the gathered tribes.

“Now is the time to begin.”

The Shawnee war chief was calling for an alliance of native tribes to make war on the white men who had been encroaching on tribal lands ever since they first landed in what they now called America.

Although Cornstalk himself was treacherously murdered, the war cry was later taken up in even more heroic tones by the legendary Shawnee chief called Tecumseh--or Tekamthi, according to proper Shawnee usage.

Natives and Newcomers

According to Bil Gilbert’s superb biography of Tekamthi, the long struggle between the natives and the newcomers was nothing less than an American civil war, a conflict that raged for 50 years and ended only with the battle at Tippecanoe in 1811.

Tekamthi is barely mentioned in the first one-third of Gilbert’s dense historical narrative. The author gives us a detailed, authoritative and thoroughly fascinating account of Indian life and lore, religion and politics--everything from Shawnee creation myths to the purely Machiavellian diplomacy of the Iroquois, from rites of sexual initiation to methods of torture practiced by both Indians and white men.

By the time Tekamthi takes the stage, we have been given a short course in a neglected and forgotten subtext of American history.

But Tekamthi, a “red resistance leader” whose life was devoted to the dream of uniting the native tribes of North America and making a stand against the white nation, is the real hero of “God Gave Us This Country.”

Gilbert points out that Tecumseh was the King Arthur of the New World--an almost mythical figure whose historical exploits have been embroidered with rich and astounding legend.

“To get at what was remarkable, (the early historians and biographers) turned to fanciful analogies, apocryphal anecdotes, and fictions,” Gilbert explains. “Tekamthi could see in the darkest nights, cause earthquakes, was a British general and such a noble savage that a Scotch-Irish frontiersman was willing for him to marry his beautiful daughter.”

Corrupted Record

Gilbert, a careful and accomplished historian, warns us that the historical record is too flimsy--and, in many cases, too corrupted by intentional myth makers of the 19th Century--to justify many of the most romantic and exotic stories. But he tells them anyway. And he points out that myth was at the heart of the crusade undertaken by Tekamthi, and his brother, a seer and prophet whose Indian name translates as “The Open Door.” These two charismatic men preached and propagandized among their own peoples, but their message was also intended for their enemies:

“There were enough rumors . . . about the purposes of Tekamthi to convince many frontier whites that the red resistance movement was already menacing and was bound to become more so,” Gilbert explains. “For five years he sparred skillfully with American officials while threatening war. But he kept the peace by creating a balance of terror. Not until the bitter end, when all their hopes had failed, did he call out the warriors for a racial jihad.”

Gilbert is a deliberate myth-breaker and a practicing ironist. For example, he delights in pointing out some of the fallacies behind our most cherished frontier legends.

“The most pervasive myth is that the nature of Americans is such that at a moment’s notice they can take up a long rifle or its equivalent--providing subversive bureaucrats have not denied them the right to bear arms--and like their pioneer forebears rather easily whip anybody in the world,” he writes. “The facts are contrary. . . . Americans from the time of these first frontier campaigns have shown little aptitude for free-form, guerrilla-type wars and have regularly been humbled by improbable people who do.”

The Long Struggle

The Shawnees, under the leadership of Tekamthi, were among these “improbable people” who fought so well against such an imposing enemy. The long struggle between the Indian warriors and the generals who were sent by Washington, Jefferson and Madison to campaign against them--including “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and William Henry Harrison, the future President--is an important but neglected aspect of American military history, and something of an epic in itself.

But Gilbert points out that the native peoples of North America were doomed by the vast numbers, the fantastic wealth, the technological sophistication and the sheer will of the American nation in its westward expansion. The Indians stood in the way of one of the earliest and grandest real-estate booms in American history; they were outmatched by the powerful land speculators who controlled governments and armies, and outnumbered by the settlers whose hunger for land was all-consuming. In the end, the story of Tekamthi and the “first American Civil War” is a profound national tragedy.

By one of those odd coincidences of the publishing industry, a novel based on the life of Tekamthi has also just been published: “Panther in the Sky” by James Alexander Thom.

“Readers who have some knowledge of Tecumseh (Tekamthi),” wrote Dee Brown in The Times Book Review two weeks ago, “may wonder how a novel based upon his life could improve upon any good factual biography.”

After reading “God Gave Us This Country,” I wondered the same thing. Gilbert’s book is not merely a “good factual biography”--it is a brilliant one. And, as Brown suggests, the story he tells surpasses mere legend.