Indigenous Continent, page 30
The Six Nations’ noninvolvement, however, denied the British a crucial ally, enabling Montcalm to press forward and seize six forts within a year. The loss of the pivotal Fort William Henry on Lake George was Britain’s low point. Commanding the rivers and lands immediately to the west and south of Albany, the French-Indian alliance seemed to have thwarted the British. But then the French suddenly lost momentum. The battle at Fort William Henry had been a disaster for the British, but it also became an unexpected crisis for the French. The articles of capitulation had been negotiated, and the British soldiers were scheduled to vacate the fort, having agreed to become noncombatants for eighteen months. Montcalm, however, had not consulted his Native allies, who had not received their pay. Denied their rightful compensation, Native soldiers attacked the retreating British, killing dozens of provincial soldiers and taking several captives. Montcalm drew all the wrong conclusions about what had happened; he would never again rely on Native auxiliaries. Making matters worse, in the fall of 1757, smallpox spread from French soldiers to the Indians, devastating their towns in the interior and further alienating them from the French. Without realizing it, France had already lost the war—three years before its formal capitulation and six years before the Treaty of Paris.6
While the British seemed to have done almost everything wrong for three long years, from 1757 on they seemed to get almost everything right. The turn in British fortunes had much to do with the forceful William Pitt, who had become the secretary of state for the Southern Department, a role that put him in charge of Britain’s war effort in North America. At Pitt’s insistence, British officers continued to pursue proactive diplomacy with Indians. William Johnson used all his skills as a go-between to recruit Iroquois soldiers. The Six Nations may have become weakened, their armies comprising only eleven hundred soldiers, but they could still mobilize thousands more among the neighboring Native nations on the strength of their military power. “When we go to War,” they boasted, “our manner is to destroy a Nation and there is an End of it.” Backed by the domineering Iroquois League, Johnson oversaw the building of new forts and blockhouses that shielded Six Nations settlements. He effectively replaced French forts with British ones—a singular coup in the war that the Iroquois were using to preserve their dominance in the North American interior.7
Dangerously low on provisions for their armies, the British also reached out to the Cherokees, who had turned the Southeast into the most productive agricultural realm on the continent. The Cherokees had rebuffed European cajoling for years, carefully weighing their options, which unnerved the neighboring settlers, who blamed the Cherokees for much of the colonial-Indigenous violence in the South. Only in the fall of 1757 did Cherokee matriarchs, eager to gain access to British weapons and wares, authorize a war against the British Empire’s enemies. The Cherokees pledged to “make war upon the Ohio, and spare neither the French or their Indians if they fall in our way. The hatchet we began with was but a small one, but we hope to get one of a larger size, which will enable us to do more execution than we have hitherto been able to do.” The Cherokees had nurtured commercial and diplomatic ties with the English for decades, and they now brought their extensive proficiency in wilderness war into the ongoing global conflict. Cherokee leaders insisted that their alliance was with the British king, not the settlers, and they refused all British attempts to turn them into auxiliaries. Like almost all Indians who entered the war, the Cherokees fought their own war side by side with the British, using the British allies to advance their goals. They also approached the Six Nations and received wampum belts, a pledge to cooperate. By April 1758, nearly six hundred soldiers from sixteen Cherokee towns had offered military support to the British while making it clear that the alliance was one of equals. Unlike in the pays d’en haut, where creative and expedient alliances dominated, Cherokees demanded binding assurances of their sovereignty, which in turn convinced the Muscogees, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and others to join the British. As a security measure, the Cherokees kept the British in a state of uncertainty by threatening to join the French in Louisiana. They were shaping a global war through nimbly assertive foreign policy that compelled the British to remain loyal to them.8
The roles had reversed: suddenly, the French had a mere handful of Indigenous partners, mostly Abenakis dispossessed by the war. In June 1758 the British moved against Louisbourg, a strategically vital fortress on Île-Royale that guarded access to the Saint Lawrence Valley. Pitt named Major General James Abercrombie, a fastidious and lethargic man, the new commander in chief. Abercrombie, in turn, appointed the manifestly untried General Jeffery Amherst to lead the land operation against the fortress. The British navy blocked a Canada-bound French fleet, and Amherst managed to deliver a coup de grâce in the form of a methodical siege of Louisbourg. With five thousand casualties, it was a crippling defeat for France. British ships could now sail into the heart of New France. Abercrombie launched a seemingly suicidal attack on Fort Ticonderoga in July, conquering it. The battle marked, at long last, a return to European-style warfare for the British. Fort Frontenac fell in August after another siege, leaving French forts and trading posts in the pays d’en haut exposed. Spotting an opportunity to end the war in the South, Amherst ordered Brigadier General John Forbes to march against Fort Duquesne, bringing violence back to the Ohio Country.9
Terrified Virginia and Pennsylvania settlers sought refuge in the Cherokees’ mountains, while Cherokee soldiers orchestrated repeated attacks against the now isolated Fort Duquesne, preventing French supply trains from reaching it. Forbes advanced cautiously. The second battle of Fort Duquesne would be nearly the opposite of the first one four years prior: where Braddock had rejected and insulted Britain’s Native allies, Forbes embraced them to the point of equipping his troops with moccasins, face paint, and blankets. The British had found a common cause in a cataclysmic war against a shared enemy. The Lenapes openly ridiculed the French ambassadors’ desperate efforts, kicking a war belt that they brought as though it were a snake. Late in the war, the most significant difference between the British and the French armies was the disparity in Indigenous allies. Success and failure depended on following Native advice. When Forbes finally reached Fort Duquesne, the French and their Indian allies were already retreating. The French commander had the fort blown up—his futile effort to annoy the British.10
Since the spring of 1758, Pitt had asserted even more control over the British war effort. Believing that the war could not be decided on European battlefields, he moved to force an outcome in America and prepared Amherst for a decisive invasion of New France. Approximately nine hundred Six Nations soldiers joined the British in sacking Fort Niagara in June 1759. Their participation did not mean that they shared British goals and priorities, and an intense dispute broke out over the spoils. The Iroquois had not contributed to the digging of trenches or the building of fortifications, but, to the chagrin of the British, they insisted on their right to pillage the fallen fort. Johnson accommodated them. The Six Nations were fighting a parallel war over the hegemony of the Ohio Country and its people—a war that coincided only sporadically with British designs. They were not alone in their defiance. Asserting their sovereignty, the Lenapes questioned the very rationale of the war, asking the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, a Pennsylvania envoy to the Indians, “Why do not you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe, you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.” Post knew his place. “I have not one foot of land, nor do I desire to have any,” he responded. The Lenapes and Shawnees agreed to withdraw from the French alliance.11
The decisive British invasion of New France was a three-pronged operation, and it began in the fall of 1759, when a fleet sailed from Louisbourg up the Saint Lawrence to Quebec. Believing time was on his side, Montcalm chose not to engage, hoping that the British would not arrive before the Saint Lawrence began to freeze over. The plan backfired. The British forces moved into position faster than expected, evading Quebec’s batteries, and drew the French into a battle on the plateau outside the city walls. Montcalm ordered a desperate frontal attack, and well-timed musket volleys from the British stopped it on the Plains of Abraham. The French surrendered the city on September 18—a crucial British victory that was soon muddied by events in the South, where Cherokees killed land-hungry South Carolina settlers who had wormed their way into the Indians’ territory, blatantly violating Cherokee sovereignty. When the Virginia militia killed twenty-three Cherokee hostages, an open war broke out. Despite its checkered record in battling the Indians, South Carolina declared war on the mountain-dwelling Cherokees and took several hostages. When the British killed twenty-two of them, the Cherokees laid siege to Fort Loudoun. They killed and captured more than a hundred settlers as they took the fort. Led by Atagulgalu, they killed the fort’s commander and twenty-two British soldiers in revenge. The Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty remained effectively undiminished.12
The second prong of the British attack on New France came in the fall of 1760, moving through the Hudson Valley, Lake Champlain, and Richelieu Valley toward Montreal. The British blockade stopped three underprotected French supply ships, crippling France’s campaign even before it got underway. In Quebec, the anxious French inhabitants waited for the masts to appear downriver. When the masts appeared flying Union Jacks, the French knew that New France was lost.
Amherst launched the third prong simultaneously with the second by pushing to Lake Ontario. The sharp edge of his army consisted of seven hundred Six Nations soldiers whose participation William Johnson had secured—to Amherst’s dismay—for an extortionate £17,000. The British and Iroquois easily seized exposed French forts and descended the Saint Lawrence toward Montreal in bateaux and two armed sloops: the Onondaga and the Mohawk. The French were caught in a slowly closing vise. Amherst may have despised the Iroquois, but he knew their value. Their mere presence announced to the anxious Indians and settlers in Montreal that the fight would be quick and relatively bloodless. On September 6, 1760, Amherst received Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the French emissary, at his headquarters in the heights around the low-lying Montreal, from where he could easily have reduced the city to ashes. Amherst told Bougainville that he had come for New France and would not “take anything less.”13
In the south, the South Carolina militia, too, failed to defeat the Cherokees, and North Carolina and Virginia sent troops to aid the colony. In the summer of 1761, British and provincial armies retaliated by burning some twenty Cherokee towns. Guided by clan mothers, the Cherokees accepted peace and land cessions. Native American diplomacy and military might had determined the outcome of the Seven Years’ War: thousands of Indians had fought alongside the British to defeat New France and banish the French from the continent. Yet, when peace came, many of them realized that North America had become a more dangerous place for them. Numerous Indigenous nations had relied on the presence of two empires to force compromises and concessions. A New York Indian affairs secretary, Peter Wraxall, had explained the logic to British policymakers: “To preserve the Balance between us and the French is the great ruling Principle of the Modern Indian Politics,” he said, echoing Catawba tactics in the Piedmont. Now, that crucial strategy was all but defunct. Freed of European rivals, the British would begin to treat the Indians as subjects.14
IN 1761, THE OJIBWE sachem Minweweh faced British officials at Fort Michilimackinac, telling them, “The French king is our father. . . . although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us! We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains were left us by our ancestors.” In the upper Mississippi Valley, an Illini soldier nudged a French officer: “Take Courage, my Father, don’t abandon your children, the English will never come here as long as there is one red man.” French agents needed little prodding. New France and Louisiana were no more, but there were still thousands of French traders, farmers, and officers on the continent. In the Ohio Country and the pays d’en haut, many Native nations believed that the French king’s armies would soon return. The Indians maneuvered tirelessly to restore some kind of French presence in North America as a counterweight to the emboldened and expansionist Anglo-America.15
Their efforts were futile. The British Empire had swallowed New France, and the French were not coming back. France’s imperial officials had shifted their ambitions away from the North American mainland and to the Caribbean. With the British now the only source of trade and political support, the world was off-kilter. Without an imperial counterweight, the British colonies could now dictate terms to Indigenous nations from a position of unprecedented power, and they could also play the nations off against each other, just as the Indians had played the British off against the French.
George Croghan—an Irish-born borderland trader, land speculator, happy and heavy drinker, and now prominent British Indian agent—drastically curtailed gift-giving, demoting Native Americans from respected allies to mere lines in a ledger. The governor of Georgia openly extorted the Muscogees. “We can pour in Goods upon you like the Floods of a great River when it overflows,” he announced, and then he warned, “You know you cannot do well without us, but we can do without you; you have tried the French and you know they can not supply your Wants.” The governor asked the Muscogees to “witness the Choctaws and many other Nations on the Mississippi,” who “are more like Slaves than free People.” In a thinly veiled threat, he urged the Muscogees to “behave well” toward the British.16
The 1763 Treaty of Paris between France and Britain, signed in February of that year, made the demotion of Native Americans official by handing the lands of the Great Lakes Indians over to Britain without consulting them. With patent imperial arrogance, the treaty divided North America between Spain and Britain. Britain claimed the Mississippi Valley as a boundary. The treaty transferred half a billion acres between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and Spain ceded its claims to Florida and the Gulf coast. Britain now had thirty colonies in the New World—some of them tiny, others massive. Adam Smith, while writing The Wealth of Nations, recommended that Britain discard all its colonies, for managing an empire that extended across seven seas was too draining and costly.
The Treaty of Paris all but canceled the long-standing Indigenous strategy of playing the French and British Empires off against each other to extract concessions from both. When the Indians learned the terms, they were driven “to despair.” A Shawnee sachem told the French that the Shawnees could offer the support of forty-seven villages, if the French stayed. But an exhausted France accepted the eradication of New France. France did not lament the loss of Canada: its costly Indian diplomacy had turned it into a burden for the French state. The Jesuit order left North America, and Spanish settlers in Florida evacuated in droves, heading west. French Louisiana became Spanish Louisiana. Thirteen thousand Acadians, descendants of the French immigrants who settled in Acadia from the early seventeenth century onward and survived several mass deportations, scattered across the East Coast and Louisiana, as well as Great Britain and France. The radical reshuffling left tens of thousands of people homeless and rudderless. The king of Spain, Charles III, doubted whether he should even accept Louisiana, which was filled with independent Indians, whereas the total Spanish population in North America was only about twenty-five thousand. Given how little the French had been able to do with the colony, King Charles feared that it would be a money drain. The British may have been the big winners in the Seven Years’ War, but even their position was far from secure: more than a century and a half after the founding of Jamestown, their settlements were still confined to east of the Appalachians. Farther to the west, the British had claims, not possessions.17
IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1763, General Amherst, now commander in chief in North America and still an Indian hater—he branded Native Americans “pernicious vermin”—refused to issue gifts to Indigenous leaders or to release Odawa war prisoners. The Odawas and their allies prepared for a war to preserve their sovereignty, civilization, and dignity. The Six Nations sent out war belts across the lower Great Lakes, urging others to join them against the British at the time corn was planted. In late spring, the Odawa war ogimaag Pontiac held councils with Anishinaabeg, Potawatomi, Lenape, Ojibwe, Shawnee, Wyandot, and Seneca-Cayuga representatives ten miles south of Fort Detroit. An astute and bold leader, Pontiac appealed to the Indians’ shared fear of British aggression and to their shared sense of kinship rooted in long-standing nindoodemag lineages that covered much of the Great Lakes region. He urged them to rid the conceited and lethal British from their world.
Other Native nations mobilized as well, trying to preserve their power and sovereignty in a unipolar colonial setting in which the British could impose on Native Americans their notions of belonging and sovereignty, which revolved around hard borders and exclusive domains. The Six Nations adopted the long-standing French policy of containing British settlements in the east. Other nations confronted the British Empire directly. Slighted and vulnerable, thousands of Native soldiers joined a general war that swept across the interior from the Susquehanna Valley to the Mississippi. It was a war of survival against British settlers who pushed west and openly violated Indigenous sovereignty. British officials were powerless to stop the settlers, exposing the ad hoc nature of Britain’s North American empire west of the Appalachians. The Indians also protested their radically diminished political status in postwar North America. As the war ground on, trade came to a near halt, and the critical linkages between settlers and Indians became dangerously frail. The British officers did not seem to care. They now intended to dictate to the Indians. Haughty and authoritarian, Britain kept its army in the field, while its officers snubbed Indigenous diplomatic protocols. British settlers began calling Indians “dogs” and “hogs.” They thought they could simply ignore Native demands.18
