The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  The Oneidas evidently wanted little part in it. Samuel Kirkland served as chaplain and James Dean served as an interpreter and guide in the early stages of the campaign, but only four Oneidas accompanied the expedition, including Hanyerry or Hanyost Thaosagwat, who had fought at Oriskany. Sullivan complained they seemed to be “totally unacquainted with every part of the country” through which he marched, which assumes, of course, that the Oneidas were actually trying to lead the army to Iroquois villages.81 A party of Stockbridge Indians acted as advance scouts for the army.82

  Sullivan and Clinton rendezvoused at Tioga in late August. At the end of the month they fended off a force of six hundred Tories and Iroquois led by John Butler and Joseph Brant at Newtown on the bank of the Chemung River east of present-day Elmira, New York. The Indians left a dozen dead, including a woman, whom the soldiers “scalped immediately.” They also skinned the legs of two dead Indians and “Drest them for Leggins.” One officer preferred to record the incident in abbreviations: “Sm. Skn. By our S. fr Bts” (Some skinned by our soldiers for boots). As they would repeatedly during the expedition, the Americans found that Iroquois towns were not unlike those of frontier settlers. Many houses were built of hewn logs framed together, with doors, glass windows, and wooden floors; some were painted. Sullivan told Washington that Chemung “was most beautifully situated, contained a chapel with between thirty and forty other houses, many of them large and tolerably well finished. There were fields of corn, the most extensive that I ever saw with great quantities of potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, and in short every other thing which any farmer could produce—the whole of which was destroyed root and branch.” One soldier said the fields were so large he could hardly believe it. The troops put the town to the torch and spent two days destroying whatever they could not eat.83

  When Washington heard of the victory at Newtown, he immediately wrote urging Sullivan to press on and achieve the two goals of the expedition. One was to push the Indians as far as possible from the American frontiers and create a refugee crisis for the British. “The other is the making the destruction of their settlements so final and complete as to put it out of their power to derive the smallest succor from them in case they should attempt to return this season.”84 With the army’s provisions growing sparse but surrounded by an Iroquoian cornucopia, Sullivan put his troops on half rations, which they gladly put up with, wrote one of the soldiers, “being anxious to extirpate those Hell-Hounds from off the face of the Earth.”85 Then Sullivan resumed his march, burning towns and crops as the people fled before his advance.

  Despite Washington’s instructions to net prisoners, Sullivan’s troops took very few. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Iroquois usually managed to keep their women and children beyond the army’s reach.86 The soldiers also murdered noncombatants whom they could have taken captive. At French Catherine’s Town, a settlement of about thirty houses, they found an old Indian woman. Some of them wanted to kill her, but Sullivan spared her, fed her, and learned from her that the warriors and the women in her village had debated whether to fight or flee from the American army. Sullivan left the old woman with food and shelter, an act of humanity that attracted comment from many of his officers. It was an isolated incident in a campaign of terror and destruction. A young woman who had apparently stayed behind to help the old woman was shot. When the army returned several weeks later, they found her naked body lying in a mud hole. The murder, and presumably rape, of the young woman, wrote one officer, was “supposed to be done by some of our soldiers.”87

  The army lived off the land—or rather it lived off Iroquois fields, orchards, and stores—as it marched through some of the most fertile territory in the country. Time and again, officers described in their journals well-built towns, vast fields of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, potatoes, and watermelons, and orchards of apple, peach, plum, and cherry trees. Dr. Jabez Campfield, a surgeon in the 5th New Jersey Regiment, said the amount of corn in the towns was far beyond what anybody had imagined and feared that the methods the army employed would be “ineffectual for its destruction.”88 The soldiers ate well on Iroquois food, and veterans of the campaign would remember the fertility of these lands when the war was over. Some officers felt qualms about what they were doing. Campfield hoped the Indians (“these rusticks,” he called them) would be made to see reason just by the advance of the army, without suffering the extremes of war; “there is something so cruel, in destroying the habitations of any people, (however mean they may be, being their all) that I might say the prospect hurt my feelings.”89

  Most soldiers went about their work either with grim determination or in good spirits.90 In town after town, they burned the houses, some of which were single-family dwellings and others substantially built longhouses between sixty and eighty feet in length that lodged several families.91 They destroyed corn in the fields and corn in the storehouses, and cut down orchards or girdled the bark of fruit trees so that they would perish from the frost in the coming winter. Corn could be replanted and cornfields regrown, but the orchards represented a long-term investment of time and attention. Destroying them sent a clear message that there would be nothing for Iroquois people to return to.92 At one town the soldiers found an old woman and a man too infirm to walk. Sullivan would not allow them to be hurt and ordered that a house be left standing for them, but as the army was marching away some soldiers secured the door and set it on fire, burning both the house and the old couple within.93

  In mid-September the army reached Chenussio or Genesee Castle, the largest of the Seneca towns and, prisoners told Sullivan, “the grand Capital of the Indian Country.” About 128 well-built houses nestled in the bow of the river on rich bottom lands where there were too many cornfields to count, one officer thought, “there being not less than 700 acres in the place.” The Senecas had ambushed and killed an American advance party, including Hanyost Thaosagwat, whose body they hacked to pieces, and when the army entered Genesee they found and buried the bodies of an officer, Lieutenant Thomas Boyd, and a soldier who had been tortured, scalped, and “mangled in a Most Horrid Manner.” They put the town to the torch. The troops spent from six in the morning until two in the afternoon destroying two hundred acres of gardens and cornfields. They threw some of the crops into the river; most they pulled up, piled in large heaps mixed with dry wood taken from the houses, and set on fire.94 As the army headed for home, detachments broke off to destroy outlying villages en route. Four Oneidas came with a message from their nation asking that the Cayugas’ villages be spared, but Sullivan was intent on carrying out Washington’s orders to the full when it came to burning towns.95

  Washington monitored the campaign’s progress. He wrote to Lafayette on September 12 that he hoped his “plan of chastisement” would convince the Indians of two things: first, that their cruelties would not go unpunished; second, that the nation that had instigated them to take up arms and commit acts of barbarism was unable to protect them. In other words, the Iroquois had brought this tempest down on their own heads. Unlike the British and Indian attacks on American settlements that Washington denounced, Sullivan’s campaign was just retribution. By the end of September, Washington expected Sullivan to “have completed the entire destruction of the whole settlements of the Six Nations, excepting those of the Oneidas and such other friendly towns as have merited a different treatment.” He pictured men, women, and children fleeing in distress and confusion to Niagara more than one hundred miles away, with Brant and the Butlers at their head.96

  By the end of the campaign, according to Sullivan’s estimate, his army had destroyed forty towns, 160,000 bushels of corn, and vast quantities of fruit trees and vegetables. “Every creek and river has been traced, and the whole country explored in search of Indian settlements, and I am well persuaded that, except one town situated near the Allegana, about 50 miles from Chinesee there is not a single town left in the country of the Five nations.”97 Sullivan was a braggart, and it was a bit of an exaggeration; he
appears to have been rather expansive and inclusive in his definition of what constituted a “town.” Congress passed a resolution thanking Washington and Sullivan and set aside the second Thursday in December as a national day of thanksgiving. Washington, perhaps because of Sullivan’s early dilatoriness, was sparing in his praise for his general. Sullivan resigned soon after, claiming ill health.98

  There was devastation enough. The Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker said that “ruin was spread like a blanket over the Iroquois country.” Sullivan’s count of forty towns did not include the towns destroyed by Van Schaick and Brodhead. Like Sullivan, Brodhead found large towns with as many as 130 houses, some of them large enough to accommodate three or four families, surrounded by large cornfields. His soldiers burned ten towns and spent three whole days destroying the towns and cornfields. Brodhead estimated they destroyed more than 500 acres and took $30,000 in plunder.99 Washington received news of Brodhead’s success on the heels of Sullivan’s return: “This in a great measure completes the destruction, not only of the Country of the Six Nations, but of their Allies on the head of the Allegheny River,” he wrote to Gates.100

  The plunder taken by Sullivan and Brodhead’s men was not insignificant. Indian communities were tied into Atlantic networks of commerce, and Indian participation in the fur and deerskin trades meant that the products of British mills and workshops sometimes flowed into the lodges of Indian hunters more readily than into the cabins of frontier framers. American soldiers who plundered Indian villages in the Revolution, like archaeologists who excavated the sites in modern times, often found Sheffield steel knives, china, glassware, and other valuable items. When Sullivan dispatched Colonel Peter Gansevoort to destroy the small Mohawk settlement at Tiononderoga, often called the Lower Mohawk Castle, at Fort Hunter in New York, Gansevoort surprised the village and took the inhabitants prisoner. Rather than put the houses to the torch, he allowed several frontier families who had been driven from their homes by Indian attacks to occupy the Mohawks’ houses, which “were very well furnished with all necessary Household utensils, great plenty of Grain, several Horses, Cows, & wagons.” Gansevoort saw what would have been obvious to many of the soldiers: “These Indians live much better than most of the Mohawk River farmers.” The chapel at Fort Hunter contained a set of communion silver that Queen Anne had donated after the visit of Mohawk “kings” to London in 1711, but when rebel troops plundered the town, they turned the chapel into a tavern. Alarmed that Sullivan had ordered an attack on a community that had been consistently peaceful and resided there under assurances of peace from the commissioners of Indian affairs, Schuyler wanted the prisoners freed. Washington agreed and ordered their release.101

  Sullivan’s estimate of food destroyed did not include that consumed by his thousands of troops over the course of the six-week campaign.102 Relating her life story in old age, Mary Jemison, who was living with the Senecas, said that when Sullivan’s troops reached the Genesee River, they destroyed every article of food they could lay their hands on. They burned the corn or tossed it into the river, killed the few cattle and horses they found, destroyed the fruit trees, “and left nothing but the bare soil and timber.” Jemison and her people had “not a mouthful of any kind of sustenance left, not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing with hunger.”103

  At Niagara, as Washington planned, the British faced a refugee crisis as Indian families who had lost everything flooded in.104 By late September more than five thousand homeless and hungry people huddled around the fort, seeking food, shelter, and clothing. Some dispersed to relieve the pressure, but, as one of the coldest winters on record gripped northern New York, refugees in makeshift camps suffered exposure, disease, and—with supply routes from Montreal impassable—starvation.105 Others settled at Buffalo Creek, where they built a new community and attempted to rebuild their league after the war. The scorched-earth campaign and terror tactics that Washington ordered and Sullivan executed caused untold human misery. A decade later Seneca chiefs meeting Washington in Philadelphia told him, “When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you Town Destroyer; and to this day when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale and our children cling to the necks of their mothers.”106

  Washington believed the Sullivan and Brodhead campaigns had had been so successful in laying waste Iroquois country and the headwaters of the Allegheny that they would bring peace to the northern frontier.107 In addition to destroying enormous quantities of food, the Sullivan campaign demonstrated that in terms of intelligence gathering, operational planning, tactics, and leadership, Washington had made significant progress by 1779 in building an army that could confront the British in a protracted war.108

  The expeditions stunned the Iroquois but did not break their war effort. If anything, they stiffened their resolve and strengthened their allegiance to the British. Sullivan’s campaign confirmed what the British had been telling them all along (and what Washington had told Lafayette): that the Americans were intent on destroying them. Driven to Niagara with his fellow Senecas, Sayengeraghta, a chief also known as Old Smoke, declared that the Americans wanted nothing less than to wipe the Indians from the face of the earth and take their land; that was the cause of the war “between the King and his disobedient Children.”109 Even as they were taking refuge at Niagara, Iroquois warriors vowed to take revenge on the Americans as soon as they had placed their women and children in safety. James Madison told Jefferson that Sullivan’s campaign seemed “rather to have exasperated than to have terrified or disabled them.” One of Sullivan’s officers summed up the effects of his campaign: “The nests are destroyed but the birds are still on the wing.”110

  The Iroquois had no choice but to fight on. Come spring, they resumed their raids on the American frontier, looking for food and vengeance. According to John Butler fifty-nine parties totaling almost 2,300 men went out from Niagara between February and September 1780. They killed 142 Americans and took 161 captives, destroyed 2 churches, 157 houses, and 150 granaries, and drove off 247 horses and 922 cattle. In New York, the raids led by Brant, Butler, and the Seneca war chief Cornplanter (see plate 6) that spring destroyed 1,000 homes, 1,000 barns, and 600,000 bushels of grain. Pennsylvania fared little better. The Susquehanna Valley, through which Sullivan’s army had marched before following the Chemung River into Seneca country, suffered at least thirty-five separate raids from 1780 to 1782.111 Washington’s war on Iroquois homes and food generated more, not fewer, raids on American settlers. Despite the devastation of American scorched-earth campaigns, according to the British Indian agent Daniel Claus, the Six Nations maintained they still held the balance of power on the continent.112 Indians and colonists who had once coexisted now burned each other’s homes with equal vigor and violence.

  The Oneidas fared little better than those who fought against the Americans. Their allegiance to the United States made them a target for retaliation by the British and other Iroquois nations. In the winter of 1779 they still had not received help building their picket fort and faced the threat of starvation. Other Iroquois pressured them to renounce their American alliance. The Senecas threatened to strike them hard, and the Oneidas braced for an attack.113 Governor Haldimand of Quebec advocated threatening to execute more than thirty Oneida prisoners to guarantee the good conduct of the rest of the nation, and the fear of assault drove the Oneidas to evacuate their towns. In August 1780 Joseph Brant put Kanonwalohale and Kirkland’s church to the torch.114 The Oneidas fled east to Schenectady, where, like those Iroquois driven west to Niagara, they lived the rest of the war in squalid refugee camps. James Dean accompanied them. Convinced that it was both good policy and justice to support a tribe “who have manifested so strong an attachment to us as the Oneidas have done,” Washington did what he could to help, but it was not much. In the winter of 1781 he sent Schuyler articles of clothing for the Oneidas that he had selected from the army’s depleted stores; the quality was not good enough for hi
s troops, but it was enough to make the Indians comfortable at least. He could promise nothing in terms of provisions. The troops at Albany and Schenectady had been short of food all winter, he told the Board of War: “When our magazines are full, the Indians will participate, when scanty, they must share accordingly.”115 In the spring Congress approved Schuyler’s measures for relieving the Oneidas and Tuscaroras from the suffering they had incurred as a result of their fidelity to the United States, and provided him $1,000 to purchase blankets for them.116

  Despite their losses and suffering, Oneidas continued to assist the Patriots. A handful witnessed the surrender of the British army under General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781.117 When Washington went to Schenectady in the summer of 1783, two hundred Oneidas and Tuscaroras turned out to honor him, although emissaries presented him with a memorial reciting their losses and requesting rum, and powder and ammunition for hunting.118 The Oneidas later petitioned Congress to compensate them for the frame houses, wagons, farm equipment, livestock, kitchen utensils, clothing, teacups and saucers, punch bowls, looking glasses, jewelry, and many other items they lost during the war.119 Like the Mohawks at Tiononderoga, the Oneidas apparently had enjoyed a material standard of living at least equal to that of their white neighbors.