The Morality Of Joseph Brant During The Revolutionary War

Isabel Kelsay published her book, Joseph Brant, sixty years after Siles published his book, and her neo-progressive interpretation of frontier warfare during the Revolutionary War is indicative of this leap forward in time. When describing the morality of the Native American fighter compared to that of the American fighter, Kelsay provides the equal treatment that Siles could not. To be clear, Kelsay's work isn’t free of bias, for it is surely there, but her admiration for Joseph Brant, who she depicts as a tragic figure of history misunderstood by the contemporaries of his time, never reaches a level of inappropriateness similar to Siles’ admiration for the frontiersman. Rather she provides a full picture into the life of Joseph Brant: the
In addition, Klooster makes notice of the fact that the Native Americans, especially those belonging to the Six Nations, were put in between a rock and a hard place, lured by both sides to join their war efforts, and persecuted for doing regardless of what side they joined. Meanwhile, neutrality seemed near impossible, as the Native Americans could not risk losing their trade with either the Americans or the British, and, therefore, had to commit to an alliance with one of the powers, or risk starvation.(Klooster, pg.78) Overall, Klooster, when discussing the motives of both the
Klooster is neither judgemental nor attached to any one historic figure, he simply sees the American Revolution and the frontier war that existed within it through the eyes of the world. Klooster was born in the Netherlands in 1962, and was taught about the American Revolution from the point of view of Europeans. As such, he was removed from the racism that could be found in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and so too was he removed from the patriotism that some American historians attached with certain characters of the war. He felt neither an obligation to defend nor criticize either the Native Americans or the Americans who fought each other in the frontier.(Klooster, pg.vii) Moreover, Klooster even states that his intentions were not to fully explore each of the four revolutions he writes about in his book, but to analyze four aspects that tied them all together: 1) how “they cannot be understood outside the realm of international politics,” 2) none of them were foreordained, 3) each of them contained within them a civil war, and 4) none of them aimed at establishing a democracy.(Klooster, pg.2) As such, Klooster refrains from touching on the frontier war any more than he has too, any more than it pertains to his analysis of the American Revolution, for his focus lied