Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  Indians took their own measures to restrict the liquor trade and to exercise restraint. In 1725–26, Iroquois delegates went to Albany to complain about rum sales and sent the New York commissioners a wampum belt “as a Solemn Token that they desired there might be an Absolute Prohibition of bringing rum in their Country.”167 The delegates at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, noted Witham Marshe, “were very sober men … and sundry times refused drinking in a moderate way.” Whenever Indians made treaties or sold land, he said, “they take care to abstain from intoxicating drink, for fear of being over-reached; but when they have finished their business, then some of them will drink without measure.”168 Even the hard-drinking Teedyuscung “earnestly desired that a Stop might be put to the sending excessive Quantitys of Rum Into the Indian Country, and that at Treaties especially particular care might be taken to prevent Indians getting it.”169 Unfortunately, such measured abstinence was not always the case. Plying Indians with alcohol and then getting them to put their marks on deeds of sale was common practice, and many chiefs under the influence acquiesced in treaties that robbed their people of thousands of acres of land. During a conference with William Johnson in 1755, the Oneida speaker Conoghquieson pointed an accusing finger at the trader John Henry Lydius and said: “That man sitting there … is a Devil and has stole our Lands, he takes Indians slyly by the Blanket one at a time, and when they are drunk puts some money in their Bosoms, and perswades them to sign deeds for our lands upon the Susquehanna, which we will not ratify nor suffer to be settled by any means.”170

  Once negotiations were finished, the treaty was drawn up (if it had not been drawn up in advance) and signatures affixed. Indian signatures could take a number of forms. Indians who were literate signed their names; more often they made their mark by their name or, as the phrase went on the Plains, “touched the pen.” In many cases in the eastern woodlands, Indians signed by drawing pictographs of their clan totems—bear, beaver, deer, turtle, eagle, hawk—that conveyed individual and collective identity. Sometimes these pictographs appear upside down on the treaty—because the document was slid across the table from a commissioner or scribe for the Indians to sign. Such pictographs might better be understood as the equivalent of wax seals rather than individual signatures on European documents. Just as seals could not be duplicated on the facsimile copies of treaties that were made, so totems were often omitted or imperfectly copied from those drawn on the original document, and they were rarely reproduced on printed copies of treaties. Distortions and removals of totemic signatures frequently obscure the identity and affiliation of Indian signatories.171

  After the treaty was signed, presents—often displayed but withheld as an inducement to signing—were distributed, usually to the chiefs who would then redistribute them among their people. The Indians would depart with their payment and the commissioners would leave with their treaty. Then, increasingly, the surveyors and settlers moved in.

  After a treaty involving a land transaction, the new boundary lines had to be delineated on the ground as well as on the maps. Those boundaries often ignored and cut across kinship connections and patterns of shared land use between tribes.172 Sometimes, Indians drew their own maps of their country and the territory they ceded. Sometimes they accompanied surveyors as they “marked the land” by etching symbols on rocks and blazing hatchet marks on trees. Sometimes Indians marked the new boundary themselves to warn off trespassers.173 Long before the poet Robert Frost, Indians understood the relationship between good fences and good neighbors, even if whites rarely respected Indian “fences.”

  Some treaties involved delivering up people as well as, or instead of, land. Indians often returned captives as peace initiatives and gave captives to forge friendships, cement alliances, and end bloodshed. In 1762 Abenakis gave Sir William Johnson a Panis Indian slave to be sent together with two wampum belts to the Stockbridge Indians to atone for a killing and to make peace. The gift of a captive, notes the historian Brett Rushforth, “even more powerfully than wampum or the calumet, signified the opposite of warfare, the giving rather than the taking of life.” In New France, where Indian slavery was omnipresent, the French quickly adopted such practices and made exchanging captives a key component of their Indian diplomacy.174

  As captive taking escalated in the mid-eighteenth century, English colonists increasingly made the return of captives a condition of peace treaties. “You must bring here with you also all the Prisoners you have taken during these Disturbances,” Governor Robert Hunter Morris told Teedyuscung and the Delaware chiefs at the Easton council in July 1756. “I must insist on this, as an Evidence of your Sincerity to make a lasting Peace, for, without it, though Peace may be made from the Teeth outwards, yet while you retain our Flesh and Blood in Slavery, it cannot be expected we can be Friends with you, or that a Peace can come from our Hearts.” But Indians were often reluctant to return captives they had adopted and chiefs had limited ability or desire to compel people to give up relatives. They also balked at the idea that they should return captives before peace was established. “Such an unreasonable demand,” they told the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, “makes us appear as if we wanted brains.” Sometimes returning captives was a relatively straightforward process and Indians handed over people who were only too eager to be liberated. In other cases, captives who had been adopted into Indian communities and had become accustomed to Indian ways of life were reluctant to be freed and their new families were reluctant to let them go. Colonel Henry Bouquet made a peace treaty in 1764 that required the Delawares and Shawnees to turn over all captives taken during the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War. The Indians complied, reluctantly. They reminded Bouquet that the captives had been “tied to us by Adoption ….We have taken as much care of these Prisoners, as if they were [our] flesh and blood.” They wanted to make sure that Bouquet would treat them “tender, and kindly, which will be a means of inducing them to live contentedly with you.” Many of the captives resisted liberation and regarded their new “freedom” as captivity. The children parted from their Indian families in tears, and even some of the adult captives had to be bound by the English to prevent them from running off and rejoining the Indians.175 In the South, treaties often stipulated that Indians must return runaway slaves who had taken refuge with Indian nations.

  Even when treaties were conducted in good faith and resulted in mutually satisfying terms, they were subject to modification or even rejection by people who had not been present when the agreement was made. Indian leaders pointed out, and whites complained, that they lacked authority to make binding commitments for all their people, who had to be convinced before they would accept a treaty. Iroquois delegates at a meeting in Albany in 1714 told the governor of New York that they could not answer his proposals point by point but would convey them to “the ears of our people when we get home to our country and shall make it our business to imprint them into their minds and hearts.”176 In 1756 a delegation of Upper Creeks led by the chief Gun Merchant negotiated and signed a treaty with the English in Charlestown, South Carolina, but when they returned home the Creeks refused to accept it, “thereby reducing the treaty text to worthless paper.” Creek headmen told Governor William Lyttleton that Gun Merchant “has not the Consent of one Man in the Nation.”177

  Complaints about inadequate representation reflected how treaty making changed during the colonial era. Initially treaties were forums in which Indians and Europeans met to establish or renew peace, alliance, and trade; settle disputes; and perhaps exchange land for gifts. Increasingly, treaties became almost entirely about land, and for Europeans, as the Treaty of Stanwix would show, sealing the deal was often more important than who was there to seal it.

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  Fort Stanwix, 1768

  SHIFTING BOUNDARIES

  The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, held at present-day Rome, New York, in 1768 was the biggest Indian treaty council and the biggest land cession in colonial America. For two weeks
, three thousand Indians talked, ate, and drank with Crown agents; delegates from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; merchants; various interested parties; and assorted hangers-on. When it was over, the British gave the Indians twenty boatloads of goods and £10,000 in cash; the Indians gave the British millions of acres of land in the Ohio Valley that they claimed but did not occupy.1 Ostensibly carried out to ensure an orderly movement of a boundary line dividing Indians and colonists, the Treaty of Stanwix instead turned the ceded lands into a racial killing ground, dismantled the world that both sets of signatories hoped to preserve, and rendered the Ohio River a battle line that Indians fought to defend and whites to breach for almost thirty years.

  Searching for a Boundary

  After the Peace of Montreal in 1701, the Iroquois negotiated the treacherous waters of international, intercolonial, and intertribal competition by playing off rival powers and asserting their primacy in intertribal affairs at colonial conferences. By offering each colonial power the possibility of allegiance but never totally committing to such allegiance, they maintained their independence from European control while simultaneously maintaining access to European goods.2 By claiming sovereignty over peoples who inhabited lands where their war parties had ranged in the seventeenth century, Iroquois leaders created a mythology of conquest and domination that the British bought into and that allowed the Six Nations to negotiate away other peoples’ lands in their dealings with the British colonies. At the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, for example, Iroquois delegates ceded title to a vast territory in the interior, lands occupied by other Indian nations. They would do the same thing at Fort Stanwix, but that would be the last time.

  FIGURE 2.1 Sir William Johnson. Copy after a lost portrait painted by Thomas McIlworth at Johnson Hall in 1763. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

  The Iroquois held a preeminent position in British-Indian relations, and the Mohawks in particular enjoyed a privileged role, in large part due to their relations with Sir William Johnson (see figure 2.1). Johnson had migrated from Ireland and settled in the Mohawk Valley in 1738. Starting out as an Indian trader, he developed close ties with the Mohawk community at Canajoharie, became a prosperous merchant and landlord, and expanded his trading ties westward. He presided over an Anglo-Irish-Iroquois household and took readily to Indian ways. As early as 1746, he rode into a treaty conference in Albany “dressed and painted after the Manner of an Indian War Captain.” He participated in Indian dances and sang Indian war songs. He married an indentured German servant girl named Catherine Weisenberg and had three children with her, but he also slept with Indian women and when Catherine died he took sixteen-year-old Mary or Molly Brant as his common-law wife. Johnson developed a close friendship with the Mohawk sachem Hendrick, who helped him gain acceptance in Iroquois communities and attendance at council meetings. Like Johnson, Hendrick knew how to operate on a multicultural frontier: he accepted Christianity, dealt regularly with colonial officials and, in Timothy Shannon’s phrase, “dressed for success” on the frontier, melding indigenous and European styles of clothing.3 Supported by large sums of Crown money, Johnson, in Cadwallader Colden’s judgment, “made a greater figure and gained more influence among the Indians, than any person before him.” Governor George Clinton of New York believed no one on the continent could hold the Iroquois allegiance “so much as this gentleman.” It was clearly a mutually beneficial relationship: “you have been A Great Good Standing tree amongst us a long time,” the Mohawks told Johnson.4

  Johnson resigned from public office in 1751 when British-Iroquois relations hit a low point but he had made himself indispensable to the British and to the Iroquois and his star continued to rise. Hendrick was killed at the Battle of Lake George with the French in 1755 but Johnson’s action in the same engagement saved the day and earned him a baronetcy. With the support of Iroquois leaders who wrote letters to the Crown recommending him for the position, William Johnson was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs north of the Ohio. (A Scotsman, John Stuart, was appointed in the South.) One thousand Indians assembled in conference at Fort Johnson in the summer of 1755 and from that point onward Johnson seemed to be engaged in an endless stream of meetings, councils, and negotiations to restore and keep bright the Covenant Chain. He cultivated personal alliances with Iroquois chiefs, bolstered the standing of chiefs with whom he was allied, exerted influence in the appointment of chiefs, and did not hesitate to circumvent the sachems and deal directly with war chiefs when the empire needed Iroquois warriors. He built a network of connections and his marriage to Molly Brant took him into the kinship networks of Iroquois society. He understood, as he told the Iroquois, “your Women are of no small consequence in relation to public affairs,” and he took account of them in his conduct of business. However, he also manipulated Iroquois gender relations and tried to exclude women when he felt their presence hindered or complicated the business at hand. Molly evidently did not: according to contemporaries, “she was of great use to Sir William in his Treaties” and “often persuaded the obstinate chiefs into a compliance with the proposals for peace, or sale of lands.” “He knew that Women govern the Politics of savages as well as the refined part of the World and therefore always kept up a good understanding with the brown Ladies,” Tench Tilghman wrote in his journal the year after Johnson’s death.5 Sir William sent Molly’s younger brother, Joseph, to school in Connecticut to study under the Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock, the future founder of Dartmouth College, and Joseph became both Johnson’s protégé and an important ally. The British increasingly looked to Johnson to conduct the Crown’s Indian affairs, and Johnson artfully advanced British interests and his own standing among the Iroquois. He lavishly bestowed gifts, food, and even cash, demonstrating that the king, and he himself, was a true father, and binding the Iroquois to the empire with ties of economic dependence and reciprocal obligation.

  He made his home in the Mohawk Valley, which was the favored site for intertribal meetings and the diplomatic hub for British-Indian relations, trumping Albany and Onondaga. He built his first estate, Mount Johnson, on the north bank of the Mohawk. Ten years later, he moved a few miles downriver to a larger, stone-built house that became known as Fort Johnson. In 1763, with the French defeated and future prospects looking bright, he built a new mansion, Johnson Hall. Johnson’s homes reflected his increasing fortunes and Britain’s growing empire. They were also places where peoples and cultures mingled. He employed Dutch, German, and Irish workers; had African American slaves; and attracted Highland Scots as tenants on his estates. And Indians were there constantly. He hosted, lodged, fed, and entertained Indian visitors, and he complained to his superiors that Indians ate him out of house and home. He and Molly had eight children together. Johnson donned Indian attire and hosted feasts of bear meat; Molly donned European clothes and served tea in porcelain crockery.6

  Johnson described himself to the Iroquois as “one Half Indian and one Half English.”7 He learned Iroquois ways, adopted Iroquois customs, and loved Iroquois women, but in truth he had no intention of becoming Iroquois. He went native to the extent that doing so promoted his own and his empire’s interests. The trader John Long related a story, one of several versions, that though likely apocryphal, illustrates how Johnson exploited his knowledge of Indian ways. During a council meeting with a party of Mohawks, a chief (identified as Hendrick in other versions) told Johnson that he had dreamed the night before that Sir William had given him a fine laced coat, and he believed it was the same one he was wearing. “Well, then,” said Sir William, observing Indian custom, “you must have it,” and pulling off his coat, he handed it to the chief. The next time they met in council, Johnson told the chief that he, too, “had dreamed a very surprising dream”: the chief “had given him a tract of land on the Mohawk River to build a house on and make a settlement, extending about nine miles in length along the banks.” The chief smiled and said that “if he really dreamed it he should have i
t; but that he would never dream again with him.”8

  Johnson built his career on Iroquois trade and friendship. He regarded a well-regulated Indian trade as vital to the prosperity and security of Britain’s North American empire, and he thought the Iroquois were “the only barrier against our troublesome Neighbours the French.”9 He used his position to promote the transfer of Iroquois land to the Crown, to private purchasers, and to himself. He portrayed himself to William Pitt as “a man who was willing to Sacrifice his own ease, & business to the public Welfare,”10 but he linked his own fortunes to those of the empire and the Iroquois and he was adept at serving the king and himself. By the 1750s, Johnson was “the most famous American in the British Empire,” far surpassing men like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, whose historical reputations rose as Johnson’s world, and the Iroquois power on which it rested, fell apart.11

  Iroquois skills in intercultural diplomacy and representing themselves to the British as the dominant voice in Indian country, together with Johnson’s skill in building his power base and managing the Iroquois role in his vision of empire, combined to create a mystique of Iroquois influence: “What Johnson was for British policy, the Iroquois League was assumed to be for Indian policy.” Britain’s propensity for dealing with other Indians via the Iroquois meant that other tribes often had to deal with the British through the Iroquois and by attending multitribal gatherings at Johnson Hall.12 But Britain’s total defeat of France after more than half a century of recurrent conflict in North America meant the Iroquois were no longer able to play off European rivals. They must now deal only with King George and his representatives, or, more accurately, with his main representative: Sir William Johnson.