In the period circa 1818-1840, Revolutionary War veterans gave oral pension depositions in local courts that described their experiences in the War for Independence. These public recollections of the American Revolution closely related to emerging constructions of national identity. Many veterans who applied for pensions had never fought with the main armies against the British. For men from the greater Pennsylvania backcountry (upon whom this paper focuses), their war was a struggle over the future of the Trans-Allegheny West. Their narratives reveal that the frontier war produced an American identity predicated on an increasingly biologically-oriented notion of "whiteness." This concept created unity among diverse backcountry settlers and implicated Indians as "non-white." The development of white racial consciousness grew haltingly during the colonial wars of the 1750s and 60s. By the War for Independence, however, concepts of race became central to defining "Americaness." Revolutionaries were then able to adapt Indian culture, especially methods of warfare, with no peril to their belief in their superiority. "Otherness" on the Pennsylvania frontier was no longer defined by cultural differences, but according to perceptions of skin color. The veterans' understandings of the Revolution and national identity helped solidify the early republic's equation of white manhood with citizenship. With property ownership largely vanishing from suffrage requirements, early Americans placed a greater emphasis on gender- and race-based notions of exclusion in defining the body politic. This of course helped mitigate potential class conflict in the political arena among whites. Historians have already noted how in the Revolution's aftermath racism became a way to formally deny rights to African Americans, both slave and free. I argue that Pennsylvania backcountry veterans' pension depositions reveal a significant parallel process in which Indians, no matter how culturally assimilated, could never be accepted in the Republic by virtue of their lack of "whiteness." The perceived skin color of European Americans was, therefore, crucial to the construction of national identity in the early United States.