Seeds of Empire

The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois

Max M. Mintz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781479880225
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Seeds of Empire recreates the events surrounding General John Sullivan's scorched-earth campaign against the Six Nations of the American Indians of New York and the Eastern territories in 1779, following the surrender of General John Burgoyne's British army at the Battle of Saratoga. Mintz's meticulous historical research and renowned storytelling ability give life to this arresting narrative as it probes the mechanisms of the American Revolution and the structure and function of the Iroquois Six Nations.

CHAPTER 1
IN HIS STEPS

For two hours in the broiling late-morning sun of July 11, 1774, Sir William Johnson exhorted the Iroquois sachems assembled in the arbor of his Mohawk River mansion not to join the Delawares, the Shawnees, and the Mingoes in their war against the Virginians. In the garb and the language of the Mohawks, who had adopted him as a member of the tribe, he cajoled and implored, gesticulated and promenaded, calling up once more “that influence which has never yet forsaken me.” By midday, the ache of the bullet in his hip began to tell, and the dysentery that would not go away became acute. He felt a tightening across the stomach and needed assistance to retire to the library. He took some wine and water, sank down in an armchair, leaned back, and died without a groan.¹

His like would never come again. Some magic of adaptability had produced in this transplant from Ireland’s County Meath a bicultural marvel who moved with equal ease among colonists and Indians. With the Palatinate Germans, he danced in their festivities; with the Indians, he dined in their religious rite on boiled dog and soup laced with lice. As a young man, he had impressed a rich uncle in America, who brought him over to manage his Mohawk Valley estate near the mouth of the Schoharie. The protégé soon set himself up on his own as a trader, land speculator, and politician, and within twenty years he emerged as the undisputed mogul of the valley. An army officer’s daughter still remembered him after half a century as “an uncommonly tall, well made man” with “an expression of dignified sedateness, approaching to melancholy” and “the most entire command of temper, and of countenance.”

As a reward for protecting the Indians against the speculators, the Mohawks gave him a tract of land sixteen miles by ten on the north side of the river, near Little Falls. As a reward for leading victorious Anglo-Indian armies against the French at Lake George and Fort Niagara, the king confirmed the Mohawk gift, establishing it as a royal patent, and created him a baronet. He had become himself the arch speculator. He was named superintendent of Indian affairs for the region north of the Ohio, including Canada; and the lieutenant governor of New York declared that he had “a greater influence among the Indians than any other Englishman ever had.”² The Iroquois did heed his deathbed appeal to stay out of what became known as Cresap’s War against the Virginians.

Had he lived, would this decorated pillar of the empire have stood with the Patriots or the Tories? Some among the Patriots insisted that he could never have done violence to his neighbors. True, he had supported the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties. But, after receiving news of the tea disturbances at Boston, averred the Patriots, he had committed suicide rather than take sides.³ Those who lived closest with him never doubted that they knew better. His Indian consort, his Indian brother-in-law, his only white son, and his two white sons-in-law all believed that he would have remained loyal to the Crown, and they considered it their mission to summon his Iroquois cohorts to aid in the suppression of the unnatural rebellion.

Mary, better known as “Molly” Brant (in her language, Gonwatsijayenni, or someone lends her a flower), was a Mohawk whom Johnson took as mistress after the death of his German wife. He had eight children by Molly, to each of whom he had bequeathed fifteen hundred pounds and three thousand acres. Although not married in English law, she was known as “the Indian Lady Johnson.” The mention of her husband’s name brought tears to her eyes and a reminder that he had often promised “to live & die a firm Friend to the King of England.” Reputed to be descended from the Indian King Hendrick, she became head of the Society of Six Nations Matrons, a position of power in a matriarchy where the mothers chose the sachems. She had a beguiling personality but a violent temper; she did not hesitate to berate a venerable sachem in council for considering peace with the Americans. A British army captain serving with the Indians declared that her influence among them was “far superior to that of all their chiefs put together.” One of her sons, William Johnson, went to Canada to fight with the “Sword of my Father” against the invading rebel army. “I kill’d and scalp’d, and kick-d their arses,” he boasted.⁴

Molly’s thirty-four-year-old brother, Joseph Brant (in the Mohawk tongue Thayendanegea, or two sticks bound together), in time became the best-known chief in the history of the Iroquois. So light-skinned as to inspire a rumor that he was Johnson’s son, he was, said an American captive who saw him in 1780, “about the middle size, of a square, stout build.” He had dark hair and eyes, an easy dignity, and a lurking sense of humor. Not a hereditary chief on his mother’s side, he needed to earn elevation through willpower and achievement, and he began the climb to eminence at thirteen, serving under Johnson at Lake George and later in the fighting to put down Pontiac’s Rebellion. When he was fifteen, Johnson sent him to a Congregationalist free school for Indian boys at Lebanon, Connecticut, where he absorbed a smattering of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. He rejected, however, the rigid New Light doctrine of the schoolmaster, preferring the warmer appeal of Anglicanism, and afterward assisted an Anglican priest to translate the Gospel of St. Mark and a history of the Bible into Mohawk. Before Sir William died, he saw to it that Brant was appointed a Pine Tree chief (a nonhereditary man of distinction) of the Mohawks. Brant also achieved economic solidity. He owned a well-stocked 80-acre farm on the fertile flats of Canajoharie, the chief village of the Mohawks, on the south side of the Mohawk River at the mouth of Nowadaga Creek. Sir William had deeded him another 512 acres across the river.⁵

Of all the Iroquois, Brant was the earliest and most outspoken to take the British side. “It was purely on account of my forefathers’ engagements with the king,” he said. “I always looked upon these engagements, or covenents, between the king and the Indian nations as a sacred thing.” Loyalty would bring its reward. “Every man of us thought,” he said years later, “that by fighting for the King, we should insure to ourselves and our children a good inheritance.”⁶

His decision also involved a personal factor. Living in 1769 at Springfield, on a six-thousand-acre estate at the head of Lake Otsego, was Augustine Prevost, Jr., a son-in-law of George Croghan, a deputy to Sir William Johnson and a prominent trader and land speculator. Croghan’s second wife was an Indian related to Brant’s stepfather. Prevost, two years younger than Brant, was a Swiss-born, English-educated, half-pay lieutenant, veteran of the British Sixtieth (Royal American) Regiment in the French and Indian War. A close relationship sprang up between the two young men. According to Brant’s Anglican missionary priest, John Stuart, it was a custom among Iroquois men to choose an intimate male friend to share secrets, joys, and sorrows, “carried in practice to an incredible length.” Prevost rejoined the Royal Americans in 1771 and the following year was assigned to Jamaica, later to serve against the Americans in Georgia. Brant sent him an Indian costume of the most costly furs, and Prevost kept close by him a portrait of Brant.⁷ It would have been traumatic for Brant to fight on the side against his bosom friend.

Sir John Johnson, thirty-three, Sir William’s only legitimate son, had an antipathy to his father and cared only to inherit his lands. He visited England in 1765, where he obtained for himself that rarity among Americans, a knighthood to match that of his father. He declined to accept the succession to his father’s superintendency of the Indians, and his antipathy carried over to his brothers-in-law, Guy Johnson and Daniel Claus, and to Molly and Joseph Brant. Perhaps the father-son estrangement stemmed from Sir William’s acquisition of the Indian consort. Sir John wished to bask in baronial eminence, protected by a corps he had raised of Loyalists and Indians. Sooner than lift up his hand against his king,” he vowed, he “would suffer his head to be cut off.”⁸

The succession to the management of Indian affairs fell by default to his white brothers-in-law, to each of whose wives Sir William had bequeathed fourteen thousand acres. Guy Johnson, thirty-four, also a distant Irish cousin of Sir William’s, was named superintendent of the Northern Indian Department. Bright, personable, and portly, he lived at Guy Park Manor, his square-mile estate at the present Amsterdam. He despised the emerging revolutionary movement in Tryon County, led, he declared, by an “itinerant New England leather-dresser, and conducted by others, if possible more contemptible.” If he was to keep his position, he really had no choice but to remain with the Crown, for the Continental Congress appointed its own commissioners of Indian affairs.⁹

Daniel Claus, forty-eight years old, was the deputy for Indians in Canada. Born into the lesser landed gentry of southwestern Germany, at twenty-two he had arrived at Philadelphia to seek his fortune and soon became active in Indian affairs, first with Pennsylvania’s Indian agent, Johann Conrad Weiser, and then with Sir William Johnson as his deputy secretary, his colonel of militia, and ultimately as his sonin-law. More than any other of Sir William’s white staff, he learned Indian languages, living for a time in the home of Joseph Brant and forming a lifelong friendship with him. He was short and unimpressive and prone to the gout; he compensated for his physical insignificance with a histrionic vanity. He considered the Indians savage and gullible but thought it an “ill judged Delicacy” not to unleash them against the colonists.¹⁰

Instructions in cipher arrived for Guy Johnson from General Thomas Gage in Boston, directing him to gather his Indians and join forces with Sir Guy Carleton in Canada for an invasion of New England. The order was welcome, for Johnson had reason to fear arrest by the Continental Congress. On May 31, 1774, with Claus and Brant and 120 Loyalists and 90 Mohawks, he left his estate never to return. He held a conference with the Iroquois at Fort Ontario, where he secured their agreement to protect the St. Lawrence River-Lake Ontario supply route. If Puritan missionary Samuel Kirkland interfered, he openly threatened, he would cut his head off “as soon as he would a snakes.” At a larger meeting of 1,664 in Montreal on July 26, with Carleton at his side, he obtained their pledge of support.¹¹

The pledge, however, came mostly from Canadian Indians, rather than those of the Mohawk Valley. The Oneidas and the Tuscaroras refused to attend the meeting. The Senecas, the Cayugas, and the Onondagas were only sparsely represented, and they were attempting to remain neutral. The Oneidas and the Tuscaroras had closer ties with the Germans and the Dutch than with Sir William’s British relatives and retainers.

To the Indians, this war of Britisher against Britisher was difficult to fathom. Among the Oneidas, Kirkland was a major influence, winning over the warriors against the pro-British sachems. A record of his reasoning with warrior chief John Skenandon has been preserved:

Kirkland: “England is the father: we the son. The father heaped burdens upon the son until he was longer unable to bear them and in place of hearing his entreaty for relief, heaped the burdens heavier upon him. Because the son could not stand up under these burdens, the father is trying to whip him. Now, which will you help, father or son?”

Skenandon: “I go for the son.”¹²

Only the Mohawks, the easternmost tribe and the one most inundated by white settlement, inclined toward the British. They competed with the Oneidas and the Tuscaroras for the fur trade and were followers of their Loyalist Anglican missionary, John Stuart. Unlike the stern Kirkland, who would baptize only children of regenerate parents, Stuart accepted children of dissolute parents provided a reputable godparent came forward. Yet division existed even among the Mohawks. At a council meeting of the Iroquois Confederacy with the Continental Congress’s commissioners for Indian affairs in August 1775 at Albany, the spokesman was a Mohawk sachem, Little Abraham (Tigoransera). The Six Nations, he declared, were determined “not to take any part, but as it is a family affair, to sit still and see you fight it out.”¹³

Despite these obstacles, Guy Johnson had a consuming ambition to return to the Mohawk Valley with a conquering army of Indians. In this he met with the opposition on the British side of Sir Guy Carleton, governor and commander of military forces of Canada. Carleton, a forbidding and inflexible man, had, beneath his imperiousness, an insight more perceptive than Johnson’s. He declared that he had supreme authority over the Indians in Canada and that they must not be deployed below the forty-fifth parallel. He wished to use them only within Canada, as scouts, in defense against an American invasion then being prepared at Fort Ticonderoga. He even wished to limit the war in the hope that a settlement might be negotiated.

His opposition to Johnson deepened into antagonism. “This gentleman,” he wrote, “understands he has the supreme command over all the Indians, and … I believe we can manage those of this province better.” Carleton had, in fact, already obtained the appointment in London of a new superintendent of Indian affairs for Canada, Major John Campbell of the 27th Regiment, a son-in-law of a brutal Ottawa chief, La Corne St. Luc, who had fought on the side of the French against the British in 1757. Since the border of Canada, according to the recently enacted Quebec Act, now extended south to the Ohio River, Johnson’s jurisdiction was severely restricted and Claus’s was totally eliminated. When Campbell arrived on September 10, bearing the authority of the royal seal, Johnson was outraged. Claus charged that “after such a Disgrace” he could not “look the Indians in the Face.” They determined on an extreme resort: they would take ship to London and plead their case directly with the secretary of the American department, Lord Dartmouth.¹⁴

They had made a major miscalculation. Happy to see them go, Carleton soon found replacements that would make it all but impossible for them to regain their positions. The principal one was Sir John Johnson. At his Mohawk home at Johnson Hall, he learned that a contingent of Continentals under Colonel Elias Dayton had been sent to arrest him. His adherents were mainly Catholic immigrants from Scotland, anathema to the Protestant Germans from the Palatinate and the Puritans from New England. Against a superior Patriot force, they proved unavailing. He disbanded them and gave his parole that he would remain under the orders of the Continental Congress. Four months later, May 13, he broke his parole, leaving his pregnant wife a hostage and fleeing with 170 supporters to Canada. At Montreal, where he arrived July 16, 1775, Carleton three days later granted him a commission as lieutenant colonel to raise a ranger regiment, the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, commonly known as “Johnson’s Greens” for the color of their uniforms. Among them were the Catholic Scots of the Mohawk Valley and their Irish chaplain, Father John McKenna, a native, like Sir William Johnson, of County Meath. Sir John was now the prime head of native Canadians, white and Indian.¹⁵

John Butler replaced Claus as deputy Indian superintendent. A protégé of Sir William Johnson who had migrated from Connecticut to the Mohawk valley, he was not one of the inner circle of relatives. Starting as an interpreter, he had gone on to prove himself a skilled leader of Indians as a captain in the French and Indian War, at Ticonderoga, Fort Frontenac, Fort Niagara, and Montreal. Fifty years old and commissioned a major, he was the very model of a dutiful officer. An undersize, beefy stump of a man with somber, weather-buffeted features, he spoke in rapid torrents, repeating words when excited. He had abandoned his inherited five-thousand-acre estate, Butlersbury, near Johnstown, to join Guy Johnson in the exodus to Canada, taking with him two sons and leaving his wife and other children to be interned by the rebels. To Carleton he seemed “very modest and shy.” To the resentful Claus, he was an “illiterate interpreter.”¹⁶ In time, however, he was to overshadow Claus.

Joseph Brant accompanied Guy Johnson and Claus on their voyage to England. The Mohawks delegated him to present to the ministry their claim to disputed land at Brant’s birthplace, Canajoharie, fifty miles east of Schenectady, and additional lands in the upper Susquehanna River valley. Although Brant was fluent enough in English to be employed by the Indian Department as an interpreter, Johnson appointed Captain Gilbert Tice as a companion to make arrangements for him in London. Tice, a former innkeeper at Johnstown, had been wounded while leading a group of fifty Indian scouts at the defense of Montreal. The ship’s party, which included Johnson’s three little daughters, Claus’s wife and one child, and a second Mohawk, John Hill Oteronyente, departed from Quebec on November 11, 1775, aboard the Adamant. In chains in the ship’s hold, amid blackness, stench, and lice, lay Ethan Allen, the taker of Ticonderoga, who had been captured in a rash attack on Montreal.

The Adamant docked at Falmouth December 27 and was greeted by a crowd straining for a sight of the famed Vermonter. He was to be imprisoned in Pendennis Castle, but rather than provoke reprisals, six months later he was returned to America and paroled in New York City. The Adamant’s added attraction was the spectacle of two authentic American Indians. They and t...