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The Battle of Oriskany and General Nicholas Herkimer
Revolution in the Mohawk Valley
Paul A Boehlert
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The Battle of Oriskany and General Nicholas Herkimer
Revolution in the Mohawk Valley
Paul A Boehlert
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A gripping account of events before, during, and after this British defeat in New York's Mohawk Valley, and the man who led the Continental army to victory. During the critical Battle of Oriskany in August 1777, Continental forces led by General Nicholas Herkimer defeated the British army under St. Leger in the heart of New York's Mohawk Valley. It was a hard-won victory, but he and his brave troops prevented the British from splitting the colonies in two. Although they did not succeed in relieving the British siege of Fort Stanwix, Herkimer's citizen-soldiers turned back the British and protected Washington's northern flank from attack. The Continental army survived to fight the decisive Battle of Saratoga the next month. Herkimer was mortally wounded, but his heroism and leadership firmly placed him in the pantheon of Revolutionary War heroes. Paul Boehlert presents a gripping account of the events before, during and after this critical battle. Includes photos and illustrations
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Historia americana tempranaChapter 1
NICHOLAS HERKIMER, AMERICAN PATRIOT
He was born in the year 1728, some say in March, in the town of Danube on the banks of the Mohawk River in Governor Burnetsfieldâs Patent, on the northwestern frontier of the colony of New York. His parents, Han Yost Herchkeimer and the former Catherine Petrie, owned two hundred acres of good farmland, which they were steadily clearing and making productive. Nicholas was their firstborn and the first in the family to be born in the New World; his parents had come to the American colonies as children eighteen years before, with some 2,800 other refugees from the Palatine district of southwestern Germany.
Although born in this country, Nicholas Herkimer in many ways was an archetypal immigrant. Throughout his life, he was far more comfortable speaking German than English, and he was ridiculed by his English neighbors for his foreign ways and thick accent. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of respect, he became an economic overachiever. His grandfather and father were penniless when they docked in New York, but by the end of the French and Indian War, Nicholas was so affluent that he built a fine brick Georgian mansion overlooking the river and had a set of dishes custom-made in China and shipped around the world to grace his dinner table.
He was a complex, paradoxical man as well: a quietly religious man who rowed across the river to church each Sunday and read his Bible aloud as he lay dying, but one who owned more than thirty slaves and regarded them like cattle; a tall, handsome, energetic man with a pretty eighteen-year-old second wife who fathered no children; a calm and even-tempered man who sent dozens of men to their deaths by losing his temper at a moment of crisis.
It may have been his fatherâs stories of the mistreatment given to the Palatines by the British that sparked in him a revolutionary attitude. Or it may just have been a wealthy manâs reluctance to pay ruinous taxes that inspired his support of the rebellion. But whatever the cause, Nicholas Herkimerâs life and legacy would come to be defined by the role he played in the fight for American independence. He led the local militia, his neighbors and friends, into a savage battle that had a decisive effect on the course of the Revolutionary War, and in the course of winning an improbable victory, he sustained a wound that would claim his life.
If we wish to understand this enigmatic man just a little, a good way to start is by understanding his origins. The Herkimer familyâs journey, and that of all the other Palatines in America, began in the last years of the seventeenth century.
THE FLIGHT OF THE âPOOR PALATINESâ
Herkimer and his family probably would never have ended up in the American colonies had it not been for the plight of the Germans who lived in a region known as the Electorate of the Palatinate. Roughly centered on the city of Neustadt in southwestern Germany, the Palatinate had been a battleground during the War of Spanish Succession. French armies under Louis XIV, the Sun King, repeatedly invaded this part of Germany during the war, burning and pillaging. The main occupations of the area, farming, winegrowing and animal husbandry, were obliterated by the destruction the French left behind them.
The final straw was the winter of 1709â10, a long, harsh season that destroyed what little the Palatines had been able to save from the invading armies. As soon as the snow began to melt, thousands of refugees made their way to the North Sea coast around Amsterdam. They hoped to go to England, which had taken a benevolent interest in their plight. Louis XIV was notorious throughout Europe for his mistreatment of Protestant people, and many in Britain thought that the Palatines were victims of his religious persecution and were thus sympathetic to their sufferings.
During the spring and summer of 1710, many thousands of âPoor Palatinesâ landed in England, completely overwhelming the largely private charitable efforts to care for them. Head counts varied from just over 13,000 to about 15,500âpeople who had to be quartered in tents on common land in the fields of southeast London for lack of any housing that could take so many refugees.
They truly were poor, too. One famous watercolor cartoon entitled An Allegory of Poverty showed a Palatine farmer bowed beneath the weight of family and country, in threadbare garments and wooden shoes stuffed with straw. Another painting showed a small boat filled with Palatine refugees approaching a ship in hope of begging passage to England.
Their arrival started a political controversy as well, because unlike previous refugees from religious persecution such as the Huguenots, the Palatines were largely uneducated laborers who could contribute little to British industry or economy. And when it was found that more than two thousand of the German refugees who came over with the Palatines were actually Roman Catholic, the sentiment in staunchly Protestant Britain was that these undesirable foreigners must go to protect the security and primacy of the Church of England.
So it was decided that many of them would be sent to the American colonies to work on a major new project to produce naval stores from the pine trees that grew thickly in the woodlands north of New York. In the summer of 1710, some 2,800 Palatines were transported across the Atlantic to New York and settled in two camps on the east and west banks of the Hudson.
A maritime power since the reign of Elizabeth I, England was always conscious of the needs of its navy and merchant fleet. Naval stores such as turpentine, pitch, pine tar and other products of evergreen trees were vital to the maintenance of sailing ships, and the experiment of generating them from New York pines was a quasi-governmental project. The Palatines represented a pool of labor for this experiment at little cost; they were even charged for their passage and required to work without pay at first to compensate the government for transporting them to America.
The naval stores project was a failure. The builders of the various works and stills found that northern pines of the type that grew near the Hudson were not the right sort of trees for producing pitch and turpentine. Southern pines, which grew in Georgia and the Carolinas, were perfect for the job, and so the naval stores industry relocated to the southern colonies, where it thrived until the end of the age of sail.
But once again the Herkimer family and the rest of the Poor Palatines were, for all intents and purposes, abandoned with winter coming on. Their lives had been little better than those of slaves or indentured servants while working in the stills and trying to produce pine tar. Then, when the project was canceled on September 6, 1712, those stills were immediately shut down, and all support for the workers ceased without warning. Said one government report, âThe last day of the government subsistence for most of the Palatines was September 12th.â
After a time in which the mortality rate of the forsaken Palatines was very high due to their generally poor health and lack of the necessities of life, the colonial government came up with another scheme. This time, Palatine families were to be settled on land in the Burnetsfield Patent, near Little Falls in the Mohawk Valley. As usual, there was nothing generous or altruistic about the governmentâs motive in making this offer. The Palatines were being offered land in exchange for acting as a buffer settlementââagainst the French and their Indians,â as one document put it.
However, land was land, and the chance to get back to farming as theyâd done in the Palatinate instead of barely scraping by as poor laborers in the Hudson Valley was an attractive one. The heads of one hundred Palatine families, including Han Yost Herkimer the younger, could each acquire one hundred acres of land in the valley on a work-purchase arrangement. They were the first Europeans to be allowed to buy land that far west, and on a map one can see that their holdings actually created a bulge in the frontier. Han Yost was canny, and he chose his one hundred acres fronting the river itself, knowing that the flow of expansion and settlement would pass right by his back door as more and more people moved west.
The Herkimers took possession of their new patent of land in 1723. All around them were other Palatine lands, so like most first-generation immigrants they kept to their customs and language. Many Palatines married only within the German community and consciously shunned âEnglishâ customs such as gravestones for many years.
Even Nicholas Herkimer, the first of the family to be born in America, spoke mostly Hochdeutch German at home and with his neighbors. He could speak and read English after a fashion, and even write a little, but his conversation with non-German speakers was in a sort of pidgin dialect used by many Palatines that was mockingly termed âMohawk Dutch.â
In the central New York region and especially the Mohawk Valley, the name âPalatineâ became a synonym for German and was used to describe any German-speaking immigrant regardless of what part of the old country they called home. Hints and shadows of the colonial German settlement can still be found today in town names like Palatine Bridge and in somber old burying grounds like the Old Klock Cemetery outside the present-day town of St. Johnsville.
View from the back porch, Herkimer Home State Historical Society. The Mohawk River is visible in the distance. Author photo.
One of the intriguing things about Herkimer is that he apparently never could decide on a single way to spell his last name. In the grand scheme of things, this isnât very unusual; consistent spelling was regarded as unimportant until relatively recent times, especially when it came to oneâs own name. For a very famous example, consider the Bard of Avon, who variously spelled his last name Shaxpeare, Shakspear and Shakespere, as well as the currently approved spelling, Shakespeare.
Statue of General Herkimer, Myers Park, Herkimer, New York. Note the clay pipe in Herkimerâs left hand, an enduring traditional motif. Author photo.
Our friend Nicholas was even more inventive. In various documents written by him or about him, his name appears as Herkeheimer, Harkimer, Harcomer and Herchkeimer, as well as three or four other spellings, not to mention minor variants that could be attributed to poor penmanship. One of his signatures, carved on the boulder that supports his statue in Myers Park in the village of (you guessed it) Herkimer, is spelled Herchheimer.
However, the shorter and more phonetic âHerkimerâ is the version that has been the standard since shortly after his death. This is no doubt reassuring to the residents of the village, the county and the many roads that bear his name, since it means that their mail will continue to come to the right address.
A LAND OF GIANTS
We are naturally focusing on one man in this book, but no one lives and acts in a vacuum. At the time Herkimer lived, the Mohawk Valley and central New York in general were home to an array of great and influential figures who would impact and interact with Herkimer throughout his lifetime. Itâs a shame to relegate these men to the status of supporting players, since each one of them deserves a book of his own. Some supported Herkimer and some were his adversaries, but all were outstanding individuals who played vital parts in the sociopolitical pageant of the frontier at the time of the American Revolution.
SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON was a truly towering figure in the early history of the New York colony. He first traveled to America to serve as a manager on a large estate owned by his uncle but quickly began to use his intelligence and personal charisma to learn more about the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. He learned the Mohawk language and became a trusted go-between with the native peoples on the frontier. He served with distinction in the French and Indian War, his successes earning him a baronetcy, and then in 1756 he was named the superintendent of Indian affairs for all of the northern colonies.
Combining official business with an eye for personal gain, he acquired thousands of acres of native land and made himself very wealthy. Always close to the Mohawk people, he is known to have had several mistresses from that nation and fathered numerous children by them. This was likely seen as a major advantage by Mohawk sachems and leaders, as in their eyes it bound the two peoples closer together.
Almost uniquely among the English settlers in the area, Johnson treated Herkimer as an equal, and there is evidence of mutual respect and admiration. But toward the end of his life, Johnsonâs loyalty to the Crown cooled his relations with the revolutionary Herkimer. Very significantly, the Iroquois peopleâs trust and love for Johnson influenced four of the six nations of the confederacyâthe Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas and Cayugasâto fight on the British side.
Sir William died in 1774, but his influence on the campaign of 1777 was immense. Not only was he indirectly responsible for the presence of the Mohawk and Seneca war band at Oriskany, but he was also like a second father to their leader, the Mohawk war chief Thayendanegea.
To the British and the colonists, Johnsonâs protĂ©gĂ©, Thayendanegea, was known as JOSEPH BRANT. Born into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation, not a traditional path to leadership, Brant impressed Johnson with his intellect. Sir William sent him to Moorâs Indian Charity School, later known as Dartmouth College. As he grew to manhood, Brant showed a deep understanding of diplomatic technique along with a first-rate military mind. He became a gifted leader and, despite his lowly birth, was named one of the two war chiefs of his people during the Revolution. He was thirty-four years old in 1777, one of the youngest of the major figures in these momentous events. We shall hear much more of Joseph Brant later in this story.
General John Burgoyne, stipple engraving, John Chapman, 1801. The New York Public Library/Art Resource NY.
Even in an age when military and political figures were expected to be accomplished in a variety of disciplines, GENERAL JOHN BURGOYNE stood out above the rest. An accomplished poet and playwright, âGentleman Johnnyâ served as a member of Parliament in London both before and after his service in North America. But he was no dilettante, playing at war. After serving under Sir Guy Carleton, he convinced London that he could do a better job of subduing the rebellious colonies. His major offensive for the summer of 1777 was a complex and ambitious three-pronged affair, which, if successful, would have shattered the colonies and allowed the British to mop up the resistance piecemeal.
Burgoyneâs counterpart on the rebel side was MAJOR GENERAL PHILIP SCHUYLER, Herkimerâs commanding officer. More of a desk soldier than a field commander because of poor health, Schuyler was none...