In an age and society where seizing Indian land and killing Indian people was taken for granted, Virginians developed a particular reputation for greed and violence in Indian country. Indians feared Virginians more “than all the Rest of the Colonies,” said one of Washington’s correspondents.102 “The Virginians are haughty Violent and bloody,” wrote the British governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton; the Indians respected them as warriors but resented their encroachments and distrusted their word in treaties.103 Indians came to apply “Virginian” to any Indian-hating, land-hungry white people. Washington had killed no Indians and, unlike his grandfather, seized no chiefs, but his actions helped drive Virginians’ expansion and contributed to their reputation in Indian country.
The Cherokees bore the brunt of the land grabbing. The treaty lines negotiated by William Johnson and John Stuart did not hold. Instead, wrote Stuart, “amazing great settlements” had been made beyond the boundaries on tracts that individuals had acquired by taking advantage of Cherokee needs and poverty or by forgeries and frauds that the Cherokee Nation never agreed to, “for they are tenants in common and allow no person, however so great, to cede their lands without the consent of the nation obtained in general council.”104 In the spring of 1775, Washington started getting reports of one such transaction. At the so-called Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in March, Attakullakulla, Oconostota, and the Raven of Chota sold Richard Henderson and a group of North Carolina speculators known as the Transylvania Company 20 million acres of land between the Cumberland and Kentucky Rivers for a cabin full of trade goods. Attakullakulla’s son Tsí-yu-gûnsí-ni or Dragging Canoe stormed out of the treaty in anger, warning Henderson that the land “was the bloody Ground, and would be dark, and difficult to settle.” Undeterred, Henderson intended to divide the land and sell it at twenty shillings sterling per hundred acres. “It is suspected some of our Virga Gentlemen are privately concern’d in it,” George Mason confided to Washington. Indian lands that had been kept out of Washington’s grasp by British imperial authority seemed to be toppling in a scramble as that authority crumbled; “there is something in that Affair which I neither understand, nor like,” he wrote to William Preston, “& wish I may not have cause to dislike it worse as the mistery unfolds.”105 Dunmore issued a proclamation prohibiting Henderson and his associates from taking possession of any of the king’s Virginia lands “merely under any Purchase, or pretended Purchase made from Indians.”106
The actions of men like Henderson—and Washington—undermined the British government’s attempts to slow the assault on Indian land. “I know of nothing so likely to interrupt and disturb our tranquility with the Indians as the incessant attempts to defraud them of their land by clandestine purchases,” wrote John Stuart in March 1775.107 In 1776 a delegation of fourteen Indians from the North traveled to Chota in Tennessee and called on the Cherokees to take up arms with them. The Shawnee delegate held up a nine-foot-long wampum belt painted with vermilion as a sign of war and told how the Virginians had taken all their lands, provoked an unjust war, and reduced the Shawnees from a great nation to a handful. It was clear that the Virginians intended “to extirpate them,” said the speaker; it would be better to “die like men than to diminish away by inches.” Many Cherokee warriors agreed.108
Chapter 10
The Question of Indian Allies
In the skirmishing around Concord in April 1775 that opened the American Revolution, British officers complained that “the rebels followed the Indian manner of fighting, concealing themselves behind hedges [and] trees and skulking in woods and houses, whereby they galled the soldiers exceedingly.” A month later, Ethan Allen, leader of Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, asked Kahnawake Indians to help him fight the redcoats. “You know they stand all along close together, rank and file, and my men fight as Indians do, and I want your warriors to join with me and my warriors like brothers and ambush the regulars.”1 It has become a commonplace in American history and popular culture that embattled farmers succeeded in defeating the British military machine by employing Indian ways of fighting. In fact, like British officers, Washington employed irregular operations as an adjunct to the regular campaigns of the main army. He tried to create an army that was modeled on the British army, employed conventional British tactics, and emulated British military culture in which gentlemen officers commanded. In other words, there was nothing revolutionary about the Revolutionary army.2 Far from abandoning orthodox tactics and fighting Indian style, Washington as commander in chief sometimes advocated tactics, such as full-frontal assaults and marching in line formation while under fire, that were totally alien to Indian concepts of waging war.
However, both sides used scouts, light infantry, ranger companies, Indian allies, and more flexible formations when necessary. After his experiences in the French and Indian War Washington knew Indians would figure prominently in this one, and Indian allies were essential to an army’s capacity to compete in forest fighting. During the French and Indian War, he had urged adopting Indian clothing and tactics; during the Revolution, he ordered snowshoes and moccasins for American troops, specifically asking that they be made in Indian country, preferably by Oneidas, who were allies.3 In the spring of 1777 James Smith went to Washington and proposed raising a battalion of riflemen “acquainted with the Indian method of fighting, to be dressed intirely in their fashion, for the purpose of annoying and harassing the Enemy.” Washington offered him command of an existing battalion of riflemen but did not pursue his “scheme of white-men turning Indians.”4 That summer, when General Horatio Gates’s soldiers were reported to be panic-stricken by the Indians and the Tories who dressed and fought like Indians accompanying General John Burgoyne’s army, Washington dispatched to their aid Colonel Daniel Morgan and five hundred handpicked riflemen “well acquainted … with that mode of Fighting which is necessary to make them a good Counterpoise to the Indians.”5 Washington wanted a regular army to combat British regulars, but Indian-fighting tactics were best for fighting Indians. He knew that the best people to fight “Indian style” were Indians. But whether, where, and when to employ Indian allies troubled him.
Against the British he developed a strategy that was essentially defensive. Military historians call the strategy Fabian, after the Roman general Quintus Fabius, who defeated Hannibal by a war of attrition. General Arthur St. Clair, for one, saw a clear analogy between the Carthaginian invasion of Italy and the British invasion of America. Writing to Washington in January 1778, he predicted that just as the Romans had adopted a defensive system that saved their country from the brink of ruin, so Washington’s strategy “will ultimately crown you with Glory and the Blessings of a free and happy People.” Washington agreed, at least in principle, to always “avoid a general Action” and never “put anything to the risque” unless compelled by necessity.6 As long as the army remained intact, the Revolution could continue, General Nathanael Greene told him; it was “the Stamina of American liberty; and our position and measures should be taken upon this principle.”7
These were not the strategies Washington favored when fighting Indians. Committed or compelled to wage a defensive war against the British, he consistently advocated offensive war against Indians. His primary goal in the Revolution was to win independence by fighting the British army in the East, but he was also intent on winning lands in the West. Washington was the hero of the Revolution, the man who held the struggling Patriot army together through its darkest hours and secured the victory that gave birth to the new nation. His role as commander in chief of the Continental Army has a different cast viewed from Indian country.
during the french and indian war, Washington had put himself forward for military office and seethed with resentment when it was denied or deferred. In the Revolution, he had it thrust upon him. His appointment as commander of the Continental Army by unanimous vote of the Continental Congress was “an honour I wished to avoid, as well from an unwillingness to quit the peaceful enjoyment of my Family as from a th
orough conviction of my own Incapacity & want of experience in the conduct of so momentous a concern.”8 His reputation stemmed from his service in the French and Indian War, where, despite displaying impressive courage, he had won no battles and, as we’ve seen, experienced several debacles. His record early in the Revolution would be not much better. The historian Edward Lengel rates his performance on the battlefield in the first year of the war as “practically incompetent,” an assessment that many of Washington’s fellow officers shared.9 Washington’s appointment had much to do with the fact that as a Virginian he represented one of the largest colonies and a broader colonial unity than if he’d been from New England. In the French and Indian War, he had taken a narrow view of campaigns and pushed Virginia’s interests over those of other colonies; now people, as Lengel put it, “identified him not with his colony, but with the frontier, and ultimately with America.”10
Washington knew a British-Indian alliance would threaten the northern frontier much as the French-Indian alliance had done twenty years earlier. His first instructions to Major General Philip Schuyler, commander of the Northern Department and Congress’s chief negotiator with the Iroquois, included watching the movements of Colonel Guy Johnson, the new British superintendent of Indian affairs, doing everything he could to counter his intrigues among the Indians, and gathering information on the disposition of the Indians.11 Schuyler hardly needed to be told. Like Washington, he was a wealthy land speculator who had served in the French and Indian War, and he was well aware of the influence of the Johnson family among the Iroquois.12
Most Indian people wanted to stay out of the struggle as relations between Britain and its colonies escalated into violence. “What have they to do with your Quarrels?” asked the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom, who hoped the whites would not drag the Indians into the fighting.13 Nevertheless, both sides expected the Indians to take part, as they had in the French and Indian War; they had “been long taught by contending Nations to be bought & sold.”14 John Adams said the French had “disgraced themselves” by employing Indian allies in the last war. “To let loose those blood Hounds to scalp Men, and butcher Women & Children is horrid.” Patriot leaders and newspapers played on fears that the British were preparing to do the same in this one.15 In fact, both sides courted Indian allies, and both sides hesitated to employ them. Messengers and scouting parties crisscrossed the northern borderlands, and reports and rumors of enemy agents in Indian country created a tense environment. Indian communities tried to figure out what was going on and what it would mean for them.
Washington and the Continental Congress were initially reluctant to employ Indian allies, as they were reluctant to use black soldiers. However, recognizing that Britain had the edge—not just in its Indian Department personnel, experience, and connections, but also in having tried to restrain the invasion of Indian lands—the Americans watched developments nervously, worked to keep Indians neutral, and looked for opportunities to win them to the Patriot cause. Many British officers and officials shared Washington’s concerns: Indian allies were unpredictable; they fought for their own reasons and in their own way; they were expensive to supply and maintain; they might commit atrocities. Like the Americans, the British worried that if they did not employ Indian allies, the enemy would.16
The competition for their allegiance imposed huge strains on Indian communities. Some Indian people in southern and central New England volunteered to join American companies in the first months of the war, fought alongside their colonial neighbors at Bunker Hill, and served the Patriot cause throughout the war, often at great cost. William Apess, a Pequot writing in the next century, said that the Indian town of Mashpee on Cape Cod sent twenty-six men to the war, and all but one “fell martyrs to liberty in the struggle for Independence.” The Pequots of Connecticut lost about half of the men who went to fight. Their Mohegan neighbors suffered heavily as well: Rebecca Tanner lost five sons serving in the American army during the war.17
The Declaration of Independence asserted that the king had unleashed savage warriors against innocent families on the American frontier. In reality, the first Indians to fight in the war appear to have joined Washington’s army. Indian men from Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, a mission community of some two or three hundred people from the Mahican, Housatonic, and Wappinger tribes, volunteered as minutemen even before the outbreak of the Revolution. Stockbridges had served alongside the British in the French and Indian War, but the Revolution and its rhetoric offered them hope for reversing their history of indebtedness and land loss. “If we are conquered our Lands go with yours,” Captain Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut told American commissioners, “but if we are victorious we hope you will help us recover our just Rights.” Seventeen Stockbridge warriors joined Washington’s army, besieging Boston and the British forces under General Thomas Gage, his former friend and comrade-in-arms from the Braddock campaign.18
The Stockbridges’ arrival caused “much Speculation,” said one of Washington’s soldiers.19 Their presence in Washington’s army gave the British justification for employing Indian allies of their own. “The rebels have themselves opened the door,” announced Gage; “they have brought down all the savages they could against us here, who with their riflemen are continually firing on our advanced sentries.”20 With Stockbridges already engaged in the fighting, the Continental Congress had to decide its policy on employing Indians. (It also had to decide on its policy of employing free blacks, which was, it informed Washington in February, that the black volunteers in his camp could be retained but he should enlist no more. Slaves, of course, were not considered.21 As the war dragged on and few white men volunteered for service, Washington and Congress revised their reservations: by the end of the war, black soldiers comprised 10 percent of the Continental Army.22) In December 1775 Congress decided to call on Indians “in case of real necessity.”23 Six months later it approved employing up to two thousand Indians.24 Although it did not offer scalp bounties, it also authorized offering the Indians a bounty for capturing British soldiers—a hundred dollars for officers and thirty for privates—which Washington thought would prove “a powerful Inducement to engage the Indians in our Service.”25 If insufficient numbers enlisted, Schuyler wrote Washington, the companies would be made up with white men who lived near the Indians and were at home in the woods, provided they did not exceed one-third of the company strength.26
But then Congress clarified its position: the authorization was intended only “to employ in Canada a Number of Indians not exceeding two Thousand.” John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, instructed Washington to stop raising companies of Mahican and Stockbridge Indians.27 The Stockbridges were troubled at not being used and came to ask Washington why. Considering the Indians’ expectations, the problems of raising men, and the danger that some of the Stockbridges might take “an unfavourable part,” Washington thought they should be employed.28
Congress reconsidered and gave him approval to employ the Stockbridge Indians, if he thought “proper.”29 Hancock informed Washington at the beginning of August, and Washington immediately sent a copy of the congressional resolution to Indian Commissioner Timothy Edwards and to Schuyler, explaining the reasons for the change in policy. He asked Edwards to recruit as many as he could and give them the choice of joining his army or Schuyler’s army in the North.30 Edwards duly conveyed the news to the Stockbridges, and by the third week of August 1776 they had a company ready to march to join Schuyler.31 They were issued with red and blue caps to distinguish them from enemy Indians.32 Formerly reluctant to employ them, Washington was now eager, optimistic, and perhaps even a little desperate to have them. His own forces were inadequate. The militia, he said, “come in, you cannot tell how—go, you cannot tell when—and act, you cannot tell where—consume your provisions—exhaust your Stores, and leave you at a last critical moment.”33 His complaints sounded like those he made about Cherokee allies twenty years before.
“Wherever you go, w
e will be by your sides,” Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut declared. “Our bones shall lie with yours. We are determined never to be at peace with the red coats, while they are at variance with you.”34 Stockbridge men served in New York, New Jersey, and Canada. They served with General Gates in the fighting around Saratoga in 1777, although most of the warriors returned home to help with the harvest before Burgoyne’s army surrendered. In October that year Congress ordered payment of two hundred dollars to the Stockbridge chief Abraham Nimham and his men “for their zeal in the cause of the United States.”35 Nimham was killed the next year near New York City when the Stockbridges were cut to pieces by the British cavalry and infantry in a battle that became known as Indian Field.36 In Washington’s words, they “suffered severely.”37 A contingent of Stockbridges under Captain Solomon Hendricks volunteered to take part in General John Sullivan’s expedition against the Iroquois in 1779. Hendricks and about twenty Stockbridge volunteers served with Washington’s army in the summer of 1780, attached to the light infantry, and Washington said they “conducted themselves with great propriety and fidelity.” However, he remained ambivalent about employing them, and as the war shifted south toward Yorktown he paid less attention to his Indian allies. In September 1781 he refused an offer of support; he told the Stockbridge chiefs their help was not required at that time, but he told Major General William Heath “their services never compensated the expense.”38
The Indian World of George Washington Page 29
