Founding Myths

Founding Myths Page 26

by Ray Raphael

  This is surprising. For a decade now, Colonial and Revolutionary Era academics have been exploring and dissecting what they call “the Atlantic World”: the cultural, social, political, economic, and military interplay among peoples and governments of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Yet even this has not significantly broadened the narrow parameters in which we tell the Yorktown story, not only for younger students but at the college level as well.46 One recent college text is subtitled U.S. History in a Global Context, but here is all it says about the impact of Yorktown: “When British prime minister Lord North heard the news of Yorktown, he reportedly exclaimed, ‘Oh God! It’s all over!’ The British government decided to pursue peace negotiations.” So ended “the final phase of the Revolutionary War.”47

  Another recent college text, sophisticated in other respects, announces proudly, “The Continental Army had managed the impossible. It had defeated the British army and won the colonies’ independence” (emphases added)—no mention of help from the French fleet, French army, or French finances, and acknowledgment of only a single British army, Cornwallis’s.48 It’s a simple tale and still the one we still prefer: by besting Great Britain, our nation shaped its own destiny. Americans have always done their best to avoid European entanglements, and this applies to the telling of history as well as to history itself.

  “We said, The whole west, clear to the Mississippi, is ours; we fought for it; we took it; we hoisted our flag over its forts, and we mean to keep it. We did keep it.”

  Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap.

  Detail of painting by George Caleb Bingham, 1851–1852.

  14

  MARCH OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  The American Revolution, with its happy ending, set us on our path: first a Constitution, then expansion across the continent, and finally the ascendancy to international prominence. But the story ended happily for only some. For others, the Revolutionary War signaled a loss, not a gain, of popular sovereignty. When we tell the story of the American Revolution from the standpoint of those who lost their land and their sovereign status, it takes on an entirely different aspect.

  In 1958 two of the nation’s most prominent historians, Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, concluded their 1,300-page compilation of primary sources for the American Revolution on a bright, optimistic note:

  The American Revolution . . . did little lasting damage, and left few lasting scars. Population increased throughout the war; the movement in the West was scarcely interrupted; and within a few years of peace, the new nation was bursting with prosperity and buoyant with hope.1

  This view prevailed for two centuries. The Revolutionary War, by freeing white Americans from their shackles to the east, allowed them to look—and move—to the West. The rest, as they say, is history: the United States grew and thrived as it stretched across the North American continent.

  We like to think of the Revolution as a war for independence. It was that, but it was simultaneously something very different: a war of conquest. Commager and Morris were partially correct—the Revolution did promote westward expansion—but the march of white settlers across the Appalachians did not leave all Americans “buoyant with hope.” For many indigenous people, it signaled the end, not the beginning, of independence.

  The American Revolution was by far the largest “Indian war” in our nation’s history. Other conflicts between Euro-Americans and Native Americans involved only a handful of Indian nations at a time, or even just a single one—but all nations east of the Mississippi River were directly involved in this war. Most fought actively on one side or the other; more sided with the British, but some, particularly those east of the Appalachians, thought they would gain by joining the rebels. Before and during the Revolution, Indian played off one set of whites against the other as they sought to maintain their own lands. Afterward, with the power of competing European nations on the wane and the fledgling United States tilting westward, their options became more limited: resist at all costs; retreat to the West, where other native people lived; or negotiate a surrender as best they could.

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  According to one recent high-school textbook, “Native Americans remained on the fringes of the Revolution.”2 What constitutes a “fringe,” however, depends on one’s vantage point. The Revolutionary War looks very different if we stand on Indian lands and look east.3 Narratives told from the perspective of the Iroquois or Delaware, Cherokee or Shawnee bear little resemblance to those most Americans have incorporated, without question, into our national narrative.

  Iroquois. Not all Iroquois were of one mind about the Revolutionary War. Both British agents and American patriots courted the Iroquois, the British using presents, the Americans veiled threats. Reasoning that American expansion posed a greater threat to their own interests, four of the six nations—Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Mohawks—cast their lots with Britain. Influenced by a missionary named Samuel Kirkland, the other two nations—Oneidas and Tuscaroras—allied with the Americans.4

  In 1777 the grand council fire for the League of Six Nations was extinguished. Instead of coming together, Iroquois fought each other as well as their white foes. On August 6 at Oriskany, New York, several hundred Seneca, Cayuga, and Mohawk warriors joined with British rangers and loyalist volunteers to ambush patriot militiamen and their Oneida allies. Angry that their traditional allies had fought against them, Senecas attacked an Oneida settlement, and the Oneidas, in turn, plundered nearby Mohawks. A civil war among whites had become a civil war among Native people.

  Pro-British Iroquois were far more numerous than their pro-American counterparts, and they figured more prominently in the war. In 1778 they staged numerous raids on white settlements, most memorably at Wyoming Valley and Cherry Valley. The following year, Congress responded by authorizing a force of some four thousand soldiers, commanded by General John Sullivan, to conduct a scorched-earth campaign against Indian villages. On July 4, 1779, Sullivan’s officers offered a toast: “Civilization or death to all American Savages.”5 Then, for the remainder of the summer, they burned every village, chopped down every fruit tree, and confiscated every domesticated plant they could find. In the name of civilization, they tried to wipe out the developed civil society of people they called savages. At the end of the campaign, Sullivan reported triumphantly to Congress:

  The number of towns destroyed by this army amounted to 40 besides scattering houses. The quantity of corn destroyed, at a moderate computation, must have amounted to 160,000 bushels, with a vast quantity of vegetables of every kind. Every creek and river has been traced, and the whole country explored in search of Indians 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.6

  The Sullivan campaign, which was followed by the “Hard Winter” of 1779–1780—the coldest on record for the eastern United States—created great hardships among the Iroquois people. (For more on the “Hard Winter,” see chapter 5.) It did not, however, terminate Iroquois resistance. The following summer, more than 800 warriors staged raids in the Mohawk Valley, killed or captured 330 white Americans, and destroyed six forts and over 700 houses and farms. Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Mohawks also forced Oneidas and Tuscaroras off their lands, causing them to seek refuge on the outskirts of white settlements.

  The war continued in 1781, with angry Iroquois warriors continuing their raids on whites who tried to occupy their lands. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the Iroquois were still fighting, but they couldn’t continue forever without British support. In 1782 that support was withdrawn, and in the Treaty of Paris the following year, Britain recognized United States sovereignty not only in the thirte
en rebellious colonies but over the trans-Appalachian region as well, land which was still owned by the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Indians who had fought by the side of the British felt deceived and forsaken. Meanwhile, Euro-Americans felt entitled to settle land that Native Americans regarded as their own.

  Delaware and Shawnee. The fate of other Indian nations paralleled that of the Iroquois: the Revolution caused internal divisions, while the termination of the war triggered an onslaught of white incursions. Initially, chiefs from the Delaware and Shawnee pledged friendship with American patriots, hoping to work out some sort of accommodation with whites who bordered on their lands. Patriot officials offered these people assurances of support and protection, and they even suggested they would allow friendly Indians “to form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress”—one of the most disingenuous promises in the history of white-Indian relations.7 Patriots never did come through with any significant support, and white settlers continued to harass rather than protect indigenous people, friendly or otherwise, whom they encountered. After Indian-hating frontiersmen murdered four friendly Shawnee who were being held as hostages, the rest of the Shawnee joined with their militant neighbors—the Mingo, Miami, Wyandot, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Kickapoo—in support of Britain.8

  American acts of aggression alienated the Delaware as well. When white Americans invaded their land and burned their villages, most of the Delaware joined the resistance. A few Christian converts tried to remain out of the fray, but this proved impossible. On March 8, 1782, volunteers from the Pennsylvania militia massacred ninety-six men, women, and children—none of whom were warriors—at the Gnadenhutten mission. As justification for their deeds, the militiamen alleged that their victims had given aid to the British by harboring enemy warriors. This was the crude underbelly of the American Revolution in Indian country.

  Cherokee. To the south, the Cherokees waged their own war for independence during the (white) American War for Independence. When Henry Stuart, a British agent, visited the Cherokees early in 1776, he found them in heated debate over how to deal with the advance of Virginians and Carolinians onto their lands. Young warriors argued for immediate resistance: it was “better to die like men than to dwindle away by inches,” they argued. Cherokee elders, on the other hand, favored caution. The young hawks were “idle young fellows” who should not be listened to, they told Stuart. Warriors, on the other hand, told Stuart that their elders were “old men who were too old to hunt.”9 The threat to Native lands was producing serious stress within Cherokee society.

  The warriors prevailed. In the summer of 1776 angry young Cherokees staged numerous raids on frontier white settlements, but their timing could not have been worse. Patriots had just repelled a British attack on Charleston, and since there was no other threat in the region, rebels from the four southernmost states were free to vent their rage on the Cherokee. Six thousand armed men, having trained and mobilized for war against the British, marched against Indians instead. David Ramsay, a South Carolina patriot, explained how the campaign against the Cherokee was used as a training ground for the Revolutionary War:

  The expedition into the Cherokee settlements diffused military ideas, and a spirit of enterprise among the inhabitants. It taught them the necessary arts of providing for an army, and gave them experience in the business of war. . . . [T]he peaceable inhabitants of a whole state transformed from planters, merchants, and mechanics, into an active, disciplined military body.10

  This war had a particularly Southern bent. As in the Sullivan campaign against the Iroquois, the object was to starve Indians into submission—but once they did submit, some of these Indians were taken as slaves. William H. Drayton, one of South Carolina’s leading patriots, instructed members of the expedition against the Cherokees: “And now a word to the wise. It is expected you make smooth work as you go—that is, you cut up every Indian cornfield, and burn every Indian town—and that every Indian taken shall be the slave and property of the taker.”11 Enslavement of captured Indians, however, proved controversial; since this might result in Indians enslaving their white prisoners, the practice was eventually banned. Although whites were forced to turn over Indians they hoped to keep as slaves, this Southern scorched-earth campaign still accomplished its desired result: a total disruption of Cherokee society. Colonel Andrew Williamson, commander of the South Carolina forces, reported back to Drayton on the success of the mission: “I have now burnt every town, and destroyed all the corn, from the Cherokee line to the middle settlements.”12

  The impact on Cherokee society was profound. Elders signed two treaties in which they relinquished over five million acres of land (an area the size of New Jersey) and agreed to end their hostilities—but young warriors, the ones who initiated the conflict, refused to give in. Instead, many moved to the South and West, and they vowed to continue fighting. These people, called the Chickamaugas after their new home, refused to recognize the treaties negotiated by Cherokee elders. The Cherokee, like the Iroquois, became divided by differing responses to the American Revolution. Further, as some native people were forced from their homes, competition for land increased among multiple Native nations. By the war’s end in 1783, these sorts of internal and external tensions had affected all indigenous people in the vast stretch of land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

  After the Treaty of Paris. For many Indian nations, the War for Independence—their independence—continued long after the British conceded defeat. They continued to fight because so much was at stake. Before the war, Britain had restrained white Americans from settling in the West. After the war, unrestrained, settlers streamed over the mountains at a breakneck pace and claimed Indian land. It had taken Euro-Americans more than a century and a half to settle the thin strip of land east of the Appalachians, but it took them scarcely a decade to extend their reach across a broader area to the west of the mountains. The Revolutionary War had made that possible.

  Indian resistance did not fall away, even in the face of this onslaught. In the South, factions within the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations, including the breakaway Chickamaugas, formed a pan-Indian confederacy dedicated to fighting white encroachments on all of their lands. By procuring arms from Spain, which controlled the mouth of the Mississippi and lands to the south and west, they made a show of force that slowed, but did not stop, white advances. White Americans assumed they now owned the western lands—but many Indians thought otherwise. Alexander McGillivray, a half-Creek, delivered the message of the pan-Indian Confederacy to the United States Congress:

  We Chiefs and Warriors of the Creek Chickesaw and Cherokee Nations, do hereby in the most solemn manner protest against any title claim or demand the American Congress may set up for or against our lands, Settlements, and hunting Grounds in Consequence of the Said treaty of peace between the King of Great Britain and the states of America declaring that as we were not partys, so we are determined to pay no attention to the Manner in which the British Negotiators has drawn out the Lines of the Lands in question Ceded to the States of America—it being a Notorious fact known to the Americans, known to every person who is in any ways conversant in, or acquainted with American affairs, that his Brittannick Majesty was never possessed either by session purchase or by right of Conquest of our Territorys and which the Said treaty gives away. . . .

  The Americans . . . have divided our territorys into countys and Sate themselves down on our land, as if they were their own. . . . We have repeatedly warned the States of Carolina and Georgia to desist from these Encroachments. . . . To these remonstrances we have received friendly talks and replys it is true but while they are addressing us by the flattering appellations of Friends and Brothers they are Stripping us of our natural rights by depriving us of that inheritance which belonged to our ancestors and hath descende
d from them to us Since the beginning of time.13

  To the north, nations from the Great Lakes region—the Mingo, Miami, Wyandot, Chippewa, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Delaware—continued to fight as well. Officially, the British in Canada could give them no support, but Indians were still able to get unofficial aid in the form of arms and favorable trade. In 1790, Miami fighters defeated an onslaught of soldiers led by Josiah Harmar, commander of the United States Army. In 1791, when white militiamen marched in full force into the Ohio country, warriors from across the North, and even some from the South, stood up to the intruders and killed 630 troops in a single battle along the banks of the Wabash River.

  Until recently, these successful acts of Indian resistance were rarely noted. White victories, on the other hand, have not only been noted but celebrated. Historically, American history texts have seen fit to include the story of Fallen Timbers, when Washington sent “Mad Anthony” Wayne and 2,600 soldiers of the United States Army to confront a force of 2,000 Indians—the largest and most diverse force of Native Americans ever assembled against the United States government. This time the whites won and the Indians lost, and that triumphant story gets told.

  From an Indian perspective, the American Revolution was pivotal, a global war that encompassed all people proximate to their known world. Fighting continued nonstop for two decades in the Native fights for independence that swept one-third of the way across the North American continent, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. If we view those fights as “fringe,” we undermine the whole concept of a people’s independence.

  “WHO DEFENDED SETTLERS IN THE WESTERN LANDS?”

 

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