Kathleen DuVal is the author of the new book Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. Her other books include The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She teaches history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Q: You write, “This book focuses on the Gulf Coast, from
Florida to Louisiana, because of the astounding number of competing interests
that came into conflict there.” What were some of the most important interests?
A: In the battles on the Gulf Coast, the British fought
against the Spanish empire, not against the rebelling American colonists. The
king of Spain hoped to take advantage of the American rebellion to attack
Britain and seize some of its North American colonies for the Spanish empire.
Besides the two main competitors, there were countless
smaller groups with their own reasons for fighting in the war or trying to stay
out of it.
There were European colonists who had come to North America
seeking land and prosperity from their homes in England, Scotland, Ireland,
Wales, France, Spain, the German provinces, and other parts of North America.
There were enslaved and free people of African descent. And
there were American Indian nations who were still in control of most of the
North American interior and did not want any Europeans to take possession of
their lands.
Q: You focus in the book on eight people. How did you select
them, and what do they represent?
A: Because the 18th-century Gulf Coast was complex and will
be unfamiliar to most readers, I follow eight people through the course of the
war and its aftermath.
I chose people who represent groups who were important in
the war on the Gulf Coast but who also have interesting individual stories and
who left enough primary sources in the historical record so I can know quite a
bit about their lives.
They include the Chickasaw leader Payamataha, the Creek and
Scottish diplomat Alexander McGillivray, the Irish Protestant merchant Oliver
Pollock, the Irish Catholic Margaret O’Brien, the Scottish plantation owners
James and Isabella Bruce, the enslaved man called Petit Jean, and the Acadian
refugee and soldier Amand Broussard.
Q: How did you conduct your research for this book, and was
there anything that particularly surprised you?
A: Most of my research was in the colonial archives of Spain
and Britain as well as in the manuscripts collections of the Library of
Congress.
Fortunately for historians, wars create a lot of paperwork,
and we can learn about people who might not have appeared in peacetime
archives.
For example, Petit Jean served as a spy and courier for
Spanish military officers, who wrote about him in their correspondence with one
another.
Most enslaved people appear in historical documents only as
numbers and perhaps names and ages. I would never have learned about Petit Jean
if he hadn’t become involved in the war. More importantly for him, he gained
his freedom because of his wartime service.
Q: Why did you pick “Independence Lost” as your book’s
title?
A: We tend to think of American independence as an
unequivocally good thing for everyone involved (except, I suppose, for King
George).
My book tells the stories of people who didn’t celebrate
American independence. Many of them fought on the opposite side.
Whichever side they chose, they fought not because they
loved the British or the Americans but for their own independence every bit as
much as the minutemen in Massachusetts fought for theirs.
Many of these people, most obviously American Indians, lost
independence as a result of the American victory in the Revolution.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have become fascinated with the Spanish general and
governor of Louisiana Bernardo de Gálvez, who led the Spanish forces to victory
at the battles of Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola.
I am starting to work on a biography of him, perhaps a dual
biography of him and his wife, Marie Felice de St. Maxent, who was a French
Louisianan. They were sort of a “power couple” of the 18th century.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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