Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
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Yet for all their distress, the Iroquois enjoyed an important advantage over the southern Indian nations. Situated in the borderlands between British Canada and the United States, they straddled a vital imperial frontier. In the south, British agents had primarily wished to retain Indian allegiance to protect trade and to support nebulous future initiatives against the United States or maybe Spain. In the north, where the British Empire bordered the United States, the British had an active investment in retaining Indian loyalty. The Mohawks’ location thus placed them at the crossroads of British and American interests. The Americans wanted to lure them back to the Mohawk Valley, neutering their potential for making trouble on the frontiers; the British hoped to keep the Mohawks on the Canadian side of the border, thereby preserving the alliance. Chased by two suitors, the Mohawks could compensate for their relative vulnerability by playing the powers off each other.
The Mohawks had a further asset, one that Joseph Brant was especially well positioned to exploit. Because of their long connection with British imperial officials, they could mobilize personal relationships to broker a better future. Not only did Brant enjoy kinship with two successive superintendents of Indian affairs, Guy Johnson and Sir John Johnson, and a position in the Indian department himself; he also found a relatively sympathetic interlocutor in General Frederick Haldimand, governor of Quebec since 1778. Haldimand, unlike his predecessor Sir Guy Carleton, actively cultivated Iroquois support—and he shared the Indians’ sense of betrayal at the terms of peace. “My soul is completely bowed down with grief at seeing that we (with no absolute necessity) have … accept[ed] such humiliating boundaries. I am heartily ashamed,” Haldimand confessed—unwittingly echoing the sentiments of Thomas Brown, Indian superintendent for the south, on learning of the abandonment of the Creeks.42 In much the way that Sir Guy Carleton insisted on abiding by British promises of freedom to the black loyalists, Haldimand felt personally committed to maintaining British support for the Indians. His own personal dignity, as well as Britain’s national honor, stood on the line.
During the trying months of 1783, Haldimand, like his counterparts in East Florida and Nova Scotia, coped with a steady influx of loyalist refugees from the American states. While some of those heading to Nova Scotia brought rudimentary supplies with them, the overwhelming majority of migrants into Quebec were virtually destitute: by the end of 1783, one tally suggested that more than three thousand refugees stood in need of basic clothing.43 Sadly, Haldimand had painfully few resources at his disposal. His office laid out a series of brutally simple cost-cutting strategies:
Sick & infirm women with young children & those whom from their situation, cannot go out to service. Instead of alowing them lodging money seperately to be placed togather [sic] in one or two houses. Wou[l]d be a considerable saveing in regard to Fireing & Lodging Money.… Some of Those, might also be usefully employed in making blankett coats Leggins &c. at a Fixt & Cheaper rate than the Canadians. Royalists getting into service (as so great wages is given in this province) to be struck off fireing & provisions if they big [beg] sickness are obliged to leave their places to be taken care off till again provided for. The same rule might be observed in regard to trades people or artificers.44
Inspectors of refugees were instructed to distribute full rations only to “those objects whose necessities absolutely require it.”45 Refugee complaints soon followed. Without government relief, they pleaded, “we shall not be able to over come the Seveir and approaching hard Winter,” suffering as they were in “a Strange and Disolate Place where they can get nothing to Work to Earne a Penney for the Support of Each Other,… much more the Bigger part of us Without one Shilling in our Pockets and not a Shew [shoe] on our feet.”46 One inspector told of another “very sickly” group of refugees, of whom “several died owing as they think for the want of provision & Cloathing”—only to be reprimanded “for representing the distresses of the Loyalists.”47
Such desperate economizing toward white loyalists made Haldimand’s concessions to the Indians even more striking. For against the backdrop of dearth and want, he assumed a major extra expense on the Indians’ behalf: he arranged to give Mohawk loyalists a land of their own. In the autumn of 1783, the Indian agent Daniel Claus (a son-in-law of Sir William Johnson, and another close connection of Joseph Brant’s) traveled to La Chine to encourage the Mohawk refugees there to remain in British Canada, rather than return to their ravaged ancestral lands in New York. It was, he recognized, “a disagreable proposal … to a people who lived at their ease, upon a rich Tract of Country, left them … by their ancestors from Time immemorial.” He also knew how hard it would be for them to abandon “the Graves of their deceased Friends and Relations to be demolished and abused by their Enemies.” But Claus successfully persuaded the community to “pitch up on a good spot” in British domains “where they and posterity might spend their days undisturbed.”48 At the invitation of British officers, Joseph Brant and some Mohawk associates selected a site on the Bay of Quinte, near present-day Kingston. “With great Chearfulness” Haldimand arranged the purchase of this land from the Mississauga Indians for the Mohawks, and granted provisions to carry them through the first hard seasons: “I have always Considered the Mohawks as the first Nation deserving the attention of Government and I have been particularly interested for their Wellfare & reestablishment.”49
Though personal conviction may have informed Haldimand’s actions at least in part, he justified his expense to Whitehall on strategic grounds. This settlement, he argued, might ensure the Mohawks’ loyalty for generations to come. By the end of 1784, more than fifty-six hundred white refugees had clustered at Kingston (then called Cataraqui) and along the Saint Lawrence River as far as Sorel, on sixteen settlements so hastily formed they were known by number.50 Haldimand hoped that the Mohawks could be folded into this band of new villages, becoming a sort of loyal anchor to the chain of British-allied nations that he wanted to set as a buffer between Quebec and New York. As an extra means of ensuring Mohawk support, Haldimand ordered adjacent houses built in Kingston for Joseph and Molly Brant.51 All these measures stood out as relatively unusual in the context of Anglo-Indian relations, evidence of how desperately the British needed the Mohawk alliance to ensure imperial security. Placed in the context of provisions for loyalists, however, Haldimand’s treatment of the Mohawks appeared less exceptional. By granting the Indians land, Haldimand extended to them the same central concession the British government gave to other loyalist refugees. Such actions demonstrated afresh that British officials saw the Mohawks not only as sovereign allies: they were also loyalists, and won privileges accordingly.52
So where did that leave the Mohawks themselves? Joseph Brant intended to make the most of the Mohawks’ double role. The question that most concerned him was how much autonomy he would be able to carve out on the strength of it. He had always believed the British offered more for the Mohawks than the Americans. That judgment would only be confirmed by unsatisfying negotiations with the United States to reclaim Iroquois lands. A fresh treaty of Fort Stanwix, signed in 1784, further hemmed in the Iroquois, and confirmed Brant’s desire—in line with Haldimand’s—to keep the Mohawks on the British side of the border.53
For Brant, however, the attraction of the British Empire wasn’t about cozy assimiliation into Canada, as British authorities may have hoped. Rather, he saw the empire as the best arena in which to rebuild Mohawk sovereignty. Empire could provide land, land could provide a foundation for unity—and unity, he knew, meant power. One of the first things Brant did after learning about the peace treaty was to reach out to the nations to the west, hoping to form an Indian confederacy even greater than the Six Nations had once been. At a giant conference at Sandusky, in the Ohio Country, representatives from dozens of nations, including the Creeks, met to discuss their position, pressed between the British Empire and the United States. Brant delivered a compelling speech in support of unification under Britain’s aegis. At the end o
f the meeting, thirty-five nations pledged their support to an Iroquois-led confederacy.54
With this vision of western cooperation in mind, Brant set his sights on a different tract of land for Mohawk settlement. It lay on the Grand River, between Lakes Erie and Ontario, a good strategic spot from which Brant could communicate easily both with Indian nations to the west and with neighbors in New York State. Haldimand paled at the prospect of a further expensive land acquisition. But still feeling guilty over the peace treaty, and eager to retain Brant’s support, he agreed to buy the territory. In October 1784, “in consideration of the early attachment to [the King’s] cause manifested by the Mohawk Indians, and of the loss of their settlement which they thereby sustained,” Haldimand authorized the purchase of the Grand River tract and granted it to the Mohawks for “them and their Posterity … to enjoy for ever.”55 This expenditure for the Indians would be among his last: three weeks later, Haldimand returned to Britain, recalled from his governorship for overspending.
In the middle of 1785, the Indians of Loyal Village traveled to their new imperial home. (The two hundred or so Mohawks who had originally come from Fort Hunter opted to remain at the Bay of Quinte with their own leader.) The grant marked a significant achievement for the Indians: this was to be the ground on which they could rebuild their personal livelihoods and reestablish their collective power. But Joseph Brant’s business with the British Empire was not yet done. For like other loyalists, the Indians not only wanted a new place to live, they wanted compensation for what they had lost in the United States. The Mohawks had repeatedly approached the British government with their claims, but to no avail. Fed up with delays, Brant decided to cut straight to the heart of the empire. While his people settled down on the Grand River, Brant sailed for Britain, determined to pursue the issue of compensation in person.
Shortly before Christmas 1785, the British press heralded the arrival in London of “Colonel Joseph Brant, the celebrated King of the Mohawks.” As ever, Brant maneuvered in two guises: as Thayendanegea, “King of the Mohawks,” he undertook “an embassy to the British Court,” while as Joseph Brant he deployed his Anglicized charm and social connections to win favor. Taking up lodgings with his friend Daniel Claus, Brant promptly sought an audience with Lord Sydney. There he laid out the case for Mohawk compensation—speaking in Mohawk, with an old military colleague acting as interpreter. On behalf of “the whole Indian Confederacy,” he said, “We were struck with astonishment at hearing we were forgot in the treaty.”56 In the same terms used by other loyalist refugees, he asked Sydney to respect “the claims of the Mohawks for their losses … in consequence of their faithful attachment to the King, and the zeal they manifested in supporting the cause of His country against the rebellious subjects in America.” British officials had promised him “that their losses should be made good,” he concluded, and it was past time for them to follow through.57 As he waited for an official answer to the Mohawks’ collective claim, Brant pursued his and Molly Brant’s personal claims for compensation, in the amount of about £1,200 each. He also sought the half-pay (pension) that his position in the Indian department entitled him to but that he had never actually received.
Meanwhile, as on his visit to London in 1775, Brant found himself lionized by high society. People clamored to meet this brown-skinned warrior prince from the North American woods, one of the many indigenous imperial subjects whom late-eighteenth-century Britons embraced as real-life “noble savages.” If the response to him hadn’t much changed, though, how much had Brant himself? Ten years after he had been painted by George Romney, Brant sat again for a portrait, this time by the American-born artist Gilbert Stuart. Plumed again in red feathers, he sports a medallion with the king’s image beneath his shining gorget. But where the younger Brant, in Romney’s canvas, looked his viewer in the eye with a kind of sultry swagger, this Brant’s gaze drifts downward. He has been visibly aged by a decade of conflict: his left eye droops, creases outline his chin, sagging flesh bunches above his collar. At a glamorous costume ball, guests admired Brant’s appearance in Mohawk dress, with half his face streaked in scarlet paint. An Ottoman diplomat at the party, thinking that Brant was wearing a mask, reached out and grabbed the Mohawk’s nose to yank away his presumed facial covering. Suddenly an “appalling war-whoop” sliced through the room. The buzz of conversation stuttered into silence, as Brant whipped his tomahawk from his belt and swung it about the Turk’s head, the steel blade flashing in the lamplight. For one breath-catching moment, the company stood suspended—until Brant replaced his weapon, and they broke into a din of relief. Nobody could ever quite figure out whether Brant meant it all in fun or not; maybe the danger was part of his appeal.58
Four months after his audience with Lord Sydney, Brant received his long-awaited response about Mohawk claims for compensation. The king, explained Sydney, denied the “right of individuals to compensation for losses sustained by the depredations of an enemy.” But “as a proof of his most friendly disposition toward them,” and with “due regard to the national faith, and the honor and dignity of his crown,” the king agreed as a special favor to compensate the Mohawks regardless.59 The king’s response demonstrated exactly the same logic that Parliament had shown toward other loyalists. Mohawks had no more “right” to compensation than any other loyalists—but the “national faith” would see right done by them in the end.
Brant returned to Canada later in 1786 flush with winnings great and small: a silver snuffbox given to him by Charles James Fox, a gold watch, a locket with his portrait in miniature, a pair of caged canaries. He had secured his half-pay as a retired captain. Better yet, he had received £2,100 in goods and bills, handsome reimbursement for his and Molly’s losses.60 As for the British promises of compensation to the Mohawk nation, those would also gain material reality. He reached the Grand River to find the new Mohawk village, “Brant’s Town,” nicely taking shape. A tidy settlement of log houses with glass windows, surrounded by well-farmed fields and mills, Brant’s Town resembled the Mohawk Valley villages they had left behind. A schoolhouse had been built at British government expense. At the center of the village stood the largest monument to the Anglo-Mohawk relationship: a trim white clapboard church, with a sharply angled façade and square steeple, set off by pointed finials. When the missionary John Stuart (with whom Brant had lived in the 1770s) visited the “mohawk village on the grand River” a couple of years later, he found “about 700 souls,” most of them “my old Parishioners,” lodged among “a great Number of good Houses.”61 He was especially pleased to find the church equipped with rich crimson fittings, a pipe organ, and a resonant bell imported from England. The royal arms hung over the pews, while the silver communion vessels, Stuart might have noted, were the same ones he had once used in his chapel at Fort Hunter, in New York.
To Stuart and other white visitors, Brant’s Town appeared a model of Anglicized civilization among the savages. “Indeed, I was so pleased by that Country,” Stuart declared, “that I was strongly tempted to remove my Family to it.”62 Brant, for his part, played the lordly role to perfection on his Grand River manor. His elegantly furnished house was ringed by a neat picket fence, and a British flag flew out front. When he entertained white company, he raised toasts to the king and queen with glasses of madeira served by his black slaves, who were kitted out with frilly neckerchiefs and silver buckles on their shoes. After dinner, he led his guests through expertly danced Scotch reels and entertained them with tales of his military exploits. The man who had cut a swath through London society never failed to impress white callers at Brant’s Town with his “civilized” deportment and hospitality.63
But Brant’s Town was also, in a sense, Thayendanegea’s town. (The Mohawks called it Ohsweken.) For all that Brant took satisfaction at the sight of the flourishing church, school, and farms, it must have been equally gratifying to watch his vision of a broad Indian confederation begin to come alive. Within a year of the move to Grand River, nearly
two thousand Indians lived on the reserve—not just Iroquois, but Algonquian groups and even a handful of Creeks and Cherokees, settled in their own small villages by nation.64 Shortly after his return from Britain, Brant attended another major Indian council at which the participating nations reaffirmed their solidarity and issued a pacific overture to the United States. It seemed, at least for now, that his new Indian confederacy was successfully taking hold on the borders of the British Empire and the American republic.
One can never really know how much Brant struggled with his joint role, the need to be at once Mohawk leader and loyal British subject. Nor, frustratingly, do many sources survive to attest to the attitudes of the majority of Indians who lived under his authority. Did they see the Grand River settlement—as New Brunswick’s advocates were inclined to understand their own province—as a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat? Peace, they had surely learned, could prove as challenging a thing as war. In an ideal world, Brant thought, he could “unite the Indians together and make such a peace between them and the United States, as would remove all prejudices and enable us to set quietly down on our seats, free from apprehensions and jealousy.”65 But this was no ideal world. The Mohawks had lost their native lands, villages, and property. They had lost, to varying degrees, real political independence in a reshaped landscape, pressed between British and American states. In later years, Brant would have much to complain of in the actions both of the British, who increasingly hemmed in Indian land rights, and of his fellow Iroquois, who steadily trickled east into New York State, abandoning his model society.