With the outbreak of war the British-Americans laid waste to Cherokee villages and killed indiscriminately. They summarily executed 22 chiefs who had come to negotiate an understanding. Catawba and Chickasaw warrior allies joined the British and South Carolina rangers in the Cherokee War. In borderland fighting in 1761, Lieutenant Colonel James Grant, sent from New York by Amherst, burned to the ground Cherokee villages and summarily executed noncombatant captives regardless of age and gender. “I had orders to put every soul to death,” Grant acknowledged. Already devastated by smallpox epidemic, the Cherokee were left starving and homeless by the “scorched earth campaigns waged by the colonial whites.” With many settlers and British officials calling for extermination, it was “the Cherokees’ readiness to reach out from their side that made peace possible.”28
The Catawba, denizens of the Carolina upcountry, allied with the British in the French and Indian War as well as the Cherokee War, but the alliance did not prevent their eventual dispossession. The Catawba received clothing, weapons, ammunition, food, and other supplies but after the wars the British concluded that “the more gifts they get the more proud and devilish they are.” The British cut off trade as settlers with their cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses swallowed up Catawba land, hunting grounds, orchards, and burial mounds. They cleared forests, built farms, cabins, fences, wagon roads, towns, and taverns from which drunken men emerged to molest Indian women without fear of legal repercussions. Once the sole proprietors of the piedmont, the Catawba received a small reserve and “existed only on the sufferance of people inclined to cheat them as often as protect them, mock them as readily as befriend them.”29
With settler colonialism revivified by the victory over the French, the British resumed land sales and squatting in the Ohio River Valley. As settlers streamed down new roads into the Ohio country, ambivalent relations, trade, gift giving, and diplomacy gave way to indiscriminate warfare. Britain had proven ungrateful to its indigenous allies and unworthy successors to the French by cutting off trade in high-demand items, notably guns and alcohol. Moreover, the British Army did not withdraw from the Forks of the Ohio as promised in the Treaty of Easton and also failed to stem the tide of the settler advance.
Dramatically underestimating Indian anger, and unwittingly promoting unity among the diverse bands, the British under Amherst soon reeled from the impact of a pan-Indian uprising. Amherst had shrugged off suggestions of violent indigenous resistance by citing their “incapacity of attempting anything serious.” In any case, he would relish the opportunity to “punish the delinquents with entire destruction, which I am firmly resolved on whenever any of them give me cause.” Belying such assurances, in the spring of 1763 the Seneca and Delaware joined by the Chippewa, Shawnee, Huron, and Ottawa under Pontiac (Obwandiyag) assaulted forts and settlements throughout the borderlands, killing indiscriminately and sending the Redcoats and the settlers into a panicked retreat.30
Indian homeland defense set off a new wave of borderland warfare replete with genocidal intent. Declaring, “No punishment we can inflict is adequate to the crimes of those inhumane villains,” an apoplectic Amherst urged policy that would “extirpate this execrable race … I wish to hear of no prisoners.” In a dispatch on May 4, 1763, Amherst asked, “Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among those disaffected tribes?” Two months later Colonel Henry Bouquet responded, “I will try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets that may fall in their hands.” British officials knew of the effects of smallpox before Amherst gave his order and infected blankets and handkerchiefs in fact already had been distributed. But no one could have foreseen the massive smallpox epidemic that would ravage the entire continent, with little regard for ethnic distinctions, from 1775 to 1782.31
Stunned and traumatized by the scope of the Indian resistance, Britain attempted to rein in the settlers by issuing the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The Proclamation drew a line proscribing new trans-Appalachian land grants or purchases and requiring a permit for trade on the western side of the mountains. Moreover, the Proclamation outlawed private sales by Indians to settlers or speculators, decreeing that only the Crown could purchase land from the indigenes. The British had not suddenly decided to respect indigenous homelands or to “protect Indians” from settler colonialism. Rather the Crown, already indebted by the French and Indian War, sought a respite in the violence in order to regroup and get its imperial house in order, in part by raising revenue with new duties on the colonists. In the long run, “removal rather than sustained coexistence” remained the structural imperative behind British Indian policy. In any case, various loopholes in the Royal Proclamation allowed land hunters to continue to survey the Ohio Valley while the “bans on squatting invited scorn.”32
The Royal Proclamation combined with the new tax levies ignited the colonial rebellion. Shutting off access to new land for settlers was no more acceptable in 1763 than it had been at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion. The “Americans” had no intention of respecting Indian ownership of the land or of complying with restrictions on settler mobility. Nor would they go along with the new duties and many other royal initiatives for that matter.
In the triangulated relationship typical of settler colonial situations, the settlers claimed colonial space already inhabited by indigenous people as well as the freedom of restraint from exogenous metropolitan authorities. In the wake of the Royal Proclamation, Americans associated the British with the Indians as impediments in the path of their providential destiny. They continued to pour into the borderlands with disregard for both British and indigenous sovereignty.
Racial formation coalesced in the context of rising American nationalism and indiscriminate borderland warfare with Indians. Increasingly identifying themselves as a superior race of white people, the settlers at the same time were traumatized by Indian violence. The French and Indian War simultaneously prompted Indians to take on a collective racial and cultural identity as well. Spiritual revival, especially the teaching of the Delaware mystic Neolin, accentuated the cultural divide between all “red” Indians and the “white” man. As Neolin’s preaching spread across the borderlands, Indians rejected British paternal authority and began to ally more with one another. The settler colonial drive to take Indian land thus fueled a “rising conviction” on the part of the indigenes as well as the Euro-Americans that they were “opposite peoples” who literally lacked common ground.33
Indians and the American Revolution
Of utmost significance Indian removal and indiscriminate warfare evolved in tandem with the formation and achievement of American racial and nationalist aspirations. American national identity thus evolved not just in opposition to “taxation without representation,” as American schoolbooks long emphasized, but also within the context of a murderous race war driven by settler colonial expansion. Unremitting borderland violence affirmed the increasingly homogenized colonial discourse that framed Indians as a unitary and savage foe in the path of civilization, progress, and national independence. In the face of this unifying discourse, colonial ambivalences degenerated into campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
Materialist motives also drove the American settlers and land speculators. Most colonial elites engaged in land speculation. The Proclamation Line thus infuriated Washington, a land surveyor and speculator, as well asThomas Jefferson, Arthur Lee, Patrick Henry, and other American patriots. The colonial elite and land speculators, as Colin Calloway puts it, “saw tyranny in Britain’s interference with their ability to make a [financial] killing in the West.”34
But the elite men of the cities and plantations were generally not those who actually performed the bloody work of cleansing the land of the indigenous other. “The pressures that inspired Indian hating did not descend from the top down, but arose from the bottom up,” Patrick Griffin explains.35 Thousands of men, women, and children of divergent European ethnicity knew little about land speculation; only that they intended to carve out a stake of their own where t
hey could build farms, homesteads, and outposts for trade. On the eve of the American Revolution, more than 50,000 “whites” lived on the trans-Appalachian borderlands beyond British ability to control them. British officials invariably described these squatters as “low” and “the very dregs of the people.” But they also realized the squatters and settlers were “too numerous, too lawless and licentious ever to be restrained.”36
The Indians on the borderlands “now confronted a people who were, in a sense, stateless,” Starkey explains. “The frontier thus became a very unstable place and the potential for violence almost unlimited.”37 Traumatized by Indian violent resistance and determined to occupy colonial space, the settlers stepped up the indiscriminate killing of Indians. As the English trader, go between, and land speculator George Croghan noted, settlers “thought it a meritorious act to kill Heathens whenever they were found.”38
In late 1763 and early 1764, a Pennsylvania mob known as the Paxton Boys, determined to exterminate a “nest of perfidious enemies,” seized 14 Indians from protective custody in Lancaster for summary execution and mutilation. As one settler explained, “the storm that has been so gathering has at length exploded.” The “piecemeal ethnic cleansing” of the Paxton Boys “crystallized long-simmering hatreds into explicit new doctrines of racial unity and racial antagonism.” Declaring that all Indians were “enemies, rebels, and traitors,” the Pennsylvania governor made the colony a free fire zone, thereby authorizing settler colonials “to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, taking, killing, or destroying” Indians. The by now time-honored practice of offering bounties to scalp hunters flourished, including special rewards for the scalps of women and children.39
Settlers drove Indians off western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio lands, forcibly repatriating any “white” children as well as adults that they found. These settlers wanted no vestiges to remain of ambivalent ethnic mixing and intercultural relations. Scores of men but especially women and children did not want to leave the tribes for “civilization.” As an observer at the time put it, they “parted from the savages with tears.” Many later escaped and tried to return to their Indian way of life. These “white savages” seem to have responded positively to a “strong sense of community” and a freer, less anxiety ridden indigenous lifestyle.40
In an effort to provide a legal veneer for opening up new lands for the inexorable encroachment of settlers, the British turned to their longstanding allies, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation. The ambivalent Iroquois—whose pan-Indian consciousness, as it turned out, would arrive too late for their own self-interest—proved perfectly willing to sell out the Ohio Indian tribes when it served their purposes. Having already savaged the Ohio Indians during in the “beaver wars” over control of the fur trade in the mid-seventeenth century, the Iroquois now undermined them through diplomacy. In 1768 the Six Nations signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (near present-day Rome, New York) with the British.
The “Stanwix line” supposedly resolved the Euro-Indian boundary question by confining settlement to the east and south of the Ohio River. The deal rewarded the Iroquois with silver and trade goods and also opened lands from New York to Kentucky to speculators. The Stanwix Treaty was an especially egregious accord in a long and notoriously dishonest history of Anglo-American diplomacy with indigenous people. Under this “cynical compact,” Timothy Shannon points out, the Iroquois “sold thousands of acres of land hundreds of miles away from them to agents whose official credentials barely disguised their private interests.” Among those cashing in was the influential go-between William Johnson, who had established kinship ties with the Six Nations through his marriage to Molly Brant (Konwatsi’tsiaienni), from an influential Mohawk family.41
Insidious diplomacy only deepened the conflict, as the Ohio Valley Indians, settlers, and speculators were primed for war. On the eve of the American Revolution the innocuously entitled Lord Dunmore’s War broke out when the eponymous Virginia governor overturned royal decrees against speculation in Indian lands. Virginia surveyors, settlers, and speculators promptly claimed the colonial space of “Kentucky” as their own. Their encroachment precipitated violent resistance by many of the Shawnee, who would lose their Kentucky hunting grounds thrown open for settlement by the Stanwix line.
Dunmore’s War stemmed from a spate of indiscriminate killings of Indians in 1774, some perpetrated by drunken settlers who murdered the indigenes for sport. The killings included the pregnant sister of the Mingo chief Logan, who had embodied colonial ambivalence by living alongside settlers and counseling peace with them. Logan did not hesitate to seek blood revenge, however, as he took 13 settler scalps. Logan declared that through this proportionate violence he had satisfied the need for retaliation over the like number of murders of his people, in keeping with indigenous cultural tradition. The conflict could have ended there but Dunmore, declaring that the Indians should be “severely chastised,” precipitated a wider war of indeterminate violence by ordering the destruction of entire Indian towns and villages and moreover, in deference to the ultimate goal, the seizure and sale of their lands. Dunmore, as Richard White put it, thus “demonstrated how murders occasioned by rum and backcountry settlers could serve the desires of more discreet men to become wealthy.”42
The difference between Logan and the settler invaders underscored larger cultural distinctions. “Indian culture continued to have some means of limiting the horrors of war,” Starkey explains. “The settlers seem to have inhabited a harder world and to have been equipped with very insecure moral anchors. The step to total war was easier for them than it was for their Indian opponents.”43
At the very time that Dunmore drove Indians from their villages, the First Continental Congress simultaneously began the process of driving the British from the future United States. The American Revolution, framed in historical discourse as a struggle for freedom and self-determination, was simultaneously a campaign to drive Indians out of colonial space. Whereas the Crown had sought however haltingly to regulate westward expansion, land-grabbing settlers received the backing of local and national revolutionary governments in a “dramatic inversion of the earlier model of imperial development.” For squatters who had already begun to settle on the borderlands without authorization, Hinderaker points out, “the language, the ideas, and the urgency of the American Revolution all helped to validate their scramble for western lands.”44
Revolutionary War discourse inculcated the binary of savage Indians impeding enlightened patriots in pursuit of liberty, thus rationalizing driving Indians from the land. The Declaration of Independence excoriated King George for unleashing “on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” By blaming the British for inciting Indians, the Americans dismissed the indigenous people as mercenaries, eliding the legitimacy of Indian homeland defense. Subsequent campaigns of Indian removal could be obscured beneath the larger frame of the Revolutionary struggle for the triumph of republicanism over monarchy. The British “were a useful enemy,” Andrew Cayton explains, “in that they made it easier to reconcile conquest and liberty.”45
As the British once again turned to alliance with “the savages” to chastise the rebellious colonials, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) spearheaded Indian resistance. A prominent example of colonial ambivalence, Brant could hardly be called a savage, as he had graduated from the future Dartmouth College and embraced the Anglican Church. Brant, whose sister had married the go-between William Johnson, “presented a hybrid persona—both genteel and native.” Brant gleaned that a British victory in the Revolutionary War offered the only hope of containing the relentless American drive against all Indian homelands. The British and their Indian allies thus sought to destroy and terrorize vulnerable pockets of rebellion in the backcountry in order to undermine morale and divert American military resources from other battlefields.46
In
July 1778 in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, the Iroquois Confederation joined British forces under Colonel John Butler in a massacre of settlers. The attack centered on the township of Wilkes-Barre, which had been named for rebellious Whigs in the British parliament and had become an American rebel stronghold. In the wave of murder, torture, scalping, and mutilation that followed, the Indians, Butler’s rangers, and Tory allies killed 227 while taking only five prisoners. “The massacre of the Wyoming Valley militia illustrated the savagery of frontier fighting and civil war at their bloody worst,” Glenn Williams observes.47
The Iroquois Confederation would pay a devastating price for allying with the British in the massacre. The Iroquois had long enjoyed relatively peaceful relations with settlers in the Mohawk valley. It was “not until the American Revolution that the Iroquois and New York colonists experienced the same destructive and racially charged warfare that Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other British colonies had experienced much earlier,” David Preston notes.48
In 1779 the Wyoming valley assault led to a boomerang of exterminatory violence against Loyalists and especially the Iroquois. Under orders from Washington, General John Sullivan’s forces routed Loyalists and razed some 40 Iroquois villages in the Finger Lakes region of New York. “The immediate objects of this expedition are accomplished,” Sullivan reported to Washington, “total ruin of the Indian settlement, and the destruction of their crops, which were designed for the support of those inhuman barbarians, while they were desolating the American frontiers.” Washington pronounced the success of a campaign that had been designed to “relieve our frontiers from the depredations to which they would otherwise be exposed.” The Iroquois, who froze to death or died of starvation in droves, ever after dubbed Washington “the Town Destroyer.” Washington’s search-and-destroy campaign bore “striking similarities with other operations conducted by the US Army later in its history,” Williams notes.49
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 11