Crucible of War
Page 52
It was in early 1761, at the zenith of British military fortunes in America, that Amherst—soon to become Sir Jeffery, knight of the Bath— began in the name of rationality and economy to reverse the openhanded policies that had produced such remarkable cooperation between the colonists and the empire and the Indians. Perhaps nothing in the postwar period was more predictable than the effect that Amherst’s shift in policy produced among the Indians, who reacted as adversely to the restriction of trade and the end of gift-giving that he decreed in 1761 as they had to the strangulation of French commerce during the latter years of the war. Amherst’s action, however, was no more an act of caprice than it was an expression of arrogance. Rather it arose from his intention, as a conscientious European professional soldier, to impose order on a frontier that seemed, at the very moment of victory, to be slipping out of control. For reasons perfectly understandable in terms of his own culture, Amherst sought to reform Indian relations without fully understanding why they functioned as they did. He hoped to improve the character of Indians without comprehending how different from Englishmen Indians were, much less appreciating how they would understand his efforts. Despite his intentions, Amherst’s postwar efforts at reform produced not a new coherence on the frontier but a new wave of violence: the sporadic extension of the war in the west, long after the defeat of the French.
The Indians who rebelled against British control after the Seven Years’ War were trying, in the only way they knew, to maintain local autonomy and customary rights against an imperial authority heedless of local conditions. In that sense the catastrophic breakdown of Anglo-Indian relations following Britain’s great victory was both a mirror of the past and an eerily accurate predictor of the future. Like the failure of Montcalm to transform the Indians into reliable auxiliaries and the failure of Loudoun to compel the colonists to participate in the war on his terms rather than their own, the uprisings in the American interior would demonstrate the limited potential of coercion as a basis for imperial control. But this was not a lesson that the victor was prepared to learn.
CHAPTER 47
The Cherokee War and Amherst’s Reforms in Indian Policy
1760-1761
THE FIRST INDICATION that something was amiss in Anglo-Indian relations came in the form of a bloody, unexpected uprising in what had been the quietest sector in eastern North America, the far southern frontier, during the last year of the war. There, for three decades, the largest single Indian nation in contact with the British colonies, the Cherokees, had been the peaceable trading partner of South Carolina. With a population of perhaps ten thousand living in three groups of villages near what is now the eastern border of Tennessee—the Lower Towns east of the Great Smoky Mountains, the Middle Towns in their hollows, and the Overhills in the valley of the Little Tennessee River beyond—the Cherokees dominated the South Carolina frontier and served as important allies of the low-country–dominated government. For years they had sold deerskins and slaves (war captives taken from nations of the interior) to the licensed Carolina traders based in their towns. They had functioned as slave catchers, too, handing runaways back to their masters in return for rewards. Most recently they had participated, after a fashion, in the defense of the Virginia frontier. At the high point of the alliance, in 1758, as many as seven hundred warriors had briefly offered their services to John Forbes. Broadly speaking, the Cherokees’ rebellion stemmed both from the Seven Years’ War, which destabilized what had been a durable relationship between the nation and South Carolina, and from the disorderly settlement of white farmers and hunters in the backcountry, beyond the control of the colony government. But in a narrow, immediate sense, Forbes’s expedition was where the trouble started.1
The Forbes campaign did nothing to endear the British military command to the Cherokees, who streamed northward in the summer of 1758 to offer themselves as British allies. Warriors who had traveled hundreds of miles for trophies, captives, and plunder found only frustration in Forbes’s stolid advance and insult in his commanding manner. Virtually all of them left before the end of summer, taking home the muskets and ammunition he had provided. On the way south through the Virginia and North Carolina backcountry, the combination of these arms and the fighters’ warlike appearance unsettled the frontier farmers, who suspected them of stealing horses and killing livestock. Acting on rumor and fear, unable or unwilling to distinguish between Indian allies and Indian enemies, local militiamen treated the returning Cherokees with offhanded savagery. In one episode, a militia patrol hunted down, murdered, and mutilated three Overhill chiefs, then claimed the reward Virginia offered for enemy scalps. In another, a group of whites surrounded a party of Lower Town warriors whom they suspected of theft, forced them to lay down their arms, and then opened fire—killing three and wounding a fourth before the survivors could make their escape. No fewer than thirty warriors lost their lives while trying to return to their villages.2
These murders alone would have impaired the Cherokee alliance, but what the warriors discovered when they finally reached their villages made hostilities virtually inescapable. White hunters from the Long Canes settlement in South Carolina had taken advantage of the warriors’ absence to cross over into Indian country and poach Cherokee game. This invasion of the Lower Towns’ hunting grounds disrupted the Indians’ winter hunt, threatened their food supply, diminished the number of deerskins available for trade, and added weight to the nativists’ arguments that the time had come to teach the backwoodsmen a lesson. Civil chiefs—mainly older men who had had some role in establishing the alliance and maintaining peace with the colony government—still urged caution. The spring of 1759 was therefore a time of division and confusion: even as parties of Overhill and Lower Town warriors set out to avenge the deaths of the previous summer, moderate emissaries were trying to reach some agreement with Governor William Henry Lyttelton in Charleston.3
If anything could hold the rapidly disintegrating alliance together, it was some material improvement in the terms of trade, for the Cherokees were no less dependent than any other native people on European manufactures, and licensed traders monopolized all of South Carolina’s Indian commerce. Because exchange principally occurred at two remote and exposed posts—Fort Prince George in the Lower Towns, and Fort Loudoun in the Overhill country—the colony had excellent reason to seek common ground with moderates. The nation’s leading accommodationist, Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter), had tried to lessen tensions by seeking concessions and demanding a substantial gift from the Carolina government. This tactic, if successful, might have strengthened the bonds between his people and the province. It would certainly have increased his credibility as a mediator and helped counter the arguments of the Creek emissaries from the vicinity of Fort Toulouse in the Alabama Country, who reportedly were urging Cherokee nativists to join them in an alliance with the French.4 Although Governor Lyttelton negotiated with Little Carpenter through the spring of 1759, he refused to bestow the needed present—thus diminishing the status of the man who had the best chance to preserve the peace—either because he failed to understand the tenuousness of the situation or because he actually wished to force a conflict in order to gain for himself some of the military glory that was currently showering on British arms. When it became known that Cherokee raiders on the frontier had killed thirty settlers, Lyttelton completely undercut Little Carpenter’s position by embargoing all gunpowder shipments until the Cherokees surrendered the murderers to colony authorities.
A New Map of the Cherokee Nation, 1760. Published in the London Magazine from “an Indian Draught,” this view of the Cherokee settlements responded to public curiosity about what had been until recently almost entirely unknown territory. Although the engraver was far from literally accurate in his depiction, he does actually represent something like the number and distribution of Cherokee towns. Here the Lower Towns appear along the river systems that flow southeast to the Atlantic; the Middle and Overhill Towns on the tributaries of the
Coosa (here labeled, with wild inaccuracy, “a branch of Mississipi R.”), the Hiwassee (shown as a tributary of the Coosa rather than the Tennessee), and the Tennessee (here called the “Cherokees or Hogohegee R.” and shown as a tributary of “Mississipi River”). Fort Prince George is not shown among the Lower Towns, but would appear opposite Keewohee (Keowee), lower right; Fort Loudoun appears as “Savanna Hill” at upper left. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
Desperate for ammunition they needed for the fall and winter hunts, the nation now sent a new delegation of moderate chiefs to Charleston to negotiate with the governor, but in October, Lyttelton blasted what slender chances remained for accommodation by taking them prisoner. He would hold the chiefs hostage, he declared, until every man who had killed a settler had been surrendered for punishment in the colony’s courts. In November, believing that a show of force would bring the Cherokees to their senses, he carried his hostages up-country to Fort Prince George at the head of thirteen hundred provincial soldiers. In anticipation of a restoration of normal relations he also brought a great gift, including three tons of gunpowder, to bestow once the Cherokees had turned over the guilty warriors.5
The governor had made peace all but impossible to preserve. By imprisoning the chiefs who had been most inclined to negotiate, Lyttelton strengthened the hand of militant nativist leaders and rendered suspect any arguments that the last remaining moderate chief, Little Carpenter, could make. Eventually he persuaded his fellow chiefs to surrender two suspected murderers to the Carolinians, and Lyttelton responded by releasing a handful of his captives; but this hopeful turn of events was lost when the governor announced that he would hold the remaining twenty-two hostages at Fort Prince George until twenty-two more murderers had been turned over. Since by now most of the participants in the spring’s war parties had taken to the woods, and since according to Cherokee law and custom they had acted legitimately to avenge deaths inflicted on their families or clans, the surrender of twenty-two warriors was beyond the power of any Cherokee leader. Lyttelton blustered on and issued ultimatums regardless: a tactic that would have been counterproductive enough even had smallpox not broken out in the vicinity of the fort and made his provincials, whose enlistments were set to expire on January 1, eager to return home. The combination of an epidemic and the prospect of mass desertions left him no choice but to withdraw. Lyttelton accordingly marched for Charleston with the two accused murderers on December 31, escorted by his officers and the few troops who had not already deserted or been discharged. Behind him he left both the hostages and the gift, instructing Fort Prince George’s commandant to complete the exchange of malefactors for prisoners—then distribute the gunpowder. He might as well have lit a fuse to it.6
On January 19, 1760, a party of Cherokee warriors tried to free the hostages by force. Failing, they laid siege to the fort, cut communications between it and its distant satellite in the Overhill country, Fort Loudoun, and launched a series of sanguinary raids on backwoods settlements from southwest Virginia to Georgia. Within a month, following a surprise attack that killed their commanding officer, the garrison of Fort Prince George massacred the twenty-two hostage chiefs. Meanwhile, Cherokee raiders struck all along the southwestern borderlands; by the end of March they had killed or captured more than a hundred settlers and traders. With the exception of those families “forted up” in isolated stockades like Ninety-six, the warriors had rolled the frontier back a hundred miles, from Long Canes to Orangeburg—and Orangeburg lay just seventy-five miles from Charleston. 7
Lyttelton, who had done so much to bring about this state of affairs, seems to have been genuinely surprised by it, and found himself almost completely helpless to restore order. Since disbanding the previous year’s provincial regiment, he had only militiamen—unembodied, untrained, and unwilling to leave their homes—and a couple hundred regulars to defend the province. Early in February, Lyttelton accordingly demanded that the legislature appropriate emergency funds to raise a new regiment and seven mounted ranger companies, asked Governor Fauquier to send Virginia troops down to relieve Fort Loudoun, and appealed to Amherst for two or three regiments of regulars. All this would take time, three or four months at the least, to produce any result; and in the meantime smallpox, carried back in January by the returning provincials, broke out in Charleston, along with rumors that the slaves were planning to rebel. Fortunately for Lyttelton, the British government had already seen fit to reward his political and military skill by making him governor of Jamaica, the richest post in the colonies. He sailed for Kingston in March, presumably without regret.8
Meanwhile all that restrained the Cherokees was the growing awareness that they stood alone. The Creeks, who had so insistently pressed for hostilities, now showed no disposition to attack settlers on the Georgia frontier, but bided their time, to see if they might reap advantage by offering themselves to the English as mediators or even allies. The commandant of Fort Toulouse, the French outpost on the Alabama River 250 miles to the southwest, gave his best wishes to the Cherokee emissaries who approached him, but he had no powder to spare. The Indians of the Ohio Country, who had lately made their peace with the English, were equally unwilling to offer aid.9
Thus despite their success in emptying the frontiers of whites, and despite the military impotence of the South Carolinians, the Cherokees hesitated to attack Forts Loudoun and Prince George in the spring of 1760—not because they feared the tiny mixed garrisons of redcoats and provincials, but because they understood the consequences of diplomatic isolation. Had the Carolinians been willing to make peace on the basis of the status quo ante bellum, the war could undoubtedly have been ended at this point. The arrival in April of more than thirteen hundred regulars from the 1st and 77th Regiments of Foot under Colonel Archibald Montgomery, however, forestalled the option of negotiation. By May 24, with support from about three hundred mounted Carolina rangers, a handful of provincial infantry, and forty or fifty Catawba warriors, the redcoats reached the stockade at Ninety-six. On the first of June they marched into the Lower Towns, skirmished with their defenders, killed or captured over a hundred warriors, and burned five villages. Only then did Montgomery halt and invite negotiation and find that the Cherokees were not disposed to parley. As the population of the Lower Towns retreated to the Middle Towns, the war chiefs refused even to respond to Montgomery’s summons. The British would have to dig them out of the mountains.10
When the ten days he had allotted as time for the Cherokees to answer had passed, Montgomery ordered his men to prepare to march against the Middle Towns, sixty miles to the northwest, in the midst of some of the most rugged terrain in eastern North America. The redcoats, virtually all of whom were Scots, therefore set about improvising panniers and packsaddles for the horses of the baggage train, cutting up tents for packs and provision bags, cooking rations for the march, and taking what other measures they could to enable them to operate without wagons, which could not pass beyond the Lower Towns. In the country they were about to enter, operations would be infinitely more taxing than before and strictly limited in duration by the supplies that men and horses could carry on their backs. On June 23, Montgomery’s men began their sixty-mile trek up the traders’ path to the Middle Towns.
By July 1 they were back, bone-weary and deeply shaken by the resistance they had encountered. They had met the Cherokees near the first of the Middle Towns, Echoe, on June 27, sustaining a hundred casualties to the Indians’ fifty and losing so many pack animals that it was impossible to proceed further. The next day, after ordering excess provisions jettisoned and the wounded to be loaded onto the remaining horses, Montgomery had led his men in a hasty retreat to Fort Prince George. They remained at the fort only long enough to turn over supplies to the garrison and to leave off men who were too sick or badly wounded to travel. On July 3, Montgomery marched for Charleston; by the middle of August he and his men were sailing for New York. Amherst called Montgomery’s exped
ition “the greatest stroke the Indians have felt,” but to Charlestonians it looked very much as if the Cherokees had sent the British packing.11
Although Montgomery’s expedition accomplished little of military significance, it had unquestionably written Fort Loudoun’s death warrant. The garrison had been under a kind of open siege since March, cut off from communication with the outside world and surviving largely on what food Cherokee women (mainly the soldiers’ wives) brought in from the surrounding towns. Little Carpenter, still a voice for peace, had also done his best to protect the garrison, at one point discouraging a rumored attack by moving his own family into the fort. Once word of Montgomery’s devastation of the Lower Towns arrived in the Overhill country, however, nothing could stay the hand of the nativists. On June 3 they began a close siege, with the intent of starving the defenders out. In a week’s time the commander, Captain Paul Demeré (or Demere), was forced to cut the daily corn ration to two-thirds of a pint per man; by the time another week passed, the men had eaten the last of their horses. At the end of July, “miserable beyond belief” and living on a few kernels of parched corn a day, the civilian traders and packhorse drivers who had sought shelter in the fort began stealing away under cover of darkness, preferring captivity to starvation. Soon thereafter individual soldiers (most likely those with Cherokee wives) began to desert. On August 5 the garrison’s remaining troops declared their intention to depart en masse if their officers did not capitulate. Two days later Captain Demeré, his options gone along with his food, surrendered the fort and its contents to the Cherokees in return for safe passage to Fort Prince George.12