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Domestic insurrection: sowing the seeds of disorder in Revolutionary America.

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ROUGH CROSSINGS Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution By Simon Schama Ecco | $29.95

FORGOTTEN ALLIES The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution By Joseph Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin Hill & Wang | $26

"It is not one war, but many." So wrote the foreign correspondent William Langewiesche in a recent dispatch from Baghdad. The truth of this apothegm must be evident to anyone who has, even from a distance, watched the Iraqi conflict unfold. For American military strategists, it is one front in a global "war on terror." For pan-Islamic jihadists, it is one front in a global holy war. For Sunni and Shiite militiamen, it is a battle for power and a settling of ancient scores. For many Kurds, it is a long-awaited opportunity to assert their people's independence. And for most ordinary citizens of Iraq, it is simply a daily struggle for survival.

Indeed, Langewiesche's statement (in the September 2006 issue of Vanity Fair) probably applies to most large-scale military conflicts throughout history. Warfare, with its sudden unleashing of entropy and violence, also has a way of unleashing long-contained hatreds and aspirations and messianic hopes, not just among the principal combatants, but also among those who might have been considered mere bystanders or bit players. Often, this side action ends up shaping the course of the entire conflict--not to mention that of thousands of individual lives--in ways that the protagonists could never have foreseen, much less wished.

Such was the case with our own Revolution. For two centuries, most historians have treated the struggle more or less as a two-sided conflict between the forces of liberty on the one hand and those of imperial authority on the other. Yet as two recent books describe it, for certain Americans the wartime experience resembled not...

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