History: Fintan O'Toole has emerged as one of Ireland's pre-eminent persons of letters, a man of astonishing versatility. In Sir William Johnson, the subject of his latest book, even O'Toole may have met his match. Indeed, the Irish-born British official in America was by anyone's reckoning one of the most intriguing men of the 18th-century Atlantic world, writes Patrick Griffin
Born in Meath to a Jacobite family descended from the O'Neills, Johnson migrated to America as a young man to oversee the lands of his famous uncle, Sir Peter Warren. In America, he became a military hero, a British superintendent of Indian affairs, and a wealthy landed gentleman. Like O'Toole, Johnson was a man of immense talent and boundless energy. He carved out multiple identities, styling himself an Irishman, a Briton, an American, and a New Yorker. On the eve of his departure, he converted to the established church but retained a Catholic identity, all the while cultivating a careful anti-religiosity. In some ways, he also considered himself an Indian, a member of one of the most important groups of the eastern woodlands, the Iroquois. He worked as a frontier diplomat, military commander, and fur trader.
He loved good company, music, languages, and science. Finally, even by 18th-century standards, he enjoyed the reputation of a ladies' man.
O'Toole has written the story of this well-known figure to make a larger point. "The big issue for people around the world," he argues, "is the process of globalization," a "fancy name for Americanisation". In this book, he has aimed to deconstruct the myths surrounding America and its defining tropes of the conquest of lands and peoples, as well as the victory of civility over savagery. Such ideas drove American expansion and, as O'Toole suggests, animate American attitudes to the wider world today. In Johnson, O'Toole has found what he considers the perfect vehicle with which to challenge these myths. Johnson's Irish background, O'Toole contends, prepared him to deal with Indians sympathetically, to embrace what many would consider their enlightened views on the market, sexual relations, and human interaction. The Irish in America - at least during Johnson's time - "were liminal creatures whose natural habitat was ambiguity". According to O'Toole, Johnson bridled at the attitudes of "lunatic enthusiasts", those who tended to see the world in stark, irreconcilable terms, people like the Puritans of New England or the so-called "Scotch-Irish" immigrants. Johnson, therefore, fashioned himself the benign British imperial official, the exiled yet cosmopolitan Gaelic landlord, and the exotic Mohawk sachem, taking the best elements of each guise, and blending in protean fashion what we would consider conflicting or contradictory personae. In a word, he epitomized "tolerance". In doing so, he became an exemplar of what we would call a "multicultural" identity, allowing him to champion a "careful, respectful and culturally sensitive approach" to Indians. Against what we know would happen to Indians in the years after the Seven Years' War - decades of murder and displacement at the hands of Americans - Johnson stands as a witness to the opportunity missed, the path not taken.
O'Toole's argument is provocative and his take on Johnson is fascinating. His Johnson emerges as a vital man, able to move between worlds, the ultimate cultural "go-between". O'Toole also has a solid grasp of the broader context, moving easily from the fields of Warrenstown to the longhouse in Onondaga - no mean feat. And he follows the fortunes of a mythic Johnson long after his death, when 19th-century American writers resurrected and reinvented him as an exemplar of a distinctively white American identity to speak to the frightening reality of what America had become. He has produced a book that is a great pleasure to read, and his argument about Johnson's multiculturalism is one we want to believe.
IF ONLY IT were so. In fact, Johnson arguably proved no more or no less open-minded than many others who moved through the same worlds he did. The German-speaking frontier diplomat Conrad Weiser, the Irish "king of the traders" George Croghan, Scot and fellow superintendent John Stuart, and of course the English Quaker William Penn - to name a few - proved every bit as culturally sensitive as Johnson. Moreover, explaining Johnson means understanding that first and foremost he was the consummate 18th-century man. "I am ambitious," is how he summed up what made him tick. He used friends and relied on patronage as well as any man in Britain, underscoring his ability to move up the ladder. He abandoned his Catholic faith, not because of its alleged superstitions, but for pragmatic reasons, a move that his father would lament for the rest of his days. Being British represented a choice, not a birthright. Even those born in Ireland of Catholic parents could rise - on paper at least - as high as their talents and connections would allow so long as they declared loyalty to the Crown and embraced - outwardly at least - Protestantism. No doubt, he formed lasting bonds with a number of men and women in Iroquoia and respected their traditions. But he did so while advancing the peace and stability of the British empire in America, as well as his own career. When these aims did not conflict, Johnson could inhabit two worlds.
Perhaps, as O'Toole argues, his Irish past allowed him to move between worlds more easily than most. The ability to do so, though, did not allow him to escape completely the hard realities that his world presented, tensions that would force him from time to time to abandon the middle ground that he had so studiously cultivated. And when push came to shove, pragmatic loyalty, which he demonstrated time and again in the service of ambition, trumped most considerations.
These tensions and realities begin to become evident near the end of White Savage. In a series of chapters that almost acts as a coda to the biography, O'Toole grapples with some uncomfortable truths about Johnson's life that would seem to challenge his argument. He concedes that Johnson did defraud Indians out of a great deal of land, most famously during the sordid negotiations of the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix that he masterminded. For O'Toole, though such manipulation seems out of character, it does not prove defining. Moreover, as O'Toole makes clear, Johnson owned slaves. O'Toole implies, as others have, that Johnson's experience of oppression in Ireland transformed him into an oppressor in the New World. "In truth," O'Toole writes, "the wounded pride of the Irish dispossessed often found a salve in the joy of dominating others."
More likely, Johnson could not escape the 18th-century Atlantic world, a place in time defined by dependence, patronage, and domination, when modern notions of human relationships - some liberating, others terrifying - and modern political and economic systems were taking shape. It is on the edge between two temporal worlds that Johnson existed, making him so much like us and so different. As he straddled the early modern and the modern, he also stood at the cultural intersection of the centre and the margins of an Atlantic world far different than our own, yet tantalizingly similar.
The truth and attraction of Johnson, as O'Toole understands, lie in his liminality, but perhaps not entirely in ways O'Toole would lead us to believe. Johnson did not condemn Indians as an irredeemably savage "race". Few did, however, in the years before Pontiac's War. Nor did he fully embrace Indian culture. As a rule, precious few "go-betweens" did so. Rather, he saw Indians as redeemable savages and also as fully human. After all, for Johnson as for most early moderns, culture, notrace, mattered in determining human capacity and potential.
In America's pre-revolutionary years, therefore, people had the cultural space to live on the margins, to move between worlds and create middle grounds between them. And Johnson's ambition and shrewd political sense made him especially adept at doing so. After the American Revolution, that would no longer be possible. Johnson, therefore, appears as an elusive character, living on cultural, temporal, and geographic cusps, on the edge of two worlds, one in which there was a place for Indians and the other where there was not. Thus, in many ways his experience was not exceptional; rather, his now vanished world differed from ours in subtle but profound ways.
Patrick Griffin's latest book, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and the Revolutionary Frontier, will be published by Hill & Wang next year. Griffin teaches history at Ohio University and this year is Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway
White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America. by Fintan O'Toole, Faber and Faber, 402pp. £17.99