Wayne E. Lee

Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture Adaptation

This article explores and compares how two southeastern Native American societies responded to the challenge of defending their home territories against European incursions in the eighteenth century. As the Tuscaroras and the Cherokees learned more about their European opponents, they progressively adapted their defensive techniques. The Tuscaroras relied on increasingly elaborate fortifications, at first successfully, but ultimately leading to a disastrous defeat. The Cherokees, observers of the Tuscarora defeat, continued to use fortifications through the middle of the eighteenth century. As the European threat drew closer to their mountain homeland, however, they shifted to a strategy of dispersal, ambush, and attacks on supply trains.

EARLY AMERICAN WAYS OF WAR: A NEW RECONAISSANCE, 1600–1815

This review examines recent work on the ideology, culture, and socio-economic composition of early American militaries down to 1815. A fresh place has been given to the role of a Native American culture of war in influencing colonial warfare, although the exact nature of the synthesis of European and Indian traditions remains unclear. Social and economic investigations of the colonial militias and the Continental Army have revealed persistent patterns of expectations of contractual service and subsequent effective resistance when those conditions were not met. Taken together these works have brought us closer to a deeper understanding of the links between culture and military behaviour.

Using the Natives against the Natives: Indigenes as ‘Counterinsurgents’ in the British Atlantic, 1500–1800

Taylor and Francis FDEF_A_439465.sgm 10.1080/1 702430903392877 Defence Studies 470-2436 (pr nt)/1743-9698 (online) Original Article 2 1 & F ancis -2 0 0 00March-June 2010 Way eLee wle @unc.e u A key component of most modern counterinsurgency efforts (hereafter, COIN) is not merely to pacify or appease a local population, but to actively use the locals as part of the solution. 1 Large portions of the US military’s new COIN manual discuss the issues involved with developing what it calls ‘Host Nation’ forces. 2 In any circumstance this is a complex problem, but it is even more complex when the ‘host nation’ is an indigenous people (as opposed to, e.g., colonists) whose social structure and military system is markedly different from the occupier. This paper examines how English or British administrators dealt with this problem in the early modern era in the two contexts of 16th-century Gaelic Ireland and Native North America – not asking just about the use of indigenous peoples as allies, but more specifically as allies in a counterinsurgent role – as like against like. English colonists and later British administrators pushing outwards into the Atlantic basin between 1500 and 1800 never had sufficient people or money relative to the scope of their ambitions, and the ‘Military Revolution’ notwithstanding, European military systems provided only limited solutions. 3 Improvements in European military technology and technique brought tactical superiority in most open-field confrontations, with famous exceptions like Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone’s early victories in Ireland in the 1590s, the Jacobite Highlanders’ successes in 1745–46, and Major-General Edward Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela River (Pennsylvania) in 1755. Battlefield superiority, however, did not convey rapid strategic conquest capability over land in either Ireland or North America. In navigable waters western European superiority was more marked at both tactical and strategic levels. In the long run improved gunpowder weapons and drilled infantry proved adaptable to most