As a historical boardgamer, my greatest hope in trying out a new game is that it will reveal to me something about some other time or place that I did not already understand.  Harold Buchanan’s Liberty or Death does that for me, even on the should-be familiar topic of the American Revolution.  Let me tell you how so…

A Puzzle

In 1994, my wife and I took a wonderful driving vacation through the Empire State—wonderful for me, at least, as we endeavored to visit all New York’s colonial-era historical exhibits that we could reach.  Our last stop before the drive back south to Virginia was Newtown Battlefield.

Newtown in 1779 had been the site of the deciding battle of the Sullivan Expedition—a Continental Army campaign into Iroquois country with the objective of destroying the Iroquois Confederacy.  The Continentals won at Newtown and pressed ahead to burn or otherwise destroy all the Indian villages, crops, and other support for Indian life in their path.

From that 1994 visit on, the Sullivan Expedition had posed a puzzle for me.  The Revolutionary War in 1779 was still raging:  the British were undertaking major conventional offensives in the South, and Washington’s army in the North was faced off against a British army occupying New York City.  At that moment, Washington risks sending a major conventional force—not just local militiamen, but four brigades of regulars, artillery, logistics, and a general officer in charge—not against the massed British threat to his front, but rearward into the wilderness.  It would be the major northern offensive of the year. 

What’s going on here?  How does this decision by Washington square with the usual narrative of a heroic, desperate, and finally successful Patriot effort to build a regular army that could stand toe-to-toe and beat the British?  What is Washington doing, in the midst of the emergency of redcoat occupation, using his hard-won conventional capability for such a long-term objective as destroying the Iroquois Indians’ means of life?

The Solution

Liberty or Death illuminates the answer.  That answer can only be that Washington saw the Iroquois, and likely Native Americans beyond the frontier generally, as a power that must be dealt with, even destroyed, and promptly.  The answer must be that this power had the military means to affect the course of the current emergency, and so the success of the Revolution. 

That power, to be sure, was an amalgam of tribes or “nations”—as were the Colonies.  The Indians faced similar, interwoven incentives; and they fielded similar capabilities to pursue those incentives.  Those incentives and capabilities were highly consequential to the course of the War for American Independence.  The Indians were a faction, key to the War’s course and outcome.  (And so no wonder that the list of charges against the Crown in the Declaration of Independence included its interactions with “the merciless Indian Savages” of “our frontier”).

As my wife and I toured the New York “frontier” on that road trip, we read aloud historian Allan Eckert’s outstanding 1978 narrative of the Iroquois in the Revolutionary War, The Wilderness War.  Filtered by my preconceptions, the account struck me at the time as the charming tale of a sideshow.  But the complex and decisive interactions of Indian, Colonial, and Royal agendas are there, underneath the story of raids and reprisals. 

In Liberty or Death, these complex interactions come to life.  Play the game first as the Patriots, then as the Indian Faction, and the Revolution will look different to you.  Play the game as the British and feel the ambiguity of your alliance with the Iroquois.  If the Continentals venture off on a major expedition to crush your allies’ Villages, is that a good or a bad thing for your Regulars’ and Tories’ prospects against the Insurrection?

And the revealed complexity does not stop there.  Now Harold’s design throws in a French player, who might serve the French Crown’s interests before those of the Patriots.  How can this be?  Surely Continental and French operations by 1781 were as joint as they come?

Harold’s treatment of the French as another Faction in the War helped me reconcile its history with another familiar topic to me:  the “French and Indian War” that climaxed just a generation earlier.  The same French Crown that put its sons in harm’s way to help win Washington’s war in the Virginia of 1781 had not long before sent them to lead Indian war parties to scalp Virginian settlers.  Indeed, the main military opponent of the French on the Virginia frontier was none other than George Washington’s 1^st Virginia Regiment!

French military intervention in the Revolution, the decisive maneuvers of its land and sea forces, can hardly have been out of love for Virginians.  The Patriots and the French were joined by a common enemy, yes.  But such junctures in history make for overlapping, not identical interests.  What did the French want?  How did – or might have – those interests guided those maneuvers?  The famous story of the Yorktown campaign, the Battle of the Capes, and so on cannot alone show the answers.  We must step back and look at the interactions of the factions.  Harold’s design does so, and thereby provides us a hypothesis to address this remarkable turnabout in the role of French forces in the 13 Colonies.  In Liberty or Death, we get to play it out and judge for ourselves how well it comports and illuminates.

Author: Volko Ruhnke