In her original and creative study No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution, Rachel B. Herrmann explores the fundamental human dynamics of food and hunger in the revolutionary Atlantic. She draws her book's title from the words of Frederick Haldimand, the governor of Quebec, who in 1780 stipulated that “no useless mouth” among Britain's Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) allies should remain at British posts like Fort Niagara. Haldimand wished to avoid the expense of feeding refugee Native communities, but he and other British officials found that privation among their Native allies actually strengthened their negotiating power. Herrmann seeks to restore negotiations over food and hunger to a central place in our understanding of eighteenth-century diplomacy: “Hunger prompted violence and forged ties; it was a weapon of war and a tool of diplomacy” (3).

Herrmann advances three interrelated concepts—food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism—to describe the ways that British, American, Native, and African peoples used food as power, by consuming, destroying, providing, or refusing it. Those concepts also have a chronological quality, in that food diplomacy describes the earliest ways in which Natives and newcomers traded, consumed, or abstained from food or alcohol as they created and maintained alliances in North America. Victual warfare describes the eighteenth-century North American tactics of warfare practiced by all combatants, focused on the scorched-earth destruction of the means of survival: burning farms, barns, and agricultural fields; killing livestock; and girdling fruit trees.

Perhaps the best-known example of this destruction in the War for American Independence occurred in 1779, when American general John Sullivan led an expedition to Iroquoia (modern upstate New York). Sullivan's men burned and destroyed several Haudenosaunee towns and laid waste their verdant and productive countryside. Herrmann puts Sullivan's claim of having destroyed more than 160,000 bushels of corn into powerful perspective: she calculated that the prerevolutionary Six Nations population of 6,400 (a low estimate) required a minimum of 38,400 bushels of corn per year. Sullivan's army thus destroyed four years of sustenance for their population.

Part of the American strategy in Sullivan's expedition was to curtail British and Indian attacks on the settlement frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania, which provided crucial supplies to the Continental Army. Americans also hoped to diminish British resources, which would be needed to avert privation, if not actual starvation, for the western Haudenosaunee refugees who flocked to British posts for shelter and sustenance. Many historians emphasize that the American Revolution resulted in Native defeat and demoralization. But Herrmann challenges that portrait as she demonstrates Haudenosaunee resilience in their effective food diplomacy. British officials like Haldimand were willing to feed only useful mouths: the Iroquois warriors who supported the war effort. But Native leaders understood their diplomatic expectations, particularly how allies shared provisions and endured hunger together. Given Britain's dependence upon Native military support, British officials increasingly had to provision all Iroquois men, women, and children.

One of the strengths of Herrmann's book is the broad topical and chronological vista on the Revolutionary era that she presents. Along with her portrait of the Haudenosaunee, she illustrates how Cherokee and Creek Indians in southeastern America fought against the Americans in a vicious cycle of victual warfare. Herrmann also emphasizes how African Americans affected the dynamics of food and hunger in the southern colonies. Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation of freedom to the slaves of rebel masters, along with the later presence of large British armies in the southern colonies, enabled thousands of enslaved Africans to seek freedom in the British fold. Liberated Blacks often foraged or destroyed rebel provisions as they fought alongside British forces. Herrmann argues that rebels feared those developments, for they simultaneously “deprived the colonists of producers, and . . . made those formerly enslaved producers into food destroyers” (106).

Through these collective portraits of Natives and Africans, Herrmann challenges simple declension narratives of how the Revolutionary War foreclosed their autonomy and futures. On the postwar American frontier, food remained an important point of diplomacy among the Natives, British, and US officials in the region. Effective food diplomacy and military victories such as St. Clair's Defeat (1791) demonstrated that Native nations remained resilient and autonomous despite the suffering and losses of the Revolutionary War. Similarly, both white and Black loyalists competed for land and resources upon their resettlement in Nova Scotia, often to the detriment of the freed people. Blacks in Nova Scotia, however, emphasized “ideas about aid, charity, and usefulness to make a case to Britain's abolitionists” (138) to pursue new opportunities elsewhere in the British Atlantic, particularly in Sierra Leone.

In the final chapters, Herrmann explores the theme of victual imperialism, by which the United States and the British Empire expanded their dominance and control over Native Americans and Sierra Leone colonists. In the 1790s and early 1800s, US officials transitioned from older patterns of food diplomacy to an “institutionalization of a centralized, federal food policy—built on the introduction of plowing, cattle ranching, and then price-fixing food laws” (158–59). This program of “attempts to ‘civilize’”(159) Indians enabled US officials to seize more Native lands, and to create a false narrative that only Europeans were capable of agricultural productivity. In Sierra Leone, civil unrest over price-fixing and food laws eventually led Black colonists to lose the political powers that they had enjoyed in the colony's first decade.

Scholars of the American Revolution and the first British Empire will profit from this wide-ranging study that speaks to a variety of themes in war studies, Native American history, loyalism, foreign relations, and social history. In this original and deeply researched volume that draws on dozens of archival collections, Herrmann has provided a truly insightful understanding of the power of food and its absence in the eighteenth-century revolutionary Atlantic.