Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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cuff and salem, dick and jehu 189

nowhere, squashed by southern delegates in Congress. Washington

wrote to him on 10 July 1782: “I must confess that I am not at all

astonished at the failure of your Plan. The spirit of Freedom which at the

commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing

to the attainment of its object has long since subsided, and every selfish

Passion has taken its place; it is not the public but the private Interest

which influences the generality of Mankind nor can the Americans any

longer boast an exception; under these circumstances it would rather

have been surprising if you had succeeded.”

It was a breathtaking

piece of humbuggery when one remembers that Washington did not

free any of his many slaves to fight in “the spirit of Freedom.” The

young Laurens is one of the most attractive figures of the war; brave

both physically (he was wounded at Germantown and Monmouth

Courthouse) and morally. Not many scions of wealthy slave-owning

families had the courage to confront the evil from which their fortunes

flowed. Tragically, he would be killed in a minor action at the last gasp

of the war.

Benjamin Quarles, author of The Negro in the American Revolution

(1961), asserts that “most slave soldiers received their freedom with

their flintlocks.”

The idea of manumission (a word resonant of ancient

Roman gladiators who could win their freedom through combat) has

an appealing nobility. But the truth is somewhat less uplifting. Black

men who fought in the Continental or British army were much more

likely to be used either as personal servants (British field officers, for

example, were allowed two) or as laborers (working on fortifications,

felling trees, toiling in ironworks or lead mines) than toting a musket.

Captured slaves of Loyalist masters were even offered as enlistment

incentives to patriot whites. In South Carolina a white man enlisting

as a private got one slave, a colonel three large and one small slaves.

However, there were simply not enough to go around. At the end of the

war Wade Hampton’s regiment, for example, was owed ninety-three

and three-quarters grown slaves and, intriguingly, “Three Quarters of

a Small Negro.”

The “Proper Subjects

of Our Resentment”

INDIANS

here were two declarations of independence on 4 July 1776.

One was issued by a nascent imperial power that would go on

to enjoy a world hegemony unparalleled in human history. The

other was from a nation that also had once entertained, admittedly within

the confines of its smaller sphere of influence, imperial ambitions. It

too had enjoyed conquests and assimilated the defeated into its empire.

Its fate, however, would be very different. The first declaration (which

characterized the indigenous peoples as “savages”) would write “finis”

to the second.

A powerful consortium of Indian nations (Iroquois, Delaware,

Ottawas, Cherokee, Wyandot, Mingo, and Shawnee) gathered in grand

council at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River on or about 4 July 1776

to make their declaration of independence—independence from patriot

America. Cornstalk of the Maquachake Shawnee (who would later be

murdered by patriot militia while in captivity) spoke for them all: “It

is better for the red men to die like warriors than to diminish away by

inches. Now is the time to begin. If we fight like men we may hope to

enlarge our bounds.”

the “proper subjects of our resentment” 191

The Iroquois Confederacy was, at the outbreak of war, a 200-

year-old alliance composed of Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga,

Cayuga, and, from 1722, the Tuscarora.

It had been a highly successful

colonial power whose domain stretched from the Hudson Valley in the

east to the shores of Lake Ontario in the west. Built into its “articles

of confederation”—“The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse

People”—was an aggressive declaration of the right of conquest:

“When the council of the League has for its object the establishment of

the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation and that nation

refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a

declaration of war upon themselves from the Five Nations.

Then shall

the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the

rebellious nation.” But as with so many similar declarations, be they the

Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, or Pax Americana, economic self-interest

lay beneath the thin veneer of altruism. The Iroquois Confederacy

was fighting to maximize its trading position with first the Dutch and

then the English and, like any good corporation, saw acquisition as the

way to add muscle to its negotiating arm. Between 1648 and 1656 the

Iroquois had destroyed their competitors, the Huron, the Tobacco, the

Neutral Nation, and the Erie, to the west. They would have certainly

gone on to conquer the Mahican (Stockbridge) of the upper Hudson

Valley, the Susquehannock of the Susquehanna Valley, and the Sokoki

of the upper Connecticut Valley had not those tribes, like the Iroquois,

been armed with European flintlocks.

The patriot and British hierarchies had a problem with the Indians.

And to some extent it was the same problem. On the one hand, the

Indians had long been valued as light-infantry auxiliaries, as George

Washington had realized in his early military career: “The cunning and

vigilance of Indians in the woods are no more to be conceived, than they

are to be equaled by our people. Indians are only match for Indians; and

without these, we shall ever fight upon unequal terms.”

On the other

hand, they were held in considerable contempt and fear. To the majority

of whites, whether American or British, they were savages, and to unleash

them on white men, even enemies, was a profound moral betrayal. It

patriot battles 192

was un-Christian. John Adams (whose grandfather had been killed by

Indians) recoiled at “the incivility and Inhumanity of employing such

savages.”

As it turned out, a flimsy justification was constructed along

the lines of “they did it first, so we can follow suit” to enable both sides

to use Indians. For example, Lord Dartmouth, secretary for the colonies,

wrote in July 1775: “the Rebels having excited the Indians to take part,

and of their having actually engaged a body of them in arms to support

their rebellion [even before the outbreak of hostilities, the Massachusetts

Provincial Congress had called on the Stockbridge Indians to act as

minutemen] justifies the resolution His Majesty has taken requiring

the assistance of his faithful servants, the Six Nations.”

At the end of

the war both sides would betray their Indian allies and the patriot side

would ruthlessly strip its Indian enemies of their lands.

The British had a considerable advantage over the “Bostonians,” as

Indians called the Americans. Their prewar policy had been designed

to prevent, or at least retard, American incursions into tribal lands. The

Exclusion Proclamation of 1763, cemented in 1768 by the Fort Stanwix

Treaty, attempted to create no-go zones for land speculators seeking

further westward expansion. (George Washington, for one, was

disgruntled by the legislation.) They were in part good-faith measures

and in part a self-interested attempt to limit Indian-white friction and

thereby control the cost to Britain of frontier policing.

Given the bloody history between colonists and native Americans,

the patriot hierarchy knew there was little chance of winning over the

mass of Indians to the cause. If their neutrality could be secured, that

was probably going to be the best result the Americans could expect,

and indeed, a treaty of neutrality was agreed on between the Iroquois at

German Flats in 1775. But continued encroachments on their ancestral

lands and the inability of patriot America to supply them with the

goods, particularly firearms and powder, on which they now relied

pushed most of the tribes into the British camp.

The British colonial administration had been very successful in

creating an infrastructure to support and supply many of the tribes

east of the Alleghenies. The Indian Department, led by such inspired

administrators as William Johnson, who was thoroughly integrated into

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Indian society through marriage, had worked assiduously and wisely to

forge and nurture alliances. The payoff for the British would be to profit

from the Indians’ passionate resentment of American settlers, an anger

that had only intensified as the white population of America exploded

during the eighteenth century. For example, in New York colony alone

whites numbered little more than 20,000 in 1700; by 1740 they were

65,000, and in 1770 they had soared to 160,000—an 800 percent increase

in seventy years.

The population of the whole of the eastern woodland

Indians was about 150,000 in 1775.

In any event winning Indians to the

patriot cause was flawed at its heart because American interests would

be best served by fighting rather than affiliating with those Indians

whose lands had long been targeted for expropriation.

The war patriot America fought against the Indians was like a

Chinese box within the larger box of its war against Britain—a smaller

replica, with Americans cast in the role of Britain. And to a large extent

the tactics employed by the patriots were Europeanized, formalized,

dependent on mass and weight. Indian tactics, on the other hand, were

most successful when they followed the traditional forms of guerrilla

warfare: the ambush, hit-and-run attack, firing from cover, retreat

and counterattack, sniping, picking off weaker forces, and using the

psychological impact of terror. It was an alien form of warfare that

the early colonists cannily adopted for their own use: “In our first war

[Pequot War] with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of

our military skills in managing our arms, after the European mode,”

wrote John Eliot to Robert Boyle on 23 October 1677. “Now we are glad

to learn the skulking way of war.”

On those occasions when Indians were either headstrong enough

or pressed by their British overlords to fight in static and compacted

formation, they usually came to grief. For example, Burgoyne learned

that at best they were a fifty-fifty proposition on his invasion from

Canada. He had about 400 with him at the start, but whatever advantage

they conferred as scouts and skirmishers was canceled by their refusal

to conform to the hierarchical command structure of a European army.

Their war-fighting tradition valued individualistic and opportunistic

combat rather than “corporate” uniformity—a failure of “discipline” as

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far as Europeans were concerned. Forced into a role within a formalized

army, Burgoyne’s Indian auxiliaries often performed poorly. They ran

away at Bennington: “The Indians to a Man, and most of the Canadians

Ran away at first and got safe,” wrote a disgusted British artilleryman,

Lieutenant James Hadden. Lieutenant Thomas Anburey summed up

Burgoyne’s native auxiliaries.

They were of vast service in foraging and scouting parties, it being

suited to their manner; they will not stand a regular engagement,

either through the motives I formerly assigned, or from fear, but I am

led to imagine the latter is the case, from the observation I have made

of them in our late encounter with the enemy. The Indians were

running from wood to wood, and just as our regiment had formed

in the skirts of one, several of them came up, and by their signs were

conversing about the severe fire on their right. Soon after, the enemy

attacked us, and at the very first fire the Indians ran off.

Other aspects of Indian behavior also deeply offended Europeans,

even those who were their allies. Their treatment of captives, for

example, had more in common with the pre-Columbian rituals of

the Aztecs and Maya. Excruciating tortures were inflicted to test the

captive’s soul, and cannibalism captured his strength.

Burning was a common element in torture. The victim was

frequently made to walk barefoot over fires, as well as being slowly

roasted in other ways. Hot knives and hatchets would be applied

to his body till his skin was in shreds. His muscles would be pulled

out and pierced. Hot irons or splinters would be thrust through his

limbs. His fingernails would be wrenched out, his fingers crushed,

his flesh cut, his scalp removed. The whole village—men, women,

and children—would usually participate.”

Although these gruesome rituals had a religious or spiritual basis—a gift

to the god of war—they appalled eighteenth-century Europeans, who,

nevertheless, were at peace with their own predilection for hanging

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and-quartering, the ritual execution of children, and, in their still fresh

history, the rack, the stake (as recently as December 1774, black slaves

who went on a murderous rampage in St. Andrew Parish, Georgia, were

burned alive after capture),

and all those other ingenious instruments

fertile Christian minds had devised to bring the benighted to a better

understanding of God’s mercy.

That other trademark of Indian warfare—scalping—had also been

enthusiastically adopted by whites. There was a long tradition of paying

bounties for Indian scalps: “This Scalping Business hath been encouraged,

in the Colonies, for more than a century past. Premiums have been given,

frequently, by the Massachusetts Assemblies, for the Scalps of Indians,

even when they boasted loudest of their Sanctity,” declared the Loyalist

Peter Oliver.

The British paid bounties for live captives and scalps. As it

was the same price for both, those captives who could not keep up during

the forced marches were often dispatched and scalped.

Native Americans, contrary to the woolly-minded notion that they

were simply put-upon protohippies, fought for their land ferociously.

Women and children were killed as often as they were taken into

captivity and adopted. The war was brutal, especially during the 1778

Cherry Valley and Wyoming Valley campaigns. For example, Colonel

John Butler’s Loyalist Rangers and his pro-British Indian allies, mainly

Seneca and Cayuga, lured the 450-strong garrison of Forty Fort out into

the open and either killed or wounded 300 of them—a number larger

than the casualties of many of the “big” battles of the war. The fate of

captive soldiers could be grim, to put it mildly. And it worked both

ways; in March 1782 the patriot colonel David Williamson gathered

ninety “friendlies”—Christian (Moravian) Delaware, men, women,

and children—at Gnadenhutten, Pennsylvania, tied their hands behind

their backs, and executed each one with a mallet blow to the head.

Despite an outcry, Williamson was never punished. To induce the

British garrison at Vincennes to surrender, the leader of the besieging

patriot force, George Rogers Clark, pulled out five captured and bound

Indians and tomahawked them to death for the edification of the

besieged.

And so it went on, in the immemorial way of war, the systole

and diastole of savagery.

patriot battles 196

By the end of 1778 the northern and western frontiers had been

ravaged by a series of Loyalist-Indian raids, and George Washington

decided to launch a massive punitive expedition—in fact three expe

ditions acting in concert—to suppress the Iroquois of the Six Nations.

The overall commander was John Sullivan, a man of indifferent mili

tary ability and cautious almost to the point of paralysis. Washington’s

orders were categorical: the land of the Iroquois was not to be “merely

overrun but destroyed.”

Sullivan, who relished the chance to “march

against an enemy whose savage barbarity . . . has rendered them proper

subjects of our resentment,” painstakingly (excruciatingly so as far as

Washington was concerned) gathered a huge column consisting of 2,500

men, 1,200 packhorses (twenty for Sullivan’s personal baggage alone),

and 120 boats for artillery and stores. He was to set off from Easton,

Pennsylvania, move north through the Susquehanna Valley, and meet

up at Tioga with a second column of 1,500 men (including a contin

gent of Oneida who had broken with the Iroquois Confederacy) under

Brigadier General James Clinton which would be coming south from

the Mohawk Valley. A third column of 600 men under Colonel Daniel

Brodhead set off from Fort Pitt (modern Pittsburgh) up the Allegheny

Valley with the goal of meeting up with Sullivan at Genesee. On 18

June 1779 Sullivan’s leviathan left Easton, making only six miles a day,

and not until 22 August did it meet up with Clinton’s brigade at Tioga

in Delaware country.

On 19 August the Delaware made a fateful decision. They would

stand and meet the invading patriot army at Newtown. Captain Walter

Butler of the Tory Rangers urged them to remain true to their tactical

heritage and advised sending out strong parties “along the Heights to

harass the Enemy upon their March and keep them in perpetual alarms.”

The Delaware were adamant, and Butler “was obliged to comply.” Dug

in behind log breastworks, they were no match for Sullivan’s artillery

and were soon in full retreat, “thoroughly intimidated.” The Sullivan

expedition certainly destroyed many villages and thousands of acres

of crops, and notched up an impressive body count. But the more

thoughtful patriot officers realized the expedition’s strategic futility:

“The question will naturally arise,” wrote Major Jeremiah Fogg on the

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return of the expedition in September 1779, “what have you to show

for your exploits? Where are your prisoners? . . . When the querist will

point out a mode to tame partridges, or the experience of hunting wild

turkey with light horse, I will show them our prisoners. The nests are

destroyed but the birds are still on the wing.”

The following year, 1780, the birds were truly on the wing. Led

by the great Mohawk war leader Joseph Brant with 500 Indians and

Tories, and Sir John Johnson with 400 Tories and 200 Indians, the

Mohawk Valley was torched, Canajoharie overrun, a Pennsylvania

militia column cut to pieces, and the Scoharie Valley in Tryon County,

New York, ravaged. As late as June and August 1782 Indians were

inflicting substantial defeats on patriot forces. In June Colonel William

Crawford’s force, sent to pacify the Delaware and Wyandot of the

upper Sandusky, was destroyed and Crawford burned alive. In August

the half-breed Simon Girty killed or captured 50 percent of Hugh

McGary’s Kentucky militia on the lower Blue Licks River.

Although the patriot cause was anathema to most Indians, one

tribe—the Stockbridge—was as loyal as its fate was tragic. Lieutenant

Johann von Ewald of the Schleswig Jäger Corps described the

Stockbridge Indian contingent of the Continental army after the battle

of White Plains on 31 August 1778.

Their costume was a shirt of coarse linen down to the knees, long

trousers also of linen down to the feet, on which they wore shoes of

deerskin, and the head was covered with a hat made of bast [bark].

Their weapons were a rifle or musket, a quiver with some twenty

arrows, and a short battle axe which they know how to throw very

skillfully. Through the nose and in the ears they wore rings, and on

their heads only the crown remained standing in a circle the size of

a dollar-piece, the remainder being shaved off bare.

What is chilling about Ewald’s meticulous description is that he was

reviewing the dead. The Stockbridge had just been killed almost to a

man in a vicious skirmish with German and Loyalist forces at King’s

Bridge (now Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx). A Loyalist officer

patriot battles 198

recorded that “no Indians, especially, received quarter, including their

chief called Nimham and his son, save for a few.”

The Stockbridge of western Massachusetts were part of the

Mahican tribe and, since the arrival of the Europeans, had experienced

an unrelenting dispossession of their lands. In the 1730s they had been

converted to Christianity and during the French and Indian War had

been loyal to the British and American cause, fighting with Rogers’

Rangers. In the 1760s Chief Nimham protested the escalating rent

demands being made on the Stockbridge by great Hudson Valley

landowners like the Philipse family. In 1765 he went to New York to

seek redress but could not persuade any lawyer to represent his people.

In 1766 he even went to the authorities in London to make petition, but

they merely referred him back to the authorities in New York, who

threw out the case. By 1774 the 75 percent of land they had owned in

the town of Stockbridge had dwindled to 6 percent. Even so, a number

of Stockbridge volunteered as minutemen, thirty-five of them joining

Captain William Goodrich’s company, and in the spring of 1775

seventeen of them joined the Continental army at Cambridge; it would

be their presence, noted by the British general Gage holed up in Boston,

that gave him a convenient justification to bring on the vastly more

numerous Indian allies of the British: “We need not be tender of calling

upon the Savages, as the Rebels have shown us the example.”

The Stockbridge’s attempts to integrate themselves with, and

perhaps appease, Americans were doomed. By war’s end, their

ancestral lands were taken by patriot speculators. The Stockbridge

lamented, “The late unhappy wars have Stript us almost Naked of

every thing . . . our Numbers vastly diminished [they were reduced to

450 souls], by being warmly engaged in favour of the United States Tho’

we had no immediate Business with it . . . we are truly like the man that

fell among Thieves, that was Stript, wounded and left for dead in the

high way.”

The same fate awaited the Oneida and Tuscarora, who also

took up the tomahawk in the patriot cause.

One of the great ironies of the independence struggle is that while

patriots had gone to war to free themselves from empire, they were

bloodily engaged in creating their own at the expense of native Americans.