One of the least-known, most terrible and most important chapters of the War of Independence was the ‘frontier war’ – the brutal struggle for land and power along the western boundary of the United States between the native Americans – the ‘Indians’ – the white settlers and the British. It will be recalled that one of the main, if unstated, motives of the rebellious colonists in the war was burning resentment at the British imposition of the Proclamation Line along the watershed of the Appalachians, beyond which land could not be settled by the whites at the expense of the large Indian population.
Once war broke out between the British and the Americans, from north to south along the western border a no-holds-barred systematic holocaust was carried out against the Indian tribes across the Proclamation Line – largely by militia raised from among the land-hungry white border settlers with the full support of Washington and the American high command. This was devastatingly successful, and opened the way to the full-scale occupation of Indian lands during the following century. Thousands of Indians were massacred in the process, hundreds of their villages burnt and levelled, vast acreages of land laid waste, thousands of tons of crops destroyed, and probably tens of thousands of Indians deliberately starved to death as a result.
The American settlers undoubtedly had a pretext for this: many Indian tribes – although probably not the majority, who were rightly fearful of the consequences of having supported the losing side if the Americans should win – favoured a British victory in the war, because they believed this would protect their lands. The British, anxious to open a new front in the war and tie down American troops to the west, did all they could to encourage the Indians to rise up.
But the small-scale British effort along the frontier and the doomed Indian raids into settler-held territory – most of them retaliatory – were in no way proportionate to the savagery of the whirlwind unleashed upon the Indians from the east. To the frontiersmen, the war against the British was of secondary importance to the occupation of Indian lands. The only real point at issue is to what extent this frontier war was instigated by or was beyond the control of Washington and Congress. Sadly, the evidence suggests the full complicity of both.
The conflict along the frontier had been simmering since the end of the Seven Years War, with settlers driving back west into Indian territory and the British valiantly, if inadequately, trying to stop the seizure of Indian lands in the late 1760s and early 1770s. In autumn 1770, a trader with the Indians reported, ‘Boonesborough was founded by Daniel Boone in April 1765 who opened a land office, disposed of over half a million acres in a few weeks, founded three more settlements, and convened a legislature before the year was out.’
Settlers poured into Kentucky from South Carolina, and in turn Pennsylvanians, West Virginians and Scots poured into South Carolina between 1765 and 1775. Dragging Canoe, leader of the Cherokees, told the British in 1776
that [the Indians] were almost surrounded by the White People, that they had but a small spot of ground left for them to stand upon and that it seemed to be the intention of the White People to destroy them from being a people. He had no hand in making the bargains but blamed some of their old men who he said were too old to hunt and who by their poverty had been induced to sell their land but that for his part he had a great many young fellows that would support him and that were determined to have their land.
As John Stuart, a British observer, commented:
In this district amazing great settlements have been made upon tracts held under titles obtained from individuals by taking advantage of their wants and poverty, or by forgeries and frauds of different sorts in which the nation never acquiesced; for they are tenants in common and allow no person, however so great, to cede their lands without the consent of the nation obtained in general council.
Many local invaders were primitive in the extreme. One Spanish official described them as ‘nomadic like Arabs and … distinguished from savages only in their colour, language, and the superiority of their depraved cunning and untrustworthiness’.
Ironically, the tribal lands these brigands invaded were usually settled and cultivated. It is a post-independence fabrication to suggest that the Indians across the Appalachians were nomadic: they were settled and highly efficient farmers. By 1771 one of their chiefs was predicting, ‘Unless you [the British] can fall upon some method of governing your people who live between the Great Mountains and the Ohio River and who are now very numerous, it will be out of the Indians’ power to govern their young men, for we assure you that the black clouds begin to gather fast in this country.’
After the war, in 1774, in a particularly brutal act, American farmers along the Ohio river had invited a group of Indians into their camp and killed and mutilated them. It was in Ohio, unsurprisingly, that hostilities first broke out in 1775.
The Indian nations were far from united in their support of the British. The British commander in Fort Detroit, Henry Hamilton, and the American Indian agent at Fort Pitt to the east, George Morgan, vied for the support of the Delawares of Ohio. The Iroquois to the north, on the boundaries of New York State, were hostile to the Americans. Further south the Wyandots and other tribes tended to favour the British as American raiding parties became more frequent. The Potowatomis to the west were divided, while the Sauk and Fox Indians on the upper Mississippi tended to support the British. To the south the Creeks, Chickasaws and Cherokees tended to favour the British, while the Choctaws were divided.
The main concern of most tribes was simply to protect their lands from the settlers. Their concept of land tenure was different from the white man’s: as one Shawnee chief declared, ‘Sell land! As well sell air and water. The Great Spirit gave them in common to all.’ Most Indian elders were deeply apprehensive about getting involved in the war at all. The Delawares remained neutral, although one of their chiefs, White Eyes, openly supported the Americans. Flying Crow, chief of the Allegheny Senecas, reproached a young warrior from a neighbouring tribe seeking his assistance against the settlers:
It is true they have encroached on our lands, but of this we shall speak to them. If you are so strong, brother, and they but as a weak boy, why ask our assistance? It is true I am tall and strong but I will reserve my strength to strike those who injure [us] … You say they are all mad, foolish, wicked and deceitful – I say you are so and they are wise for you want us to destroy ourselves in your war and they advise us to live in peace.
In the summer of 1776 the Cherokees crossed the mountains to attack the cabins of the encroaching settlers. The American response was swift and brutal. The American commander there, General Charles Lee, drew up a plan to assemble a powerful army to overwhelm the Indians. Colonel Andrew Williamson, at the head of 1,100 troops, marched in August 1776 from South Carolina into the ‘Lower Towns’ at the southern end of the Cherokee nation, ‘destroying all the villages and corn (from the Cherokee border with South Carolina) to the Middle Settlement’. The aim was to starve the villagers out of these areas.
Another pincer from North Carolina – a 2,000-strong force under General Griffith Rutherford – joined up with Williamson at the Hiwassie river. In two weeks, dozens of Cherokee villages were levelled. In October a third force under the Virginian commander Colonel William Christian punched into Cherokee territory from the north. He ordered, ‘cut up every Indian cornfield and burn every Indian town’. It was an astonishingly swift, effective and brutal campaign that drew admiration from George Washington.
The wars devastated huge swaths of Indian land, which also coincidentally suffered from a smallpox epidemic that killed thousands. Even Christian was moved to comment:
The miseries of those people from what I see and hear seem to exceed description; here are men, women and children almost naked. I see very little to cover either sex but some old bear skins, and we are told that the bulk of the nation are in the same naked situation. But this is not the greatest of their evils; their crops this year have been worse than ever was known, so that their corn and potatoes, it is supposed, will all be done before April; and many are already out, particularly widows and fatherless children, who have no men nearly connected with them.
The initial Indian raiding in Ohio was small-scale stuff. More than 400 warriors, mostly Wyandots, set out from Detroit in 32 war groups, and another 400 further south. The Detroit raiders took 20 scalps and 30 prisoners in July 1776. Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia, along with General Edward Hand, commander at Fort Pitt, were determined to inflict exemplary punishment. The dynamic twenty-five-year-old Colonel George Rogers Clark was appointed to recruit 350 men from among the militant frontiersmen (who, explained Hand, ‘liked chastising Indians’) to go on a daring raid deep into Indian territory, as far as Kaskaskias in the Illinois region, to encircle the Ohio tribes.
In July 1778 he seized the outpost from its tiny British garrison. The British commander in Ohio, Henry Hamilton, moved south to the fort of Vincennes to counter this, and then moved into winter quarters with his force of 100 men and Indian supporters. In a brilliant counter-move, in January 1779 Clark marched his men through rain-sodden, freezing territory, to surprise Hamilton. Showing the ruthlessness that was as characteristic of him as his bravery, Clark surprised a party of Indians returning to the fort and personally led his men in tomahawking them in full view of the little stockade. Soon afterwards Hamilton surrendered. Clark remarked that ‘to exceed them in barbarity was, and is, the only way to make war upon Indians and gain a name among them’.
In the summer of 1778, Iroquois Indians along the borders of Pennsylvania and New York began to stage small-scale raids into both states, destroying farms and capturing more than 100 cattle and 30 horses. Washington planned massive retaliation. One of his senior generals, John Sullivan, was placed in charge of an army of 4,000 Continentals and instructed to destroy all Indian towns without exception. Departing from Canojaharie Creek in late June, this huge punitive army – contrasting with the ill-equipped tribesmen it faced, who were in no position to harass it – methodically levelled every Indian settlement all the way to Tioga near the Pennsylvania–New York border. At Great Genesse 100 houses were burnt and 15,000 bushels of corn destroyed, taking eight hours. Any Indians the Americans met were captured or killed, or fled before them. Sullivan and his officers celebrated Independence Day 1779 with the toast ‘Civilisation or death to all the American savages.’ To the north, Daniel Brodhead set off on a more limited expedition from Fort Pitt, destroying ten Seneca villages.
Altogether Sullivan burnt forty towns and destroyed 160,000 bushels of corn. The Americans were astonished by the prosperity and extent of these vast settlements. As one army doctor remarked, ‘The quality of corn in the towns is far beyond what anybody has imagined.’ In fact the Indians were superb farmers, cultivating maize, tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, beans, and more than twenty other crops. Some soldiers pillaged Indian graves and skinned bodies ‘from the hips down for bootlegs’.
Although the Iroquois had mostly fled, they faced starvation through the terrible winter of 1780–81, and many lived as refugees in wretched camps near the British outposts. One Onondaga chief reported that when the Americans attacked his village ‘They put to death all the women and children, excepting some of the young women, whom they carried away for the use of their soldiers and were afterwards put to death in a more shameful manner.’
To the south meanwhile, in 1779, Chicamauga Cherokee country was invaded in another expedition, and eleven villages as well as 20,000 bushels of corn were destroyed and £25,000 worth of goods seized; a few Indians were killed, the rest fleeing.
All this was no more than official policy. Congress had decreed that ‘no mercy’ was to be shown to ‘those that have been at war against the States’. Washington, in respect of the Iroquois expedition into the Mohawk and Susquehanna valleys, had ordered that his men should act ‘To carry the war into the heart of the [Indian] Six Nations; to cut off their settlements, destroy their next year’s crops, and do them every other mischief of which time and circumstances will permit … it will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent them planting more.’
The next flare-up was in Shawnee territory, between the Iroquois and Cherokees lands. The Shawnee deeply resented Virginian incursions into their Kentucky hunting grounds. When their chief, Cornstalk, was murdered while being held a hostage by the Virginians, and Clark, acting on the orders of Governor Thomas Jefferson, laid waste two Shawnee villages, their patience was exhausted. (Clark had turned his cannon on one village assembly house, to which most of the Indians had fled, massacring those inside.) With the support of a small number of British troops and a single field cannon, the Indians secured a rare victory against Kentucky militia at Blue Licks. Two years later Clark had his revenge, burning five Shawnee villages. As one of their chiefs put it on that occasion, the Americans ‘have come like thieves in the night, when the Shawnee warriors were out at their hunting grounds, surrounded one of their towns and murdered all the women and children’.
Late in 1780 a further American expedition was mounted in the south against the Cherokees, who were believed to be planning raiding parties. A volunteer force from North Carolina and Virginia was marched under Colonel John Sevier and Colonel Arthur Campbell into Cherokee territory. Campbell reported that 1,000 houses and 50,000 bushels of corn ‘were committed to the flames, or otherwise destroyed’. Sevier’s son added ‘we destroyed their towns, stock, corn and everything they had to support on’. British reports suggested that women and children had been burnt alive by the ill-disciplined frontier irregulars; a Cherokee chieftain claimed that he had lost 600 warriors to the ‘madmen of Virginia’. In one attack, Andrew Pickens’ South Carolina militia, on horseback, cut down the fleeing inhabitants as they attempted to escape the open land surrounding their towns.
The bloodletting was not yet over. While skirmishing continued in the south, it was the unfortunate Delawares – who had tried to stay out of the war – who were to suffer next. White Eyes, the chief who had befriended the Americans, was repaid by being killed, possibly by an American assassin. A Moravian missionary, David Zeisberger, who had acted as a scout in Indian country for the Americans, was leading a party of around 100 converted Delawares to the village of Gnadenhutten, their tribal home. A group of Pennsylvanian militia came across them there and were welcomed. The militia promptly took the pro-American Delawares prisoner, occupied the old Moravian schoolhouse in the village, and had the prisoners brought in one by one to be bludgeoned to death – supposedly to save the trouble of taking the prisoners back to Fort Pitt. One of the Delawares survived to tell the story.
The rebels’ decision to wage a war without mercy against their Indian opponents was in gross contradiction to the professedly humanitarian and idealistic motives of the War of Independence, and in contrast with American behaviour elsewhere. While irregulars committed acts of savagery, and occasional excesses occurred on both sides, for the most part the rules of civilized conduct in war were respected. It was also unlike the behaviour of contemporary British colonists in India, who rarely committed atrocities against the native people there.
The decision to carry the war into Indian territory on a large scale, to pursue scorched earth tactics, to give no quarter to the fighters, to destroy hundreds of settlements, and to starve the women and children in a deliberate effort to expel them from a great swath of their own territory was not the isolated act of a few settlers or extremists, but the stated policy of both Washington and Congress. Even the ‘liberal’ Jefferson had called for the Shawnees to be driven from their land or exterminated. By far the blackest and most terrible chapter in the American Revolution, it for ever besmirches the reputations of the founding fathers who ordered it. Could it in any way be justified?
Fear of Indian invasion was certainly one motive. The Indians did occasionally attack along the frontier. Indian fighters also killed savagely and without mercy, routinely scalping and mutilating their enemies and taking no prisoners, although on the whole they did not wage general war against the civilian population. Yet to some extent the Indians were reined in by their British allies. Moreover, the American attack could hardly be justified by the extent of the actual Indian uprising, since most Indians tried at first to stay neutral.
There were two prime motives for the colonists’ ruthless tactics. First, carrying the war into Indian territory was undoubtedly the best way of neutralizing the tribes in case they should mount a sustained attack along the western frontier of the states. Colin Calloway, in his detailed and pioneering study of the American Revolution in Indian country, sums this up: ‘American troops and militia tramped through the Susquehanna, the Allegheny, the Scioto, Miami, and Tennessee valleys, leaving smoking ruins and burned cornfields behind them. As John Shy has pointed out, colonial military forces were used less often for protection of settlements than for exacting retribution and retaliation.’
American soldiers and militia matched and sometimes exceeded their Indian adversaries in the use of terror tactics. William Henry Drayton and Andrew Williamson of South Carolina advocated that captured Indians should become the slaves of the captors, but the legislature refused, fearing Indian retaliation for such a precedent. Since Indian prisoners brought no reward, soldiers killed them for their scalps. Captain William Moore’s contingent captured three Cherokees in their campaign against the Middle Towns in 1776. Moore argued that the prisoners should be kept under guard until Congress approved their sale, but he was obliged to give in to the demands of his men, since ‘the greater part swore bloodily that if they were not sold for slaves upon the spot, they would kill and scalp them immediately’. South Carolina paid £75 for male scalps; Pennsylvania offered $1,000 for every Indian scalp. Kentucky militiamen who invaded Shawnee villages dug up graves to scalp corpses.
Barely had the Cherokees launched their attacks on the back-country settlements than the colonists carried fire and sword to the Indians’ towns and villages, bringing the nation to its knees. As usual, the war in Cherokee country revolved around corn. ‘Make smooth work as you go,’ William Henry Drayton advised the troops. ‘Cut up every Indian cornfield, and burn every Indian town.’
The destruction of extensive settlements covering so large an area of territory was in fact a methodical cleansing of the land of its inhabitants, as a result of that relentless pressure for colonization of tribal lands which had triggered Indian hostility to the American settlers in the first place. The American armies were extending the state boundaries even as the war with Britain was being fought: land cleared was land ready for colonization by the settlers.
The Indians had sided with the British as a desperate act of self-defence against American depredations. They had not simply been unlucky in choosing the wrong side. Had they joined the Americans, as some attempted to do, they would have fared no better so far as their land was concerned. Yet their loyalty to the British provided an ideal excuse for the levelling of villages and confiscation of lands. As Calloway summarizes it:
American Indians could not expect to be accepted in a nation that denied the fruits of an egalitarian revolution to so many of its citizens and that lived with the contradiction of slavery in a society built on principles of freedom. Native Americans had been heavily dependent on, and interdependent with, colonial society and economy before the Revolution. But as Indian land became increasingly biracial rather than triracial in character, consigning most non-whites to the status of blacks, many Indian communities became increasingly multiethnic in nature. But by the nineteenth century, Indian country was envisioned as a place beyond the Mississippi.
Indian people had been virtually everywhere in colonial America, building new worlds on the ruins of old worlds. Despite recurrent conflicts, many British officials had envisaged Indians as part of their North American empire. Southern Indian superintendent John Stuart had recommended to the lords of trade in 1764 that the government continue French policies of gift-giving and evenhanded dealings as the means of ‘fixing the British empire in the hearts of the Indians’. Stuart’s vision was never realised, of course, but British officials did appreciate the imperial importance of Indian trade and presence, and that meant extending a measure of protection to Indian hunting grounds. The United States looked to build an empire on Indian land, not on Indian trade, and that required the Indians’ removal.
The United States looked forward to a future without Indians. The Indians’ participation in the Revolution guaranteed their exclusion from the new world born out of the Revolution; their determination to survive as Indians guaranteed their ultimate extinction. Artistic depictions of Indian people showed them retreating westward, suffused in the heavy imagery of setting suns, as they faded from history.
Even while engaged in mortal combat with Britain, the American eagle was spreading its wings westward in continental ambition, at the expense of the native American population and its ancient, settled and pastoral mode of existence – not as wild herdsmen on horseback, but as farmers tending great cornfields.