Charles W. A. Prior is a professor of history at the University of Birmingham. He is the author and editor of several books, including Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America and A Confusion of Tongues: Britain’s Wars of Reformation, 1625–1642. His most recent book Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty, from Roanoke to the Republic was published by Nebraska in May.

Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia’s founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the contested relationship between the British imperial state and the colonies it established along the Atlantic Coast without addressing how sovereign Native nations shaped the colonial process through warfare, diplomacy, trade, peace-making, and treaty-making.

Treaty Ground offers historical depth to our understanding of how Native nations articulated Indigenous power within colonialism, cuts settler colonialism down to size, and expands contemporary understandings of the sovereign relationships between Native nations in the United States and Canada.

Our first work is expulsion of the Salvages to gaine
the free range of the country for increase of Cattle,
swine &c which will more then restore us, for it
is infinitely better to have no heathen among us,
who at best were but as thornes in our sides, then
to be at peace and league with them: this is a worke
of a continuall charge, and we unable to beare it, to
his Maties gracious bounty it must be referr’d

—Letter of Sir Francis Wyatt, governor of Virginia, 1621– 26, in WMQ 6, no. 2 (1926): 118

In his history of Virginia, published in 1722, the clerk of the House of Burgesses Robert Beverley remarked that relations between the first colonists and Indigenous nations were initially “fair and friendly” but that in time the Natives “gave great Proofs of their Deceitfulness.” Beverley was repeating a narrative pattern that was firmly established in colonial writing, an archive on which his text relied. According to the geographer Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1589, when the English moored at Secotan, they were “well entertained there of the savages.” But after a perceived theft, a party went ashore and “burnt, and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people being fleede.” Colonial writers characterized Natives as treacherous, practicing war in a barbarous and “skulking” manner. Yet as the English struggled to establish settlements within and among the precincts of powerful and cohesive polities of the Powhatans, Narragansetts, Susquehannocks, and Wampanoags, the nature of their laws, the basis of their claims to territory, and the use of their powers of war and treaty to establish rule in and over American space were all shaped by their interactions with Native nations.

Proximity to Indigenous power shaped a process of sovereign formation in which colonies adopted elements of state supremacy. In Virginia and New England, colonies acted as virtual states and established rules of local interaction and employed the powers of war, peace, and treaty to defend and hold their positions along the Atlantic coast. These powers were harnessed to drive state formation by extending settlement into the territory of Indigenous sovereigns and to secure the surrender of that sovereignty. Yet this process was not perfect: It did not erase Native claims to land, extinguish their diplomatic status, block their ability to confederate, or stop their movement through territory that colonies sought to demarcate as exclusively theirs. Instead, Native powers of war and peace affected how the English writers and officials defined the purposes of their colonial projects; determined how the English settled, worked, and went to war; influenced how they framed colonial law and institutions; impacted how they understood spaces of movement and separation; prompted the formation of a confederation of colonies; and led the imperial state—superintended by the Crown and directed by the Privy Council and the Council on Foreign Plantations—to intervene on a dozen occasions in colonial defense, governance, and law, thereby shaping the broader contours of imperial policy in America.

The political and legal theory of colonization was concerned with the creation of static and self-sufficient societies that took legal possession of bordered territory. Yet while the ideas that the colonists brought with them may have helped frame the moral ambitions of their projects and provide them with legally intelligible justifications, the reality of what they faced obliged them to shape ideas to circumstances. In the early stages of settlement, English movement was constrained by multiple international factors, from anti-Spanish sentiment in England, the interdictions of the French navy, to the Dutch strongholds in the Hudson littoral. In the coastal interior, Algonquian control of territory forced settlers to remain in fortified positions. Conflict prompted colonial leaders to refuse to trade or engage in diplomacy, and consequently, the English were prevented from moving in networks of Indigenous power. When agreements of peace were reached, violations of these agreements were addressed not by further negotiation but with punitive force. Colonists repeatedly attacked the strongest nodes of Native power: the leadership of the Powhatan Confederacy, the Pequot “fort” at Mystic, and the Wampanoag stronghold at Montaup. They also among Nations actively disrupted these nodes using punitive “treaties” that compelled the cession of land, the relocation of Native communities, and the “submission” of key leaders. For their part, Native nations waged wars that severed links between scattered colonial settlements, targeted roving traders who carried vital goods and information, and sapped the attention and resources of colonial governments. Metropolitan officials recognized the vulnerability of colonies and published proclamations, dispatched royal commissions, issued instructions through the Council on Foreign Plantations, framed comprehensive bodies of law, revoked colonial charters, and established a massive new Dominion of New England. Each intervention they made was intended to neutralize the effects of Indian war by limiting settlement, creating lines of separation, and constraining colonies’ ability to employ independent powers of war and treaty.