Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  The balance was disrupted when the French began constructing forts along the Ohio River. In September 1753 the Half King issued a warning that the Senecas would not allow what they saw as a direct incursion into their lands. He traveled to Presque Isle, a long fish-hook-shaped peninsula on Lake Erie that the Senecas had valued ever since they had forcibly taken it from another native people a century earlier. He told the French commander that the fort there violated the agreement between their peoples. The commander rebuffed him. Tanacharison’s answer to the rebuff came eight months later when, while taking part in George Washington’s defeat of a small French party that was on a diplomatic mission, he split open the skull of the party’s leader, the Sieur de Jumonville. The action that Washington found dumbfoundingly savage was, from the Seneca perspective, logical and deft right down to its particulars: the horrific act would tell the French in no uncertain terms that the Senecas objected to their forts, and would likewise show the subordinate Munsee and Shawnee that the Iroquois League knew how to manage the Europeans. At the same time, since the Half King was operating under Washington’s leadership, his assault on the Frenchman could not be considered a violation of arrangements between the French and the Iroquois League. Where Washington saw himself as the agent of one European power defeating another, Tanacharison saw Washington as a tool for executing his own diplomacy.

  Tanacharison continued to act with perfect Iroquois logic in the ensuing Battle of Fort Necessity. The French force that attacked Washington’s makeshift structure had included a contingent of Iroquois warriors. By pulling his own warriors out before the violence began, the Half King not only avoided fighting in what he knew would be a lost cause but kept true to the Great Law of Peace, which forbade Iroquois from fighting one another.

  The Munsee stayed mostly on the sidelines as the situation between the French, English and Iroquois escalated. Increasingly, however, they came to feel that the Senecas were not up to the task of acting as warrior/diplomats for the native tribes. It seemed apparent to them that the French were gaining the upper hand against the English, and the Iroquois were losing their ability to play the European powers against one another. The Munsee had expected the Albany Congress, the great convocation of tribes and English colonists that Abraham Yates attended, to result in a new union, which would strengthen the English side, maintaining the balance; but the colonies had failed to unite. Not only that, but the Iroquois representatives at the conference, after being “handsomely entertained”—i.e., plied with alcohol—actually signed away to Pennsylvania colonists a large chunk of Munsee land.

  The last straw for the Munsee was the defeat of Braddock’s army at the Forks of the Ohio. It signaled that the English and their American colonists were losing, and that the French would overrun their lands. Groups of Munsee and Shawnee met with Seneca leaders and demanded an end to their subordination. “We expect to be killed by the French,” one Munsee spokesman announced. “We desire, therefore, that you will take off our Petticoat, that we may fight for ourselves, our Wives and Children.” In the following months the Munsee renounced their status as “women,” armed themselves, stole through the forests of western Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, and unleashed the violence that so stunned Washington and other colonial leaders. They burned the farms of families that had settled in the westernmost parts of those colonies and mutilated the bodies of men, women and children. The colonial leaders fumbled to respond. Viewing the events as a struggle between European powers, they were unable to comprehend the meaning behind the attacks, so that George Washington saw only “savage fury” and “the murder of poor innocent Babes, and helpless families.”

  From Cornplanter’s perspective, then, the French-English war brought about a swirling transformation in tribal loyalties. Meanwhile, once William Pitt’s strategy for running the war took hold, the British began to pile up victories. Under William Johnson, they took Fort Niagara in July 1759. Two months later, the French lost Quebec. After the fall of Montreal in 1760, Canada was in British hands. French soldiers began to board ships for other parts of the world; the global contest would continue for a time in other arenas, but the war in North America was essentially over.

  It became evident to Cornplanter that a British victory was no victory for his people. The newest commander of British forces in America, who arrived in 1758, made that clear even before the French soldiers left their forts. Jeffrey Amherst was a year younger than George Sackville. He had been born within a few miles of Knole House; the two had known each other since childhood. Indeed, Amherst had served as page to Sackville’s father in Dublin when Lionel Sackville was the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Amherst’s military career paralleled Sackville’s; both fought on the Continent at Dettingen and Fontenoy. Within a short time of his arrival in America, he stung tribal leaders with his open disdain for them, which went so deep that he didn’t feel it necessary to have an interpreter in his dealings with them; he wasn’t interested in parsing the meaning of their lengthy utterances, and he didn’t care whether they understood him.

  As the French withdrew, Amherst made a decision that enraged virtually every Indian tribe in the northeast. The Treaty of Easton, signed in 1758, had helped turn the war around; by its terms, ten Indian nations, including the Munsee and the Iroquois Confederacy, had promised not to side with the French. One promise the English made in return was that they would establish no new outposts west of the Allegheny Mountains. This was a great victory from the Indian perspective: if the English would permanently stay east of the line that ran from central New York to western Pennsylvania and all the way to Georgia, the Ohio Country—i.e., the west—would be forever theirs. Less than two years later, however, Amherst ordered British soldiers to occupy the recently abandoned French forts in the Ohio Country and beyond. He would use the victory over the French to extend British reach more than a thousand miles westward, blatantly stealing the lands of dozens of tribes. William Johnson’s deputy, after visiting the Senecas, reported to his boss that in the wake of Amherst’s moves the tribe “expect nothing but that the general intends to attempt enslaving them.”

  Cornplanter’s uncle, Guyasuta, was quicker than anyone to see what was happening. He called for all-out war against the British. He had little success in convincing the Iroquois, so he traveled west. The French fort on the straits connecting Lake Huron and Lake Erie, which they called Pontchartrain du Détroit (détroit being the French word for “strait”) dated to 1701. The Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians of the region had had relations with the French going back even further than that; they had come to depend on the French for trade. In 1761, Guyasuta appeared among them carrying a red wampum belt, which the Iroquois called a war hatchet: a plea to join in a general attack. But Sir William Johnson arrived shortly after, parleyed with tribal leaders, and got them to stand down.

  Guyasuta’s call to war was aided, however, by a spiritual voice. The teachings of a holy man named Neolin began to circulate among the Munsee in the Ohio Country as well as tribes to the west and the Iroquois in the east. Neolin had communicated with the Master of Life, who told him that all the native peoples had hurt him and blocked their own path to heaven by allowing the Europeans to settle among them. “This land where ye dwell I have made for you and not for others,” the Master of Life told Neolin, according to an account by a Frenchman. To atone, the Indians had to purify themselves. And they had to fight. “As to those who come to trouble your lands,” the Master of Life told Neolin, “drive them out, make war upon them. I do not love them at all.”

  By 1763, the darkness of the situation was clear to Indians as far west as the Illinois Country. With the signing of the treaty in Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War, the French formally ceded all of their North American holdings to the British. In a single flourish, the English had “won” the continent as far west as the Mississippi River. The language of the treaty made no mention of the native tribes who had inhabited the lands since time immemorial.

  Together, t
he treaty and Amherst’s takeover of French forts meant disaster for the native peoples of much of the continent. It was evident that English colonizing would not be restricted by natural barriers or treaties. The English intended to keep going. The end of the French and Indian War ignited a chain of Indian outrage that extended as far west as Michigan.

  Neolin’s prophecy instructed the Indians on what they must do. Two years before, the Ottawas had refused Guyasuta’s plea to go to war; now, under their chief, Pontiac, who had become a follower of Neolin, they laid siege to Fort Detroit.

  The rebellion spread. Allied bands of Indians—Ottawas and Ojibwas, Potawatomis and Hurons, Kickapoos, Weas and Mascoutens, Munsees and Shawnees and western Senecas—attacked British forts and settlers across a large swath of the so-called frontier territory. In six weeks they took over eight forts from Pennsylvania to Michigan. Thousands of people were killed, captured or displaced, in a display of wanton violence that was unprecedented in its geographic extent and in its network of alliances.

  Most Iroquois, including most of the Senecas, refrained from participating in the uprising, but the western Senecas—Cornplanter’s people—joined in. In June, Guyasuta was in western Pennsylvania, among a group of Munsees, Shawnees and Senecas who laid siege to Fort Pitt. It was better manned than the other forts the Indians attacked, so the soldiers there were well positioned to hold out. Unfortunately for them, smallpox broke out among the garrison, and the commander had to erect a makeshift hospital for its victims. This, in turn, gave rise to a ghoulish thought. On June 23, the day after the siege began, two Munsee chiefs, Mamaltee and Turtle’s Heart, entered the fort to parley. After the negotiations failed, the chiefs requested some provisions. An English trader who was trapped in the fort with the soldiers reported that the commanding officer gave them “two Blankets and an Hankerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital.” And he added, “I hope it will have the desired effect.”

  This same idea occurred almost simultaneously to Amherst, who was in New York at the time. “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians?” he wrote to the commander of the fort, and in a follow-up clarified that the idea was to infect “the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to Try Every other Method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”

  Amherst didn’t know that his strategy had already been employed. A smallpox epidemic did break out among the Indians in western Pennsylvania, though it had already appeared prior to the “two Blankets and an Handkerchief” being given to the Munsee chiefs. Whether or not there was a direct link between Amherst’s idea and the outbreak, the native peoples understood perfectly well the regard the man held for them.

  Fort Pitt withstood the siege. Shortly after, Amherst was recalled to London—where officials considered that his heavy-handed approach had sparked the uprising—and replaced by Thomas Gage, an officer who had come to North America as part of Braddock’s army. Through a combination of negotiation and force, Gage brought the uprisings to an end in July of 1766. Henceforth, the British, and their American colonists, could look westward and see limitless opportunity. The French had withdrawn, and the natives had been taught a lesson.

  The struggle would become known as Pontiac’s Rebellion or Pontiac’s War, though Pontiac was not the prime instigator—Guyasuta might have been a likelier candidate—and it was less a war than a massive spasm of protest at what Indians knew would be an unprecedented new threat to their way of life. They had stopped fighting not because they had been offered sweet deals or expansive promises, but out of exhaustion. They needed to rest, to regroup, to think. They needed new leaders.

  Cornplanter had learned a great deal in these years. He had broadened his sense of the geography of the continent. He knew new faces, new tribes and customs and languages. And he had learned the strengths and limitations of the two rival European powers that had forced themselves into his world. He had seen how the British conquered and had witnessed the inexorable march of their settlements. He had perfected his battle skills: the ability to load and fire a musket several times a minute, how to throw a tomahawk and hit a man square in the back.

  He had also learned the art of scalping, which, like so much else, was perceived differently by natives and whites. To an Iroquois, the whorl, or pattern of hair at the top of the head, was the seat of consciousness. Decorating one’s hair whorl for battle was an expression of spiritual power. To slice away the scalp and whorl of a foe—laying the victim facedown, putting a knee in the back, making a long clean cut from the neck around the top of the forehead to the other side of the neck, and pulling sharply on the hair, all within a matter of seconds—was to remove the enemy’s spirit. That you and your enemy went into battle knowing that either might carry out this exchange of power on the other made warfare an occasion not only of bravery but of spiritual engagement.

  When it came to the American colonists, meanwhile, Cornplanter had learned the scintillating effect that the act had on their communities—the frank horror it generated. He knew he would be scalping again.

  Chapter 7

  THE SPIRIT THAT RAGES

  June 1762. The sun was shining, the air was warm with promise, and everywhere new life was erupting. George Washington, no longer a military man but a gentleman farmer, was overseeing the planting of two hundred hills of tobacco at Mount Vernon and noted with manly approval one day his roan mare accepting the mating advances of a neighbor’s horse. In Stonington, Connecticut, Venture had corn to tend and an abundant field of hay to cut. George Sackville, in the aftermath of his battlefield disgrace, pottered about his blossoming English estate of Knole as he and his wife anticipated the imminent birth of their third child. Cornplanter’s village observed the annual strawberry festival, when the Senecas thanked the spirits for making the forest rich and sweet. And Abraham Yates and his wife celebrated, as, following so many failed attempts, Anna at last gave birth to a healthy child: a daughter whom they named Susanna, after Anna’s mother.

  Also in this month of new life, another girl, a feisty, seemingly indomitable creature named Margaret Moncrieffe, burst into the world. From the beginning she had what all throughout her life people would remark on as astounding beauty: lustrous dark hair, milky skin, “eyes full of witchery.” She was born in Nova Scotia, probably in Halifax. Like her, the town was an infant, having sprung up a few years earlier amid murderous waves of fighting for control of Canada’s Atlantic coast that involved the British and French armies, the native Mi’kmaq people and the Acadians, descendants of French settlers of the previous century. The British eventually won, scattering the Mi’kmaq, who had for centuries hunted moose and caribou on the peninsula, and sending some of the Acadians down the Mississippi River to Louisiana (eventually to have their name corrupted to “Cajun”). The port town where the little girl took her first steps was a rough-weather place, of ice floes and blue mist, a hard-won outpost of empire.

  She was thoroughly a child of the British army in North America. Her father, Lieutenant Thomas Moncrieffe, was aide-de-camp to General Robert Monckton, who had directed major assaults on French Canada. Her mother, Margaret Heron Moncrieffe, was the daughter of an officer. The girl’s parents had named her older brother Edward Cornwallis Moncrieffe after the head of British forces in Nova Scotia.

  Her early years were a kaleidoscope of life changes. Her father’s regiment was transferred to New York and the family went with him. There, while she was still a toddler, her mother died. It happened that her father—a ramrod-straight soldier, an engineer and a man of exacting standards—was a particular favorite of General Thomas Gage, then the commander of all British forces in North America, who previously had fought alongside George Washington in Braddock’s expedition. General Gage proposed to take in the young officer’s children. So Margaret and her brother lived for a time in the general’s household on Manhattan. She was with a family, and more than that she was with the army. The British military—the uniforms, the orderliness, th
e booming of male voices—was the foundation to her young life.

  When she was three, however, her father decided his children needed more structure, so he shipped them off to be educated in Ireland. Margaret spent the next five years at a Dublin boarding school called Miss Beard’s, cut off from all warmth and family, with the memory of her mother rapidly receding, and without even the comfort of her brother’s company, since he had been sent to a different institution.

  Then one day when she was eight years old, a ghost appeared. Her father, now Major Moncrieffe, who after the passage of so much time had become a phantom presence in her young mind, stood on the doorstep of the school. He introduced Margaret to the woman at his side: his new wife, Mary. The family re-formed, this time with a stepmother in charge of the home. This woman was a member of the powerful Livingston family—the same who were benefactors of Abraham Yates—and she had a frigid hauteur that suited her wealth and status. Margaret’s feelings were quickly set: “I did not like my new mother,” she later declared, and pegged the woman with a double epithet: “a stranger to every social virtue, and a rigid Presbyterian.”

  Then her father was gone again, back to New York with his wife. This time, however, he left Margaret with a promise that before long he would send for her and her brother. She clung to the promise like a talisman. She still had a lot of growing to do, but the core of her personality had been formed. By his long absences and his arbitrary manner of shunting her here and there, by his rigid sense of discipline coupled with the occasional torrent of tenderness he showered on her, her father had created a volatile frisson in her young mind, a conviction that her sense of worth derived from him: receiving his attention, following his orders. She became a kind of soldier herself, at the beck and call of her commanding officer. And, inevitably, her longing for him was tied to a sharp bitterness. As she waited for her father to come yet again, to take her finally and truly to be with him, she both adored the man and hated him.