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GLOBAL DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL POLICY
International Impacts
on Social Policy
Short Histories in
Global Perspective
Edited by
Frank Nullmeier
Delia González de Reufels
Herbert Obinger
Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Series Editors
Lorraine Frisina Doetter
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany
Kerstin Martens
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany
International Impacts
on Social Policy
Short Histories in Global Perspective
Editors
Frank Nullmeier Delia González de Reufels
University of Bremen University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany Bremen, Germany
Herbert Obinger
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate
credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons
licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s
Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
On this Series
The intervention of states in fields such as health, social security and work
dates back to the nineteenth century, and became more dynamic over
time. Imperial Prussia, a social policy pioneer, first showcased its progress
at the Paris World Fair in 1900: the Prussian exhibit drew large crowds
eager to find out more about state pensions. Clearly, social policy had
become a matter of great interest to states and citizens alike.
Other nations soon embarked on implementing discrete social poli-
cies, thus turning the twentieth century into a time of remarkable welfare
state expansion. The end of World War II marked a new departure, as an
increasing number of countries outside the Western hemisphere began to
introduce social policy measures. States not only copied established forms
of welfare, but often developed measures sui-generis to meet their specific
needs. While episodes of policy retrenchment and ruptures can be
observed over time, recent developments point to an expansion of social
policies in low-to-upper-middle-income countries of the Global South.
Social policy has thus become a global phenomenon.
It is generally accepted that the state is responsible for welfare and that
domestic politics and ideas have been a primary driver of its expansion.
However, in an increasingly interconnected world, social policy is imple-
mented at the national level but influenced by international develop-
ments and relations. It is shaped by trade, migration, war and colonialism.
v
vi On this Series
Just as people travel, policy ideas follow. These factors merit scholarly
attention and demand interdisciplinary collaboration to generate new
insights into the global dimension of social policy.
This is what the Global Dynamics of Social Policy book series sets out
to accomplish. In doing so, it also contributes to the mission of the
Collaborative Research Center 1342 (CRC) “Global Dynamics of Social
Policy” at the University of Bremen, Germany. Funded by the German
Research Foundation, the CRC leaves behind the traditionally OECD-
focused analysis of social policy to stress the transnational interconnect-
edness of developments.
The book series showcases scholarship by colleagues worldwide who
are interested in the global dynamics of social policy. Studies can range
from in-depth case studies, comparative work and large quantitative
research. Moreover, the promotion of scholarship by young researchers is
of great importance to the series.
The series is published in memory of Stephan Leibfried to whom our
research on state and social policy at the CRC is indebted in count-
less ways.
Part V Conclusions 531
xv
xvi Notes on Contributors
xxiii
xxiv List of Figures
Table 9.1 First pension laws and adoption of national labour codes in
French Africa after independence 110
Table 9.2 Wage and salaried workers as percentage share of total
employment113
Table 13.1 Diffusion of compulsory education—cultural spheres
network, discrete-time logistic hazard model of network
diffusion, N = 153 countries 165
Table 14.1 All newly adopted conventions by ILO’s topical
categorisation, 1945–1970 179
Table 14.2 Ratifications of ILO conventions by full members, by
topical classification and Global North/Global South
divide, ILO regions, and SER-relevance 1945–1970 181
Table 16.1 Policy priorities of social administration in post-war Japan
(1950–1990s)207
Table 17.1 Washington consensus principles and healthcare reform
legislation218
Table 20.1 Indicators for the dimensions of labour regulation 253
Table 23.1 Average growth rates of global GDP and global exports for
different time periods 293
Table 24.1 Descriptive statistics on FDI stocks, social expenditure and
GDP, 1995 and 2015. 312
Table 25.1 Introduction and type of unemployment compensation
schemes, 1900–1950 322
xxvii
xxviii List of Tables
In recent years, social policy research has undergone a vast array of far-
reaching changes. Perhaps the most important change concerns the scope
of research, which is no longer exclusively focused on the nation state. In
the not-so-distant past, “(…) to study social policy was to start with the
nation” (Rodgers 2014, 302). This quote could be further amended by
pointing out that social policy research also was mainly concerned with
Western nations. While this can hardly be surprising given that the wel-
fare state as such is a European “invention” and can be considered a child
of the nation state and the Industrial Revolution (Flora 1986a, XII),
other factors come into play as well. Although the strong focus on the
nation as the main unit of analysis is reasonable, as it is the state’s preroga-
tive to enact and implement welfare legislation in a given territory, this is
only one side of the story. From the very onset of social policy develop-
ment, this process was embedded in and to a large extent the result of
influences that lay beyond the nation and its specific contexts: social
policy-makers did not act in splendid isolation. In addition to the fierce
domestic struggles over social policy, their decisions were framed by vari-
ous inter- and transnational influences. Even during the formative period
of the welfare state, intensive cross-border knowledge transfers already
enabled policy-makers to learn about foreign welfare legislation (Rodgers
1998). Nineteenth-century policy-makers were also concerned about the
impact of social policy on their nations’ economic competitiveness when
they discussed and drafted early welfare reforms during the first wave of
economic globalisation that lasted until 1914. Moreover, ever-increasing
military rivalries and power ambitions of nation states in the Age of
Imperialism left their imprint on social policy. Worries about low birth
rates or the physical fitness of soldiers vis-à-vis the alleged enemy sparked
or bolstered welfare reforms in areas such as labour protection, child wel-
fare and family policy in the run-up to war.
In 1914, war eventually became a terrible reality, only to be followed
by yet another even more devastating war in 1939. Two world wars and
their political and socio-economic aftershocks were a watershed for wel-
fare state development in several respects: they entailed welfare cutbacks
but also triggered a massive expansion of social policy in the immediate
post-war period in response to the tremendous social needs generated by
the horrors of war and demobilisation (Obinger et al. 2018). In a similar
vein, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Great Depression sent
shock waves across the globe that affected social policy in various but
ambiguous ways. International organisations such as the International
Labour Organization and the World Health Organization, established
after armistice and particularly after the Second World War, gave rise to
ever-increasing intergovernmental social policy cooperation worldwide
and provided the basis for global shifts in social policy, but also demon-
strated the limits of international support or steering of an expansion of
social policy (Deacon 2013; Maul 2019; Seekings 2019).
Moreover, the two world wars fundamentally changed the interna-
tional economic order. Whereas the Great War and the Great Depression
led to economic deglobalisation and growing trade protectionism, the
post-1945 economic order created in Bretton Woods in 1944 paved the
way for the restoration of international trade and economic cooperation
1 Introduction: International Interdependencies and the Impact… 3
Historical studies have provided insights into why and how Asian coun-
tries imported European and US concepts and ideas and adapted them to
national needs (Nishizawa 2014). But imperial contexts did not exert a
unidirectional influence: New Zealand’s pension scheme for example was
decisive for the remodelling of the Old Age Pensions Bill in Britain in
1908 (Rogers 2014).
This volume presents the most recent work on these issues from
German social policy research. Despite progress and fascinating scholarly
work sparked off by these approaches, the mainstream of comparative
welfare state research in Germany lagged behind these developments.
While German scholars have conducted cutting-edge research with
regard to the development of Western welfare states (e.g. Alber 1982;
Schmidt 1982; Flora 1986b) and EU social policy (Leibfried and Pierson
1995), social protection in the Global South was with few exceptions
neglected in scholarly work for a long time. Systematic research on social
policy in the Global South did not begin in Germany until the Bielefeld
FLOOR project (Leisering 2019). To deepen and broaden this research
approach in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is fund-
ing the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Global Dynamics of
Social Policy” based at the University of Bremen (https://www.socialpoli-
cydynamics.de/en/). Starting in 2018, more than eighty junior and senior
scholars from various disciplines working in sixteen different projects are
studying the development of state-run social policy across the globe from
the 1880s to the present. The CRC’s central goal is to describe and explain
the development dynamics of social policy within their international
contexts, worldwide interrelations and the interaction with national con-
ditions. In analytical terms, the CRC’s objective is to replace the nation-
centred orientation of social policy research with an interdependency-centred
approach that integrates the well-known domestic determinants of social
policy into the context of transregional and international interrelations.
Once the national container is left behind, cross-border interrelations—
(de-)colonisation, war, trade and financial relations, migration flows,
transnational communication and information exchange, international
organisations and international agreements—move to the centre of
social policy analysis. It is only from the interaction of national condi-
tions with horizontal and vertical international interrelations that the
6 F. Nullmeier et al.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
Part I
Violence and Welfare
2
Introduction: Violence and Welfare
Herbert Obinger and Carina Schmitt
wealth. Scholarly works by Piketty (2014) and Scheidel (2017) have con-
vincingly shown that war led to greater income equality, at least over a
longer transitory period.
Despite these improvements there are still many blind spots. Research
has mainly concentrated on interstate wars in the Western world. Much
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studies for the northern hemisphere (e.g. Obinger and Schmitt 2011;
Petersen 2013; Inglot 2013), much less is known about the social policy
ramifications of the Cold War in the Global South.
Similar to warfare, the impact of colonialism as a further form of vio-
lent interdependencies on social policy development was widely neglected
for many years. This is astounding when considering the fact that most
countries on the globe have a colonial history and social protection pro-
grammes in former colonies were often introduced before those countries
gained independence (Schmitt 2015). However, the omission of the
colonial legacy in the analysis of the determinants and consequences of
early and postcolonial social protection precludes a systematic grasp of
contemporary social problems in the Global South.
But why, when and how does colonialism affect social policy? Colonial
powers did not become engaged into social aspects of the labour question
and the provision of social services in their colonies until the first decades
of the twentieth century (Midgley and Piachaud 2011). This changed by
midway through the twentieth century when pressure on the colonial
powers, not only from inside the colonies in the form of rising demands
for social protection but also from outside in the form of soft pressure by
international organisations, strongly increased. Combined with the
increase in their ideological and human rights vulnerability after World
16 H. Obinger and C. Schmitt
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in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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the Military in France During the Third Republic, 1870–1940. Historical
Social Research 45 (2): 68–113.
Dörr, Nikolas, Lukas Grawe, and Herbert Obinger. 2020. The Military Origins
of Labor Protection Legislation in Imperial Germany. Historical Social
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Dryzek, John, and Robert E. Goodin. 1986. Risk-Sharing and Social Justice:
The Motivational Foundations of the Post-War Welfare State. British Journal
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Dwork, Deborah. 1987. War is Good for Babies and other Young Children: A
History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918.
London: Tavistock.
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How ‘Extractive’ Were Colonial Taxes? Journal of Global History 5
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Spending in British Africa, 1880–1940: Maximizing Revenue or Minimizing
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2 Introduction: Violence and Welfare 19
———, eds. 2019. Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa,
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Cold War: Condemnation, Competition, and Creative Learning. Journal of
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28: 355–373.
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and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies.
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America in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Policy and the British Imperial Legacy. Cheltenham: Elgar.
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Competition and the Welfare State during the Cold War. World Politics 63
(2): 246–270.
———. 2018. The Impact of the Second World War on Postwar Social
Spending. European Journal of Political Research 57 (2): 496–517.
———. 2020. War and Welfare Legislation in Western Countries. Journal of
European Social Policy 30 (3): 261–274.
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Welfare. Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 29 (3): 226–240.
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the Welfare State. War and the Establishment of Social Ministries in Western
Countries. Unpublished manuscript: Bremen.
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University Press.
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how the Cherokees came to their fate. It mattered little now, his
emotional, sensitive face said. Naught mattered! Naught! Naught!
In the sudden nervous shock his vitality was at its lowest ebb. He
could not spread his hands to the blaze, for his arms had been
pinioned cruelly tight. He shivered again, for the fire was low.
MacDonnell noticed it, but he did not stir; perhaps he thought Johnny
Crapaud would soon find the fire hot enough. The scout himself
mended it, as he sat tailorwise on the ground between the other two
men. Now and again the Etissu gazed at MacDonnell’s impassive,
rather lowering countenance, with a certain awe; if he had expected
the officer to show the squeamishness which Colonel Grant
developed in such matters, or any pity, he was mistaken; then he
looked with curiosity at the Frenchman. The prisoner’s lips were
vaguely moving, and Ronald MacDonnell caught a suggestion of the
sound—half-whispered words, not French, or he would not have
understood; Latin!—paters and aves! As he had expected—frogs,
papistry, French, and fool!
“What’s that?” the Highland officer said, so suddenly that the scout
started in affright.
“Nothing,” said the Indian; “the wind, perhaps.”
“Sticks cracking in the laurel—a bear, perhaps,” suggested
MacDonnell, taking up a loaded musket and laying it across his
knee. Then “Only a bear,” he repeated reassuringly.
“Choolah ought to leave more men here,” said the Etissu.
“It’s nothing!” declared MacDonnell, rising and looking warily about.
“Perhaps Choolah on his way back.”
The scout was true to his vagrant tendencies, or perhaps because of
those tendencies he felt himself safer in the dense, impenetrable
jungle, crawling along flat like a lizard or a snake, than seated
perched up here on a bluff by a flaring camp-fire with only two other
men, a mark for “Brown Bess”—the Cherokees were all armed with
British muskets, although they were in revolt, and perhaps it was one
reason why they were in revolt—for many a yard up and down the
Tennessee River. “I go see,” he suggested.
“No, no,” said MacDonnell, “only a bear.”
“I come back soon,” declared the Etissu, half crouching and gazing
about, “soon, soon. Alooska, Ko-e-u-que-ho.” (I do not lie, I do not
indeed.)
MacDonnell lifted his head and gazed about with a frowning mien of
reluctance “Maia cha!” (Go along) he said at last. Then called out,
“Come back soon,” as his attention returned to the priming and
loading of a pistol which he had in progress. “Soon! remember!”
The scout was off like a rabbit. For a moment or two MacDonnell did
not lift his eyes, while they heard him crashing through the thicket.
Then as he looked up he met the dull despair in the face of the
bound and helpless Frenchman. It mattered little to him who came,
who went. He gasped suddenly in amazement. The Highland officer
was gazing at him with a genial, boyish smile, reassuring, almost
tender.
“Run, now, run for your life!” he said, leaning forward, and with a
pass or two of a knife he severed the prisoner’s bonds.
In the revulsion of feeling the man seemed scarcely able to rise to
his feet. There were tears in his eyes; his face quivered as he looked
at his deliverer.
“Danger—big fire—burn,” said the astute MacDonnell, as if the
English words thus detached were more comprehensible to the
French limitations. Perhaps his gestures aided their effect, and as he
held out his hand in his whole-souled, genial way, the Frenchman
grasped it in a hard grip of fervent gratitude and started off swiftly.
The next moment the young officer turned back, caught the British
soldier in his arms, and to MacDonnell’s everlasting consternation
kissed him in the foreign fashion, first on one cheek and then on the
other.
Ronald MacDonnell’s mess often preyed upon the disclosures which
his open, ingenuous nature afforded them. But his simplicity stopped
far short of revealing to them this Gallic demonstration of gratitude—
so exquisitely ludicrous it seemed to his unemotional methods and
mind. They were debarred the pleasure of racking him on this
circumstance. They never knew it. He disclosed it only years
afterward, and then by accident, to a member of his own family.
The whole affair seemed to the mess serious enough. For the
Chickasaws, baffled and furious, had threatened his life on their
return, reinforced by a dozen excited, elated, expectant tribesmen,
laden with light wood and a chain, to find their prisoner gone. But
after the first wild outburst of rage and despair Choolah, although
evidently strongly tempted to force the Highlander to the fate from
which he had rescued the French officer, resolved to preserve the
integrity of his nation’s pledge of amity with the British, and
restrained his men from offering injury. This was rendered the more
acceptable to him, as with his alert craft he perceived a keen
retribution for Ronald MacDonnell in the displeasure of his
commanding officer, for the Chickasaws well understood the
discipline of the army, which they chose to disregard. To better enlist
the prejudice of Colonel Grant, Choolah was preparing himself to
distort the facts. He upbraided Ronald MacDonnell with causelessly
liberating a prisoner, a Frenchman and an officer, taken by the wily
exploit of another. As to the dry wood, he said, the Chickasaws had
merely brought some drift, long stranded in a cave by the waterside,
to replenish the fire, kindled with how great difficulty in the soaking
condition of the forests the Lieutenant well knew.
“Hout!—just now when we are about to cross the river?” cried
Ronald, unmasking the subterfuge. “And for what then that stout
chain?”
The chain, Choolah protested, was but part of the equipment of one
of the pack animals that had broken away and had been plundered
by the Cherokees. Did the Lieutenant Plaidman think he wanted to
chain the prisoner to the stake to burn? He had had no dream of
such a thing! It was not the custom of the Chickasaws to waste so
much time on a prisoner. It was sufficient to cut him up in quarters;
that usually killed him dead,—quite dead enough! But if the
Lieutenant had had a chain, since he knew so well the use of one,
doubtless he himself would have joyed to burn the prisoner, provided
it had been his own exploit that had taken him,—for did not the
Carolinians of the provincial regiment say that when the Tartan men
were at home they were as wild and as uncivilized as the wildest
Cherokee savage!
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” (It is a lie. It is a lie, undoubtedly), cried
the phlegmatic MacDonnell, excited to a frenzy. He spoke in the
Chickasaw language, that the insult might be understood as offered
with full intention.
But Choolah did not thus receive it. In the simplicity of savage life
lies are admittedly the natural incidents of conversation. He
addressed himself anew to argument. At home the Tartan men lived
in mountains,—just like the Cherokees,—and no wonder they were
undismayed by the war whoops—they had heard the like before!
Savages themselves! They had a language, too, that the Carolinians
could not speak; he himself had heard it among the Highlanders of
Grant’s camp—doubtless it was the Cherokee tongue, for they were
mere Cherokees!
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” No denial could be more definite than
the tone and the words embodied.
The wily Choolah, maliciously delighted with his power to pierce the
heart of the proud Scotchman thus, turned the knife anew. Did not
the provincials declare that the Highlanders at home were always
beaten in war, as they would be here but for the help of the
Carolinians?
“Holauba! Holauba! Feenah!” protested Ronald resolutely, thinking of
Preston Pans and Falkirk.
For the usual emulous bickering between regulars and provincials,
which seems concomitant with every war, had appeared in full force
in this expedition, the provincials afterward claiming that but for them
and their Indian allies no remnant of the British force would have
returned alive; and the regulars declaring that the Carolinians knew
nothing, and could learn nothing of discipline and method in warfare,
laying great stress on the fact that this was the second campaign to
which the British soldiers had been summoned for the protection of
the province, which could not without them defend itself against the
Cherokees, and assuming the entire credit of the subjugation of that
warlike tribe that had for nearly a century past desolated at intervals
the Carolina borders.
Although it had been Choolah’s hope that, by means of provoking
against the Lieutenant the displeasure of his superior officer, he
might revenge himself upon MacDonnell, for snatching from the
Chickasaws the peculiar racial delight of torturing the French
prisoner, the Indians had no anticipation of the gravity of the crisis
when they came to the camp with the details of the occurrence,
which, to Colonel Grant’s annoyance, tallied with MacDonnell’s own
report of himself.
For there was a question in Colonel Grant’s mind whether the
prisoner were not the redoubtable Louis Latinac, who had been so
incredibly efficient in the French interest in this region, and who had
done more to excite the enmity of the Cherokees against their
quondam allies, the British, and harass his Majesty’s troops than a
regiment of other men could accomplish. When Grant tended to this
opinion, a court-martial seemed impending over the head of the
young officer.
“What was your reason for this extraordinary course?” Colonel Grant
asked.
And Ronald MacDonnell answered that he had granted to his
prisoner exactly what he had intended to demand of his captor had
the situation been reversed—to adjure him by their fellow feeling as
soldiers, by the customs of civilized warfare, by the bond of a
common religion, to save him from torture by savages.
“Can a gentleman give less than he would ask?” he demanded.
And when Colonel Grant would urge that he should have trusted to
his authority to protect the prisoner, Ronald would meet the
argument with the counter-argument that the Indians respected no
authority, and in cases of fire it would not do to take chances.
“Why did you not at least exact a parole?”
“Lord, sir, we couldn’t talk at all!” said Ronald, conclusively. “In
common humanity, I was obliged to release him or shoot him, and I
could not shoot an unarmed prisoner to save my life—not if I were to
be shot for it myself.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Grant’s heart was well known to be soft in spots.
He has put it upon record in the previous campaign against the
Cherokees that he could not help pitying them a little in the
destruction of their homes,—it is said, however, that after this later
expedition his name was incorporated in the Cherokee language as
a synonym of devastation and a cry of warning. He was overcome by
the considerations urged upon him by the Lieutenant until once more
the possibility loomed upon the horizon that it was Louis Latinac who
had escaped him, when he would feel that nothing but Ronald
MacDonnell’s best heart’s blood could atone for the release. To set
this much vexed question at rest the young officer was repeatedly
required to describe the personal appearance of the stranger, and
thus it was that poor Ronald’s verbal limitations were brought so
conspicuously forward. “A fine man,” he would say one day, and in
giving the details of that sensitive emotional countenance which had
so engaged his interest that momentous night—its force, its
suggestiveness, its bright, alert young eyes, would intimate that he
had indeed held the motive power of the Cherokee war in his hand,
and had heedlessly loosed it as a child might release a butterfly. The
next day “a braw callant” was about the sum of his conclusions, and
Colonel Grant would be certain that the incident represented no
greater matter than the escape of a brisk subaltern, like Ronald
himself. In the course of Colonel Grant’s anxious vacillations of
opinion, the young Highlander was given to understand that he
would be instantly placed under arrest, but for the fact that every
officer of experience was urgently needed. And indeed Colonel
Grant presently had his hands quite full, fighting a furious battle only
the ensuing day with the entire Cherokee nation.
The Indians attacked his outposts at eight o’clock in the morning,
and with their full strength engaged the main body, fighting in their
individual, skulking, masked manner, but with fierce persistency for
three hours; then the heat of the conflict began to gradually wane,
although they did not finally draw off till two o’clock in the afternoon.
It was the last struggle of the Cherokee war. Helpless or desperate,
the Indians watched without so much as a shot from ambush the
desolation of their country. For thirty days Colonel Grant’s forces
remained among the fastnesses of the Great Smoky Mountains,
devastating those beautiful valleys, burning “the astonishing
magazines of corn,” and the towns, which Grant states, were so
“agreeably situated, the houses neatly built.” Often the troops were
constrained to march under the beetling heights of those stupendous
ranges, whence one might imagine a sharp musketry fire would have
destroyed the dense columns, almost to the last man. Perhaps the
inability of the French to furnish the Cherokees with the requisite
ammunition for this campaign may explain the abandonment of a
region so calculated for effective defense.
Aside from the losses in slain and wounded in the engagement, the
expeditionary force suffered much, for the hardships of the campaign
were extreme. Having extended the frontier westward by seventy
miles, and withdrawing slowly, in view of the gradual exhaustion of
his supplies, Colonel Grant found the feet of his infantry so mangled
by the long and continuous marches in the rugged country west of
the Great Smoky Mountains that he was forced to go into permanent
camp on returning to Fort Prince George, to permit the rest and
recovery of the soldiers, who in fact could march no further, as well
as to await some action on the part of the Cherokee rulers looking to
the conclusion of a peace.
A delegation of chiefs presently sought audience of him here and
agreed to all the stipulations of the treaty formulated in behalf of the
province except one, viz., that four Cherokees should be delivered
up to be put to death in the presence of Colonel Grant’s army, or that
four green scalps should be brought to him within the space of
twelve nights. With this article the chiefs declared they had neither
the will nor the power to comply,—and very queerly indeed, it reads
at this late day!
Colonel Grant, perhaps willing to elude the enforcement of so
unpleasant a requisition, conceived that it lay within his duty to
forward the delegation, under escort, to Charlestown to seek to
induce Governor Bull to mitigate its rigor.
It was in this connection that he alluded again to the release of the
prisoner, captured in the exploit of Choolah, the Chickasaw, although
in conversation with his officers he seemed to Ronald MacDonnell to
be speaking only of the impracticable stipulation of the treaty, and his
certainty that compliance would not be required of the Cherokees by
the Governor—and in fact the terms finally signed at Charlestown,
on the 10th of December of that year, were thus moderated, leaving
the compact practically the same as in the previous treaty of 1759.
“I could agree to no such stipulation if the case were mine,” Colonel
Grant declared, “that four of my soldiers, as a mere matter of
intimidation, should be surrendered to be executed in the presence
of the enemy! Certainly, as a gentleman and a soldier, a man cannot
require of an enemy more than he himself would be justified in
yielding if the circumstances were reversed, or grant to an enemy
less favor than he himself could rightfully ask at his hands.”
Ronald MacDonnell had forgotten his own expression of this
sentiment. It appealed freshly to him, and he thought it decidedly
fine. He did not recognize a flag of truce except as a veritable visible
white rag, and from time to time he experienced much surprise that
Colonel Grant did not order him under arrest as a preliminary to a
court martial.
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