The War That Made America

By the middle of the eighteenth century, European colonists had lived in North America for nearly a century and a half. They had dealt with native peoples through that whole time—as indeed their predecessors had for the century that preceded the founding of permanent settlements, when European mariners had fished in American waters and coasted along the eastern seaboard in search of wealth and trade—in ways that were by turns peaceful and violent. Those complex interactions between natives and newcomers had both enabled colonization to succeed and limited its success, yielding results that ultimately depended on the decisions and acts of the Indians themselves. Inasmuch as the different European nations competed with one another for influence and power on both sides of the Atlantic, they needed Indians as trading partners, military allies, sources of labor, and sources of land. Insofar as the Indian groups competed with one another, they also understood the Europeans as valuable trading partners, allies, and providers of the weapons and other manufactured goods they needed to survive (and indeed to prosper) in what had become a dangerous and uncertain new world.

Contact with the strangers from beyond the seas had altered native life in almost unfathomable ways. For perhaps a hundred centuries before regular transatlantic contact began at the end of the fifteenth century, the human populations of the New World and the Old had been isolated from each other, and hence unable to exchange pathogens; as a result, infectious microbes in the Americas had evolved along different paths from those in Eurasia and Africa. When native peoples in the Americas confronted the epidemic diseases that arrived from Europe along with the colonists, therefore, they lacked the immune defenses of colonizers who had been exposed in childhood to viral epidemic diseases like measles that operate on adult victims with calamitous intensity. The establishment of permanent settlement beachheads at Jamestown (1607), Quebec (1608), Plymouth (1620), and Fort Orange (on the site of modern Albany, 1624) brought close, continuous contact between native and European populations that permitted not only measles, but also chicken pox, smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, and other infections to enter the neighboring Indian communities and then to spread along lines of trade among local native groups, into the surrounding regions.

American Magazine cover. This 1758 woodcut from a Philadelphia periodical includes emblematic British, French, and American Indian figures. Despite its obvious biases, the image shows the Indian in a position of strength as he chooses between the Bible and bolt of cloth offered by the Briton and the purse of money and tomahawk presented by the Frenchman, as representatives of competing European empires. (Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections)

The effects of the resulting “virgin soil” epidemics beggar description. Ultimately they destroyed as much as 90 percent of the native population of North America. One estimate holds that an indigenous population east of the Mississippi numbering more than 2 million in 1600 shrank to less than a quarter-million by 1750. This decline did not occur simultaneously everywhere on the continent, however, but piecemeal, always striking those native populations in continuous contact with Europeans first. The groups that suffered the initial damage therefore needed to limit their losses if they were to remain viable cultural, social, economic, and military entities.

Overwhelmingly their response was war. There were, of course, shamans in Indian communities who performed healing rituals and treated the sick with traditional remedies. But such palliatives did little to forestall the wholesale destruction of life that occurred with each epidemic episode. As much as half the population of any given village or band died within days or weeks of an epidemic’s appearance; those lucky enough to survive remained vulnerable to the appearance of other viral diseases to which they also had no immune defenses. The only way to maintain population levels in the face of such devastation was for the survivors to undertake raiding expeditions against other groups in “mourning wars.” The goal of mourning warfare, which ethnologists understand as a response to bereavement, was less to kill one’s enemies than to take women and children from enemy groups as captives. They in turn could be adopted into the raiders’ families as replacements for lost members, or, alternatively, enslaved as substitutes for missing workers. As warriors, enemy adult males were all but impossible to assimilate, and hence rarely adopted. Captured warriors were typically tortured to death in rituals that allowed their captors to appropriate the victims’ spiritual power. The victims in return had whatever consolation came with a chance to die a warrior’s death, demonstrating their courage and fortitude in the face of indescribable pain.

1666 Paris document (detail). This detail from a French copy of Iroquois (probably Seneca) pictographic writing illustrates warriors returning from a campaign with scalps and a bound prisoner. Iroquois and other northeastern American Indian women produced highly decorated captive halters and ties for use in securing captives obtained through “mourning wars.” (Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence. Archives Nationales, France [Col. C. 11 A2 Fol. 263.269]. Tous droits réservés.)

Sustaining populations was the principal goal of mourning wars, but not all Indian nations were equally adept at achieving it. Those who had access to European weapons—particularly steel-edged weapons and firearms—tended to be the most successful. To obtain these, warriors needed commodities, above all beaver pelts and other valuable animal skins, to trade to their European suppliers. As a result, the taking of booty, an ancillary activity before the arrival of the Europeans, became as central to Indian war-making as the vital business of captive-taking. In a complex, unintended way epidemic diseases promoted wars among Indian groups that greatly magnified their demographic losses, even as these wars evolved into a commercial enterprise in which European merchants provided guns and ammunition in return for plundered pelts and hides. Inevitably raids became ever more deadly as wars intensified, creating a seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence, death, and retribution.

Among the most successful Indian practitioners of this new, commercialized war were the Five Nations of the Iroquois, a religious and ceremonial league made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples of what is now upstate New York. Their close ties with the Dutch traders of Fort Orange yielded the guns and ammunition that made warriors of the Five Nations the most feared and effective raiders in the northeastern quarter of North America. By the late seventeenth century they had eliminated whole peoples from the Ohio River Valley and the lower Great Lakes Basin, conducting expeditions that ranged from modern Wisconsin to northern New England, and from the Arctic shield of Ontario to South Carolina.

The very success of the Iroquois in pursuing these “beaver wars” created its own limits, for two reasons. First, external behavior and even language were more easily altered than deep-seated values, and the adoption of large numbers of captives inevitably diluted the cultural coherence of the captors’ communities. Adoptees who had previously been converted to Catholicism posed a particular threat to the ability of the Five Nations to carry on their warfare against the French and their native allies. These converts formed the nuclei of Francophile factions within each of the Five Nations. Pro-French groups began to become influential in Iroquois policy just at the time that the second factor—the growing ability of the French and their allies to fight back—came to the fore.

Beginning in the late 1650s and 1660s, French officials, missionary priests, and traders established themselves among the refugees who sought shelter from Iroquois attacks in the area west of Lake Michigan and south of Lake Superior, in what is now Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan. Many of these groups had been enemies before the Iroquois had attacked them, and having a common enemy did nothing to make them friends; mutual suspicion and hostility, indeed, embroiled them in internecine conflicts that made it all the more difficult for them to stave off raiders from the Five Nations. The French who lived and worked among them took advantage of this disorder by taking on the metaphorical role of Father: a mediator of disputes and a source of trade goods. These manufactures, particularly arms and ammunition, were given as gifts to local leaders who could in turn redistribute them as gifts to their own followers, building up coteries friendly to the French. Meanwhile French Indian traders provided an eager market for the Indians’ beaver pelts and other furs, and supplied the ammunition, brandy, and other goods the Indians needed. All this activity created a framework for a non-coercive alliance system, what has been called a cultural “Middle Ground.” As the French armed, supplied, evangelized among, and traded with them, the peoples of the Middle Ground became increasingly capable of defending themselves, and slowly moved to reoccupy areas, such as the Wabash and Illinois river valleys, from which the Iroquois raiders had driven them.

Eventually, at the urging of the French and in cooperation with French troops sent in the mid-1660s as part of Louis XIV’s strategic plan to dominate North America militarily, the Indian allies of New France grew strong enough to strike back against the Iroquois. With the English takeover of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664, the Iroquois lost their main arms supplier and thus the ability to carry on offensive warfare in search of captives and wealth; soon they found it impossible to defend Iroquoia against invasion. The Five Nations sought to replace the Dutch with the English, and succeeded in forging an alliance—the so-called Covenant Chain—with New York in the 1670s. Unfortunately for the hopes of the Five Nations’ leaders, the English proved poor substitutes for the Dutch, and utterly inadequate allies in time of danger. Over the last third of the seventeenth century, the Five Nations suffered devastating losses and grew ever more factionalized internally. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Iroquois had lost perhaps a quarter of their population at the hands of their enemies and had little choice but to make peace with New France and its native allies.

Calumet (pipe stem), c. 1780-1830. Early French and Canadian visitors to the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes region observed the widespread ritual use of smoking pipes with highly decorated stems dubbed “calumets.” Traditionally associated with peace and alliance, the calumet ritual was an important component in diplomatic exchanges between New France and American Indian allies. (Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Photo 99-12-10/53099.2 T2997)

The result was the Grand Settlement of 1701, a set of treaties concluded simultaneously with the French at Montreal and the English at Albany, by which the Five Nations stepped back from the brink of destruction. At Montreal diplomats representing the League pledged to remain neutral in all future wars between the French and the English. In return for this great concession the French agreed that the Iroquois could hunt on lands north of the Great Lakes and trade at France’s newly established commercial emporium, Fort Detroit, between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. At Albany, meanwhile, the League’s representatives ceded to the English crown all Iroquois claims to the country north of the Great Lakes—a largely fictitious claim based on the Iroquois “conquest” of the region in the Beaver Wars. Because this was a region that the English had no capacity to occupy, the cession’s main effect was to reaffirm the Covenant Chain alliance with the English, and to place the Iroquois theoretically under the protection of the English king, as Father. The English knew nothing of the Iroquois promise to New France that they would remain neutral in future Anglo-French wars; the French knew nothing of the Iroquois reaffirmation of the Covenant Chain binding them to the English colonies, and nothing of the Iroquois cession to England of lands that lay (so far as Louis XIV and his ministers were concerned) wholly within the bounds of New France.

The Grand Settlement enabled the Iroquois to carve out a position of neutrality between the increasingly competitive empires of France and England. When the two powers went to war in Europe, their colonists in the New World attempted to attack one another as well; indeed, it had been the first of those Anglo-French conflicts, the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-1697), that prompted the French and their allied peoples to attack the Iroquois homeland with such terrible effect. Having gained little but destruction and loss as England’s ally and France’s enemy, the Iroquois now discovered that their new position of neutrality gave them considerable leverage against both powers because it made Iroquoia—an area that was itself a buffer between the French and English colonies—the fulcrum on which Iroquois diplomats could counterpoise the empires against each other. With this dawning realization came the birth of a new balance-of-power diplomatic system in eastern North America, which was largely responsible for rendering Anglo-French imperial competition indecisive for a full half-century.

When conflict next erupted between France and England—as it did soon after the Grand Settlement in the War of the Spanish Succession (or, as it was known in the English colonies, Queen Anne’s War, 1702-1713)—the Iroquois exploited their supposed military alliance with the English by gaining information about planned attacks on New France and passing it along to the French. Meanwhile, the Five Nations reaped rewards from the renewed Covenant Chain in the form of English subsidies—diplomatic gifts of trade goods, arms, ammunition, and other supplies. When the English finally moved to invade Canada by way of Lake Champlain in 1709 and 1711, several hundred Iroquois warriors joined the expeditions and then did their best to sabotage them by delay and by passing along intelligence to the enemy. The result, an indecisive war that weakened both empires and enriched the Iroquois League, demonstrated beyond doubt the utility of avoiding an exclusive alliance with either European power. Neutrality had served the interests of the Five Nations admirably.

The cessation of hostilities, however, served them even better. During the Long Peace—the thirty years between the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the outbreak of the next Anglo-French war in 1744—the Five Nations became increasingly adept at maintaining the delicate balance between empires to their own advantage. Now they found themselves not only in a position to continue controlling the flow of information between New France and New York but also to act as middlemen in the smuggling trade that went on between the two colonies via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. The admission of the Tuscaroras to the League as a sixth nation in 1726 greatly enhanced Iroquois military power and enabled them to expand their raids against a variety of southern Indian groups, notably the Cherokees and the Catawbas. This limited form of mourning war enabled the Iroquois to continue rebuilding their population and spiritual power without the risk of French retaliation, for these enemies were either allied with the British of the Carolinas or with the Spanish in Florida.

The era of Iroquois neutrality furnished another opportunity for the League to regain power and wealth, as well, in building a mutually beneficial relationship with the new British province of Pennsylvania. This colony, founded in 1681 as an experiment in pacifism and religious liberty by the aristocratic English Quaker William Penn, was one of the greatest anomalies of its day: an English colony that forswore the use of force against native peoples, but rather promised them peace and traded with them on fair and open terms. Penn’s willingness to trade freely with the local Indians—at first mainly Lenni Lenape (or Delawares), who lived in the eastern part of the province in the Delaware River Valley—extended to providing them with firearms and ammunition. In the absence of a militia or any organized form of self-defense among the colonists, easy access to arms offered the Indians what amounted to an ironclad guarantee that they had nothing to fear from Penn and his colonists.

As word spread among native groups (especially those that had been living farther south) that Pennsylvania offered a refuge from the wars that afflicted them, Penn’s colony became a haven for Indians as much as it was for European immigrants. Ensconced in the upper Delaware Valley and the Susquehanna watershed farther west, selling lands at a pace that suited them to a proprietor who paid well, and secure in their trading relationship with the merchants of Philadelphia, the Delawares and other Indian groups (Shawnees, Conestogas, Tutelos, Conoys, Nanticokes, and others) became in effect a well-armed defensive shield for Pennsylvania as a whole. The Quaker province could safely dispense with a militia because it effectively outsourced defense to Indian allies whom no one expected to live according to pacificist principles.

This system worked amazingly well, and it made Pennsylvania the greatest success story in English North America. The absence of warfare (and Pennsylvania remained free from war for more than seven decades after its founding), the lack of any military obligation for the colonists, religious toleration, and the comparatively cheap and fertile soil of the colony combined to draw thousands of immigrants, primarily from the lowlands of Scotland, northern Ireland, and the war-ravaged Rhenish Palatinate in what is now southwestern Germany. Following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the press of immigrants grew ever greater, and showed no sign of diminishing as the century progressed. The colonists’ large family sizes and generally healthful conditions of settlement kept mortality low, while the influx of settlers drove an astonishing increase in white population—approximately 150 percent per decade. Prosperity kept pace with population to such a degree that eighteenth-century Pennsylvania came to be known as “the best poor man’s country on earth.”

There was, inevitably, a price to be paid for so much growth. The colony’s white farmers, with their large families and burgeoning livestock herds, needed space to expand, and hence ever more Indian land. From the very beginning, peace in Penn’s province had depended upon the ability of Indians and white settlers to develop as parallel communities, each free to pursue its own interests without interference from the other. James Logan, the Penn family’s “man of business” in Pennsylvania and the most powerful man in the colony, understood this fundamental truth, and saw that Pennsylvania’s very success could become its nemesis. The expansion of Pennsylvania, he knew, might bring war down on a province that was wholly unprepared to defend itself.

As early as the 1720s Logan understood the Indians of Pennsylvania as the most immediate threat, for they both resented the growing pressure of whites on their lands and possessed far greater military capacity than the colonists. If they struck (as Logan knew they had nearly done in 1728 when white settlers in the Schuylkill Valley murdered three peaceful Indians), the result would be a bloodbath. Yet an even greater threat, he believed, came from the ability of the French to exploit their capacity for alliance-making to create an Indian uprising on a truly grand scale. The French had a vital strategic interest in keeping the British colonists confined to the area between the Atlantic and the Appalachians, for if Pennsylvania’s mushrooming population continued to press westward, it would only be a matter of time until it breached the mountain barrier. Rather than let Britain’s colonists flood into the Ohio River Valley, the French would surely mobilize their Indian allies to attack on a broad front, along the colonial frontier from New York to the Carolinas. Pennsylvania, lacking a militia to defend itself, would be the most inviting and vulnerable target of all. The consequences would be catastrophic.

William Penn was long dead by the time Logan reached these sobering conclusions, but to abandon Penn’s pacifist policy and create a militia was impossible. Logan was not so committed a Quaker that he would have scrupled at establishing a self-defense force, but he knew the Quaker grandees who dominated the provincial assembly too well to imagine that they would abandon the Peace Testimony. The defense of the province, then, had to come from outside, and Logan knew that the Iroquois were the likeliest to provide it. As early as the 1640s Iroquois warriors had acted as musclemen for the Dutch in punishing the refractory Indians of the lower Hudson Valley; at the behest of the governor of New York in the 1670s, they had played a decisive role in putting down Indian uprisings in Massachusetts and Virginia. An alliance between Pennsylvania and the Iroquois, Logan believed, would give the notoriously weak province a means to discipline its own native people, while the exceptionally effective diplomats of the League could help fend off the threat from French-allied Indians farther west.

To this end, between 1721 and 1732 Logan worked to extend the Covenant Chain alliance to Pennsylvania, in order to have the province recognize the Iroquois as diplomatic spokesmen for the Delawares, Shawnees, and other Indians living in Pennsylvania. Making the Five Nations (or, following the admission of the Tuscaroras to the League in 1726, the Six Nations) custodians of the interests of Pennsylvania’s Indians would confer not only the security benefits that Logan was desperate to achieve, but also add one more singularly great advantage: it would greatly ease the process of transferring lands from Indian ownership to the Penn family, whose interests Logan faithfully represented.

It took the heirs of William Penn thirteen years after his death to straighten out the tangled legal circumstances in which he had left the ownership of the province. Thus when the Court of Chancery finally rendered its decision and prompted the out-of-court settlement that at last determined the ownership of Pennsylvania in 1731, Richard, John, and Thomas Penn were more than eager to make the family’s province a paying proposition. This meant acquiring substantial amounts of Indian land for sale to settlers. To adhere to their father’s policy of buying that land from the Delawares, Shawnees, Conestogas, and other Indians who actually lived on it would have been time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. Logan’s success in installing the Six Nations in a position of suzerainty over the Indians of Pennsylvania, however, allowed Penn’s heirs the convenience of acquiring the land they wanted simply by dealing with the Iroquois.

Because the Six Nations were willing to sell land out from under the Delawares and other peoples, now conveniently defined as the wards of the League, the Penns were able to buy it in quantity and begin reselling it to white settlers. Niceties of law and equity did not unduly concern them, and they grew steadily bolder and more aggressive until, in 1737, they succeeded in perpetrating the so-called Walking Purchase. This spectacular land fraud, the most flagrant of the whole eighteenth century, dispossessed the Delawares of nearly three-quarters of a million acres of land near the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers. Iroquois enforcers, complicit in the fraud, prevented the victims from making any effective protest; the League confirmed the purchase by treaty in 1742, and forced a stubborn band of Delawares who had refused to leave to move to the Susquehanna Valley. Nothing indicates that the Penn brothers ever reckoned the costs to the Indians of the Walking Purchase and various other land deals, but they could hardly have escaped the realization that their own profits were enormous. Whereas William Penn had averaged £400 or less in annual income from land sales and had died deeply in debt, his heirs raked in an average of £7,150 in income from their dealings in Pennsylvania real estate every year from 1731 through 1760.

Tishcohan, by Gustavus Hesselius, 1735. The Delaware leader Tishcohan was one of several signatories to a deed confirming the infamous “Walking Purchase” of 1737. The Pennsylvania proprietors Thomas and John Penn, who commissioned this portrait, used Iroquois aid to press Tishcohan’s people to abandon their lands in eastern Pennsylvania. Most moved to the Susquehanna Valley, nursing resentment over their dispossession. (Courtesy of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia)

By the time James Logan died in 1751, his attempts to secure Pennsylvania through diplomacy with the Iroquois League had yielded three important, if unanticipated, results. The once-penurious Penns had become one of the richest families in England; the Iroquois League had achieved a level of power and diplomatic influence it had not seen in nearly a century; and the Indians of eastern Pennsylvania had largely been driven from their homes. None of these outcomes, unfortunately, had done a great deal to achieve the goal of a defensible frontier that Logan had intended. Although he could not have known it when he died, the net result had been to move the province closer to war than it had ever been. When the war came, it would strike Pennsylvania with a fury that would make its seven decades of peaceful Indian relations seem as distant and irrecoverable as a half-remembered dream.