Indigenous Continent, page 34
ON JUNE 21, 1779, Spain declared war on Britain, prompting John Stuart, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the Southern District, to work to persuade Chickasaws and Choctaws to serve as guardians of the Mississippi, patrolling the river for Patriot activity. Struggling to both recruit and defeat Native soldiers, George Washington and his cabinet launched a scorched-earth campaign against the Senecas, whom they considered the most militant of the Six Nations. In the fall, Washington mobilized five thousand troops against the nation. The campaign was a resounding success: “Forty of their towns have been reduced to ashes, some of them large and commodious, that of the Chenissee—the Genesee Castle, a Seneca stronghold—alone containing 128 houses. Their crops of corn have been entirely destroyed.” The assault created five thousand refugees, who fled to the Niagara Valley, stretching out for eight miles on its banks. Hundreds died of disease and hunger. It was also a direct attack on Iroquois women, “who were the Truest Owners, being the persons who labor on the Lands.” The Mohawks and Onondagas had lost vast tracts of land and gravitated even more toward the British, whereas the Oneidas acted as a buffer for the British at the head of the Mohawk River. In return, they received guarantees for their lands. Washington believed that the momentum had shifted decisively; the domain of the Six Nations “has been overrun and laid waste,” he said.23
In the winter of 1779–80, allied Indians secured plenty of guns and powder from the British and destroyed American settlements across a vast frontier belt extending from New York in the north across Pennsylvania and western Virginia, and to Kentucky in the south and, on the east–west axis, from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi Valley. British officers hoped to shift the primary battle zone westward and provide relief to their armies operating on the Eastern Seaboard. The Ojibwes, Lenapes, Mahicans, Miamis, and Meskwakis joined the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas in a vast British-Native alliance. These Indigenous soldiers were not auxiliaries providing supplementary support to the British army. They fought for their own reasons, with their own methods, and under their own leaders; they were waging their own war within the larger war, determined to protect their sovereignty. Their mobile soldiers relied on ambushes, retreats, regroupings, sieges, and, when necessary, frontal attacks. Whenever they provided support to British maneuvers, they expected to be rewarded. “The Indians have been accustomed to receive so very liberally, that now their Demands are quite unlimited,” one British officer despaired. The Iroquois began to call Washington Hanadagá:yas, “Town Destroyer.”24
British troops and pro-British Iroquois soldiers chased the Oneidas out of the Mohawk Valley, burning their villages and destroying the critical buffer zone that had shielded American settlements. Clark was in a rush because he knew that British troops under Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton would try to entrench themselves in the Illinois Country in early spring. To reach their destinations, the two armies had to enter the middle ground, where they could operate only by embracing Indigenous diplomacy. Rather than simply killing the Piankashaw sachem Grand Coete as his Indian-hating would have dictated, Clark appeased him. He compared the sachem to Pontiac. Facing Native Americans whom he could not afford to alienate, Clark awkwardly announced, “It may appear otherwise to You, but [I] always thought we took the wrong method of treating with Indians, and strove as soon as possible to make myself acquainted with the French and Spanish mode which must be preferable to ours. Otherwise they could not possibly have such great influence among them.” With a new mindset and proper words, Clark forged bonds with Kaskaskians, Kickapoos, and Peorias. The British militia at Fort Sackville abandoned Hamilton, and the Patriots took the fort and restored its original name, Vincennes. Every maneuver, however forceful or creative, seemed only to prolong the war. Dozens of Indigenous war expeditions left from Fort Niagara in both 1781 and 1782. At Fort Pitt, an official complained that “you could not send out your servant 100 yards without having him scalped.” American power and presence in the Ohio Country were shrinking fast.25
While the Patriots and the British were preoccupied with the war and its many theaters of operations, smallpox had traveled in the bodies of soldiers, triggering local outbreaks in Quebec, Boston, and the Great Lakes. The pox then moved south from Quebec and north from Pensacola along the Eastern Seaboard with the marching British and Patriot armies. In 1781, the British were confident of victory and spent £100,000 to stock Forts Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac with gifts for the Indians; Niagara alone treated Indians with over twenty-seven thousand gallons of rum a year. But an epidemic changed the course of the Revolutionary War when it devastated Lord Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment,” a group of loyalist African Americans who had escaped slavery and joined the British army in a march across the South. In October, General Charles Cornwallis and the main British army were hopelessly trapped in Yorktown on the Virginia Peninsula. A promised fleet from New York had been intersected by French ships, Dunmore’s Black allies were dying of the pox, and his regulars were succumbing to malaria. His army vanishing under a double pathogenic assault, Cornwallis surrendered, bringing the American Revolutionary War to an end.26
Britain may have exited the war, but Native Americans continued to fight. Their war of independence was still undecided, and 1782 saw some of the bitterest battling in the Ohio Valley. Shawnee, Lenape, and Seneca-Cayuga war expeditions left nearly nine hundred Kentucky settlers dead. In the pays d’en haut, British troops were still occupying forts and faced Indians who harbored nostalgia for Onontio and French traders, French gifts, and French meditation. The nostalgia was real, but it was also performative. It served to terrify British officials and force them to make concessions and keep trade goods flowing in.
In 1782, Major Arent DePeyster, the commander of Fort Detroit, apologized to his superior for the fact that the Indians “are not under better discipline.” It was not for lack of trying: “I have wrought hard to endeavor to Bring them to it, but, find it impossible altogether to change their natures. I assemble them, get fair promises, and send them out, but when once out of sight the turning of a Straw may divert them from the original plan.” DePeyster did not articulate it, but his report captured the fact that after twenty-five years of almost continuous war, Native Americans were still in control in the continent’s interior.27
THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore’s War, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty-year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The 1783 Treaty of Paris extinguished that long-standing ambition. The thirteen colonies were severed from the British Empire and recognized as the United States of America. Native Americans had not been invited to the treaty talks, and they knew to expect an undesirable outcome. Still, when the news arrived, they were shocked and appalled. The treaty gave the United States an enormous territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, including the southern Great Lakes. The United States was an instant empire, claiming lands far beyond its effective borders. The change was so abrupt that it took Jefferson, ordinarily an expeditious labeler, several years to define the new empire. He called it an “empire of liberty.” For most Native Americans, it was a crude robber regime.28
Contemporary Europeans saw the 1783 treaty as a decisive turning point in the North American continent’s history that spelled doom for Native Americans, who could no longer play rival colonial powers against one another. That view of the situation was wishful thinking. The fledgling United States may have claimed an enormous swath of Indigenous territory, but it controlled very little of it. Native Americans, allied with both Patriots and Britain, had retained their territorial supremacy in North America throughout the long war. The Great Lakes region and nearly all of the Trans-Mississippi West remained under Indigenous rule, with catastrophic consequences for the British Empire: British possessions were confined to north of the Ohio River, isolating the British from the main commercial and diplomatic networks.
In the summer of 1783, thirty-five Native nations gathered for a conference at Sandusky, a Wyandot settlement in the Ohio Country, where Joseph Brant urged them to join in an alliance against the United States through the ancient “Dish with One Spoon” law. Others directed their anger at the British. The Iroquois were “thunderstruck” when they realized that their British allies had done nothing on their behalf in Paris, limiting their territory within the boundaries of the new United States. A year later, at Fort Michilimackinac, the Ojibwe ogimaag Matchekwis branded all British “liars [and] imposters” for having “encouraged him and others to go to Canada [and] to fight and lose their Brothers and Children.” Despite all his people’s sacrifices, he said, the British “now despise them, and let them starve.” The Seminoles, who had incorporated large numbers of fugitive slaves, shamed the British by asking them whether they now intended to sell them into slavery. For the Muscogees, Cherokees, and other southern Indians, the wars of independence would continue for generations in various forms.29
The wars of independence, both Indigenous and Anglo-American, that covered a half century were about respect, resources, land, and sovereignty. More abstractly, they were about legitimacy and the moral mandate to determine how war, commerce, and diplomacy were to be conducted. At the heart of the matter was the question of power—not just who should have it, but how it should be wielded in a world where Indigenous nations remained largely undefeated. By engaging selectively in wars between empires, most Native nations had preserved their independence and centrality: when the fighting ended, most of the continent was still Indigenous. Massive numbers of American settlers had crossed the Appalachians into the West, but they did not control the interior, where Native power dominated. Spain controlled a few small patches within its vast paper empire in North America—struggling settlements in the Mississippi Valley, an embryonic Indian mission project in Alta California, and the ungovernable Florida, where Indians reigned supreme. Spanish authorities tried to control the vast Louisiana Colony with five hundred troops. Crucially, Native Americans held sway in the pivotal Ohio Country where Iroquois, Seneca-Cayuga, Lenape, and Shawnee towns greatly outnumbered the colonial populations. The few American forts, garrisons, and settlements in the region were defensive enclaves.30
The Treaty of Paris and its repercussions, however, had only heightened the contest between the Native peoples and the settlers. The British Empire of crown soldiers and officials had been replaced by a new American empire of settlers who clamored for Native land even as they felt victimized by the Indians. Native Americans, although far from a single people, had prevailed and continued to think of themselves as sovereign nations. Where the American War of Independence had created a new sovereign nation, the Indigenous wars of independence had saved dozens of existing ones.
PART SEVEN
AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS
(late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century)
Chapter 23
THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE
THE TALKS HAD BEEN UNDERWAY FOR SEVERAL DAYS already, and the participants were getting edgy. In the fall of 1778, with the Revolutionary War still undecided, U.S. commissioners had invited Lenape delegates to treaty talks at Fort Pitt in the heart of the Ohio Country. Both sides had delivered elaborate speeches, hoping to forge mutual understandings, and had patiently removed obstacles to peace. Yet problems remained. The commissioners felt compelled to explain Article 6 of the proposed treaty, which stated, “The Enemies of the United States have endeavored by every artifice in their power to possess the Indians in General with an opinion, that it is the design of the United States . . . to extirpate the Indians and take possession of their country.” Through its new and aggressive national government, the United States had become a self-conscious settler colony that was impatient with Indigenous peoples on its claimed borders. U.S. agents were troubled by the implications of the accusation: their new nation, just two years old, had already been denounced as a genocidal behemoth, lending credence to long-lasting Native fears. The United States could not afford to carry such a reputation, because its position in the Indigenous continent was far from secure.1
The Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s War, the Revolutionary War, and Lord Dunmore’s War had positioned the Native Americans to contain the United States stalwartly. The Great Lakes region remained resolutely Indigenous, Spain was distracted by a war with Britain, and the United States was crippled by a $75 million war debt. The new Department of Finance printed so much money that it caused debilitating inflation. More than twenty-five thousand Americans had died in the wars—many of them from disease—yet wages plunged by more than twenty-five percent. Patriots abused Loyalists and confiscated their property. Sixty thousand Loyalists left the young republic, along with some fifteen thousand Black slaves and five thousand free Blacks. In Massachusetts, farmers were paying a third of their income to the state, sparking Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, which forced the governor to mobilize four thousand volunteers to suppress the uprising. The United States was reeling, its moral authority in shambles.2
Conversely, Native Americans could take solace in the fact that they had survived three consecutive wars that shook North America in the late eighteenth century. The United States was now the dominant force east of the Mississippi, but its reach did not even extend to that attractive boundary. Britain continued to occupy forts in the interior to protect the fur trade, its most important resource in North America, but it lacked a coherent strategy for reconquest. With enduring British and Spanish presence, however diminished, Native nations could once again systematically rely on the strategies that had kept the competing colonial powers at bay. Many Native nations forged new connections to preserve their sovereignty, while American promoters and land speculators worked feverishly to lure more colonists into the Trans-Appalachian West—the vast region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River—and especially to the fertile Ohio Country. There, people like Daniel Boone now operated as petty speculators.3
War-weary and nearly crushed by debt, the United States failed to properly staff its newly won forts in the interior. The upshot was that there was no effective federal oversight in the Trans-Appalachian West. The absence of overarching authority—whether American, British, or Indigenous—turned the region into a free-for-all. A genocidal massacre set the tone. In the fall of 1782, David Williamson, a wealthy Pennsylvanian militia leader known for his zeal to kill Indians, led a vigilante group to Gnadenhütten—“tents of grace”—a peaceful Lenape town where the Indians had allowed Moravian missionaries to live among them. The Americans entered carrying an English flag, and the missionaries offered them food. The vigilantes found metalware in the town and decided that the Indians must have raided American settlements. The militiamen lifted their hammers and smashed in the skulls of ninety-six children, women, and men, who kept singing a Christian hymn to the end. Many were scalped. Afterward, there was no American attempt to apologize or compensate for the massacre, which then became a declaration of war. This incident, together with other recent atrocities, especially the Paxton Boys’ frenzied killing spree, brought the young United States’ reputation to an all-time low.4
Within a year of the Gnadenhütten massacre, building on the pan-Indian Sandusky summit the previous summer, the Mohawk sachem Thayendanegea urged the Indian nations in the central Mississippi Valley and the Ohio Country to move against the United States: “Let there be Peace or War, it shall never disunite us, for our Interests are alike nor Should any Thing ever be done but by the Voice of the whole.” Native nations formed what became known as the Indian Confederacy, the largest pan-Indian resistance movement in the history of North America. It had one overarching agenda: stop the United States, now a nation of four million people, from stealing Native land. The confederacy’s members were committed to restoring the pre-1776 colonial borders and, in a radical measure, agreed that no nation could sell its land without the consent of the others. The member nations—Shawnees, Illinis, Miamis, Lenapes, Potawatomis, Wyandots, Odawas, Ojibwes, Piankashaws, and Wabash—agreed that all decisions had to be unanimous in order to present a unified front to the Americans. The wide-ranging Shawnees, with their deep knowledge of various colonial powers, their manifold links with distant Native nations, and their linguistic fluency, emerged as leading architects of the coalition, brokering Indigenous alliances against the savage Americans.
Alarmed, Colonel William Crawford, an old friend of George Washington, decided to attack the Indians along the Sandusky River without authorization. The Indians prevailed, captured forty Americans, and took them to Sandusky. According to one account, the Indians stripped Crawford of his clothes and told him that he would be burned. Native women put hot coals on his skin, while Crawford’s pleas for a merciful bullet went ignored. Where the United States should have been cultivating alliances with Indigenous nations, most of which they had not defeated, rogue colonists and soldiers alienated nation after nation.
Blinded by land hunger and vicious racism, the Americans were fostering a dangerous climate of violence, hatred, and revenge along their badly exposed borders. The critical Fort Pitt had 110 soldiers, most of them malnourished and unpaid alcoholics. Militarily, the fort was an empty shell. The Ohio Country, one American despaired, “is in a dreadful situation, having been almost entirely overrun this Summer by the Indians; and most of the useful men having been killed.” The Congress, created by the Articles of Confederation in 1781, managed to maintain only two hundred soldiers in the all-important Ohio Valley. The government was dangerously decentralized, vesting power in individual states.5
