The idea “to carry the war into their country” in Pennsylvania, in the words of Governor Vaudreuil, capitalized on the gnawing bitterness many Delawares felt for being forced off their land. In the end, however, it’s too simplistic to say that the frontier war was only about payback for the Walking Purchase and other frauds. Other issues contributed to the Lenape’s actions, including very real worries about continuing British inroads on the upper Ohio River. But the decision to make war alongside the French also had much to do with immediate rewards—the chance for booty and prestige in battle—as well as the danger of ignoring French ascendancy and a feeling of betrayal and abandonment by the British, whom they had once considered friends.
You couldn’t live in the woods and remain neutral. The Ohio Indians felt they had to make a choice, and for many the choice was Father Onontio in Montreal, not Brother Onas in Philadelphia. Runners from the western villages slipped quietly into such Indian towns as Big Island, along the upper Susquehanna, with strings of black wampum painted red and a message from the governor of Canada: “If Onontio finds any of your Indians among the White people he will kill them, & therefore he gives you this Warning.”
Scarouady, with Andrew Montour at his side, confronted the thirty-six-man Pennsylvania assembly, throwing two wampum belts on the table—one black, one white. “I must deal plainly with You,” the sachem said, “and tell you if you will not fight with us we will go somewhere else. We never can nor ever will put up [with] the affront. If we cannot be safe where we are we will go somewhere else for protection and take care of ourselves.”
But the government of Pennsylvania was deadlocked. Governor Morris was pushing for swift action, but in such a maladroit way that he further alienated the Quaker-dominated Assembly, which knew the Indians had legitimate grievances. “Instead of . . . providing for the safety and defense of the people and Province in this Time of imminent danger,” Morris thundered, “You have sent me a Message wherein you talk of regaining the Affections of the Indians now employed in laying waste the Country.” His frustration may have been authentic, but his words were also politically calculated. Morris saw a cudgel with which he could bludgeon the Quakers, scoring points against those who had long opposed unbridled proprietary power. With angry settlers, pushing carts in which they carried the scalped bodies of their families through the streets of the city, it was easy and effective to argue that the Quakers were being unreasonably, almost treasonously, sympathetic to the Delaware.
Most Pennsylvanians no longer distinguished friendly Indians from hostiles, and because they recognized some of the faces among the raiding parties—men who in many cases had eaten and drunk at their tables—they no longer felt any reason to try. Weiser, appointed a colonial colonel, came home from Philadelphia to find that war parties had struck for the first time south of the Kittochtinny Hills, and the countryside was in a froth. He was barely able to prevent a mob of five hundred armed men from lynching Scarouady and Montour, whom he sent north under armed escort.
“[They] called me a Traitor of the Country who held with the Indians and must have known this Murder before hand,” Weiser wrote to Morris. “I sat in the House by a Lowe Window, some of my Friends came to pull me away from it, telling me some of the People threatened to Shoot me . . . The cry was The Land was betrayed and sold.”
Teedyuscung would have found that cry grimly amusing. A big, heavyset man in his fifties, with a gift for oration and an astounding capacity for liquor, Teedyuscung had again and again seen his family pushed off land they thought was theirs. He was born near what is now Trenton, New Jersey, to an increasingly isolated Lenape family surrounded by white-owned farms and towns. For a time, he made a quiet living weaving baskets and making brooms for sale. About 1730, he and his family moved to the Forks of the Delaware, until that sanctuary was lost to them in the Walking Purchase.
Teedyuscung—whose name means “he who makes the earth tremble”—converted for a time to Christianity, becoming a Moravian known as Brother Gideon or Honest John. He was married in a church ceremony to a Delaware woman christened Elizabeth. They lived at Gnadenhütten, a Moravian mission town along the upper Lehigh River whose name means “cabins of grace” in German. Around 1753, at the Six Nations’ invitation, Teedyuscung led his family and about seventy other Lenapes and Mahicans from Gnadenhütten north to the Wyoming Valley along the north branch of the Susquehanna. He was at Albany in 1754 and knew the shenanigans by which Connecticut was trying to steal the Wyoming Valley, and he understood that his new community was a line in the sand against New England colonization. But he also saw the Delaware as emerging from the shadow of their “uncles,” the Iroquois League, and increasingly able to speak for themselves.
One British officer who knew Teedyuscung described him as “a lusty, rawbon’d Man, haughty, and very desirous of Respect and Command.” Most remarkably, the officer observed, “he can drink three Quarts or a Gallon of Rum a Day without being drunk.”
Teedyuscung also had a sly, cutting wit, as evidenced by an encounter with a colonist who once hailed him as “cousin.” Teedyuscung looked quizzically at the man, who was apparently a bit of a lowlife. Cousin? the Lenape asked. How so? “Oh, we’re all cousins from Adam,” the fellow replied. “Ah,” said Teedyuscung with relief, “then I am glad it is no nearer.”
Although the Pennsylvanians usually referred to him as “King Teedyuscung,” he was never a sachem in the traditional, generally hereditary Lenape sense. But his flair for language and his knack for being in the right place at the right time won him an outsize role among the eastern Delaware during the Seven Years’ War.
In time, he and Shingas would become opposite sides of the Lenape coin—the war chief and the peacemaker—but in the frenzied months after hostilities erupted, Teedyuscung, too, took the red-painted wampum, leading war parties south into the heretofore untouched settlements along the Kittatinny Ridge, within the Forks of the Delaware, and further paralyzing the Pennsylvania frontier.
If the Ohio Indians fought for many different reasons, the goal of Teedyuscung and his followers was fairly direct—to drive the settlers out of the Forks and the Tulpehocken Valley and to reestablish the old line of demarcation that once existed along South Mountain in the days of Sassoonan, three decades earlier. Breaking free of the Onondaga council—and with backing from the Seneca, many of whom were openly supporting the French—Teedyuscung reached out to Father Onontio. The eastern Delaware needed help; they’d entered the war hampered by food shortages, brought on by late frosts and severe drought the previous growing season, and now that the traders had fled, war booty did not make up for the lack of supplies. But when he visited Fort Niagara in the summer of 1756, Teedyuscung was shocked to find the French in equally desperate condition.
Just as Teedyuscung was beginning to rethink the wisdom of war with the British, Pennsylvania took the worst possible action, turning all but the most die-hard, pro-British Natives against the colony. Morris and a majority of the provincial council, thumbing their noses at the Quaker assembly, used their authority in April 1756 “immediately to declare War against the Delawares and all other Enemy Indians” and to pay “the following Rewards to such as shall make captive or put to death any of the said Enemy Indians.” It was a scalp bounty—$150 for “every Male Indian Prisoner, above Ten years Old,” $130 for a live woman or a man’s scalp, $50 for a woman’s scalp. It was a death sentence for many friendly Delawares; it was easier to scalp a neighbor than to ambush a warrior.
The Quakers, who though now a minority in the colony William Penn had founded still controlled the Pennsylvania assembly, also found themselves ambushed. Penn’s son Thomas—who as provincial proprietor had long abandoned his father’s principles, along with most of his Quaker beliefs—was conspiring against the Society of Friends, which posed a roadblock to his power and income. Publicly, the Quakers were smeared as disloyal radicals in collusion with the French, a message that the Reverend William Smith, a Penn lackey and Anglican pr
iest with a talent for libel, happily broadcast in anonymous tracts, pamphlets, and letters to newspapers, urging, among other things, that Quaker pacifists have their throats cut.
Spooked by the bloodshed in the backcountry and urged on by Penn, the British Parliament was poised to require a loyalty oath to the king from Pennsylvania’s assemblymen—which, because Quakers refused on religious grounds to swear oaths of any kind, would bar all observant Friends from election or service. Only a last-minute compromise, by which ten pacifist Quakers resigned from the assembly for the duration of the war, derailed the oath bill. If anything, though, it stiffened Quaker determination to find a way to peace.
The war of skirmish, feint, attack, and retreat continued—almost entirely one-sided, since with few exceptions it was a defensive action on Pennsylvania’s part. The militia had been raised, what arms and ammunition that could be found had been distributed, and Benjamin Franklin was overseeing construction of a line of forts roughly paralleling the Kittatinny Ridge from the upper Delaware, across the Susquehanna, and into the mountains west of the hamlet of Shippensburg. Typical was Fort Allen, near the Gnadenhütten mission on the Lehigh, where eleven Moravians had been murdered two months earlier. Working in frigid winter rain, Franklin’s men cut pines, sharpening the ends to build a circular palisade 150 feet across. They hauled a single swivel gun, the only artillery they had, into place on the rampart and fired it, “to let the Indians know, if any were within hearing, that we had such pieces; and thus our fort, if that name may be given to so miserable a stockade, was finish’d in a week,” Franklin said.
The forts, including some private garrisons, gave the nervous settlers an illusion of security, but they did very little to actually curb the ongoing Indian attacks. In fact, French and Indian raiders overran several of the installations, including Fort McCord west of Chambersburg, where Shingas killed or captured more than two dozen people, and Fort Granville along the Juniata, taken by Captain Jacobs and Louis Coulon de Villiers, the victor at Fort Necessity. (Captain Jacobs was later killed during a withering strike on his village at Kittanning, on the Allegheny River—one of the few successful counterattacks the provincials were able to mount into the upper Ohio Valley.)
Having left the government, pacifist Quakers redoubled their efforts to negotiate with the Delaware outside official channels. Via Scarouady, they reached out to the eastern Delaware, and Teedyuscung was ready to listen. In July 1756, wearing a gold-trimmed coat the French had given him, he came to Easton to lay the groundwork for what would eventually be three peace treaties over the next two years, as the Quakers formed the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures and provided funds to make the councils possible.
It was fitting that the treaties took place at Easton, a tumbledown settlement at the very Forks of the Delaware, where the long-concealed deceit of the Walking Purchase, and the Penn family’s role in it, would finally be exposed. At the second treaty in November 1756, despite everything that Conrad Weiser and provincial secretary (and Walking Purchase coconspirator) Richard Peters could do to prevent it, the newly installed Governor William Denny asked Teedyuscung and the Delaware, Mahican, and Shawnee leaders present a simple question: “Have we, the Governor or People of Pennsylvania, done you any kind of Injury?”
Denny—a forty-seven-year-old captain, hastily promoted to lieutenant colonel so that he could hold office without embarrassment —has always left historians reaching for adjectives. He was, said one, “venal, lazy and inept, unsteady and self-pitying, boastful but physically timid . . . bewildered, frightened, flighty, irritable.” Another described him as “idle, fatuous, greedy, and almost simple-minded.” No other Pennsylvania governor, beholden to the Penns for his office, would have dreamed of asking such a loaded question.
According to Quaker witnesses, “the Joy which appear’d in the Countenance of ye Indians canot be express’d.” The assembled chiefs punctuated every sentence in the remainder of the governor’s speech with loud, approving cries of “Ye-ho!,” running to him to shake his hand the moment he finished.
Teedyuscung, seeing his opportunity, asked for a day to consider his reply—and to ratchet up the anticipation. In the morning, he laid a series of wampum belts before the council and invoked the timeless ritual of the “clearing the woods” ceremony.
“The Times are not now as they were in the Days of our Grandfathers; then it was Peace, but now War and Distress,” the stocky Delaware told a crowd silent but for the scratch of quill pens; Peters was, as usual, taking the minutes, as were several observers. “I take away the Blood from your Bodys with which they are Sprinkled. I clear the Ground and the Leaves that you may sit down with Quietness. I clear your Eyes that when you see the Day-light you may enjoy it.”
What injuries had been done the Lenape? “I have not far to go for an Instance,” Teedyuscung said, his voice rising, as he stamped his moccasined foot on the ground for emphasis. “This very Ground that is under me was my Land and Inheritance, and is taken from me by fraud.” When he sold land, the sachem said, he meant to sell it: “A bargain is a bargain.” But if, after a man’s death, “his Children forge a deed like the true one, with the same Indian Names on it, and thereby take the Lands from the Indians they never sold, this is fraud.”
Just as the sachems and officials were gathering for the second Easton treaty, circumstances took a distinctly ominous turn for Robert Stobo and Jacob van Braam.
In late October, armed with the letter and map found in the ruins of Braddock’s retreat, the French brought Stobo and Van Braam to trial for their lives, pour le crime de haute trahison. Governor Vaudreuil sat as judge, and Céloron de Blainville—he of the lead plates along the Ohio—served as the king’s prosecutor.
The officers’ belongings were searched, and the men were questioned separately at length. Van Braam, disavowing any knowledge of the letter, did concede that the handwriting appeared to be Stobo’s. For his part, Stobo declined to swear any oaths or sign any papers, although he promised to tell the truth “following my conscience.” When confronted with the damning map and letter, however, he refused to confirm anything regarding his past actions, arguing unconvincingly that he did not remember what he had written.
As the trial unfolded, Stobo grasped at two circumstances by which he might extricate himself without perjury. As a newly commissioned officer, Stobo maintained, he had not understood the rules of parole, which none of his captors had explained to him, and to the extent that he had understood them, he considered his obligation to abide by the terms of the capitulation void after he saw British soldiers who had surrendered honorably being held as Indian slaves.
It didn’t work. When Vaudreuil, Contrecoeur, and the five others on the Council of War met on November 8 to render the verdict, Stobo may have realized the decision was foregone; this was hardly a disinterested jury. For the first time, he admitted the obvious: the map and letter were his. “I believed myself entirely free to do what I pleased for the interest of my country,” he told the tribunal, “and to give all the information I could contribute to that end. Therefore I wrote the letter in question and I drew the map that is joined to it.”
Van Braam was acquitted; Stobo was not. He was ordered held until a scaffold could be built in Montreal, at which time he was to be publicly beheaded. There were no dissenting votes.
It must have felt a little strange to George Croghan to be back in Philadelphia in the early winter of 1756. For one thing, the fear of being taken up for his enormous debts, which had restricted him to the dangerous backcountry since the fall of Fort Necessity, had just been put in abeyance by a special act of the assembly, granting him and his old business partner William Trent ten years’ grace from imprisonment. But more than that, he wasn’t there as a frontier trader or a militia captain, but as the deputy superintendent for Indian affairs, the new right-hand man to Sir William Johnson in New York, the Crown’s liaison with all the tribes of the northern colon
ies.
The change had done Croghan good and, given the French bounty on his head, maybe saved his life. But in the mayhem of the ongoing frontier war, Quakers weren’t the only publicly reviled religious group; Roman Catholics were automatically suspected of French sympathies. The previous year, Conrad Weiser had been seeing ghosts in every corner, claiming that Catholics were colluding with Indians in his neighborhood. (The provincial council investigated and found “very little foundation for that representation.” In fact, there was none.) Croghan’s Irish background made him a target of similar rumors—so much so that when a series of letters surfaced in which the anonymous writer, signing himself “Filius Gallicae,” proclaimed a secret Catholicism and love of French ideals, took credit for leading British scouts at the Monongahela, and offered sensitive military information, Croghan was an immediate and obvious suspect.
Croghan was undoubtedly innocent, and the letters were almost certainly a plant, likely part of the larger plot to smear Quakers and Catholics. But his fortunes had turned since his salad days on the Ohio. Frontier attacks made life at Aughwick (now garrisoned and known as Fort Shirley) dangerous. Shingas had publicly boasted that he’d take Croghan’s scalp and kept a cadre of warriors near the fort at all times, hoping to snare the trader. Croghan’s debts were still crushing, even if he was free of the immediate threat of lawsuits. He was blamed in some quarters for Braddock’s defeat, and his skills at Indian diplomacy were largely unused.
The First Frontier Page 41