People in the fort could hear screams and see flames rising from cabins and barns. The next day, after the attackers had left, men were sent out from the fort to bring in the dead. “Such a shocking sight my eyes never beheld before of savage and brutal barbarity,” one of the officers wrote in his diary. He saw a “husband mourning over his dead wife with four dead children lying by her side, mangled, scalpt, and some their heads, some their legs and arms cut off, some torn the flesh off their bones by their dogs—12 of one family killed and four of them burnt in his house.”39 There were thirty-two bodies of civilians, most of them women and children. Sixteen soldiers were also killed. The burning of the valley left 182 settlers homeless.40
The murders were blamed on Indians, but survivors said they saw Loyalists amid the carnage.41 A man identified as a Tory sergeant named Newbury was seen murdering a young girl by driving a tomahawk into her skull.42 In a letter to Major General Schuyler of the Continental Army, Walter Butler later denied responsibility for the murders: “I have done everything in my power to restrain the fury of the Indians from hurting women and children, or killing the prisoners who fell into our hands.” He went on to make his prisoners essentially hostages to the fate of his mother and young siblings, who had been held by the Patriots ever since Walter and his father fled to Canada in 1776.
“I am sure you are conscious that Colonel Butler or myself have no desire that your women or children should be hurt,” he continued in the letter. “But, be assured, that if you persevere in detaining my father’s family with you, that we shall no longer take the same pains to restrain the Indians from prisoners, women and children, that we have heretofore done.”43 Schuyler had been relieved of his commission, so the letter was answered by Brig. Gen. James Clinton, who referred to what Butler had written as a threat. But Clinton began making the arrangements that would eventually send Mrs. Butler and her children to a reunion with John Butler.
• • •
Stirred by outcries over the Wyoming and Cherry valley raids, Congress directed Washington to send the Continental Army against the Indians and their Tory allies. Washington responded by ordering what would be history’s first large-scale attack on Indians by an American armed force. He put Maj. Gen. John Sullivan in command of an expedition “against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents.”
Washington ordered “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground & prevent their planting more.” He went on to suggest that his attacks be “attended with as much impetuosity, shouting, and noise, as possible” and that the troops “rush on with the war-whoop and fixed bayonet. Nothing will disconcert and terrify the Indians more than this.” If any Indians tried to negotiate a peace, he said, they were to be dealt with only if they showed their sincerity “by delivering up some of the principal instigators of their past hostility into our hands: Butler, Brant, the most mischievous of the Tories.”44 Sullivan led more than twenty-three hundred troops, most of them Continentals. At an Indian village called Tioga Point (now Athens, Pennsylvania), he rendezvoused with Brigadier General Clinton, who added his fourteen hundred Continentals to the campaign of retribution and destruction. On the Fort Pitt frontier to the west, a third, smaller expedition was ordered to head up the Allegheny River valley to begin a similar slash-and-burn foray against the western villages of the Six Nations.45
While Clinton was in Canajoharie, New York, waiting for his troops to assemble, local militiamen captured two Butler Rangers—Sgt. William Newbury and Lt. Henry Hare—lurking near Clinton’s troops. The spies had lived in the area until they went off with recruiting parties to Canada. Tried by a court-martial, they were found guilty and sentenced to death for spying. The hangings, Clinton wrote his wife, “were done … to the great satisfaction of all the inhabitants of that place who were friends of their country, as they were known tobe very active in almost all the murders that were committed on the frontiers.” Before being hanged, Newbury, the father of six, confessed to the tomahawk slaying of a young girl during the Cherry Valley raid. Hare admitted that he had killed and scalped one of the girls slain outside Fort Stanwix in 1777.46
John Butler had only about three hundred Rangers to oppose the mighty Sullivan-Clinton force because his Indian allies, preferring retreat to annihilation, offered little resistance to any of the three armies.47 Brant and Walter Butler set up an ambush to slow down Sullivan. But, outmaneuvered, the ambushers fled northward to Niagara as the troops swept through the Iroquois country, burning villages and crops, sometimes avenging past atrocities with a few of their own. Some soldiers scalped Indians they had killed. An officer told of finding two dead Indians whose bodies he then had skinned “from their hips down for boot legs … one pair for the Major the other for my-self.”48 Civilian Rebels joined the troops one day, locked an old Indian woman and a boy in a cabin, and set it afire.49
After one of the few armed encounters, surviving Indians went off with two captured Continentals. Comrades later found their bodies: “The Indians … tied them up & whipped them prodigiously, pulled out their finger and toe nails, cut out their tongues, stuck spears and darts through them & set the Leuts [lieutenant’s] head on a log with the mouth open: we could not find the other head.”50
As part of the Sullivan expedition, a detachment marched from Fort Stanwix and crossed Oneida Lake to raze the principal settlement of the Onondaga, who had not taken either the Tory or Rebel side. Leaders of the Oneida, allies of the Patriots, begged the Continentals not to attack the Onondaga, stressing their neutrality. But expedition officers dismissed the claim. The Continentals reported slaying twelve Onondaga, destroying about fifty log houses, burning “a large quantity of Corn and Beans,” and killing “a number of fine horses & every other kind of Stock we found.”51 The attack turned the Onandaga into foes of the Patriots.
Sullivan went about as far north as Genesee, New York. His expedition produced devastation as methodical as Washington had ordered. In a report to Congress, Sullivan said that “every creek and River has been traced” and “not a single town left” in the Iroquois country. His men had wiped out at least forty villages and, by Sullivan’s “moderate computation,” had destroyed at least 160,000 bushels of corn. In one large village soldiers cut down fifteen hundred peach trees.52
Indian families, fleeing before the soldiers and carrying few belongings, sought refuge at the British base at Niagara, more than one hundred miles beyond Genesee. Thousands became homeless people seeking help. By the time the first of them reached Niagara, the chill of autumn was in the air, a prelude to the most severe winter in memory. The Butlers and other Loyalists built huts around the fort for the more than five thousand Indians gathered there. Food was scarce, and hunters risked freezing to death when they sought game. Hunger, cold, and disease killed an unknown number of the Indian refugees—perhaps hundreds.53
Originally Washington had hoped that the western force sent up the Allegheny River valley would link up with the Sullivan-Clinton expedition in a great sweep that would subdue the entire Iroquois Nation. But, fearing that he would be overextending his forces, Washington changed his mind and left the western commander to venture on his own. The Allegheny Valley expedition, which did not lose a man, reported extensive destruction, burning down thirty-five houses, including some large enough to shelter three or four families, and putting the torch to fifteen hundred acres of corn. The western Indians also fled toward Niagara. In their flight, they left behind packets of trade pelts and other valuables, which the invaders seized as booty.54
The western campaign turned that frontier into a cauldron of competing foes. Virginia and Pennsylvania argued over where their boundary should be drawn. Settlers, thinking the frontier had been freed of the Indian menace, began heading westward. Among them were Tories escaping persecution and seeking the protection of territory around
British-held Detroit. Patriots feared that Tories would seize lead mines, vital to Rebel ammunition production, on the western Virginia frontier. A Virginia militia force swooped down on a Loyalist settlement near the mines and reported, “Shot one, Hanged one, and whipt several.” The Virginia House of Delegates confiscated the Loyalists’ land and lauded the militiamen for “supressing a late conspiracy and insurrection on the frontiers of this State.” Skirmishes between western Tories and Rebels would continue through the war.55
The Sullivan-Clinton expedition inspired small hit-and-run vengeance raids that began soon after the new year.56 Then, in May 1780, Sir John Johnson mobilized a force of more than five hundred men, made up of Indians and companies of his own King’s Royal Regiment. Loyalist boatmen took the raiders down Lake Champlain to a landing below Crown Point, where they went ashore to begin an overland trek. One detachment went directly with Johnson to his birthplace, Johnstown, New York. At Johnson Hall his men dug up two barrels of family silver plate that he had buried before his flight to Canada in 1776. The treasure, carefully inventoried, went into Loyalist knapsacks for the return trip.57
A second detachment struck settlements south of the town, burning 120 houses, barns, and mills. They killed or wounded several men who were considered special enemies or were simply defending their homes. Some Tories were also killed and scalped by mistake in a frenzy of looting and burning. At sunset, on a hill in one settlement, lost dogs from smoldering homes joined the dogs of missing masters, and the forsaken pack howled deep into the night.58
Rebel militiamen and Continentals belatedly responded to the raid. Johnson eluded them, even though he was burdened by his silver plate and a couple of dozen prisoners. He had also rounded up 143 Loyalist men, women, and children who had been living fearfully in Rebel territory. Pursuers finally got on Johnson’s trail as his fiery nineteen-day invasion was ending. When Johnson, his men, and their guests boarded bateaux for their return voyage, the pursuers were right behind. But they had neither the boats nor provisions to continue their pursuit.
The Johnson raid raised Loyalist morale in the borderland, deprived the Continental Army of food, and aided recruitment. With their families safe at Niagara, many of the Tory men Johnson had rescued signed up for the King’s Royal Regiment, completing the muster of one battalion and starting a second.59
Sir Frederick Haldimand, Guy Carleton’s successor as “Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over our Province of Quebec in America,” believed that, in the wake of Burgoyne’s stunning defeat, a new invasion of Canada was likely. He saw the Rebel settlements of the frontier as a potential staging area for a strike across the border.60 To diminish that threat—and stop the flow of grain to the Continental Army—he ordered attacks on the people and crops of the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys.
Haldimand, born in Switzerland in 1718, became an officer in the Prussian army at the age of twenty-two. On the eve of the French and Indian War, as a soldier of fortune, he joined the Royal Americans, who included deserters from, or veterans of, European armies, along with Swiss and German settlers of Pennsylvania. After distinguished service in the war, he remained in the army and in America, assuming commands in posts from Massachusetts to Florida. His varied postings and familiarity with American ways made him one of Britain’s most experienced North American officials.61
Under his direction, Sir John Johnson assembled a main force of nearly one thousand men, including about 180 British Army Regulars, twenty-five Hessians; 150 Rangers, under Col. John Butler; about two hundred men of the King’s Royal Regiment; many Tories in independent companies; and about 580 Indians. Haldimand rounded up an additional 970 men for diversionary raids near Saratoga and down the Richelieu River route to the Hudson River.62
Scouts went out to alert Tories along the routes, assuring them that they would be escorted to Canada and resettled in safety if they believed they had endangered themselves by aiding the invaders. A scout from the King’s Royal Regiment, sent specifically to seek out Loyalists who might join the invasion, was caught, tried as a spy, andhanged, as was a Continental Army deserter who was caught recruiting Tories.63
Men took down their muskets and went off to join the side of their choice, leaving wives and children behind. A Mohawk Valley man wrote about his father, who left his farm to join Butler’s Rangers: “It was a momentous struggle, a frightful warfare… . The farms were left to the care of the women, who seldom ate the bread of Idleness… . They spun, they wove, they knit, prepared their own flax, made their own homespun gowns, the children’s dresses, they churned, made cheese, and performed all the various duties of domestic and social life … my father’s mind was at ease about the affairs of the Farm.”64
Three forts defended the verdant Schoharie Valley, Johnson’s first objective. The Lower Fort, as it was called, had as its core a stone Dutch Reformed church. Surrounding it was a stockade encompassing about an acre of land dotted with small huts. The fort’s powder was stored beneath the pulpit, and in the belfry was a platform for lookouts and rifle marksmen. Outside one of the two corner blockhouses was a tavern.65 The Upper Fort was about fifteen miles south, near the village of Schoharie; the Middle Fort was just below Mid-dleburg.
On October 16 Johnson’s expedition camped near the Upper Fort, which was built around a farmhouse and barn, its stockade surrounding about two and a half acres. The next morning a soldier outside the fort spotted the Loyalist force and ran to give warning. A signal gun boomed. Hearing it, Johnson ordered the destruction to commence. Flames and smoke began rising from barns and deserted houses. Cattle and pigs lay dying, their cries and their blood drawing dogs and vultures.66
The invaders broke into houses, took what they wanted, and torched them. Some people stayed to defend their homes, which in this prosperous farmland were framed and painted wooden buildings, not log cabins.67 The raiders moved on quickly, heading for the Middle Fort through a day that was growing gray under wind-whipped sleet and snow.68 Johnson set up two small cannons that began firing at the fort as his Rangers and Indians cautiously approached it. After a whilethe firing stopped, and men in the fort saw a white flag appear in the enemy ranks. The flag bearer began walking forward, flanked by an officer in the green coat of Butler’s Rangers and a fifer playing “Yankee Doodle,” still a mocking tune to the ears of a Rebel.
The commander of the Middle Fort, a Continental in charge of militiamen accustomed to having their own officers, ordered the gates opened to the flag of truce. Timothy Murphy, a militiaman, defied the order. He was a sharpshooter, one of Morgan’s riflemen in the Battle of Saratoga. Now he shot at the flag party—to warn them off, not to hit them. He told his stunned commander that he believed that the white flag was a ruse to allow the officer to assess the fort’s garrison. If the Ranger did enter, he would see how few defenders there were. The flag party turned back, then came forward two more times, and each time Murphy fired a warning shot. Murphy’s defiance undermined the authority of the Continental officer, who threatened a court-martial but finally turned over command of the fort to a militia colonel.
Johnson decided to march on, bypassing the fort to continue destroying every Rebel farm in his path—while sparing Tory property.69 After another bivouac in the Schoharie Valley, he headed for the Mohawk Valley, pursued by frustrated and outnumbered Rebel militiamen only able to “hange on their Rear.”70 As soon as Johnson left, outraged Rebels burned the untouched Tory farms, completing the absolute destruction of the valley’s crops and livestock.71 Tories fled northward, joining Johnson’s followers.
At the Mohawk River the raiders split into two detachments to loot and raze along both sides of the river, camping for the night near the town of Root. On the morning of October 19 the main force crossed the Mohawk and headed for the German village of Stone Arabia, the center of an area settled by immigrants from a part of Germany known as the Palatinate. At nearby Fort Paris, Col. John Brown mustered about three hundred men, including a few Oneida Indians, and, ast
ride his small black horse, led them toward Johnson’s force.72 Brown was killed in an ambush. His men fled, leaving behind the fallen to be scalped.73
Johnson’s “Destructionists,” as raiders were sometimes called, kept on swooping down on farms. Among his men were settlers who had lived in these houses, built these barns, tilled these fields. But now they were Tories on a mission, and to them, somehow, this rich valley had become an alien land. A farmer, hidden in the woods with his family, watched his own farm vanish in flames. He saw the Indian Tories move on, swinging firebrands over their head until they blazed, then touching them to barns full of grain. After the Indians left, the farmer found seven hogs dead in their pen, killed by a pitchfork taken from what had been a barn.74 And so it went, farm after farm.
British soldiers in the attack force sometimes guarded prisoners to protect them from the Indians, whose behavior was unpredictable. At one farm Indians took a woman and her seven children out of their house, then loaded them and armfuls of loot into a horse-drawn wagon. Around that time Johnson was told that Continentals and militiamen were on their way from Albany and Schenectady. He released the woman and her children, except for her fourteen-year-old son, presumably kidnapped to become a future Ranger.75
About nine hundred Rebels, most of them militiamen, caught up with the raiders toward the end of day. In a twilight skirmish Johnson tried to set up a battle line but failed to hold off a Rebel charge. Men of Johnson’s own regiment were driven back—” running promiscuously through and over one another” in the dark, a Tory said. As the Johnson Destructionists settled for the night near the battlefield, the Rebels’ commander inexplicably ordered his men to camp about three miles away. He planned to strike the next morning. By then Johnson and his force were well on the way toward Canada.76
Tories Page 30