Until conflict erupted in the mid-century, Indians and Europeans acknowledged each other’s land, and provincial go-betweens helped keep the peace by promoting diplomacy and cultural exchange. The Euro-American intermediaries often learned Indian languages, mastered cultural practices, and established kinship ties. In the end, however, they typically remained implicated in the settler colonial project of dispossessing the indigenes. “No provincial go-between was immune to the land fever that afflicted British America,” James Merrell points out. The European go-betweens never lost sight of a “brighter future” in which “Indians would follow the forest into oblivion.” Despite the often tireless efforts of both Indian and white negotiators, the “harsh lesson” of the woods was “the ultimate incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared.”9
By the mid-eighteenth century the explosive growth of settler colonialism undermined the long peace, and ambivalent relations gradually gave way to indiscriminate violence and ethnic cleansing. In 1750 the non-Indian population of about 1.2 million was more than quadruple the number on the continent in 1700. The encroachment of this rapidly growing settler population into colonial space sundered older ties of exchange and alliance linking natives and colonizers. Settlement drove many Indians west, “reducing those who remained to a scattering of politically powerless enclaves,” Daniel H. Usner explains. “An old world, rooted in indigenous exchange, was giving way to a new one in which native Americans had no certain place.”10
In Pennsylvania beginning in the 1680s, William Penn, the Quaker proprietor, had personified colonial ambivalence. Penn and other Quakers believed that Indians like all people possessed the “inner light” from God hence he sought peace with the tribes. At the same time, however, Penn pursued the incompatible goal of selling off lands to generate revenue. “From the beginning, this practical need abraded uncomfortably with his benign intentions toward the Indians,” Eric Hinderaker explains. As Euro-Americans pursued profitable land sales and expansion into new settlements, the Delaware and other Indians “were increasingly forced to adapt rapidly or pick up and move.”11
By the time of the French and Indian War, the British Army exacerbated an already deteriorating situation in Penn’s Woods by displaying contempt for the indigenes and their claims to the land. Wedded to the European way of war, the British dramatically underestimated Indians and in consequence suffered a series of shattering defeats in the war. No one better symbolized the British Army’s ignorance of irregular warfare combined with contempt for the “savages” than General Edward Braddock. Before launching his famously ill-fated march to besiege the French at Fort Duquesne, Braddock contemptuously dismissed an offer of alliance from the Delaware leader Shingas. After arriving with his delegation to meet with Braddock in Cumberland, Maryland, Shingas linked Delaware support against the French with securing the lands for the Indians once the French had been driven from the Forks of the Ohio.
Contemptuous of conducting diplomacy with Indians, Braddock declared gratuitously, “No savage shall inherit the land.” Shingas replied, “If they might not have liberty to live on the land, they would not fight for it”—at least not on the side of Great Britain. The most prominent settler of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, warned that the Indians were a force to be reckoned with, but Braddock rejected the advice. The “savages” might be “a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,” he told Franklin, “but upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make an impression.” But make an impression they did on July 9, 1755, as the Indians along with their French allies routed Braddock’s army, killing him and more than 450 troops and support personnel in the Battle of the Monongahela. French and Indian losses were minimal by comparison.12
Spurned by the British and besieged by the settler colonial advance, the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and other tribes launched a campaign of terror targeting squatters and backcountry settlements. The peace and ambivalence that had characterized the prior history of Pennsylvania evaporated, as the borderlands became the “scene of chaos and rout, with colonial forces hardly managing even to hinder the raids.” As the indigenes lashed out against settler encroachment, their violent homeland defense dealt a deathblow to already waning Quaker calls for toleration. Indian warriors took prisoners and plundered, killing “nearly every male colonist they encountered, often going out of their way to escalate the body count.” As they conducted a “psychological terror campaign designed to intimidate and dishearten their opponents,” the Indians affirmed the colonial discourse of savagery by mutilating and posing the bodies of many of their victims. Few considered that the indigenes— increasingly outnumbered by the flood of borderland settlers—employed terror as a deliberate tactic of intimidation, one that often worked by prompting reverse migrations.13
The indiscriminate borderland warfare fueled a boomerang of retributive violence, a pattern that would play out in American history across the breadth of the continent. By killing and taking the scalps of hundreds of settler victims, the Indians traumatized the Euro-Americans, who increasingly yearned to cleanse them from the land. Settlers acting within a discourse emphasizing Indian terror targeting innocents launched campaigns of extirpation. The colonial press routinely referenced Indian resistance as “murder” and “massacre” perpetrated by “barbarians” and “savages” against innocent men, women, and children. Graphic narratives relayed “careful descriptions of bashed-in skulls and cut-out tongues. Of sharp objects stuck into eyes and genitals.” Children learned “to hate an Indian, because he always hears him spoken of as an enemy,” explained the settler James Hall. “From the cradle, he listens continually to horrid tales of savage violence, and becomes familiar with narratives of aboriginal cunning and ferocity.” Another settler avowed, “The tortures which they exercise on the bodies of their prisoners justify extermination.” As Armstrong Starkey notes, “The image of the Indian as a murderous savage was a powerful weapon.”14
Settler incursions, land and trade disputes, spiritual divergence, alcohol consumption, and war had eroded colonial ambivalence. An “enraptured discourse of fear” and a “horror-filled rhetoric of victimization” had become “all but unanswerable as political discourse” in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River country. As in future American conflicts, opponents of violent retribution against evil and savage foes quickly became marginalized. “Anyone who professed not to see the dangers,” Peter Silver explains, “or who seemed not to care enough about the suffering it relentlessly described, was open to the charge of acting against the best interests of ‘the white people.’ “15
Colonial discourse also emphasized the anxiety-producing threat of Indian captivity of “helpless wives and poor defenseless babes.” Since the harrowing saga of Mary Rowlandson in 1682, the captivity narrative had been a staple of colonial discourse, reinforcing gendered frames of helpless women and maidens confronting the proverbial “fate worse than death” at the hands of the savages. To Indians, “captivity was a normal accompaniment to warfare.” The captives might be adopted to “cover the dead” or eventually exchanged through diplomacy to facilitate bringing an end to conflict. However, to the Euro-Americans, captivity of “white” people, and their living and residing among the indigenes, ruptured the colonial binary of civilization reigning over savagery.16
In 1757 an Indian massacre and seizure of captives outside Fort William Henry on Lake George, New York, broadly affirmed the trope of Indian savagery in colonial discourse. The French under Marquis de Montcalm bombarded and forced the surrender of the English fort, but what followed underscored the Indo-European cultural divide and became a turning point in the war. After accepting Montcalm’s terms, the British began their march out of Fort William Henry whereupon Montcalm proved unable to constrain his Indian allies, who descended upon defenseless men and women with knives and tomahawks to kill and also take their customary captives and trophies. The Abenaki, Ottawa, and Potawato
mi, among others, killed 185 and took some 300–500 captives.
The Indians had joined the French in anticipation of proving themselves in battle and taking trophies back to their villages, hence Montcalm’s reversion to a European-style honorable surrender was a betrayal of them. Moreover, with the English colonies often killing Indians indiscriminately and offering bounties for the scalps of indigenous men, women, and children, the Indians outside Fort William Henry viewed their actions as consistent with the prevailing way of war. Nonetheless, the “massacre of Fort William Henry” cemented the trope of Indian savagery while making a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 type of traumatic impact on the British North American mind. The slaughter outside the fort, vividly recounted in newspapers across the colonies, led to an upsurge in recruitment of thousands of new militiamen.17
Although they would long remember the Fort William Henry massacre, the British, desperate to change the course of a war they were losing, now sought alliance with the tribes. Many British colonials had learned a valuable lesson from Braddock’s dismissal of Indians and the subsequent debacle at the Monongahela. George Washington, a narrow survivor of Braddock’s folly, grasped that Indians were the masters of irregular warfare in the woods. He and others realized that the indigenes alone could provide crucial intelligence on the strength and positioning of the French and their allies.18
In 1758, after tense negotiations, the British, the settlers, and representative of 13 tribes came to terms in the Treaty of Easton. The Indians won concessions on hunting grounds and supposedly permanent occupation rights in the Ohio country. British military officials secured an alliance with the tribes against the French in return for pledging to stop settlement west of the Appalachians and to guarantee that Indian lands “shall remain your absolute property.”19 The settlers got an end to the indigenous campaign of terror but the brutal ethnic violence was not forgotten and would return with a vengeance at the end of the French and Indian War.
With British America now fully mobilized, new officers such as James Wolfe and Jeffrey Amherst conducted “wildly violent campaigns” against New France and the remaining Indian “miscreants” allied with the French. Few events better illustrated the embrace of indiscriminate warfare at the moment of British-American triumph than the murderous assault by Rogers’ Rangers on the Abenaki village of St. Francis on October 4, 1759. During decades of warfare with the New England settlers the Abenaki had often descended from St. Francis, located north of Montreal, to conduct murderous raids. Major Robert Rogers of Massachusetts, who today “is regarded as the founding father of the American Army’s Special Forces units,” recruited a force of mostly Scotch-Irish irregulars from New Hampshire, together with some Indian and even a few African-American fighters, to make the audacious trek deep into enemy territory. “Take your revenge,” General Amherst charged Rogers, adding the contradictory directive to show “no mercy” and yet to spare women and children.20
In an operation much like those that would occur later in places like Sand Creek and My Lai, angry attackers primed for slaughter would make no distinction on the basis of age or gender. Indeed, as so often happened in such attacks, warriors were not even present at the village, leaving mostly old men, women, and children to die by the scores if not hundreds as “the well-disciplined assault swiftly degenerated into an uncontrolled massacre.” The villagers, who had celebrated a wedding the night before, burned alive in their wooden houses in the sunrise assault or were bludgeoned or shot dead on the spot. Noting that hundreds of scalps wafted in the breeze around the village, Rogers’ Rangers took their own trophies from the dead and plundered the village of valuable metals and icons. “The American frontier could find and un-tether the savage that lay within even the most civilized of men,” Stephen Brumwell observes.21
The British, aided by their Indian allies, defeated France decisively in the French and Indian War, paving the way for another wave of European settlement. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763), the British arrogated to themselves all French territory in North America, including indigenous lands, while Spain received the trans-Mississippi Louisiana territory from France. The Indians had cooperated in the war in the expectation that in return the British would reward them with trade and gifts and respect their right to their lands and access to hunting grounds. Yet even though Braddock had been killed in the first major battle of the war, his declaration that “no savage shall inherit the land” still prevailed in the minds of Englishmen. The British had erected a chain of forts in the Upper Great Lakes region from 1758 to 1762 and soon cut off trade with the Indians in weapons and powder, thus precipitating another wave of violent conflict.
The pays d’en haut (French term for the “upper country” of the Great Lakes region) had long been a multicultural “middle ground” reflecting the ambivalence of the colonial encounter. Indians outnumbered the French in the region yet became increasingly dependent on the fur trade as well as access to firearms and European trade goods. Indian women married French men, thereby forging kinship ties, blurring identities, and opening up third spaces in the colonial encounter. Trade, ceremonial gift giving, and interethnic mixing thus stabilized French-Indian relations in the region. Many British officials and settlers expressed contempt for the race mixing “interior French” and failed to recognize the critical role they played as “cultural negotiators with Native people.”22
Emboldened by their victory over the French, British elites expressed contempt for trade and diplomacy with Indians. Amherst, like Braddock before him, had no respect for council fires, gift giving, wampum and calumet exchange, and other tiresome rituals associated with conducting diplomacy with the savages. In contrast to the French, who had long worked within the context of Indians’ ways in establishing the middle ground, the preferred British model was one of removal and dispossession. “Never during the colonial period did British or British-colonial officials establish an alliance in North America closely resembling the French alliance with the Indians of the Great Lakes,” Gregory Dowd points out.23
Following patterns rooted in the centuries-old system of chieftainship, indigenous groups had long pursued exchange relationships in order to access items as a means of ensuring loyalty to the regime. Chiefs whose tribes had become increasingly dependent on European trade goods to maintain popular support often sought war with other tribes, otherwise their young warriors would attack the Euro-American settlements, putting a stop to trade and gifting. War between tribes provided a way to “channel animosities and provide opportunities for young men to acquire status.” The British often seized opportunities to provide weapons to the warring tribes as a means of weakening the indigenes as a whole in furtherance of the settler colonial project.24
With the French defeated and the British claiming sole possession of the continent, the indigenes now confronted a single European power that, even when willing to engage in diplomacy, lacked the experience and understanding of the French in how to deal with the tribes. While some leaders and mediators grasped the nature of indigenous diplomacy, British Indian policy “was fragmented between the various colonies” and thus depended on local attitudes and conditions. Moreover, the decentralized nature of settler society enabled traders and individuals rather than the state to handle Indian affairs, which broadened the opportunities for fraudulent deals, alcohol peddling, violence, and sexual abuse. Organized trade fairs and diplomacy enabled chiefs to control relations and deliver to their constituents, but with their victory over the French, the British increasingly viewed the Indians as having been enabled by such ceremonies, spoiled by gift giving, and in need of being “convinced of our superiority.”25
Increasingly tenuous Anglo-Indian alliances fell apart on the southern borderlands. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Cherokee, who had coalesced in the southeastern mountains and valleys, backed the Carolinians in the Yamasee War. The English, however, pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy and thus refused to back the Cherokee in a vicious conflict with
their rival, the Creeks. The Cherokee nevertheless continued to pursue good relations with the British in order to access European trade goods. Led by Little Carpenter, the Cherokee marched with General John Forbes to drive the French from Fort Duquesne (renamed Fort Pitt) in 1758. However, along the way the Cherokee chieftain grew resentful over the contempt shown to him by the British, who attempted to force European-style military discipline onto the indigenes. Virginia settlers then besieged the Cherokee on their way back home, including “random killings” based solely on their identities as Indians.26
As in Pennsylvania, settler encroachment was the ultimate cause of the “Cherokee War” of 1758–1761. Despite the British being “allies,” settlers built new homes and towns on Cherokee lands and hunting grounds. As the British became assured of victory over the French, the fragile alliance collapsed and an indiscriminate war soon followed. The Cherokee viewed the alliance as a partnership and perceived the British as penurious in gift giving after the Cherokee cut short the hunting season and risked their lives to go to war against the French. The British resented having to give gifts to the tribes and viewed the Indians as insatiable mercenaries. As British “concepts of status bore an increasingly racial tinge,” they expected the Cherokee to show “grateful subordination to British power and wealth” but instead encountered a “haughty” resistance. In the absence of trade and gift giving, the chiefs proved unable to rein in young warriors, who attacked settlements to take away what they wanted. A boomerang of retributive violence ensued.27
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 10
