He wanted an army commission because the war’s outcome mattered, and because his skills could contribute to an outcome that would, among other things, settle the question of federal authority over the states in a way that had implications for treaty enforcement and Native rights.

He wanted the Commissioner’s position because it placed him inside the system that governed his people’s lives, with at least the potential to make that system function less destructively.

Whether that strategy succeeded, overall, is a question that does not have a clean answer.

What it produced was a career unlike any other in nineteenth-century America — a life spent at the intersection of Seneca identity and American institutional power, navigating both with exceptional skill and without being able to fully satisfy either.

What He Built After Washington