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There is no more powerful and resonant foundation myth than the one that underpins the ideas that Americans have and are taught about themselves: that the young nation, throwing off the tyrannous chains of the old, proclaimed its freedom and its pristine future. But in the past few years, American scholars have been complicating the story of the American revolution and the decades that led up to it, writing about the loyalists who fought their countrymen for the right to remain subjects of George III, about the fates of slaves during and after the revolutionary war, and about the languages, cultures and shifting allegiances of the Indian nations who lived around and beyond the colonial settlements.

Popular historians are now joining the academics. Their work is controversial because it has the power to change the founding myth of the United States, and it is compelling because it paints a picture of an empire whose flexibility towards local cultures and religions and tolerance of miscegenation were lost as the project expanded, hardened and came under increasing government control. Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings, published next month, brilliantly re-creates the histories of runaway slaves in and after the American revolution. Fintan O’Toole’s White Savage, whose title and contents echo to some extent those of William Dalrymple’s recent White Mughals, tells the astonishing story of Sir William Johnson, a muscular, ruthless Irishman, born in 1719, who carved out huge estates around the town of Albany in the last decades before the American war.

O’Toole sees Johnson’s as, above all, an Irish life, albeit one lived in the service of Westminster and the British constitution. This enables him to make brilliant and suggestive connections between a man born in County Meath and the Iroquois among whom he lived. Johnson was a Catholic who abandoned his ancestral faith only when called by his Anglican uncle to make what he could of a large parcel of land outside Albany on the Mohawk r iver in upper New York. Johnson’s uncle didn’t want any hint of Catholicism to jeopardise his title to the land, but it was precisely Johnson’s familiarity and emotional bond with the sacred trees and wells, the rituals and the holy men of Irish Catholicism that gave him a sympathy with the same elements in Indian culture. Even as he cleared the forests and built up his land-holdings, which would eventually stretch to an astonishing 170,000 acres, Johnson was learning Indian customs and rituals. In the early 1740s, he was initiated into the Mohawk nation as a holy man with the name Warraghiyagey. Thereafter, he had three intertwined lives. First, he was a British subject and servant, commissioner for Indian affairs and a freelance general whose mixed army of Indians and Europeans helped drive the French out of Canada in the Seven Years’ war, ensuring that part of British America at least stayed overwhelmingly loyal to George III. Second, he was an honorary Indian who mediated between the Indians and the British, securing for the Iroquois confederacy favourable treaties. From 1759 until his death in 1774, he lived with a Mohawk, Molly Brant, with whom he had numerous children and created, through intermarriage, a large mixed-race, multi- lingual family that remained loyal in the American war, lost its patrimony and ended up in Canada. He was, finally, an imperialist adventurer, an “enthusiastic slave owner”, as O’Toole puts it, who always had his own interests at heart and didn’t hesitate to deal unscrupulously with Indians outside his own family to enlarge his land-holdings. Slaves cleared his land, carried his water, cooked his food and built his solid stone house, Johnson Hall. Among his business records, O’Toole finds the casual purchase, “ Negroes Handcuffs charg’d Boston Money 18/-”. Hero, adventurer, servant of the crown, Irishman, lover, brother and father of Indians — Johnson was all of these, and O’Toole compellingly tells the intertwined stories of these identities and grippingly makes us see how the world he created and inhabited was swept away by the American revolution.

This accomplished and supremely readable book commands our sympathy and evokes a regret for what might have been. But when, almost at its end, O’Toole explains Johnson’s slave-owning as an element in his own advancement and in the restoration of a family pride that the British had taken away, we are jolted out of any warm multicultural haze his story has built up. For there was one element of empire that compromised all the heroism and bravery, all the sophistication of liminal identity, all the cleverness of multiple loyalties: men, manacled and shackled, bought and sold, separated from their families, and worked to death in a slavery that many in Johnson’s own lifetime were already calling an evil.

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