Crucible of War

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by Fred Anderson


  The war had lately taken a promising turn because of Pitt’s change of policy and because Amherst was capable of behaving with more tact and restraint that any previous commander in chief. The prospect of winning a great victory over the French had thus made the Americans into British patriots—of a sort. As Amherst and his superiors saw it, however, all their enthusiasm for the empire, all their protestations of loyalty, were superficial appearances beneath which the colonists remained unchanged. Although it was by no means an entirely just inference, British observers in 1759 tended to conclude that Parliament’s subsidies had bought the provincials’ enthusiasm. No matter how much zeal he might profess for the common cause, you could still scratch a colonist and, beneath his patriotic veneer, find only—an American.

  CHAPTER 33

  Emblem of Empire FORT PITT AND THE INDIANS

  1759

  IF INTERNAL POLITICAL frictions and intramural distrust delayed the opening of the campaign to consolidate British control over the Forks, problems stemming from the previous year’s operations hindered it even more severely once it began. Building Forbes Road and supplying the troops along it had destroyed thousands of wagons and perhaps tens of thousands of horses that the army had leased for the expedition; Forbes’s death had slowed the settlement of the owners’ claims against the army. These conditions hardly encouraged civilians to come forward when Stanwix began to appeal for wagoners and teams, and through most of the spring his army suffered an acute shortage of transport. Meanwhile the state of the troops holding Pittsburgh and Fort Ligonier was becoming perilous. Provisions could be brought in only in heavily guarded pack trains until the woods cleared of snow and enough grass grew in the meadows to feed the herds of cattle that would have to be driven westward to sustain the big summer garrisons. It was the middle of June by the time drovers brought the first cows to Pittsburgh, where the soldiers had been eating horses and dogs. When the first cattle arrived, the troops butchered forty of them on the spot and, barely pausing to cook them, devoured the beasts without pausing to distinguish entrails from meat.1

  The shortage of supplies at the western posts was more than a matter of discomfort for the garrisons. When the French had withdrawn, they had taken with them, destroyed, or dispersed to friendly villages all the provisions and trade goods that they had stored at Fort Duquesne. The Shawnees, Delawares, and Mingos of the valley therefore found themselves facing a winter subsistence crisis: the first and most tangible effect of their decision to make peace with the Anglo-Americans. To retain their cooperation, the trade that Forbes and the Pennsylvania authorities had promised had to be opened as soon as possible; as long as it was not, the possibility remained that the Indians would revert to their old French suppliers. Fort Duquesne’s commandant, Captain François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, had withdrawn only as far as the Allegheny River post of Fort Machault, or Venango. During the winter he sent out appeals for aid not only to such traditional French allies in the pays d’en haut as the Potawatomis, Ottawas, and Ojibwas, but to the defecting Shawnees and Delawares themselves. All winter long Lignery was able, even with a skeleton force, to keep up his raids on the pack trains that were barely sustaining Pittsburgh and Fort Ligonier. There was no doubt that when the rivers cleared of ice in the spring and he once more built up his troops at Fort Machault, he would return. As winter slowly waned in 1759, the only real question seemed to be whether the Ohio tribes would stand by the Anglo-Americans or change sides once again. 2

  A vigorous trade at the Forks was therefore critically important if the British hoped to maintain control in the west, but disorganization and competition among those who wished to dominate it perilously delayed its revival. As part of its obligations under the Easton agreements, the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1758 had passed a law creating a provincial monopoly over the Indian trade. Stores were to be established in each of the province’s three great valleys: at Fort Allen on the Delaware, Fort Augusta (Shamokin) on the Susquehanna, and Pittsburgh on the Ohio. There “honest, prudent, and Sober Men” would sell goods to Indians at fixed prices as a means of countering the abuses and correcting the destabilizing effects of unregulated trade; there missionaries, schoolmasters, and “other sober and Virtuous Men” were to take up residence to “civilize and instruct” the Indians. It was an ambitious and philanthropic scheme, endorsed by the Friendly Society, but conditions in wartime Pennsylvania made it supremely unrealistic. Shortages of capital and poor planning prevented the colony from establishing its store at Pittsburgh before September 1759, and in the interim Israel Pemberton—at the urgent request first of Forbes, then of Stanwix—did his best to fill the need with a private establishment. With great difficulty and expense Pemberton’s employees managed to get a pack-train load of goods to Pittsburgh before the end of April 1759. These items and the shipments that followed helped to preserve the goodwill of the Ohio tribes, but they came too late to relieve the pressure on Pittsburgh’s slender supplies of trade goods and food during the winter. Thus the garrison’s commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Mercer, allowed many small traders (primarily farmers from Virginia with produce and whiskey to sell) to operate an all-but-unrestricted trade at the Forks.3

  The final element in this rapidly developing muddle of Indian commerce—all of it technically illegal, since it contravened Pennsylvania law—was heralded by the arrival of George Croghan in June, at the head of a long pack train bearing the official gift from the Crown to the Ohio tribes. Croghan, as Sir William Johnson’s deputy agent in the Ohio Country, came to Pittsburgh no less as a diplomat than as a trader in his own right. In both capacities he intended to prevent the establishment of a Pennsylvania monopoly trade at the Forks. As official representative of the superintendent of Indian affairs he was eager to rebuild a lively trade in the valley as a means of tying the Indians closely to the British interest; therefore he granted licenses to several Philadelphia mercantile houses, enabling their representatives to carry on commerce in the Indian villages themselves—the setting in which, he knew, the Ohioans preferred to do business.4

  Croghan was also eager to establish himself at Pittsburgh because he had land-speculating interests there to protect. Back in 1749, the wily Irishman had purchased from the Iroquois Council the rights to 200,000 acres near the Forks. Because he thus had a plausible claim to owning the land on which the British army intended to build Fort Pitt, Croghan had every reason not only to be present in the vicinity but to seek to dominate it commercially. If the British retained control of the Forks, he knew, both Indians and whites would gravitate to the fort. What better position could any businessman be in than to trade goods to the Indians for deerskins while selling land to the arriving whites? Who was better qualified than he to supply them with the provisions and tools they would need to turn their wilderness freeholds into working farms?5

  The Ohio Indians, of course, needed the goods that the traders sold and to that degree welcomed even the chaotic commerce that grew up at Pittsburgh in 1759. They did not welcome dishonest treatment, a permanent British military presence, and the potential of thousands of white settlers swarming into the Ohio Country; as the year wore on, however, it grew steadily clearer that those were what they were actually getting. Tamaqua, Pisquetomen, Shingas, and the other chiefs had agreed to terms of peace that, they believed, promised the British would open a trading post at the Forks and then withdraw their soldiers across the mountains as soon as the French threat had been eliminated. By the middle of July the French had not reappeared, but the English were coming in ever-larger numbers and obviously preparing to build something more formidable than a trading post, or even Fort Duquesne. A British army engineer was laying out a huge pentagonal fort at the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny: a fort that would measure more than four hundred feet from bastion tip to bastion tip, with outworks that would enclose more than seventeen acres, interior barracks to shelter a thousand men, and embrasures that could mount more than a score of cannon. By mid-August soldie
rs and artisans were busily constructing a sawmill, felling and hauling trees, quarrying sandstone, mining coal, burning lime, making bricks, and shoveling and hauling the tens of thousands of cubic yards of dirt necessary to build the fort. On September 10, its inner walls began to rise within a wide glacis and moat.6

  Fort Pitt. Unlike the cramped Fort Duquesne it replaced, Fort Pitt was a powerful pentagonal fort with walls nearly sixty feet thick at the base, substantial outworks along the river-front, and a ditch, covered way, and glacis that extended across the width of the peninsula. It was, however, poorly defended against other enemies: in the floods of 1762 and 1763 water stood from five to seven feet deep within the walls. The fort, never fully repaired, decayed until it was finally abandoned in 1772. From Rocque, A Set of Plans and Forts. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  As early as July 9, Pisquetomen had “put it closely to” James Kenny, the man who ran Israel Pemberton’s store, “to tell what . . . ye General [Stanwix] meant by coming here with a great army.” All the honest store-keeper could say was that, so far as he knew, the soldiers were there merely to prevent the French from returning, and that “when they were subdued, ye army would be called away home.” Pisquetomen also wished to think that this was so, for although he reminded Kenny that “Quakers always should speak truth & not lie,” he “commended” the answer and went on his way. By the time Kenny left Pittsburgh two months later, neither he nor Pisquetomen would have thought this answer plausible. No one could have mistaken Fort Pitt, ten times the size of Fort Duquesne, for a trading post.7 It was a symbol of dominion, an emblem of empire; and by autumn the Ohio Indians were beginning to discern its meanings only too well.

  CHAPTER 34

  The Six Nations Join the Fight THE SIEGE OF NIAGARA

  JULY 1759

  THE POSITION of the British at Pittsburgh, so precarious at the beginning of summer, had become one of mastery by summer’s end—not because anything decisive had occurred at the Forks of the Ohio, but because in July, two hundred miles to the north, an Anglo-American army had seized Fort Niagara. The Niagara expedition, under the command of Brigadier General John Prideaux, had been the first to take the field, beginning its trek up the Mohawk River from Schenectady before the end of May. There could be no better indication of the dramatic shift in the North American balance of power than the fact that when Prideaux’s Anglo-American troops reached Oswego on June 27, a thousand Iroquois warriors and Sir William Johnson were waiting to join them. 1

  Onondaga’s new willingness to support the British proceeded from the well-founded fear that the Shawnees and Delawares were about to create an independent Indian confederacy in the west: a new regional power that might potentially include French allies like the Miamis and the Munsees, who shared an interest in excluding Iroquois influence from the area south of the Great Lakes. At the Treaty of Easton the Six Nations had reasserted their claims to suzerainty over the Ohio Country, but the leaders of the Confederacy knew only too well that that same agreement had recognized the Delawares’ right to negotiate directly with the government of Pennsylvania, and neither the Delawares nor any other people on the Ohio would gladly resubmit to Iroquois dominion. Sometime during the fall or early winter of 1758, the League Council seems to have concluded that the only means of restoring substantial influence over the Ohioans was by cooperating directly with the British, and they therefore began to send the necessary signals. At the beginning of January an Iroquois delegation at Pittsburgh took aside the commandant, Hugh Mercer, to warn him privately that “the Shawanese and Delawares [intended to] Join in the Confederacy against [the Iroquois, and that] their ruin would soon be compleated, unless a very powerfull aid is afforded them by the English.” The Six Nations’ spokesmen were obliged to maintain strict secrecy, Mercer reported, because “they observe too great an intimacy Still Subsist[s]” between the Ohio nations and the French. Yet, he continued, “at the Same time they appear to be convinced that the French may be easily drove from this Country; that one or two Defeats will make their Indians drop their Alliance, and universally join the English.”2

  Soon thereafter, emissaries from Onondaga evidently also approached Sir William Johnson and offered what they knew he could not refuse— military aid in an expedition against Fort Niagara. The northern superintendent hurried to his desk on February 16, writing to inform Amherst that he would require “a large Augmentation” of Indian gifts for a meeting in the spring. If he had the support he needed, he wrote, he would “be able to engage a large Body of Indians” for a campaign against the last French stronghold on Lake Ontario. “I flatter myself,” he wrote, “and have some Reason to expect that (as Affairs are now Circumstanced) if an Expedition was designed against Niagara . . . thro’ the Country of the Six Nations, I shou’d be able to prevail upon the greater Part if not the whole of them, to join His Majesty’s Arms.”3

  This was indeed a remarkable change, particularly in Johnson’s suggestion that perhaps even “the whole of” the Iroquois would “join His Majesty’s Arms.” With the exception of thirty or forty Oneidas who had accompanied Bradstreet to Cataraqui the previous year, only the Mohawks (to whom Johnson was related by marriage) had shown any willingness to aid the British, and even they had done little since the death of Chief Hendrick in 1755. Throughout the war Iroquois warriors, and particularly the Senecas, had aided the French as participants in frontier raids if not as formal allies. Yet when Prideaux’s field force reached Oswego, warriors from all of the Six Nations were there to greet them, including even substantial numbers of Senecas.

  This reversal was so abrupt that no British officer—not even Johnson—was sure of its meaning, and no one thought to look beyond the Iroquois themselves to understand its origins. The “nativist” impulse among the western Indians was so recent, so much a product of the war and its upheavals, that the Anglo-Americans could scarcely have been expected to see what was going on in the Ohio villages. But resistance in the valley was already developing a powerful religious dimension, and the leaders of the Six Nations were not as slow as the whites to grasp its significance. Because Iroquois influence in the west had always depended upon Onondaga’s ability to manipulate the Europeans diplomatically, any exclusionary resistance movement among the Ohio nations would gradually wear away the Iroquois position. Insofar as the roots of resistance were religious, however—insofar as the Ohio Indians became convinced that contact with the Europeans had spiritually contaminated the Iroquois, making them in effect indistinguishable from whites—the influence of the Six Nations would vanish like smoke in the wind.4

  Fort Johnson, c. 1759. Unlike its successor, Johnson Hall (1763), an elegant Georgian mansion, Sir William Johnson’s base of operations during the Seven Years’ War was a thoroughly utilitarian complex, including a campground for visiting Indian delegations, several storage structures, a mill, and stout, defensible living quarters. The lack of outward-facing windows in the main house, center right, suggests that Johnson’s highest priority was security. His modest original house is partially visible at the bend of the Mohawk, just beyond the flank of the hill at left. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  Thus during the winter of 1758–59 the chiefs at Onondaga concluded that the only way to restore their ascendancy over the interior tribes was to harness British military power to serve Iroquois ends. If Fort Niagara were to fall to the Anglo-Americans, the French would lose control of the critical portage to Lake Erie and their power in the west would shrivel. Yet merely to exclude the French from the Ohio Country would not enable the Iroquois to control the region. The Anglo-Americans somehow had to be encouraged to remain at the Forks in force, for only British hegemony could guarantee Onondaga’s influence over the western Indians. The virtually simultaneous approaches of Iroquois emissaries to Johnson, urging an expedition against Niagara, and to Mercer, informing him of the dangers posed by an incipient western confederacy, had formed complem
entary halves of a single Six Nations strategy. In the end, therefore, it was not pressure from the Europeans but the Confederacy council’s well-founded fear that the Iroquois would be unable to reestablish influence over their former client peoples that made the Six Nations abandon neutrality for an open military alliance with the British. No doubt the chiefs at Onondaga thought of this move as a temporary, tactical accommodation—only one of many pragmatic policy shifts in the long history of relations between the Confederacy and the British Crown. But this time the tilt toward the British would prove irrevocable, and its consequences would exceed any that the Iroquois could have intended. For the commitment to an active alliance, in fact if not in name, meant the acceptance of dependency. Once French power in the west had been broken, Britain’s economic and military might would serve the needs not of the Iroquois, but of the empire.

  Once begun, the Niagara campaign was no prolonged affair. General Prideaux—yet another junior colonel serving as a temporary brigadier— did not tarry at Oswego. He detached a thousand men to begin rebuilding the fort there, then hurried on toward Niagara on June 30 with the remainder of his troops and Johnson’s warriors. For four days they rowed westward along the wild south shore of Lake Ontario, then put in about three miles from their goal, a handsome gray granite “castle” overlooking the lake from a bluff at the mouth of the Niagara River. Fort Niagara was by no means as easy a target as Fort Frontenac had been in the previous year, for its commandant, a forty-seven-year-old regular captain named Pierre Pouchot, was also an experienced military engineer, and he had greatly improved the post’s defenses. When the British arrived on July 6, they faced the only fort in the North American interior that was protected by extensive, European-style earthen outworks: a glacis, ditch, and covered way stretching across the peninsula and screening the castle and other buildings within the ramparts.5

 

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