He ended this report from the depths of misery with an almost comically jarring segue into a series of directives about work to be done at Mount Vernon, saying, “With respect to the chimney, I would not have you for the sake of a little work spoil the look of the fireplaces,” and “You ought surely to have a window in the gable end of the new cellar.”
But there was a certain logic in his switch of topics. He was a creature of honor who now saw no honorable way forward. He had been beaten soundly not only by a superior enemy but by himself. He had little faith in his army. In truth, it wasn’t a proper army. (One of his generals, frustrated over the lack of uniforms, had sent his men into battle with tree boughs in their hats as a way to mark them as a unit.) The British now had New York: the city and the port. Loyalists were coming out of hiding and making the city their home again. He had let everyone down, including the gentlemen in Philadelphia, who less than three months ago had ceremoniously proclaimed independence, and who had placed their faith and hope in him. And he and his harried men were still being pursued. It seemed everywhere he looked he saw regiments of redcoats approaching: “like a clover field in full bloom” was how a private in his army described the sight. The scene before him held nothing but misery. But if he closed his eyes, he was back home.
Chapter 12
SO CELESTIAL AN ARTICLE
The surface of a lake does not show the lake itself but the sky. This world, the world of humans, is a reflection of the Sky World. Since everything in the Sky World is invested with consciousness—is, in a sense, a person—so too are all the things on earth. A tree is a kind of “person,” as is a rock, a lizard, a meteor, a corn beetle, the yarrow root, the sun, a snake. Thunder is a person and ice is a person. You can speak to all of these, whisper hot prayers or encouragements, and they will hear. It is possible, furthermore, for a “person” to change from one form to another, or to have his or her form changed: root to snake, rock to moon, flower to woman, child to mouse, man to tree stump. Certain objects are special; they can transform themselves or work the effect on others. These are aaskouandy: charms. A snake bone, a twist of husk or hair, the castor sac of a beaver, a claw, a black stone found glistening in a deer’s stomach. What we see before us does not remain as it is, but shifts. This is reality. These things happen here in the world.
Such was the knowledge pool from which Cornplanter, warrior of the Wolf Clan of the Senecas, drew. When he met with Americans or British, sat smoking, drank, laughed, listened to them boast of the greatness of their society, discussed the quality of a musket or the need to share the “island” of North America, his perspective was animated by such knowledge. His sense of the world was ontologically different from that of his counterparts, the American and British leaders. For him everything was alive and conscious. Magic was ordinary truth.
When the Iroquois had met with the agent of George Washington in the fall of 1775, and Cornplanter had declared himself leader of the Senecas, they had agreed to stay out of the conflict. Now, as George Washington led his army in retreat from the British on Manhattan, Cornplanter and the Senecas at Conawaugus were harvesting corn and preparing for the fall hunt. Cornplanter and his wife (whose name has not come down to us) had a two-year-old son. As far as they were concerned, their world was complete. Cornplanter lived with other members of his wife’s extended family in one longhouse, with high, sloping ceilings and firepits spaced down the center to delineate the immediate family units. He, his wife and their son would have had, as their own area, one of the low bunks that ran along the sides and, above it, a storage shelf that held their personal belongings: baskets, clothing, jewelry, pipes for smoking, soft hides of bear and fox and deer, maybe a dried elk’s bladder used as a canteen, stoppered and fitted with a string for wearing around the neck. As the winds of autumn swept in and nights grew colder, as Cornplanter settled into his bed with his loved ones, the coughs and rustlings and intimate noises of the other relatives in the house signaled not a lack of privacy but the wider bounds of familiarity. In Seneca society, you were close. You knew everyone by sound and smell. You were not alone, not ever.
Though they preferred not to think of the affairs of the whites, agents had, over the previous months, come to the village requesting them to appear at councils. John Butler had come. Cornplanter knew him. He had been brought to Iroquois country as a child by his father, and learned several Iroquois languages as he grew up. He had served in the Seven Years’ War and learned firsthand how the Iroquois fought, the value they put on torture, the meaning of the charms that they adorned themselves with, braiding them into their hair, tying them to the pipes they smoked at councils. He knew their world. He came with rum and presents. He was on the British side in the war, and he wanted the Iroquois to join in, to fight alongside the redcoats. He assured them that the Americans were going to lose; if the Iroquois helped the British now, the British would remember it and reward them.
Cornplanter didn’t like this. Seneca country was far from the fighting; this war was not their affair. But some Iroquois, who lived to the east, joined the British in the Canadian battles. They fought the Americans at a place called the Cedars, near Montreal; some died there.
After that came another call to council, this time from the American side. The involvement of Iroquois at the Cedars had gotten their attention. They wanted to talk, and they were suddenly very insistent. The council took place in Mohawk country, a 160-mile walk due east, at a place the Americans called German Flatts. Many Senecas from Conawaugus made the journey. In all, 1,700 Iroquois—men, women and children—gathered at the behest of General Philip Schuyler.
This was inauspicious ground for a peace council: two decades earlier German Flatts had been the location of a bloody attack by Iroquois and Frenchmen; they had killed some of the German settlers there and taken others prisoner. Now the Senecas arrived to find the Americans building a fort, with the slender and imperious figure of General Schuyler in command. At age forty-three, Schuyler was an almost exact contemporary of Washington, and, like Washington, he had a frosty, aristocratic mien. But where Washington’s sense of entitlement had come from the Anglo planters of Virginia, Schuyler was a native of Albany who traced his ancestry to the Dutch period. As a member of the Albany elite, he had a long and mostly contentious relationship with Abraham Yates. He had been named by Congress to head the Northern Army, and reported to Washington. While Washington was at this moment preparing for the British invasion of New York, Schuyler was tasked with keeping the Iroquois out of the war.
The Iroquois found Schuyler in a foul mood, for he had been waiting for them for more than three weeks. His disregard for them (“haughty princes of the wilderness,” he called them) was plain.
Despite their tardiness, the Iroquois insisted on being properly feted before getting down to business. Schuyler was further annoyed: “The Consumption of provision and Rum is incredible,” he reported.
Eventually—it was August 6, 1776—the council fire was lit. The Iroquois began with a ritual request for condolence for the recent death of two of their chiefs. This was standard protocol, but for Schuyler it was too much to bear. These warriors had been killed in action against Americans: in violation of a solemn agreement, the violation being the very reason for this present council. He would not take part in the condolence ceremony. The Iroquois considered, and decided they would not press the matter. Whereupon General Schuyler must have held aloft the first of many strings of wampum and, trying to calm himself, intoned, “With this String we open your ears that you may plainly hear what the independent States of America have to say to their Brethren of the Six Nations.” He reiterated the facts that led the Americans to break with England, and reminded the Iroquois that in the council the previous year they had agreed—and he quoted them—“not to take any part” in the war, as it was “a family quarrel.”
Then he brought up the machinations of John Butler, how he had stirred some Iroquois to fight for the king, and listed several instances in
which Iroquois warriors had fought against Americans in Canada. He closed by affirming that if they would keep their promise to stay out of the fighting, then the “independent States of America” would vow to live in friendship not only with the Iroquois but with all Indians.
Cornplanter was a man of depth, who had an appreciation of subtlety, of reality’s layers and changeability. He may have seen both the Americans and the British as rather childlike in their seeming clarity. There were many occasions, like this one, when he and other Iroquois leaders—the Oneida chief Good Peter and sachem Jimmy Tayaheure, Sagwarithra of the Tuscaroras, the Cayuga Fish Carrier, his own half-brother Handsome Lake—might have tried to enlighten an American or British interlocutor on the power structure of the Six Nations, which had built into it the autonomy not just of its six major divisions but of every single Iroquois. If a small group of them wished to join in a fight, there was little the confederacy could do about it. The Americans, who were at war over their freedom, had difficulty comprehending that among the Iroquois each individual, with his or her unique consciousness, had freedom, and each cherished it. Freedom, in other words, was basic to the Iroquois.
But the Iroquois leaders did not make this point at German Flatts. Neither the Americans nor the British would truly understand, just as they could not fathom the use of an aaskouandy for altering reality. To them the Iroquois concept of freedom came across as shiftlessness, irresponsibility.
The point was made in a different way by the hundreds upon hundreds of Iroquois present at the council (their consumption of food and drink, General Schuyler complained, “equals that of an army of three thousand men”), whose numbers spoke to the diffusion of power among them. At any event, the leaders mollified the general by reaffirming their intention to remain neutral. They promised to be deaf to John Butler’s repeated and insistent attempts at persuasion. They accepted the wampum belts, ate and drank some more, then went home.
John Butler’s backwoods cajoling of the Iroquois to join the British had its origins in London. It had its origins, to be precise, with George Germain. When he sent Guy Carleton to Canada, Germain included instructions to “employ” Indians in “making a Diversion and exciting an alarm” among the colonists. While he considered himself to be respectful of codes of military conduct, Germain also believed it was appropriate to use every available means to do the job he had been assigned. Carleton—who had longtime knowledge of American Indian nations and believed that their methods violated principles of proper conduct in war—chose not to follow Germain’s order.
If Germain wanted assistance in his effort, it showed up in timely fashion. In what must have seemed like an apparition, a genuine Mohawk warrior appeared before him one day in March of 1776. Thayendanegea, known to the Americans as Joseph Brant, was handsome, intelligent, dressed in European clothing and spoke good English. He was a perfect foil to the notion prevalent among the British that the American natives were creatures outside the boundaries of civilization. Even better, Thayendanegea had come expressly to forge an alliance between the Iroquois and Great Britain. He had been groomed from childhood by William Johnson, the Irish-born powerbroker who lorded over the Albany region from his estate in Mohawk country. Johnson, a devout loyalist, had died recently, but he had given Brant not only a taste for all things British but a conviction that England, with its mighty army and navy, was certain to win the war. Brant had traveled to England with Johnson’s nephew, Guy Johnson, a colonel in the British army, and everything he saw as he walked the streets of London reinforced his awe at the power and grandeur of Britain. The English, meanwhile, were intent on wooing him. They arranged for him to have his portrait painted. He received visitors at the inn where he was staying, the Swan with Two Necks. He had an audience with the king. And he met with Germain. The American Secretary was happy to overlook the fact that the Mohawk leader addressed him as “Brother Gorah,” for Brant quickly got to the point:
We have crossed the great Lake and come to this kingdom, with our superintendent Col. Johnson from our Confederacy the Six Nations and their Allies, that we might see our Father the Great King, and joyn in informing him, his Councillors and wise men, of the good intentions of the Indians our bretheren, and of their attachment to His Majesty and his Government.
Brant, as he moved through London society, was the very picture of sophistication, and he provided the support Germain needed in his quest to get the Iroquois on the British side. The Secretary began exploring ways to work around the reluctance of General Carleton to employ Indian fighters. In the spring of 1776 he sent another general, John Burgoyne, to Canada. Burgoyne would technically serve under Carleton, but Germain planned to give him command of the army that would move south, down the Hudson River, cutting the New England colonies off from the others. Before Burgoyne left, Germain told him pointedly that “the assistance of the Indians” was “highly necessary.” At the same time, he wrote to General Howe in New York, saying that “the securing of the affection and assistance of our old friends and allies, the Indians of the Six Nations, is a consideration of no small importance.”
Most of the British generals resisted this push, but Germain kept at it, determined to see to it that, as he said, “proper persons are employed to negotiate” with the Iroquois. So began the campaign of councils, conducted by Indian agents loyal to Britain, to work on the Iroquois. The agents knew this would not be easy work. They had some awareness of the Iroquois method of decision-making: that it required patience, time and effort for the various villages and tribes to come to a consensus, and that even then it would not be universal. This kind of outreach also required money, so even before Congress had declared America’s independence, Germain devoted 5,000 pounds to buying presents to help sway the Iroquois.
Initially, the agents reported no progress, but Germain was insistent. Once Burgoyne was installed with Carleton’s forces, he wrote him again, saying, “I hope every precaution has been taken to secure the Indians to our interest. The Congress is exerting all their influence to debauch them from you.” He knew that Burgoyne recoiled at the Indians’ brutal tactics, but, he said, those tactics were precisely the point: “The dread the people of New England &c. have of a war with the savages proves the expediency of our holding that scourge over them.”
Meanwhile, news reached the offices of Whitehall in the fall of 1776 that must have caused the American Secretary to expel a stupendous sigh of relief: Howe had taken New York. Hugh Percy—the same friend of Major Thomas Moncrieffe to whose quarters on Staten Island Margaret Moncrieffe was taken for her reunion with her father—was also a confidant of Germain. Lord Percy had been part of the campaign as Howe’s men chased Washington from Long Island to Manhattan and took control of New York City. He wrote Germain from America: the battle “was ably planned and nobly executed. The behavior of both officers and men on that occasion did honour to the country they came from and to the cause in which they are engaged. The rebels have severely felt the blow, and I think I may venture to foretell that this business is pretty near over.”
Germain was exultant. The peace commission, which he had been against from the start, had failed. “Roman severity” was succeeding. He was succeeding. The larger strategy—an army from Canada would move south, while Howe’s would move north from New York, using the Hudson River as a conduit for splitting the rebellion in two—was still in motion, but it might not be necessary. For all he knew the next packet of letters might bring news that Washington and his misfit army had been vanquished.
Once more, as he had at Kip’s Bay before an oncoming line of British soldiers, Washington froze. Summer—the summer in which his colleagues in Philadelphia had declared American independence from Britain—was over. The wind off the river was cold now, and leaves were turning. His fellow officers believed the army had to get off Manhattan, which had been lost, and find another place to make a stand. Yet day after day he stayed holed up on the Harlem Heights, paralyzed with indecision. He was trying to second-guess H
owe. What would the British general do? Would he charge up the Hudson, en route to a rendezvous with the oncoming army from Canada? Would he lead his troops across the Hudson and into New Jersey, and storm Philadelphia?
Then Howe made his move. Word came that the British had maneuvered their ships through a thick fog and landed 4,000 men on Throg’s Neck, a spit of land at the place where the East River spilled out into Long Island Sound. Howe was coming directly for Washington.
Washington acted. He marched his men 18 miles north, to White Plains. (Yates and the rest of the New York Convention had previously abandoned the town, as had many of its residents.) Howe pursued; there was a hard, close fight as the Americans tried to hold a hilltop. They failed, and lost 175 men in the process. Howe then surprised Washington by spinning back to the south. His target this time was the last place on the island where Washington had troops: the fortification that guarded the northern end of Manhattan. There was a psychological as well as a strategic reason to take the post. The rebels had named it Fort Washington.
Washington couldn’t decide whether to abandon the fort or not. In fact, there was no sense in trying to hold it, but his subordinate, General Nathanael Greene, decided the matter for him: they would defend. Thousands of British and Hessian troops clawed their way up the steep ridge and engaged the men crammed into the fort. After a bloody fight the Americans realized they were trapped. The American commander, Robert Magaw, offered his sword. More than 2,800 hungry and sorry-looking soldiers marched out of the fort and surrendered. They were taken to prison ships, where many, if not most, eventually died. The British renamed Fort Washington as Fort Knyphausen, after the Hessian leader of the attack.
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