Conquered into Liberty

Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War

Eliot A. Cohen

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781451627336
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Americans often think of the Civil War as the conflict that consolidated the United States, including its military values and practices. But there was another, earlier, and more protracted struggle between "North" and "South, " beginning in the 1600s and lasting for more than two centuries, that shaped American geopolitics and military culture. Here, Eliot A. Cohen explains how the American way of war emerged from a lengthy struggle with an unlikely enemy: Canada. In Conquered into Liberty, Cohen describes how five peoples—the British, French, Americans, Canadians, and Indians—fought over the key to the North American continent: the corridor running from Albany to Montreal dominated by the Champlain valley and known to Native Americans as the "Great Warpath." He reveals how conflict along these two hundred miles of lake, river, and woodland shaped the country's military values, practices, and institutions. Through a vivid narration of a series of fights— woodland skirmishes and massacres, bloody frontal assaults and fleet actions, rear-guard battles and shadowy covert actions—Cohen explores how a distinctively American approach to war developed along the Great Warpath. He weaves together tactics and strategy, battle narratives, and statecraft, introducing readers to such fascinating but little-known figures as Justus Sherwood, loyalist spy; Jeduthan Baldwin, self-taught engineer; and La Corne St. Luc, ruthless partisan leader. And he reintroduces characters we thought we knew—an admirable Benedict Arnold, a traitorous Ethan Allen, and a devious George Washington. A gripping read grounded in serious scholarship, Conquered into Liberty will enchant and inform readers for decades to come.

CHAPTER ONE

The Schenectady Raid, 1690

They dreamed that while the deep snow of winter continued, they were safe enough

At five o’clock in the morning on February 9, 1690, a bleeding man on a wounded horse staggered into the fortified, winter-bound Dutch town of Albany. Despite the bullet in his thigh, Symon Schermerhoorn had ridden nearly twenty miles in six hours from Schenectady to Albany through knee-deep snow. The mayor, Peter Schuyler, hastily convened a meeting of the aldermen to hear the exhausted Schermerhoorn’s grim news. Just before midnight on the eighth, a party of French and Indians had stormed Schenectady, killing most of the inhabitants, carrying off others, and setting its houses on fire. In the following days some fifty survivors of the Schenectady massacre, many suffering from frostbite, trudged their way to Albany. They and their horrified hosts eventually pieced together what had happened.

There had been more Europeans than Indians in the war party—116 Frenchmen and Canadians and 92 Indians from an assortment of tribes—and together they slightly outnumbered the civilian population of the town they attacked. They had spent three weeks journeying south along the Great Warpath from Montreal, camping some six miles from the town and gathering last-minute intelligence from four Indian women they found there. The raiders had initially considered attacking Albany, but the Indians, believing the latter too well defended, pressed for Schenectady as an alternative target, and the French acquiesced.

The raiders had silently circled the town, hoping to attack simultaneously through the two gates in the palisade. In the snow and dark, however, they found only one open, and they quietly assembled opposite it. It was enough. The attackers slipped in through the north gate, dividing into parties of five or six to storm each house. With a sudden chorus of war whoops they broke into the homes, capturing or killing the inhabitants and setting the dwellings on fire. A larger body attacked the settlement’s sole blockhouse, which contained some two dozen drowsy militiamen from Connecticut, sent to reinforce the New Yorkers.

The war party did not kill everyone they found in Schenectady. Shrewdly, they spared the few Mohawks in the town, partly because Mohawk converts in the raiding party had no desire to launch civil war in their own tribe, partly as a matter of policy. This forbearance, the French thought, might help wean the Iroquois from their English sponsors. And there was some genuine humanity as well. After a standoff at his fortified house, the French spared the mayor of Schenectady, who had earlier saved French prisoners from their Indian captors.

Nonetheless, when the English and Dutch relief force came to the smoking ruins two days after the raid to bury the dead, they found horrifying sights. “The cruelties committed at said place no pen can write nor tongue express,” the Albany officials wrote to their colleagues in Connecticut. “Women big with child ripped up and the children alive thrown in to the flames and their heads dashed in pieces against the doors and windows.”1 The rescuers from Albany included Connecticut militia. In the ruins of the blockhouse at the corner of the palisade they found all but three of their comrades’ remains, mutilated and charred by fire. The raiders had killed sixty civilians, including the town’s minister, and had begun making their way back to Canada, carrying with them twenty-seven civilians.2

The Albany council, which deplored Schenectady’s lack of watchfulness, spread the alarm. “Gentlemen, it would not be amiss if you should send post to all our towns to be upon their guard that they may not be surprised,” Mayor Schuyler wrote to colleagues in New England. The officials passed the word, but not all acted on it. Cotton Mather, Boston divine and the first historian of colonial New England, somberly described the mood in the New England towns. “They dreamed that while the deep snow of winter continued, they were safe enough; but this proved as vain as a dream of a dry summer.”3 A month later Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, suffered the same fate as Schenectady.

This is the beginning of your war

The Schenectady raid was the culmination of a broader development in French strategy in North America. For years the French had waged war against the Iroquois, the extraordinarily formidable Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) whose disciplined ferocity had terrified enemies as far off as what is now Pennsylvania and Ohio. In the 1650s, for example, the Seneca, the westernmost of the Iroquois nations, had attacked a village of the Miami Indians who lived in what is now the Midwest, carrying off many of their enemies’ children. Knowing that they would be followed by Miami war parties as they withdrew to their own lands, at each of their daily campsites the Seneca left the head of a Miami child impaled on a stick, looking in the direction of the pursuing Miami fathers who had arrived too late.4 The calculated cruelty of the Iroquois turned on the French as well. Not because of Champlain’s battle half a century before, but because of Iroquois desire to control the fur trade, to establish hegemony, and to gain glory, the Five (later the Six) Nations harassed and slashed at the French colony in Canada, which attempted, by turns, to appease, divide, and when unavoidable, confront them.5

In the second half of the 1680s Governor Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, a capable soldier, had reformed, strengthened, and militarized the colony in what is now the province of Quebec.6 He began, among other practices, the commissioning of young Canadians as officers in the king’s forces. After a careful survey of the situation he concluded that the previous policy of accommodating the Iroquois would fail and decided to wage war more aggressively against them. He also saw the long-term threat posed by the English and Dutch of New York, who traded with and armed the Iroquois. In 1687 he protested the French policy of friendship with England that tied his hands in the New World. “The King orders me to observe great moderation towards the English. But, My Lord, can any one wage war more openly against us than M. Dongan [governor of New York] has done, when he admits that he aids and abets our enemies with whatever ammunition is necessary to operate against us?”7

In 1687 Denonville launched a conventional offensive against the Iroquois, striking the Senecas in the west and the Mohawks in the east, attempting to crush the Five Nations and secure relief for New France’s Indian allies to the west. Having massed a force of over eight hundred regulars, nine hundred militia, and four hundred Indians, he left first for Fort Frontenac (today’s Kingston, Ontario) and then the land of the Senecas, the westernmost of the Iroquois tribes. His campaign ended as many had done before and would later, with the destruction of Seneca villages, storehouses, and crops, but without a decisive blow against the braves themselves.

Despite these inconclusive results, Denonville considered New France’s best strategic hope to lie in the offensive, if it could receive adequate resources. In 1689 he communicated to the French crown a new campaign plan drafted by his deputy, Louis-Hector de Callières, governor of Montreal, that called for an attack along the Great Warpath with some fourteen hundred soldiers and six hundred militia, plus Indian auxiliaries.8 He assumed the worst about English intentions: The English, he declared, intended to raise the Indians against Canada, ruin her trade, and then “burn and sack our settlements.”9 The strategic object was bold: Subjugate and disarm the Iroquois and shatter their ability to block or coerce New France’s western Indian allies by depriving them of their Dutch and English sources of arms and trade.

The operational concept for implementing this strategy was even bolder: The French army of two thousand regulars and militia would take Albany—then a town with less than a fifth that many men to defend her. From there the army would advance along the Hudson and seize New York City, in conjunction with a naval force dispatched from France.10 He planned to occupy and disarm the city of New York itself, treating the inhabitants mildly (or most of them—a revised version of the plan provided that Huguenots would be shipped back to France), but shattering English and Dutch ability to support the Iroquois.

It was a plan probably beyond the capabilities of the French in Canada at the time, and one that expected too much by way of naval and military coordination. And indeed, the outbreak of war between Britain and France kept Paris preoccupied with continental affairs. Absent the resources required for this bold scheme, Denonville attempted to negotiate a settlement with the Iroquois—a path opposed by France’s Huron allies, who promptly ambushed a group of Iroquois ambassadors with a view to disrupting the talks. For their part, the Iroquois, backed by the English, were quite capable of fighting while talking. Still resenting the French raids of 1687, they launched a devastating stroke of their own. In August 1689 a huge Iroquois war party struck the French town of Lachine on the outskirts of Montreal. Fifteen hundred warriors killed or took prisoner over a hundred Frenchmen, and burned fifty-six of seventy-seven homes—a severe psychological blow to a French Canada composed of scarcely ten thousand souls already racked by disease and war. Denonville returned to France exhausted and depressed. His replacement would have to figure out a way of coping with both the Iroquois and the English.

On October 12, 1689, Louis de Buade de Frontenac stepped off a French warship at Quebec, returning to a colony that he had governed, erratically and often arbitrarily, for a decade from 1672 to 1682.11 Although treated in the Canadian national myth as the great founder of New France, he was, in fact, a complicated and problematic figure. An aspiring nobleman and soldier who habitually lived beyond his means, and whose vanity and imperiousness made him more than the usual number of enemies common to viceroys in Quebec, he had used his influence at court to obtain his initial appointment as governor of New France in order to escape his debtors. He returned, however, to save a colony imperiled by Iroquois attacks (Fort Frontenac, named after him in 1673, had been abandoned), English colonial expeditions (including a rumored naval attack on Quebec itself from New England), and the larger turmoil consequent upon the first of the global wars between Britain and France.

In this dire circumstance Frontenac, though nominally under instructions shaped by the Denonville-Callières plan, decided to drop the idea of a conventional offensive. He reasoned that he would never have enough men to permanently occupy an English town, even assuming he could seize one. Of course, he clamored for more reinforcements, a plea characteristic of French governors in years to come, but he doubted that a large enough French force would ever sail across the Atlantic to definitively defeat the English in North America. From this correct premise he concluded that he should switch to a strategy of frontier raiding by Indian bands reinforced with militia and French regulars, launched from forward fortifications against English villages and towns.

This was a fateful choice. Frontenac sent bands of French, Canadians, and Indians against the English frontier not to hold ground, destroy fortified outposts, or defeat enemy forces but to burn settlements, take captives, and kill civilians. By raiding English settlements he hoped to achieve several objectives, first among them tying down substantial local forces (there were few if any regulars in the colonies) in extended defense of the frontier. Such a dispersion of effort, and the costs it would undoubtedly entail, would prevent the English from launching a direct assault on the French colony itself. Frontenac also correctly calculated that these raids would have a subtler, more political effect. The Indian allies of France would find themselves locked in perpetual conflict with the English. The inevitable losses and retaliations both sides would suffer would preclude a comprehensive Indian reconciliation with the English colonies. This was a strategic logic particularly apt for imperial frontier warfare—the stimulation of feuds and hatreds by low-level violence that would preclude one’s enemies from coming to terms with one another. At the same time, moreover, Frontenac believed that eventually the Iroquois could either be brought into the French fold (overawed, perhaps, by French prowess) or, at some later date, beaten into submission. In the meanwhile, terror would serve as his policy’s chief strategic instrument; hence, Schenectady.

Frontenac launched three raiding expeditions that winter of 1690: against Albany or Schenectady (his instructions with regard to targets were flexible) and against Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, and Casco, Maine. He picked Canadian-born French officers to lead these raids, among them such hardy adventurers as Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville.12

D’Iberville, the founder of Louisiana, was of an intrepid and ruthless type soon to become familiar to English settlers in New York and New England. In a standoff with a small group of English traders in Hudson Bay two years before—during a time of peace between England and France—d’Iberville had prevented the English from hunting for fresh meat (dooming, thereby, some twenty-five of their number to a lingering death from scurvy), kidnapped their surgeon, and brought them as prisoners to Quebec.

Raiding warfare was psychological warfare: a combination of terror and clemency intended to demoralize and split. It did some of the former, but none of the latter. Immediately after the Schenectady raid, for example, at the behest of Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, the Mohawks sent a war party of over a hundred braves on the track of the retreating raiders. The French and Indians had lost only one man each in their attack on Schenectady; the pursuing Mohawks killed or took nineteen more, many of them within sight of Montreal.13

Several weeks after the Schenectady raid a delegation of Mohawk chiefs came to Albany not only to condole with its leaders and people, as was the Indian custom, but to put some steel in the white men’s spines. The Mohawks declared that they, too, had suffered from French perfidy. The French “had broken open our house at both ends, formerly in the Senecas’ country, and now here.” But the Indians promised to avenge the dead of Schenectady with their own. “We will beset them so closely, that not a man in Canada shall dare to step out of doors to cut a stick of wood.” The Indians urged the English and Dutch to reoccupy and rebuild their ruined village. Be patient in disaster, they counseled, and—repeating the word several times and with emphasis as they gave a wampum belt in token of their friendship—show courage. “Brethren, be not discouraged, we are strong enough. This is the beginning of your war, and our whole house have their eyes fixed upon you at this time, to observe your behavior.” The Indian leaders reproached the Dutch traders who, in the interest of commerce, had formerly restrained them from waging war against the French. Let no such restraints apply henceforth; “let us now prosecute the war vigorously.”

Narrowly understood, the Schenectady raid had been a substantial French success: Surprise was complete, the settlement shattered, the homes burned (in part, the French claimed, to prevent their Indian allies from looting the liquor stored within). The follow-on attacks were, by the measure of sheer mayhem, equally successful. On March 18, raiders hit Salmon Falls, New Hampshire: Thirty-four inhabitants were killed and fifty-four carried off. And at the end of May it was the turn of Casco (Falmouth), Maine, where twenty were slain and a hundred who had fled to a local fort surrendered and were then butchered.14

But Frontenac’s raids did not, as he had hoped, paralyze the enemy. In the autumn of 1690 Sir William Phips, treasure hunter, military adventurer, and colonial leader, audaciously led a fleet carrying two thousand Massachusetts militia up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. Frontenac and his people had a narrow escape. He had strengthened the city’s defenses, and although the New Englanders landed, they withdrew a week later harassed by the Canadian militia and daunted by the approaching winter. But the New Englanders did manage to seize a foothold in Nova Scotia, at Port Royal. For their part, the Iroquois were not yet demoralized by French success and continued their war on French settlements. New England and New York cooperated in defending the long frontier, and in raising forces for the struggle with Canada.

Far from dividing the northern colonies, Frontenac’s raids had caused them to unite; and rather than diverting them from cooperation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Description
• Author Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Author’s Note
• Prologue The Great Warpath
• Chapter One: The Schenectady Raid, 1690
• Chapter Two: Fort William Henry, 1757
• Chapter Three: The Battle on Snowshoes, 1758
• Chapter Four: Fort Carillon, 1758
• Chapter Five: St. Johns, 1775
• Chapter Six: Valcour Island, 1776
• Chapter Seven: Hubbardton, 1777
• Chapter Eight: Phantom Campaigns, 1778–83
• Chapter Nine: Plattsburgh, 1814
• Chapter Ten: Rumors of War, 1815–71
• Legacies
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Notes
• For Further Exploration
• Acknowledgments
• Map Sources
• Index
• About the Author
• Footnotes