CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Shift in the Balance

Of all the groups that reckoned their positions anew in the months after the fall of Fort Duquesne and the cessation of hostilities on the Pennsylvania-Virginia frontier, none made a closer calculation of interests and priorities than the chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy. This seems to have occurred in a meeting of the League council at Onondaga sometime in the waning days of 1758. No written record survives to confirm it, because none would have been made at a gathering attended only by the chiefs of the council. Two events, however, in the early days of 1759 make it clear that the leaders of the Six Nations realized that it was no longer in their interest to maintain the neutrality they had observed more or less consistently since the fall of 1755.

The first was in January, when a delegation of Iroquois chiefs arrived at Pittsburgh and took aside Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Mercer, commandant of the winter garrison holding the Forks, to warn him not to trust the Shawnees and Delawares. Chiefs of both peoples (they said) were planning to unite against the Six Nations, and had not fully severed relations with the French. If, however, “a very powerfull aid is afforded them [the Iroquois] by the English,” Mercer reported, they could prevent the Shawnee-Delaware conspiracy from succeeding, hence preserving the Ohio country in English—and, presumably, Iroquois—control. The second event took place in February, when Iroquois emissaries arrived at Sir William Johnson’s headquarters (Fort Johnson, on the Mohawk River) and made similar overtures, along with an offer they knew Johnson could not refuse: military aid. On February 16 Johnson wrote to inform Amherst that if “a large Augmentation” could be made to the gifts he was authorized to distribute, he could procure Iroquois support for an expedition against the last great French stronghold on Lake Ontario, Fort Niagara.

These nearly simultaneous approaches to Mercer and Johnson signaled an abrupt reversal in policy, driven by the desire to reestablish the League’s influence in the Ohio country after a long, dangerous hiatus. Control (or at least the plausible illusion of control) over the Ohio Valley had long been the fulcrum on which Iroquois spokesmen had based their efforts to play the French and British empires off against each other. The inability of the Iroquois to influence developments on the Ohio in the early 1750s, when the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos had begun trying to deal independently with the British and the French, had brought about the confrontation that triggered the war. The expulsion of the French from the Forks now offered the Iroquois a chance to reassert their claims and subordinate the independence-minded Ohio Indians to their control. That would have made sense to Sir William Johnson, whose understanding of Iroquois culture and diplomacy was second to none. What even Johnson could not have known, however, was that the Six Nations had reason to fear that if they did not reclaim their influence soon, and with substantial support from the British, they might never again be able to do so.

The Iroquois chiefs’ unease arose from a prophetic spiritual movement that had begun taking shape among the displaced Delawares of the Susquehanna Valley a decade or so before, a movement that the war’s stresses and disorders had helped to spread into the Ohio country, where other groups beyond the Delawares began to respond to it. Although by 1758 the movement had not yet achieved the coherence it would gain in the early 1760s, when a Delaware prophet known as Neolin began to preach, its rudiments were evident in the spreading belief that the Master of Life had created Indian, black, and white people as separate races, each with its own way to paradise. Indians who had grown too close to whites had been corrupted by white ways, which would prevent them from reaching heaven. The worst of these corruptions was alcohol, but at some level everything associated with whites—cattle, gunpowder weapons, trade goods of all sorts—was inimical to Indian well-being, Indian spiritual power.

These “nativist” beliefs provided a foundation for a pan-Indian revival movement based on the novel notions that native peoples had more in common with one another than with whites, and that they could regain the full measure of power only by recovering the old, uncontaminated ways of life that had prevailed before the coming of the whites. The Six Nations and other groups closely bound to the Euro-Americans had become corrupted to a degree that justified withdrawing from contact with them until they, too, chose to follow this path back to undiminished spiritual power. The emerging religious climate on the Ohio, in other words, not only portended resistance to the whites, but a wholesale denial of the legitimacy of Iroquois influence as well. With a religious justification and a principle for cooperation among themselves, the Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and others who had initially sought independence by moving west might well achieve it. Unless the League moved quickly to assert supremacy over the Ohio peoples, and unless it did so with substantial material support from the English, a great deal more than just their ancient claim to the Ohio might be lost. In this context moving from neutrality to alliance with the Anglo-Americans was not only a reasonable choice, but a necessary one, for only by harnessing British material wealth and military power to Iroquois ends would the Six Nations secure their ascendancy.

Neither the chiefs of the Six Nations nor Amherst and the other British commanders in America could have appreciated fully what adding the weight of the Iroquois into the balance of the war at this particular moment would do to influence its outcome. Thanks to Pitt’s reimbursement policy and his demotion of the commander in chief from virtual viceroy to superintending military commander, the northern British colonies had reached an unprecedented level of mobilization in aid of the war effort. The assemblies of provinces that raised more than twenty thousand troops for the campaigns of 1758 did so in the expectation that overwhelming force would bring a quick end to the war. They had done their utmost for king and country—so much so that they quailed when Pitt asked them to duplicate those efforts in 1759. Nevertheless they pledged to do their best and in the end came close to meeting his request. Pennsylvania and Virginia, having been delivered from the evil of guerrilla war, initially made cuts in recruiting for 1759, but the New England provinces, New York, and New Jersey together enlisted seventeen thousand men to support approximately twenty thousand of His Majesty’s regular troops in what was expected to be a final, great push into the Canadian heartland.

As spring came on and the campaigns moved toward their start, the British and their colonists were poised to exert overwhelming pressure on French Canada. It is important to realize, however, that without Iroquois support even this extraordinary level of force might not have been enough to conquer New France. Two of the three possible avenues by which Canada could be invaded passed through Iroquois territory: the Lake George-Lake Champlain-Richelieu River corridor and the Mohawk- Oswego-Lake Ontario-Saint Lawrence route. Without Iroquois cooperation, no expeditionary force could pass through to get at the French. Moreover, the power of the Six Nations had always depended upon their ability to control the flow of information between the French and British authorities; in at least one previous instance they had foiled a projected Anglo-American invasion by covertly passing intelligence to the French. The new alliance with the British not only opened Iroquoia to Anglo-American military movements, but also denied the French advance warning.

Had these factors not entered into play, even the vast numerical superiority of the Anglo-Americans would scarcely have been adequate to conquer Canada, for the Saint Lawrence (the only remaining invasion route) was reliably open to navigation only seven months a year. Britain’s hold on Louisbourg, of course, gave it the best chance yet to mount a successful attack by the Saint Lawrence route, because a properly organized expeditionary force could ascend the river as soon as the ice had broken up. Even so, success would depend on the ability of the invaders to make a decisive stroke against the well-fortified city of Quebec, and then to hold it over the long period between the freezing of the river and the next spring’s thaw. Without overland communications with New York—a factor completely under Iroquois control—there was simply no reliable way to secure the conquest of Canada even after Quebec came under British occupation.

And there was another factor as well, which Sir William Johnson and other experienced Indian diplomats understood as the most important element of all. If the traditional Indian allies of New France—the Algonquian and Iroquoian converts of the Saint Lawrence réserves and the Ottawas, Ojibwas, Chippewas, and other peoples who lived around the Great Lakes—rallied to defend their French father, the British might well find themselves at the end of a long and tenuous supply line, embroiled in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict. The Iroquois alliance was crucial to avoiding that nightmare scenario. The ability of Six Nations diplomats to persuade the allies of New France to withdraw from the conflict gave them an importance precisely parallel to that of Teedyuscung in the Ohio campaign of 1758. Forbes’s road had reached its victorious destination only because Teedyuscung had been able to contact Pisquetomen and other peace-minded Delawares, who in turn worked to ensure that when the Anglo-Americans finally reached the Forks, they would be greeted by leaders willing to build a working relationship with a new, British father. Just so, the extraordinarily experienced diplomats of the Six Nations, armed with British gifts and operating in advance of the invading Anglo-Americans, could persuade their fellow natives not to spill their blood in support of a New France that could offer them none of the advantages that a cooperative relationship with the British promised.

There is no indication that General Jeffery Amherst understood how much he would gain from the alliance that the Iroquois held out to him. In a crucial sense, however, he did not need to understand it. Sir William Johnson grasped the idea with perfect clarity, clung to it with all his might, and used his considerable influence to make sure the Iroquois received generous gifts of weapons, trade goods, and money. Exactly how much advantage the British enjoyed as a result of Johnson’s activity, and to what purpose that diplomatic advantage could be put militarily, made itself clear in the first great campaign of 1759—the expedition against Fort Niagara.