‘Take The Badge Off’: Former Ferrari Boss Slams New $635k EV That Company Thinks Will Attract ‘Younger Buyers’
One week after Ferrari unveiled its first-ever all-electric car, called the Luce, the design continues to divide analysts. Some referred to the new model as a “mix between a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla,” while others said that Tesla’s Model S Plaid was far superior. The latest report from Goldman analysts provided new details about their most recent visit to Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello.
Last Friday, Ferrari hosted an investor day, which analyst Christian Frenes attended. He spoke with top Ferrari executives just days after the Luce reveal event in Rome earlier in the week.
Frenes said management framed the Ferrari Luce as an “additive range model designed to expand the customer base.“
He continued:
Management reaffirmed the Luce as a strategic entry point to engage new demographics and regions, particularly in markets with higher BEV penetration such as Asia and the Nordics while also targeting a new and younger customer group. The exterior design intentionally distinguishes the EV from existing ICE and PHEV models. Management also reaffirmed it remains aligned with its “technological neutrality” approach continuing to sell V12s and V8s to those interested.
Beyond design, Ferrari’s battery-powered, four-door, five-seat Luce has another problem: its price tag – a staggering 550,000 euros, or about $638,660. If Ferrari expects that to open the brand to a younger, broader customer base, management certainly has a different view of the world – one that isn’t grounded in reality.
For starters, Tesla’s Model S Plaid costs only a fraction as much and, on key performance metrics, appears to outperform the Luce. The Model S also comes with Full Self-Driving, a feature we are fairly certain Ferrari’s first EV lacks.
By the end of last week, Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna appeared to be on damage-control duty after shares dropped in response to negative investor reaction to the Luce’s design and performance specifications.
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) May 27, 2026
Let’s not forget that Ferrari hybrids are depreciating faster than their petrol-powered counterparts. This is a sign that car collectors are shunning anything electric (read the report).
Shares have yet to recover to pre-Luce reveal levels.
Beyond the terrible design and high price, one could debadge the Luce, and it would be hard to decipher the car from a Kia or Toyota or even a Nissan …
That problem itself has infuriated Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the former Ferrari president, who told local media that the Luce “risks destroying a legend, and I’m deeply sorry. I hope they at least remove the Prancing Horse from that car.”
American automotive YouTuber Doug DeMuro said Luce has the specs of a “nice Polestar” .. .
The current UK government’s policy of not allowing new drilling in the UK North Sea is “utter madness” as billions of barrels of untapped oil could benefit the UK industry and reduce Britain’s reliance on imports, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, has said.
The ruling Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer has recently moved to permanently ban new oil and gas licenses in the UK section of the North Sea, drawing criticism from the UK offshore industry associations and from the Tories.
The Conservatives’ Badenoch commented this week on a new study by the University of Aberdeen, whose researchers said on Wednesday that it would be “economically, environmentally, and strategically beneficial for the UK to prioritise domestic oil and gas production rather than increasing reliance on imports.”
The University of Aberdeen’s peer-reviewed study found that significant untapped potential remains in the West of Shetland basin, which is estimated to contain about 4.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) yet to be discovered.
The study highlights that the remaining potential in the area could extend the life of the UK oil and gas sector, said Nick Schofield, Professor of Igneous & Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen.
“West of Shetland is not a depleted frontier – it is a technically demanding but strategically important energy province,” Schofield noted.
The study showed the “utter madness” of the ruling Labour in opposing drilling in the North Sea, Badenoch said.
“The University of Aberdeen survey just demonstrates the utter madness of the stance taken by Keir Starmer and John Swinney,” the leader of the Conservatives said in remarks carried by Belfast Telegraph.
“Domestic oil and gas are vital to the nation’s energy security, as well as being the economic lifeblood of the North East,” Badenoch said.
“Yet the industry is on its knees due to the windfall tax and the ban on new developments. The Conservatives would scrap both immediately,” she added.
Global internet traffic has surged in recent years, more than doubling between 2020 and 2025 as digital services, streaming and cloud computing continue to expand worldwide.
As Statista’s Tristan Gaudiaut details below, according to data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), total traffic volumes have increased sharply across both fixed (landline) and mobile networks.
As the chart shows, landline traffic remains by far the dominant channel, rising from around 3,100 exabytes in 2020 to 7,300 exabytes in 2025.
Mobile data usage has also grown rapidly, climbing from about 560 to 1,500 exabytes over the same period.
In both cases, Asia-Pacific accounts for the largest share, at 50 to 60 percent, with traffic more than doubling across fixed networks and reaching over 900 exabytes on mobile alone.
Other regions have followed a similar upward trajectory, albeit at lower levels.
The Americas and Europe remain the second- and third-largest markets, while regions such as Africa and the Arab States have recorded particularly strong relative growth, reflecting rising connectivity and smartphone adoption.
Overall, the data highlights the accelerating scale of global data consumption, with fixed networks continuing to carry the bulk of traffic even as mobile usage expands rapidly.
With one exabyte equivalent to one billion gigabytes, which is roughly equivalent to the storage capacity of about 8 million 128GB smartphones, the figures underscore the massive and growing infrastructure demands of the digital economy.
In recent years, several large progressivecities have begun pushing aggressive minimum wage policies for food delivery and rideshare. The results have been predictable: A decline in the number of gig tasks being performed, an increase in prices for consumers, and a reduction in drivers as platforms restrict access to aspiring gig workers.
But in addition to the economic fallout, these policies also may run afoul of the law. In response to New York City’s recent expansion of its delivery driver minimum wage, the gig company Instacart has sued the city. Instacart’s lawsuit argues that NYC’s minimum wage ordinance is preempted by federal law—an argument that, if it prevails, could send shock waves through progressive city councils across the country.
In 2023, NYC became the first city in America to pass a minimum wage for delivery drivers. The ordinance set the minimum wage for drivers at $19.96 per hour, which has now risen to $22.13. Last year, New York’s city council overrode a veto by former Mayor Eric Adams to expand the minimum wage law from restaurant delivery drivers to also include grocery deliverers. The grocery delivery wage, which went into effect in January of this year, drew an immediate legal challenge from Instacart.
The company lost at the district court level on dubious grounds and has now appealed its decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. The heart of their argument is that NYC’s minimum wage ordinance is preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA).
While the FAAAA has “aviation” in the title, it applies to all “motor carriers,” as the law was passed as part of a congressional effort in the 1990s to bring the success of airline deregulation to more sectors of the transportation economy. At the time, Congress was particularly concerned about a “patchwork” of local rules that could unduly burden interstate commerce. Therefore, under the FAAAA, local laws “relating to rates, routes, or services” of motor carriers are preempted.
The arguments may seem arcane and technical at first blush, but in reality, they are relatively straightforward. Courts have previously held that independent contractors who “perform first-and-last mile pick-up and delivery services” qualify as “motor carriers” under the FAAAA; this first-and-last-mile service precisely describes the work that Instacart drivers—known as “shoppers”—routinely do.
The key question then becomes whether NYC’s minimum wage laws are related to the “rates, routes, or services” of Instacart shoppers. Past Supreme Court rulings have clarified that the effect on “rates, routes, or services” only needs to be indirect to qualify, and this is a bar that NYC’s own data show is easily cleared.
For instance, NYC found that when its minimum wage law for restaurant delivery drivers went into effect in late 2023, average consumer fees per order rose by 46 percent in the first quarter of 2024, while total consumer spending rose by 10 percent. At the same time, the total number of delivery drivers declined by 9 percent, and by Q4 of 2024, the total number of drivers had fallen by 35 percent on a year-over-year basis. The annual growth of food delivery in the Big Apple dropped from a 17 percent growth rate to 8 percent.
By definition, then, NYC’s minimum wage policies have impacted the “rates, routes, or services” of food delivery in the city as prices increased, the number of drivers declined, and comparatively fewer delivery orders were placed. A fair reading of the city’s own evidence therefore shows that its minimum wage ordinance should be preempted by the FAAAA.
If the 2nd Circuit agrees, the implications for minimum wage policy in the gig economy context would be vast. Economic research from Seattle has shown that its experience with a delivery minimum wage has produced similar results to that of NYC. Delivery fees in Seattle are the highest in the country in the aftermath of the wage’s enactment, while the mean delivery delay increased by more than 35 percent from December 2023 to December 2024, according to DoorDash. Once again, this shows a clear effect on “rates, routes, or services.”
In the end, the economic evidence continues to demonstrate that minimum wage laws in the gig economy backfire. And, ironically, this very same evidence also demonstrates that such laws should be preempted and struck down.
In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here.
Joanna Andreasson
The American Revolution took place in Indian country.
This is true in two senses. First, the physical landscape of the Revolution—the fields and forests through which troops marched and fought—was shaped by the continent’s original inhabitants. Second, and more important, the mental landscape of the Revolution, from its originating conflicts to its military tactics to the Founders’ ideas about freedom and the role of government, was also shaped by the continent’s original inhabitants.
Before the arrival of Europeans, New England had been inhabited for at least 11,000 years. Those first peoples didn’t like biting insects, thorny underbrush, and poison ivy. They did like berries, nuts, and tubers. Regular burning of undergrowth helped get rid of the bad stuff and promote the good stuff. Natives set fires in spring or fall, when dampness made the flames easy to control. Centuries of burning transformed big swaths of the eastern forest into woodlands so open and parklike that John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, boasted he could gallop a horse through them.
Native villages clustered around New England’s many rivers. Cornfields and gardens filled the riverbanks and drifted back into fire-maintained mosaics of berry fields and orchards. Threaded through this edible landscape was a network of trails—although trails may be the wrong term to describe roadways that were as much as 10 feet wide and many miles long.
With the British came epidemic diseases, especially smallpox, that depopulated the villages. Warfare further cleared the land. Settlers erected their new homes atop the old, their fields on land already cleared for farms. The first 50 colonial villages in New England were built on the sites of emptied native settlements. The roads among them were constructed over native roads.
Much as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe was fought on the geography created by the Roman Empire, the Revolution was fought on the geography created by native people. When Gen. Benedict Arnold went to capture Fort Ticonderoga, he marched along an ancient Indigenous trade route between Massachusetts Bay and the upper Hudson Valley. Today that road is Route 2, the “Mohawk Trail,” the main highway across northern Massachusetts. On their final, victorious march to Yorktown, the army led by Gen. George Washington and French Gen. Rochambeau went down the King’s Highway, a network of widened native roads that linked the 13 colonies. Yorktown itself had been one of the capitals of Tsenacommacah (Powhatan Confederacy), the native imperium encountered by the English at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And so on.
In a way that is difficult to imagine now, natives and newcomers lived cheek-by-jowl during the colonial era. Settlers in New England smoked tobacco, planted corn, carried wampum to trade, wore moccasins and deer hide to travel, and fished in canoes (rather than coracles). Indians cooked with steel knives and bowls, cut wood with European axes, and sometimes adopted Christianity. Cultural appropriation was two-way and rampant, and it moved at giddy speed.
As the decades went by, mingling hardened into acrimony, but the mutual influences remained. When natives and newcomers came to blows, Indians carried English weapons but attacked in their own style, with surprise raids by small parties darting in from the trees—what the missionary John Eliot called “the skulking way of war.” In the first big “Indian war,” the Pequot War of 1636–38, colonists shocked by Indigenous military victories ended up adopting their opponents’ tactics wholesale. “God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode,” Eliot wrote with chagrin. Fifty years later came King Philip’s War (1675–78). This time, the English waged war like natives—and won decisively.
The lessons carried over to the Revolution. “They did not fight us like a regular army, only savages, behind trees and stone walls,” one British soldier complained after the opening Battle of Lexington and Concord. The colonists, he wrote, are “full as bad as the Indians.” After the war, British Lt. Thomas Anburey grumbled that the rebels, infected by “the Indian’s idea of war,” “delight more by murdering from the woods, walls and houses, [rather] than in shewing any genius or science in the art military.”
Both sides wanted the powerful Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to fight on their side. In May 1775, the colonial militia leader Ethan Allen begged them to “Join with me and my Warriors”—the Green Mountain Boys, as his guerrilla force was known. “I know how to shute and ambush just like Indian and want your warriors to come and see me and help me fight Regulars. You know they Stand all along close Together Rank and file and my men fight as so as Indians Do.” The Haudenosaunee, a league of six Indigenous nations, was leery of involvement in what it saw as a foreign civil war. But individual members were drawn in on both sides, splitting the confederacy. Swept into the fight alongside them were another dozen native societies.
The contribution of native-style warfare—and natives themselves—to the Revolution should not be exaggerated. Washington was leery of both Indians and their tactics. Throughout the conflict, he sought to fight European-style, with massed armies blasting away at each other in open fields—although he did sometimes look for soldiers who were, as he put it, “accustomed to the irregular kind of wood-fighting practiced by the Indians.” Gradually he warmed to working with such allies as the Iswa (Catawba) and Lënapeyok (Lenape), but he relied on them only for specialized roles—scouting, spying, and safeguarding the frontier—rather than as infantry troops in pitched battles.
If natives’ impact on the battleground was limited, their impact on the war’s origins, political and intellectual, was enormous.
A turning point occurred in 1763. In January, European nations signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France (and their respective allies). Dismaying the war-weary British government, Pontiac’s Rebellion erupted barely four months later. It was a monthslong, broad-scale assault by a coalition of native nations on British forces in Michigan and the Ohio Valley. (“Pontiac” was the English name for Obwaandi’eyaag, who led the Odawa, or Ottawa, in Michigan.)
NATIVE LANDS ESTABLISHED BY PROCLAMATION OF 1763
Map: Courtesy of Charles C. Mann
In October, seeking to defuse what was becoming a long and costly conflict, King George III banned colonists from moving into land west of the Appalachians. The royal proclamation gave natives permanent title to what had been the eastern half of France’s American holdings—all of the land between the Mississippi River and the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, plus the western half of Georgia, all of Florida, and a big chunk of Canada. It blocked off an area of something like 600,000 square miles.
Leave aside natives’ annoyance at being “given” title to land they had occupied for generations. Colonists reacted with fury. From their point of view, the king was taking back the free land he had promised them—the reason that many had left their homelands, the goal of fighting the Seven Years’ War. Worse, he was giving it to “savages.”
Nowhere was the anger more volcanic than in Pennsylvania, through which many migrants had intended to move into the rich Ohio Valley. Even as the conflict with Pontiac continued, tensions rose between Pennsylvania’s colonists and their government in Philadelphia. Settlers harassed soldiers ordered to enforce the king’s proclamation. Pennsylvania’s legislature, Benjamin Franklin moaned, was under siege by a “mad armed Mob.”
British Gen. Thomas Gage and Pennsylvania Gov. John Penn initiated peace talks with Pontiac in March 1765. The negotiators left Philadelphia with a caravan of more than 80 packhorses loaded with goods as guarantees of London’s words. Viewing the talks as a sellout, a backwoods militia known as the “Black Boys” raided the supply train, attacked English forts, and kidnapped English soldiers. Penn convened a grand jury to charge the Black Boys. It refused to indict them.
Encouraged, the Black Boys seized much of western Pennsylvania, controlling traffic through the area, assaulting British forces, even issuing their own passports. The conflict continued until July 1776, when Pennsylvania, after a constitutional convention dominated by the Black Boys, became the first colony to establish an independent government, one intended to be responsive to the popular will. It was the first big revolt against British authorities—a dress rehearsal in miniature for the Revolution that was to follow.
Anger about Pontiac’s rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763 bubbled into the Declaration of Independence. When the Declaration decries the king’s support of “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,” it is referring to his attempts to compromise with the native coalition in the Ohio Valley. And when the Declaration denounces the king’s measures to “prevent the population of these States”—that is, to discourage immigration to the colonies—by “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands,” it is talking about the Proclamation.
The Revolution had causes other than the Proclamation: taxation, trade controls, forcing colonists to house troops, and so on. One of the most important was one of the most intangible: the rebels’ beliefs about freedom, liberty, and governance. These, too, were deeply entwined with North America’s original inhabitants.
The first European ventures into North America occurred as Enlightenment figures such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were questioning Europe’s absolute monarchies, state religions, and rigid class rules. All of these thinkers were fascinated by the recently revealed existence of Native Americans—living, breathing products of societies with wholly different social, political, and spiritual traditions. All of them made Indians central to their work.
None of these thinkers were ethnographers in the modern sense. The “natives” featured in their work mainly are foils—convenient human illustrations for ideas. Consider the protagonist of Voltaire’s popular novella L’Ingénu (1767). A naive young man, half-French and half-Wendat (Huron), he was less an actual character than a vehicle for the author to mock French hypocrisy and corruption. Locke, interested in the origins of society, used Indians in his work as examples of early human development, preserved as if in amber. (“In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.”) Rousseau had similar views. The difference was that Locke didn’t think much of these supposedly primitive societies and Rousseau admired them.
At the same time, other Europeans actually were interested in native life—and drew lessons from it. Again and again, foreign visitors to New England and Quebec described their inhabitants as having vastly more personal liberty and autonomy than Europeans. “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whatsoever,” wrote Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in France’s Canadian colony from 1632 to 1649. “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains [nobles and kings], while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”
Unlike Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Le Jeune had a conception of native life that was basically accurate. As he reported, native rulers had little formal authority; they had to persuade others to follow their ideas. The Haudenosaunee, for example, have a tadadaho, who presides over the Grand Council, which itself was comprised of male leaders of the league’s six member nations. Tadadaho is traditionally a lifetime appointment, like a king, but the role is more like today’s speaker of the House—someone who shapes the agenda but must marshal the support of the other representatives to make anything happen. Even if the tadadaho won the Grand Council’s backing, he could not act without the approval of a second, all-female council, traditionally formed of clan mothers.
Unlike European kings and nobles, Haudenosaunee leaders could be deposed if their people lost faith in them (although this was relatively uncommon). They had to have the consent of the governed and worked hard to keep it. Were the colonists who rebelled against King George and established a republic inspired by this? Surely not directly. But it seems clear that the colonists on the Atlantic seaboard were imbued with views about freedom that were strikingly different from those of their ancestors, and that they identified those views with native people.
Europeans at the time widely believed in the “Great Chain of Being,” in which society was organized by divine mandate into a rigid social hierarchy. At the top was the king, whose authority was endowed by God. One rung below him was the nobility, whose noble blood made them superior to the merchants and peasants below. So important was the social ladder that European nations had sumptuary laws prohibiting commoners from passing themselves off as their betters by donning their attire—in England, for instance, only the nobility could wear beaver-felt hats. Failing to kowtow to people of superior status was a violation of the Christian order. It was sinful, unthinkable, unnatural.
The Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and other northeastern Indigenous groups thought all that was hooey, and they loudly told this to the Europeans. They “brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power,” reported the Baron de Lahontan, who spent nine years in French Canada. De Lahontan’s accounts of his American sojourn, translated into half a dozen languages, include a 1703 book of “dialogues” with a Wendat leader, Kondiaronk, who scoffed at European pretensions. “I have the absolute disposal of myself, I do what I please,” Kondiaronk told de Lahontan. The baron, he said, was a fool for “choos[ing] rather to be a French slave than a free Huron.”
The appeal of native freedom was anything but theoretical. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm spent three years in the Northeast and returned with a best-selling account of colonial life. When Indians captured settlers in war, Kalm reported, most “never wanted to return….They found the Indians’ independent way of life preferable to that of the European.” Similarly chagrined observations came from Benjamin Franklin. By the time of the Revolution, wrote the aristocratic settler John Hector St. John, “thousands” of Europeans had joined native societies, “and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”
An instinctive dislike of overweening hierarchy is lodged deep in the U.S. character. Some of that surely is because settlers came to the Americas already dissatisfied with what Europe offered them. But one cannot dismiss the impact of seeing other, freer ways of life up close.
When the colonists swarmed the docks of Boston for the Boston Tea Party, they began a call for liberty that led to the Revolution. What did those colonists do to announce their quest for freedom? They disguised themselves as Indians.
In recent years, several large progressivecities have begun pushing aggressive minimum wage policies for food delivery and rideshare. The results have been predictable: A decline in the number of gig tasks being performed, an increase in prices for consumers, and a reduction in drivers as platforms restrict access to aspiring gig workers.
But in addition to the economic fallout, these policies also may run afoul of the law. In response to New York City’s recent expansion of its delivery driver minimum wage, the gig company Instacart has sued the city. Instacart’s lawsuit argues that NYC’s minimum wage ordinance is preempted by federal law—an argument that, if it prevails, could send shock waves through progressive city councils across the country.
In 2023, NYC became the first city in America to pass a minimum wage for delivery drivers. The ordinance set the minimum wage for drivers at $19.96 per hour, which has now risen to $22.13. Last year, New York’s city council overrode a veto by former Mayor Eric Adams to expand the minimum wage law from restaurant delivery drivers to also include grocery deliverers. The grocery delivery wage, which went into effect in January of this year, drew an immediate legal challenge from Instacart.
The company lost at the district court level on dubious grounds and has now appealed its decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. The heart of their argument is that NYC’s minimum wage ordinance is preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA).
While the FAAAA has “aviation” in the title, it applies to all “motor carriers,” as the law was passed as part of a congressional effort in the 1990s to bring the success of airline deregulation to more sectors of the transportation economy. At the time, Congress was particularly concerned about a “patchwork” of local rules that could unduly burden interstate commerce. Therefore, under the FAAAA, local laws “relating to rates, routes, or services” of motor carriers are preempted.
The arguments may seem arcane and technical at first blush, but in reality, they are relatively straightforward. Courts have previously held that independent contractors who “perform first-and-last mile pick-up and delivery services” qualify as “motor carriers” under the FAAAA; this first-and-last-mile service precisely describes the work that Instacart drivers—known as “shoppers”—routinely do.
The key question then becomes whether NYC’s minimum wage laws are related to the “rates, routes, or services” of Instacart shoppers. Past Supreme Court rulings have clarified that the effect on “rates, routes, or services” only needs to be indirect to qualify, and this is a bar that NYC’s own data show is easily cleared.
For instance, NYC found that when its minimum wage law for restaurant delivery drivers went into effect in late 2023, average consumer fees per order rose by 46 percent in the first quarter of 2024, while total consumer spending rose by 10 percent. At the same time, the total number of delivery drivers declined by 9 percent, and by Q4 of 2024, the total number of drivers had fallen by 35 percent on a year-over-year basis. The annual growth of food delivery in the Big Apple dropped from a 17 percent growth rate to 8 percent.
By definition, then, NYC’s minimum wage policies have impacted the “rates, routes, or services” of food delivery in the city as prices increased, the number of drivers declined, and comparatively fewer delivery orders were placed. A fair reading of the city’s own evidence therefore shows that its minimum wage ordinance should be preempted by the FAAAA.
If the 2nd Circuit agrees, the implications for minimum wage policy in the gig economy context would be vast. Economic research from Seattle has shown that its experience with a delivery minimum wage has produced similar results to that of NYC. Delivery fees in Seattle are the highest in the country in the aftermath of the wage’s enactment, while the mean delivery delay increased by more than 35 percent from December 2023 to December 2024, according to DoorDash. Once again, this shows a clear effect on “rates, routes, or services.”
In the end, the economic evidence continues to demonstrate that minimum wage laws in the gig economy backfire. And, ironically, this very same evidence also demonstrates that such laws should be preempted and struck down.
In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here.
Joanna Andreasson
The American Revolution took place in Indian country.
This is true in two senses. First, the physical landscape of the Revolution—the fields and forests through which troops marched and fought—was shaped by the continent’s original inhabitants. Second, and more important, the mental landscape of the Revolution, from its originating conflicts to its military tactics to the Founders’ ideas about freedom and the role of government, was also shaped by the continent’s original inhabitants.
Before the arrival of Europeans, New England had been inhabited for at least 11,000 years. Those first peoples didn’t like biting insects, thorny underbrush, and poison ivy. They did like berries, nuts, and tubers. Regular burning of undergrowth helped get rid of the bad stuff and promote the good stuff. Natives set fires in spring or fall, when dampness made the flames easy to control. Centuries of burning transformed big swaths of the eastern forest into woodlands so open and parklike that John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, boasted he could gallop a horse through them.
Native villages clustered around New England’s many rivers. Cornfields and gardens filled the riverbanks and drifted back into fire-maintained mosaics of berry fields and orchards. Threaded through this edible landscape was a network of trails—although trails may be the wrong term to describe roadways that were as much as 10 feet wide and many miles long.
With the British came epidemic diseases, especially smallpox, that depopulated the villages. Warfare further cleared the land. Settlers erected their new homes atop the old, their fields on land already cleared for farms. The first 50 colonial villages in New England were built on the sites of emptied native settlements. The roads among them were constructed over native roads.
Much as the Thirty Years’ War in Europe was fought on the geography created by the Roman Empire, the Revolution was fought on the geography created by native people. When Gen. Benedict Arnold went to capture Fort Ticonderoga, he marched along an ancient Indigenous trade route between Massachusetts Bay and the upper Hudson Valley. Today that road is Route 2, the “Mohawk Trail,” the main highway across northern Massachusetts. On their final, victorious march to Yorktown, the army led by Gen. George Washington and French Gen. Rochambeau went down the King’s Highway, a network of widened native roads that linked the 13 colonies. Yorktown itself had been one of the capitals of Tsenacommacah (Powhatan Confederacy), the native imperium encountered by the English at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And so on.
In a way that is difficult to imagine now, natives and newcomers lived cheek-by-jowl during the colonial era. Settlers in New England smoked tobacco, planted corn, carried wampum to trade, wore moccasins and deer hide to travel, and fished in canoes (rather than coracles). Indians cooked with steel knives and bowls, cut wood with European axes, and sometimes adopted Christianity. Cultural appropriation was two-way and rampant, and it moved at giddy speed.
As the decades went by, mingling hardened into acrimony, but the mutual influences remained. When natives and newcomers came to blows, Indians carried English weapons but attacked in their own style, with surprise raids by small parties darting in from the trees—what the missionary John Eliot called “the skulking way of war.” In the first big “Indian war,” the Pequot War of 1636–38, colonists shocked by Indigenous military victories ended up adopting their opponents’ tactics wholesale. “God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode,” Eliot wrote with chagrin. Fifty years later came King Philip’s War (1675–78). This time, the English waged war like natives—and won decisively.
The lessons carried over to the Revolution. “They did not fight us like a regular army, only savages, behind trees and stone walls,” one British soldier complained after the opening Battle of Lexington and Concord. The colonists, he wrote, are “full as bad as the Indians.” After the war, British Lt. Thomas Anburey grumbled that the rebels, infected by “the Indian’s idea of war,” “delight more by murdering from the woods, walls and houses, [rather] than in shewing any genius or science in the art military.”
Both sides wanted the powerful Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to fight on their side. In May 1775, the colonial militia leader Ethan Allen begged them to “Join with me and my Warriors”—the Green Mountain Boys, as his guerrilla force was known. “I know how to shute and ambush just like Indian and want your warriors to come and see me and help me fight Regulars. You know they Stand all along close Together Rank and file and my men fight as so as Indians Do.” The Haudenosaunee, a league of six Indigenous nations, was leery of involvement in what it saw as a foreign civil war. But individual members were drawn in on both sides, splitting the confederacy. Swept into the fight alongside them were another dozen native societies.
The contribution of native-style warfare—and natives themselves—to the Revolution should not be exaggerated. Washington was leery of both Indians and their tactics. Throughout the conflict, he sought to fight European-style, with massed armies blasting away at each other in open fields—although he did sometimes look for soldiers who were, as he put it, “accustomed to the irregular kind of wood-fighting practiced by the Indians.” Gradually he warmed to working with such allies as the Iswa (Catawba) and Lënapeyok (Lenape), but he relied on them only for specialized roles—scouting, spying, and safeguarding the frontier—rather than as infantry troops in pitched battles.
If natives’ impact on the battleground was limited, their impact on the war’s origins, political and intellectual, was enormous.
A turning point occurred in 1763. In January, European nations signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France (and their respective allies). Dismaying the war-weary British government, Pontiac’s Rebellion erupted barely four months later. It was a monthslong, broad-scale assault by a coalition of native nations on British forces in Michigan and the Ohio Valley. (“Pontiac” was the English name for Obwaandi’eyaag, who led the Odawa, or Ottawa, in Michigan.)
NATIVE LANDS ESTABLISHED BY PROCLAMATION OF 1763
Map: Courtesy of Charles C. Mann
In October, seeking to defuse what was becoming a long and costly conflict, King George III banned colonists from moving into land west of the Appalachians. The royal proclamation gave natives permanent title to what had been the eastern half of France’s American holdings—all of the land between the Mississippi River and the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, plus the western half of Georgia, all of Florida, and a big chunk of Canada. It blocked off an area of something like 600,000 square miles.
Leave aside natives’ annoyance at being “given” title to land they had occupied for generations. Colonists reacted with fury. From their point of view, the king was taking back the free land he had promised them—the reason that many had left their homelands, the goal of fighting the Seven Years’ War. Worse, he was giving it to “savages.”
Nowhere was the anger more volcanic than in Pennsylvania, through which many migrants had intended to move into the rich Ohio Valley. Even as the conflict with Pontiac continued, tensions rose between Pennsylvania’s colonists and their government in Philadelphia. Settlers harassed soldiers ordered to enforce the king’s proclamation. Pennsylvania’s legislature, Benjamin Franklin moaned, was under siege by a “mad armed Mob.”
British Gen. Thomas Gage and Pennsylvania Gov. John Penn initiated peace talks with Pontiac in March 1765. The negotiators left Philadelphia with a caravan of more than 80 packhorses loaded with goods as guarantees of London’s words. Viewing the talks as a sellout, a backwoods militia known as the “Black Boys” raided the supply train, attacked English forts, and kidnapped English soldiers. Penn convened a grand jury to charge the Black Boys. It refused to indict them.
Encouraged, the Black Boys seized much of western Pennsylvania, controlling traffic through the area, assaulting British forces, even issuing their own passports. The conflict continued until July 1776, when Pennsylvania, after a constitutional convention dominated by the Black Boys, became the first colony to establish an independent government, one intended to be responsive to the popular will. It was the first big revolt against British authorities—a dress rehearsal in miniature for the Revolution that was to follow.
Anger about Pontiac’s rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763 bubbled into the Declaration of Independence. When the Declaration decries the king’s support of “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages,” it is referring to his attempts to compromise with the native coalition in the Ohio Valley. And when the Declaration denounces the king’s measures to “prevent the population of these States”—that is, to discourage immigration to the colonies—by “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands,” it is talking about the Proclamation.
The Revolution had causes other than the Proclamation: taxation, trade controls, forcing colonists to house troops, and so on. One of the most important was one of the most intangible: the rebels’ beliefs about freedom, liberty, and governance. These, too, were deeply entwined with North America’s original inhabitants.
The first European ventures into North America occurred as Enlightenment figures such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were questioning Europe’s absolute monarchies, state religions, and rigid class rules. All of these thinkers were fascinated by the recently revealed existence of Native Americans—living, breathing products of societies with wholly different social, political, and spiritual traditions. All of them made Indians central to their work.
None of these thinkers were ethnographers in the modern sense. The “natives” featured in their work mainly are foils—convenient human illustrations for ideas. Consider the protagonist of Voltaire’s popular novella L’Ingénu (1767). A naive young man, half-French and half-Wendat (Huron), he was less an actual character than a vehicle for the author to mock French hypocrisy and corruption. Locke, interested in the origins of society, used Indians in his work as examples of early human development, preserved as if in amber. (“In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.”) Rousseau had similar views. The difference was that Locke didn’t think much of these supposedly primitive societies and Rousseau admired them.
At the same time, other Europeans actually were interested in native life—and drew lessons from it. Again and again, foreign visitors to New England and Quebec described their inhabitants as having vastly more personal liberty and autonomy than Europeans. “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whatsoever,” wrote Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in France’s Canadian colony from 1632 to 1649. “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains [nobles and kings], while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”
Unlike Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Le Jeune had a conception of native life that was basically accurate. As he reported, native rulers had little formal authority; they had to persuade others to follow their ideas. The Haudenosaunee, for example, have a tadadaho, who presides over the Grand Council, which itself was comprised of male leaders of the league’s six member nations. Tadadaho is traditionally a lifetime appointment, like a king, but the role is more like today’s speaker of the House—someone who shapes the agenda but must marshal the support of the other representatives to make anything happen. Even if the tadadaho won the Grand Council’s backing, he could not act without the approval of a second, all-female council, traditionally formed of clan mothers.
Unlike European kings and nobles, Haudenosaunee leaders could be deposed if their people lost faith in them (although this was relatively uncommon). They had to have the consent of the governed and worked hard to keep it. Were the colonists who rebelled against King George and established a republic inspired by this? Surely not directly. But it seems clear that the colonists on the Atlantic seaboard were imbued with views about freedom that were strikingly different from those of their ancestors, and that they identified those views with native people.
Europeans at the time widely believed in the “Great Chain of Being,” in which society was organized by divine mandate into a rigid social hierarchy. At the top was the king, whose authority was endowed by God. One rung below him was the nobility, whose noble blood made them superior to the merchants and peasants below. So important was the social ladder that European nations had sumptuary laws prohibiting commoners from passing themselves off as their betters by donning their attire—in England, for instance, only the nobility could wear beaver-felt hats. Failing to kowtow to people of superior status was a violation of the Christian order. It was sinful, unthinkable, unnatural.
The Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and other northeastern Indigenous groups thought all that was hooey, and they loudly told this to the Europeans. They “brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power,” reported the Baron de Lahontan, who spent nine years in French Canada. De Lahontan’s accounts of his American sojourn, translated into half a dozen languages, include a 1703 book of “dialogues” with a Wendat leader, Kondiaronk, who scoffed at European pretensions. “I have the absolute disposal of myself, I do what I please,” Kondiaronk told de Lahontan. The baron, he said, was a fool for “choos[ing] rather to be a French slave than a free Huron.”
The appeal of native freedom was anything but theoretical. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm spent three years in the Northeast and returned with a best-selling account of colonial life. When Indians captured settlers in war, Kalm reported, most “never wanted to return….They found the Indians’ independent way of life preferable to that of the European.” Similarly chagrined observations came from Benjamin Franklin. By the time of the Revolution, wrote the aristocratic settler John Hector St. John, “thousands” of Europeans had joined native societies, “and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”
An instinctive dislike of overweening hierarchy is lodged deep in the U.S. character. Some of that surely is because settlers came to the Americas already dissatisfied with what Europe offered them. But one cannot dismiss the impact of seeing other, freer ways of life up close.
When the colonists swarmed the docks of Boston for the Boston Tea Party, they began a call for liberty that led to the Revolution. What did those colonists do to announce their quest for freedom? They disguised themselves as Indians.
