The meeting between George Washington and the Mohawk chief James Brant, otherwise known as Thayendanegea (the name means ‘he who places two bets’) has caused much amusement to subsequent commentators. As has been gleefully noted, one was a well-travelled and sophisticated gentleman with high social connections, whose portrait was painted by George Romney, and the other was George Washington. And while they were both freemasons, Brant had been handed his apron by George III.
When Brant first visited London in 1776, he was interviewed by James Boswell (always watching for the man of the hour) for the London Magazine. Brant’s society friends were horrified to hear he was staying at an inn called The Swan With Two Necks, and tried to get him to move, but he was happy to remain at the Swan where he was treated with ‘much kindness’. Brant was by no means an oddity in London: many American Indians and blacks visited and often settled in England, where they found the white neighbours friendlier than the ones back home.
Brant returned to America and led the Mohawk warriors in the bloody war against the rebels. The fighting was brutal, and Brant’s Mohawks committed atrocities, though he himself seems innocent of war crimes. Atrocities were common during the war, and Brant, like many leaders on both sides, sought to prevent unnecessary killing. The Mohawk attacks were subsequently used by Americans to justify punitive expeditions against Indians, but in fact the patriot militia often slaughtered defenceless loyalists and their Indian allies (especially in the war’s immediate aftermath).
After the rebel victory in 1783, Brant told the British secretary of state that when he ‘joined the English in the beginning of the war, it was purely on account of my forefathers’ engagements with the king. I always looked upon these engagements, or covenants between the king and the Indian nations, as a sacred thing: therefore, I was not to be frightened by the threats of the rebels at that time; I assure you I had no other view in it, and this was my real case from the beginning’.
In 1792, Brant was invited to meet Washington in Philadelphia: Washington hoped that Brant would use his good influence to broker peace with the Indian nations now fighting the Americans along the Ohio river. Washington offered Brant lands and a pension, which Brant immediately rejected as an obvious bribe. Brant was being given an impossible task, as he well knew. Few of the Indians were natural allies, the British were being duplicitous, and everyone knew that Washington was just buying time; the expansion into Indian lands that had been one of the stated aims of the Revolution would continue no matter what.
What Happened Next
Brant took ill and his mission was delayed. He did his best to work out a compromise agreement between the Indians and the Americans, but negotiations ended when the Indian alliance demanded the withdrawal of Americans to behind the Ohio river: war followed, and the Indians were heavily defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Brant, a devout Anglican, and a hero of Canada, died in 1807. See 1777: Patrick Ferguson is told he decided not to shoot George Washington; 1887: Queen Victoria tells Black Elk what would happen if the Lakota were her subjects