Tomahawks and the Revolution
A neglected theater of the Revolutionary War: bloody battle with Tories and Indians.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY STUART FERGUSON
Tuesday, July 26, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The Iroquois emerged from the forest at dawn alongside their white Tory allies, who dressed as they did, complete with face paint. They gave the war whoop and swept across settlements and isolated farms, storming into homes, killing those who resisted and preserving the others for ransom, or adoption into the tribe (women and children), or torture and death (the men). They left behind smoldering houses and barns, slaughtered livestock and scalped corpses.
It was terror, 18th-century style. During the Revolutionary War, the frontier in western Pennsylvania and New York, and the Ohio country, reeled from such incursions. And more was at stake than the lives of the colonists there. The fertile valleys and bottomlands they cultivated fed the Continental Army. Thus while George Washington faced British regulars along the seaboard, local militias tried to stave off the gathering Indian threat to the west.
It was hazardous duty, far from the main action of the war. In October 1778, Col. Thomas Hartley reported to Congress on the situation in Wyoming, Pa., where a few months earlier Indians and Tories had attacked settlements along the Susquehanna River and routed the militia's troops, butchering the wounded even after they surrendered: "We are here on a Dangerous service, which gives us few opportunity's of gaining Laurels; we have a Vigilant & Dangerous Enemy, but it gives us pleasure to think we serve our Country & protect the helpless and innocent."
In "Year of the Hangman," Glenn F. Williams distributes the laurels where they are deserved and makes a case for the importance of this lesser known theater of war. (John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk," a 1939 film starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert, was set in the territory where "Year of the Hangman" unfolds.) The book's pages teem with stolid-but-brave farmers, conniving politicians, dashing soldiers and daring Indians. Mr. Williams's prose is clear and direct, his narrative thorough: He has visited the sites he writes about, and he leaves no marching order or battlefield maneuver unreported.
The "year" in the book's title refers to 1777, which participants on both sides saw as a crucial point in the Revolution. The losers might well face the gibbet (and, typographically, the year's numerals line up to resemble one). It was also the year that saw the Iroquois take part in the conflict in substantial numbers. Known as the Six Nations--after the constituent tribes (Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida and Tuscarora)--the Iroquois confederacy was the most powerful American Indian group along the northern frontier, famed for its ferocity and bravery. It was also a traditional ally of the British. Indeed, without its help in the French and Indian War, British North America might well have been lost to France in the 1750s.
But as settlement expanded westward, the Iroquois felt themselves more and more encroached upon. They looked for help to the Crown, whose official policy (however much it was ignored) was to forbid settlement west of the Alleghenies. The whites whom the Iroquois knew best--the officers of the Crown's Indian Department--were loyalists almost to a man. Naturally, they became crucial leaders of the British war effort among the Indian peoples. They traded with them, took part in Indian dances, brought rewards from London and even married into Iroquois families.
Joseph Brant--or Thayendanegea, as he was known among his fellow Mohawks--was the most feared of all the Indian war leaders. He was also the brother-in-law of the late Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent for Indian affairs whose third wife, a Mohawk, was Brant's sister. Whenever a farmer was killed in his fields, or a patriot detachment ambushed, Brant was said to be behind it. And often he was. His warriors acted in consort with Tory rangers led by Maj. John Butler and his son Walter--perhaps the next most hated men on the frontier.
By 1779 the situation had become so dire that a counterstrike was deemed necessary if the crops were to be safely harvested and the line of settlement not rolled back to Schenectady and the Delaware River. On July 4, Gen. Washington wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette: "General Sullivan commands an Expedition against the Six Nations. . . . He has already Marched to the Susquehanna with about 4,000 men, all Continental Soldiers and I trust will destroy their settlements and extirpate them from the Country, which more than probably will be effected by their flight as it is not a difficult matter for them to take up their Beds and Walk."
Gen. John Sullivan led his professional troops into the heart of Indian country, burning the Iroquoian towns and defeating Brant and Butler's rangers at the Battle of Newtown, near present-day Elmira, N.Y. Chastised and hungry, the Indians withdrew to British posts along Lake Ontario. They would continue to raid the frontier until the end of the Revolution, but their depredations came to be isolated outrages rather than coordinated challenges to the patriots' cause.
Mr. Williams delicately suggests that--in the willingness to seek out wrongdoers where they live and stamp out the threat they pose--there may be parallels between the Continental Army's anti-Iroquoian operations and "recent efforts to combat global terrorism." We need not go that far to admire what Mr. Williams has done here, making vivid an aspect of the Revolutionary War all but overlooked by traditional histories and reminding us, in case we needed reminding, that the British had allies among the American population--some white, some Indian, all defeated by 1783.
Mr. Ferguson is conducting research for a book on British campaigns against the Cherokee in 1760 and 1761. You can buy "Year of the Hangman" from the OpinionJournal bookstore. |
