Hill on Shannon, 'Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain'

Timothy J. Shannon. Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 360 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-97632-0.

Reviewed by James Hill (Mississippi State University)
Published on H-AmIndian (August, 2018)
Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52037

The Life and Times of Peter Williamson: Indian Performer, “Strolling Adventurer,” and Symbol of the Scottish Enlightenment

In Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain, Timothy J. Shannon presents a fascinating biography of Peter Williamson, a Scottish man who gained notoriety for his performances as a Delaware "Indian king" in late eighteenth-century Britain. Shannon uses Williamson's story to engage such wide-ranging topics as tropes of Indian performance in eighteenth-century Britain, the indentured servant trade to colonial America, the Scottish Enlightenment, Scotland's place in the early modern British Empire, the experiences of common soldiers during the Seven Years' War, and the dynamics of social and class divisions in eighteenth-century Britain. Therefore, the book has relevance for scholars of diverse interests for the way in which it captures a broad slice of life in the early modern Anglophone world.

Shannon organizes Williamson's life into two distinct chronological phases and uses these to structure the book by dividing it into two parts. Part 1, "American Travails," investigates Williamson's journey as a youth from his homeland of Scotland to colonial Pennsylvania as an indentured servant, soldier in the British army, and prisoner of war. The author structures this entire section as an investigation of a narrative Williamson published later in life about his experiences in America titled French and Indian Cruelty (1759). Shannon's prime concern is with attempting to separate fact from fiction, while also using Williamson's life as a means of studying how broader systems and networks functioned within the British Empire. Chapter 1 addresses Williamson's claim that merchants and magistrates in Aberdeen conspired to lure him into the empire's servant trade as a young boy. The author debunks Williamson's assertion that these authorities kidnapped him as a prepubescent child, contending that he likely entered indentured servitude as a willing adolescent. Still, Shannon does argue that Williamson made this choice within the constraints of dire economic circumstances. He was an orphan from impoverished Highland farm country, and his tale highlights how merchants and magistrates exploited desperate youth with few options by plying them with promises of prosperity in America.

Chapter 2 explores Williamson's life as a servant in America, concluding that Williamson's rags-to-riches story of rising from an indentured servant to a prosperous farmer is almost certainly false. So too does the author discredit Williamson's claim to be the victim of Indian captivity, the subject of chapter 3. Williamson asserted that Delaware raiders murdered his wife, destroyed his prosperous farm, and took him prisoner. The traveler would later use these claims as a backdrop for his Indian performance, to plead for charity, and to market his various business ventures, but Shannon finds that they were "without a doubt a bold-faced lie" (p. 56). Here, Shannon's detective work reveals not only that Williamson's timeline and description of his captivity fail to align with the documentary record but also that significant portions of his account share strong similarities with other captivity narratives published during the Seven Years' War. The author posits that Williamson's economic reality was much less exciting. Like many former servants, he likely completed his indenture with little property to speak of and few economic prospects.

Williamson's limited opportunities led him to enlist in the British army, and his career as a soldier and prisoner of war round out part 1 of Shannon's work, in chapters 4 and 5. Shannon argues that Williamson's time in the military was crucial in shaping his life by offering him the mobility that took him throughout various parts of North America and, eventually, back across the Atlantic to Britain. The author asserts that without Williamson's military service, "he very well may have spent the rest of his days as a hired hand in rural Pennsylvania" (p. 80). Shannon also finds this section of Williamson's narrative the most reliable, judging Williamson to have indeed served in the army during the early stages of the Seven Years' War, to have experienced the British army’s debacle at Oswego, and to have ended up a prisoner of the French army at Quebec, an experience that eventually led to his exchange and passage to Britain with the rest of his regiment.

Part 2, titled "The Interesting Tale," explores the latter half of Williamson's life, after he returned to Britain in a prisoner exchange. There, Williamson published an exaggerated account of his American adventures, engaged in multiple entrepreneurial ventures, embroiled himself in lawsuits with powerful merchants and magistrates, and gained fame and notoriety through his performances in mock Indian dress. Chapter 6 documents Williamson's life as a "strolling adventurer" who traveled throughout Britain after his discharge from the army, regaling audiences with fabricated or exaggerated tales of his North American adventures. It is during this period that Williamson devised the narrative and Indian performance that would come to define his life in both the historical imagination and that of his contemporaries. Williamson's performances initially served to market a published account of his adventures, titled French and Indian Cruelty, which embroiled its author in a series of legal disputes stretching decades. His claim that Aberdeen magistrates had been complicit in his supposed kidnapping as a child led to his banning from the city and the tearing of the offending passages from all copies of Williamson's narrative. Chapter 7 explores Williamson's (ultimately successful) lawsuit against the magistrates of Aberdeen and chapter 8 analyzes the much lengthier and somewhat less successful lawsuit that he waged against Aberdeen's merchant community. While Shannon at times gets bogged down in the details of Williamson's lawsuits, these chapters also offer an expertly written overview of the social, legal, and economic world of both Aberdeen and Williamson's adopted hometown of Edinburgh that should be of interest to scholars eager to learn more about eighteenth-century Scotland.

Shannon devotes the final chapters of the book to Williamson's entrepreneurial savvy, making a strong case for viewing Williamson as an unlikely symbol of the Scottish Enlightenment. The author argues that Williamson represented the living embodiment of what contemporary philosophers depicted in their writings: a figure who engaged in "a practical everyman's pursuit of improvement, rooted in commerce, conversation, and consumption" (p. 202). Williamson leveraged his fame into a more stable and socially respectable source of wealth, while also seeking to acquire a reputation as a refined and educated gentleman. The author describes and analyzes Williamson's various business ventures in Edinburgh, from coffeehouse proprietor, to bookseller, publisher, and penny post operator. Williamson frequently touted himself as a disseminator of knowledge, from the faux ethnographic details he conveyed in his performances, to the curiosities that he hung about in his coffee shop and the newspapers and city directories that he published. Shannon argues that Williamson's involvement in the printing trade best reflects how his commercial activities were just as much about social ambitions as economic ones. The printing "cabal" in Edinburgh stifled competition, and rivals to entrenched publishers struggled to stay afloat. Williamson only found profit in compiling a city directory and in printing playing cards and stationary, with his periodical, the Scots Spy, proving to be a short-lived money pit. Through it all, Shannon claims that Williamson sought to assume control over the narrative of his life. Gradually, he altered his story of Indian captivity into one of Indian adoption and kingship. Rather than accept his fate as a poor, orphaned Scottish boy caught up in the servant trade, Williamson hustled and achieved upward mobility in both a social and economic sense, no small feat then or now.

The skill with which Shannon captures the fascinating nature of Williamson's life proves to be the book's greatest strength, but also weakens its historiographical utility at times. In committing to medium of biography, Shannon often obscures the historiographical contributions and contexts of his work. He hints at the historiographical "payoff" of his work in the introduction, arguing that it allows scholars to "see the empire from the perspective of those people whose migration, labor, and military service ... made that empire possible" (pp. 5-6). In particular, he compares his work to Vincent Carretta’s biography of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man [2005]). Yet Shannon ignores more obvious historiographical parallels. His treatment of Williamson's life evokes other scholarly studies of famous performers and confidence men in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglophone world, such as J. Leitch Wright's William Augustus Bowles: Director General of the Creek Nation (1967) and Michael Oberg's recent biography of Mohawk performer Eleazer Williams (Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams [2015]). Like those figures, Williamson exploited his audience's interest in (and ignorance of) distant affairs by manipulating his identity through costume and theatrics. Although Shannon contextualizes Williamson's Indian performance within the contemporary British public's fascination with visiting Indian delegations in chapter 6, he might have strengthened this portion of his work by engaging with scholarly works on figures similar to Williamson.

A surprisingly wide-ranging book in terms of its thematic focus, Shannon's study has much to offer scholars of the Atlantic world, the early modern British Empire, and colonial America. Shannon's work must be commended for its use of microhistory to illuminate the social, cultural, intellectual, and economic world of the British Empire. The best biographies make frequent and clear connections to broader historical trends and developments, and Shannon excels at this throughout his work.

Citation: James Hill. Review of Shannon, Timothy J., Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain. H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews. August, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52037