After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  The King “had no right whatever to grant away to the states of America their rights or properties”—Iroquois reaction reported by General Allan MacLean, the Niagara commander.13

  “The minds of these people appear as much agitated as those of the unhappy Loyalists . . . and however chimerical it may appear to us, they have very seriously proposed to abandon their country and accompany us, having made all the world their enemies by their attachment to us”—Brigadier General Archibald McArthur in St. Augustine.14

  In Parliament, Thomas de Grey, the 2nd Baron Walsingham, attacked the government for abandoning its allies. “All faith was broken with the Indians,” he said. The “cruelty and perfidy” of the abandonment was beyond Walsingham’s “feeble power of description.” The Iroquois “engaged in all our wars. In the present contest, they were invited by the most flattering and deductive professions. . . . They refused the offers made them by America. They served us well.” Their reward was that “they were driven completely from their country” and were now living in Niagara at great expense to Britain.

  But it wasn’t just cruelty, perfidy, and expense that made the abandonment wrong. “We were peculiarly bound to protect them by the good faith and the obligation of our own treaties with them,” not just with the Iroquois in the North, but with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees in the South. “Our treaties with them were solemn and ought to have been binding on our honor,” Walsingham said.

  The prime minister, Shelburne, spun his government’s action with two rationales. First, the Americans would be better able to tame the Indians’ “savage natures.” Second: “The Indian nations were not abandoned to their enemies; they were remitted to the care of neighbors whose interest it was as much as ours to cultivate friendship with them, and who were certainly the best qualified for softening and humanizing their hearts.”15

  John Marshall, former Continental captain, Valley Forge veteran, and future American secretary of state and chief justice, was more honest. In 1832, he said the Indians were “divided into separate nations, independent of each other and of the rest of the world, having institutions of their own, and governing themselves by their own laws.” The idea that other nations “could have rightful original claims of dominion over the inhabitants of the other, or over the lands they occupied” was “difficult to comprehend.” Nevertheless, “power, war, conquest, give rights which, after possession, are conceded by the world.”16

  For every Indian nation east of the Mississippi, regardless of where their self-interest led them, the revolution was a disaster.

  The Cherokees signed forty treaties over three hundred years, first with the British, then with the Americans. Most resulted in a loss of land. In the 1830s, the American government forced most members of the southern tribes—Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—to leave their homelands in the 1830s, despite many of their assimilation as English-speaking farmers. This ethnic cleansing became known as the Trail of Tears.17

  A year after the peace treaty, in 1784, nearly sixty thousand whites with their twelve thousand slaves had settled on traditionally Shawnee land in Kentucky. “You are drawing so close to us that we can almost hear the noise of your axes felling our trees and settling our country,” a Shawnee chief told American officials in 1785. That year, the confederacy of Ohio Valley Indians escalated the fight. In 1790 and 1791, they routed two American army expeditions. President Washington then put General Anthony Wayne in charge. Wayne defeated the Indian alliance in 1794. The Indians signed a treaty that ceded most of Ohio, and parts of Illinois and Michigan, for goods and supplies. Tensions rose again in 1811 when another Indian confederacy led by a Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, resisted the Americans. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh allied himself with the British, but the Americans killed him in battle the next year. The confederacy disintegrated.18

  In New York, the revolution destroyed Iroquois power, turned neighbor against neighbor, decimated their population, and forced most to become refugees. The British responded to Joseph Brant’s pleas by buying land from Canadian Mississauga Indians along the Grand River west of Niagara and giving it to the Mohawks. Brant, in turn, welcomed other Indian refugees. Brant and others received military pensions, and the British continued as late as 1792 to supply provisions. He devoted many years to lobbying the British and Americans on behalf of his people’s welfare and land claims. He also translated the Bible into Mohawk. In 1786, he visited England for a second time, and in 1792, met President Washington. Brantford, Ontario, has its roots as part of the land grant. Brant’s sister, Molly, settled in what is now Kingston, Ontario, and received the highest British pension of any Indian.

  In 1784, the remaining Iroquois signed a treaty with the U.S. in which they ceded most of their land. There was one exception: The Oneidas and Tuscaroras, American allies during the war, would keep their land. Later, the Americans gave individual rewards for service, and grants to build churches, sawmills, and gristmills. From there, the Oneidas’ relationship with the U.S. deteriorated. The land grants were mostly wetlands. Veterans’ pension claims were denied. Officials pressured the increasingly poor Oneidas to sell their land. Starting in 1823, most Oneidas left New York for Wisconsin and Canada. Two hundred Oneidas remained in 1845 on a small reservation. In 2013, the Oneidas—about one thousand, of whom half lived in central New York—earned money from a resort and casino. That year, the state announced a comprehensive settlement of multiple, longstanding disputes with the Oneidas that had begun in 1795 regarding taxing power, land, and reservation issues. In exchange for a regional monopoly on casino gambling, the Oneidas were given certain taxing rights, with the revenue to be shared with the state. “Today, sovereign governments came together,” an Oneida spokesman said.19

  PART FOUR

  The Carribean

  24. Riches

  CHARLES O’HARA’S PAROLE ENDED IN FEBRUARY 1782, FOUR months after his Yorktown surrender: He was exchanged for a rebel general, Lachlan McIntosh, who had been captured when the British took Charlestown in 1780. Now, O’Hara rejoined the war.1

  Clinton ordered him to the Caribbean, where French and Spanish forces threatened the British stronghold of Jamaica. But first, O’Hara stopped in Charlestown to pick up two thousand troops that Clinton ordered Leslie to provide. Leslie reluctantly gave O’Hara 1,200. But when O’Hara and his troops arrived in the West Indies in late June, the British commander there assured him that Jamaica was in “perfect security.” O’Hara’s troops went to other islands. By fall, O’Hara was back in New York.2

  Promoted to major general, O’Hara returned to England in late 1782. He began gambling—poorly—and spending money. In 1784, he fled England to escape creditors. In Italy, he met an author, Mary Berry, and the two fell in love. Berry described him as “the most perfect specimen of a soldier and a courtier of the past age.” While they corresponded for the rest of their lives, they never married; Berry turned down his proposal because she didn’t want to be a military wife traveling from post to post.3

  In 1785, with Cornwallis’s help, O’Hara repaired his finances and returned to England. He spent two years in Jamaica, and then in 1792 was named Gibraltar’s lieutenant governor. While he was captive in France, one of his former commanders, Henry Clinton, became Gibraltar’s governor. But Clinton died before taking his post. By then, O’Hara had been exchanged, and he succeeded Clinton and an interim governor.

  Contemporaries described Governor O’Hara as anachronistic, wearing mid-eighteenth-century uniforms. While some praised his hospitality and popularity with rank-and-file troops, others complained of his rigid discipline and “fits of ill-humor which he was at no pains to conceal.” His nickname, “Old Cock of the Rock,” was affectionate—or sarcastic. His last months were “excruciating tortures” from old wounds. He died on February 21, 1802, leaving a brother and two mistresses, each with two of his children. “He died very rich,” an obituary said, rich enough to leave his “two ladies” and four children an
nuities from a £70,000 trust fund ($8.2 million today). He willed his black servant, who may have been a slave, about £7,000 pounds worth of china, silverware, linen, and cash, as well as his name.4

  He left Gibraltar a permanent legacy. Atop Gibraltar’s highest point, he built an observation tower. While the tower didn’t survive a session of naval target practice in 1888, the point was later fortified, and today, O’Hara’s Battery is a tourist attraction.

  What happened in the West Indies between February and May that turned a situation so threatening as to require major reinforcements into one of “perfect security”?

  The West Indies is vast. The distance from one end—New Providence Island in the Bahamas—to the other—Berbice (now part of Guyana), the war’s southernmost disputed post within the Caribbean theater—is nearly 1,850 miles. It’s greater than the distance from Savannah to Newfoundland, greater than Boston to Jamaica. Those are air distances. For eighteenth-century ships, dependent on winds and currents, sailors measured distance in days and weeks. Because of those winds and currents, it was often faster to sail the 4,700 miles from Jamaica to England than the 1,200 miles from Jamaica to Barbados.5

  Travel in the West Indies during hurricane season—from late summer through late fall—was limited. European navies, trading ships, and convoys that frequented the Caribbean colonies at other times of the year, sailed elsewhere to avoid potential destruction. Even Whig privateers preyed in other waters. Staying behind or returning too early could be dangerous: three thousand sailors drowned during an October 1780 hurricane and a September 1782 tropical storm.6

  In the minds of whites, it wasn’t healthy to stay long in the Caribbean anyway. One naval doctor listed a litany of diseases and injuries that befell crews in a West Indies fleet in one month of 1782: fevers, fluxes, scurvy, ulcers, smallpox, pectoral complaints, venereal complaints, colds, rheumatism, angina, gravel, dropsy, ophthalmia, leprosy, fistules, hernias, abscesses, fractures, and “various slight accidents as bruises, cuts, scalds, etc.” He concluded, “Disease was still more destructive than the sword.”7

  Beyond disease and the elements, people faced deadly animals and insects. A British admiral in 1782, for example, was “bit by a centipede on the temple, which afterwards worked itself into his ear, and continued to wound him, ‘til oil, poured in, destroyed it. A deafness and insensibility affects that side of the head so much attended with frequent twitches that he finds himself incapable of performing.”8

  Whites believed that African blacks—that is, slaves—were better adapted to the Caribbean. Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, reflected in 1776 the European consensus: “The constitution of those who have been born in the temperate climate of Europe could not, it is supposed, support the labor of digging the ground under the burning sun of the West Indies.” The truth was that slaves died at the same, if not higher, rates as whites.9

  And yet, despite the dangers and the cost of constantly replenishing slaves, the ships would always return. The West Indies made empires possible.

  Settlers took years to discover that rice was an ideal crop for the Carolinas and Georgia. The Caribbean experience was different. Columbus brought nonindigenous sugar cane there on his second voyage in 1493. He expected it to grow well, and it did. By 1506, sugar had become an industry, and Spain built its first sugar-refining mill. Within a decade, Spain used African slaves in the mills and fields.10

  The West Indies attracted other Europeans, first pirates, then settlers and traders. For three centuries, they raided or invaded each other’s islands, ceded them at the end of wars, then reinvaded when new wars began. When France entered the American war in 1778, the West Indies was a checkerboard of nations. Britain, France, and Spain owned the best sugar-growing islands; the Dutch and Danes turned their less productive islands into trading centers. Despite Spanish dominance and anger, British and Dutch settlers formed villages on the coastal mainlands of Central and northern South America. Although Britain could do only minor ship repairs in Jamaica, the French had four ports capable of major refitting, while Spain owned Havana, which had shipbuilding yards.11

  None of these countries could resist sugar’s lure, nor its by-products, molasses and rum. In 1698, the British imported 207 gallons of rum; by 1775, it was two million. Europeans used sugar in everything from tea and coffee to jam, and the British used sugar more than anyone. The French, with a lesser sweet tooth, captured the sugar market on the European continent.12

  The sugar colonies meant wealth for the largely absentee plantation owners who grew it and for the governments that taxed it. “The sugar colonies possessed by the European nations in the West Indies, may be compared to those precious vineyards,” Adam Smith wrote. Another contemporary described Jamaica as the source of “prodigious riches.” In fact, Jamaica was the wealthiest British colony in the Western Hemisphere.13

  The French made even more money from their Caribbean colonies. In negotiations to end the Seven Years’ War in 1763, France didn’t hesitate to trade all of Canada (minus a fishing village off the Newfoundland coast) for Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia. Spain swapped Florida and nearly all territory east of the Mississippi for Cuba. The final treaty caused an uproar in London; most British felt they got the short straw.14

  France knew what it was doing. The Caribbean trade accounted for thirty percent of its imports and, because none of its islands were self-sufficient, thirty-five percent of its exports. Its Saint-Domingue colony (now Haiti) was the most valuable land on earth. It produced more and cheaper sugar than all British Caribbean islands combined. Saint-Domingue’s trade was greater than that of the British North American colonies combined. The West Indies accounted for one-third of all French trade overseas.15

  “The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America,” Adam Smith said.16

  George III was blunt: “If we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.”17

  The West Indies was important to Americans, as well. Before the war, America had supplied lumber, corn, flour, rice, fish, and other food and provisions to the sugar colonies. Americans also traded illegally (under British law) with French islands that produced sugar at significantly cheaper prices.

  Once the war began, the French and Dutch colonies (and to a lesser degree, Danish and Spanish) were centers for international arms smuggling, and safe havens for state and Continental Whig navies and privateers. In the early years, about ninety percent of the Whig gunpowder was transferred in the West Indies from European ships to small, fast rebel ships that outsailed British pursuers.18

  American pirates—or privateers from the Whig perspective—hurt British trade. By early 1777, they had captured two hundred fifty British ships and seized cargo worth more than £10 million ($1.8 billion today)—enough to cause four English merchant companies to fail.19

  British West Indians also participated in smuggling and fencing. In fact, few West Indian merchants and plantation owners had loyalty to any country. By the mid-1700s, civilians almost never resisted invaders or helped the typically small garrisons that defended their islands. Their property was too valuable to risk destruction. “The genius of all West Indians without distinction seems turned to piracy and freebooting,” said Grenada’s governor. One British admiral complained that he was “laboring to protect men who wished not to be protected.” His complaint could have applied to any Caribbean nationality.20

  The long-time resident whites the admiral referred to—many of whom were born in the West Indies—developed their own society. Europeans often criticized the so-called “creoles.” A French naval officer said, “the creole women are all ugly, with the yellow complexion of the country. They are, too, very ill-mannered. Accustomed to speak to their slaves, they have a certain tone which they can never drop.”21

  Then there were the Jews—one thousand in Jamaica alone. They settled in M
artinique in the 1620s, only to be expelled after Jesuits pressured the French government. Most found havens in the Dutch colonies. In St. Eustatius, for example, three hundred fifty prospered. Janet Schaw, a Scottish traveler visiting there in the mid-1770s, described her shock and revulsion when Jews talked with her on landing. “I could not look on the wretches without shuddering,” she said. She later learned that two of the Jews she met had been tortured by the French and Spanish inquisitions, examples, she said, of “Christian cruelty.”22

  Free black and mixed-race people—about two percent of the population—lived on all the inhabited islands. Some were the children of black mistresses who had been freed by their masters. Others were freed blacks who had served in Loyalist militias, fled from America, and now, in the West Indies, continued to serve in Loyalist units. Others, like the Maroons, were descendants of escaped slaves. In Jamaica, they fought the British to a draw from 1700 to 1739, when the two sides agreed to a treaty that recognized Maroon freedom and land in exchange for their service as a militia, available for suppressing slave revolts or catching runaways. The French used free black and mixed-race men similarly, and the Spanish had black militia officers.23

  Finally, the slaves. “In all European colonies,” Adam Smith said, “the culture of the sugar-cane is carried on by Negro slaves.” He advised his readers to treat their property well. “Gentle usage renders the slave not only more faithful, but more intelligent, and therefore, upon a double account, more useful.” But he conceded that “in the good management of their slaves, the French planters—I think it is generally allowed—are superior to the English.” An Anglican minister who spent twenty years in the Caribbean concurred. “In the French colonies, the public pays an immediate attention to the treatment and instruction of slaves. . . . The power of the master is restrained to the whip and chain; he may not wound or mutilate his slave.” A modern scholar concluded that the “English sugar planters created one of the harshest systems of servitude in Western history.” Most planters, however, would have agreed with Janet Schaw. “When one comes to be better acquainted with the nature of the Negroes, the horror of it must wear off,” she said.24