Native Americans in the Revolutionary War

4 Key excerpts on "Native Americans in the Revolutionary War"

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  Indian Fighters Turned American Politicians

  From Military Service to Public Office

  • Thomas G. Mitchell(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  2 The Revolutionary War INTRODUCTION: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IN INDIAN COUNTRY The American Revolution was another in a long series of wars in North America involving European powers allying themselves to local Indians in order to accomplish their goals. This process began in 1689 and would not end until the War of 1812. The difference between the Revolution and previous wars was that instead of the French siding with the Indians against the settlers and the British protecting them, the British and Americans were each siding with various Indian tribes—some of these tribes being split down the middle. Often the tribal leaders only dimly understood the bal- ance of power among the whites. The American Revolution was more com- plicated in its interaction with the native population than was the later War of 1812, because it was less a matter of most of the natives lining up clearly on one side. At the end of the colonial period there were approximately 150,000 woodland Indians surviving in the eastern area. There was much contact between these Indians and local whites with many Indians having assimi- lated European culture to various degrees, some of them having even studied at American or English universities. There were also many whites who lived among the Indians and acted as "cultural brokers" between the European and native cultures. There were twenty odd whites living in the Shawnee capital of Chillicothe in the winter of 1772-73 and as many as 26 Indian Fighters Turned American Politicians three hundred English and Scots living among the Creek by the beginning of the Revolution. Indian and colonial economies became interdependent, with many whites using herbal medicines procured from Indians and Indians dependent on whites for alcohol, tobacco, and many trade goods.

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  The debate on the American Revolution

  • Gwenda Morgan(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  254 7 The Indians, the west and the Revolution Native Americans have long languished at the margins of revolu- tionary historiography and, more than other American peoples, have suffered from isolation and compartmentalization. 1 Trapped within the false dichotomy of civilized versus savage, Native Americans were almost invariably depicted as cruel and vengeful. 2 Commenting in 1784, Jeremy Belknap was critical of earlier writers for having done less than justice to the aboriginal popula- tion: Our historians have generally represented the Indians in a most odious light, especially when recounting the effects of their ferocity. Dogs, caitiffs, miscreants and hell-hounds, are the politest names which have been given them by some writers, who seem to be in a passion at the mentioning their cruelties, and at other times speak of them with contempt. Whatever indulgence may be allowed to those who wrote in times when the mind was vexed with their recent depredations and inhumanities, it ill becomes us to cherish an invet- erate hatred of the unhappy natives. 3 Seventeenth-century colonists anxious to assert their identity as Christian, civilized, law-abiding and English, differentiated them- selves sharply from those they perceived to lack these qualities; Slotkin described the process as ‘definition by repudiation’. 4 In the Declaration of Independence Native Americans are still labelled ‘merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undis- tinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions’. 5 The revolutionary generation As colonial resistance gave way to armed struggle, Native Americans, living along an extensive frontier stretching over 1,500 miles, were courted assiduously by the British and their American opponents. As David Ramsay put it, each side recog- nized that the Indians made ‘desirable friends and formidable enemies’.

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  "Times Are Altered with Us"

  American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic

  • Roger M. Carpenter(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  11 Native Americans and the American Revolution

  Map 11.1

  Native Americans and the American Revolution

  The unrest that developed between Great Britain and her American colonists over the decade following the end of the Great War for Empire could not have gone entirely unnoticed by native people. While many Indians probably had only a peripheral awareness as to the issues that provoked hostilities between the mother country and the colonists, others who lived close to colonial settlements, such as the Stockbridge Indians of Western Massachusetts, would have been wholly cognizant of the tensions between the King of England and their neighbors.

  Even in the lands west of the Appalachians, Native Americans heard that difficulties existed between the Crown and its subjects in North America. For these peoples, the most obvious indicator of problems in the colonial relationship would have been the unwillingness of many colonists to obey the terms of the Proclamation of 1763. Native people understood that the King’s Proclamation had created a reserve for them in the lands west of the Appalachians. Yet in the years since the Proclamation was issued, English colonists were still filtering into the west by way of the Ohio River Valley and through the Cumberland Gap, a route that had been discovered after the war by Daniel Boone of Virginia. While British troops occasionally rousted squatters, the trespassers far outnumbered the soldiers assigned to police the Proclamation Line, which stretched across the crest of the Appalachians, from New York to Georgia.

  Nevertheless, news that American colonists had fired on British troops at Lexington and Concord still would have taken native people by surprise. In planning a course of action, Native American leaders realized they had three choices: to side with the English, to side with the Americans, or to remain neutral. The last choice, that to remain neutral – the one that most native people attempted to follow at first – made the most sense. Native leaders often characterized the outbreak of hostilities as an interfamily quarrel, or as a civil war, emphasizing that the English parents and their colonial children would have to decide their disagreements among themselves.

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  Native America

  A History

  • Michael Leroy Oberg(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The rebellious colonists did not leave the Indians alone. British agents pressed upon them to take up arms or to resist the calls of the Americans for assistance. French and Spanish agents, meanwhile, looking out for their own empires’ sagging interests in America, also courted native peoples. While one British agent told the Senecas that the “Bigknife” should be ignored because “he had a very smooth Oily tongue” and “his heart was not good,” an American officer told the Shawnees that British claims to assist them were the empty prom- ises of Redcoats who crossed the Atlantic only “to rob and steal and fill their pock- ets.” Native peoples had to sort out this conflicting information as they sought to make sense of a conflict that they understood perfectly well could dramatically affect their lives. Native peoples knew they would have to live with the winner. For the Powhatans, however, the Revolution may have mattered little. Many of them spoke English, dressed and lived like their poor white neighbors, and prac- ticed the same evangelical faith that coursed through the southern colonies prior to the revolution. They maintained a low profile. Perhaps they tried not to bring attention to themselves. Some Pamunkeys served in revolutionary forces, but their service did little to improve their position in a southern society based fundamen- tally upon an ideology of white supremacy. In its first state Constitution, and in a law enacted in 1779, Virginians declared Indian lands inalienable without approval by the state’s General Assembly, an attempt to guarantee not only that Virginia could oversee the sale of lands in the settled parts of the state, but to assert Virginia’s claims over contested regions like Kentucky and Ohio. The Mohegans, too, faced assaults on their lands, and continued to live their lives on the margins. The Mohegans lived close by Connecticut’s population, and learned that many of those settlers distrusted their Indian neighbors.

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