The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Worse was to follow.

  even indians who converted to christianity and refused to fight were not safe from racial violence. As the Delawares had told Washington, some of them had embraced Christianity. Moravian missionaries began converting Delawares and Mahicans in the 1740s, and by the time of the Revolution they had founded several villages in the upper Muskingum (now the Tuscarawas) Valley. The Delawares who lived there were pacifists, but in the vicious warfare of the Ohio country, their neutrality rendered them suspect in the eyes of militants on both sides. In the fall of 1781 the Wyandots compelled them to relocate to Sandusky, where the Wyandots and British could keep a closer watch on them. They allowed them to return to their villages in the winter to gather corn, but reports that the Christian Delawares were aiding and abetting the Wyandots made them a target for retaliation by Americans, who, as they had shown in murdering Cornstalk and White Eyes, rarely distinguished between Indian friends and Indian foes. In March 1782 Colonel David Williamson and two hundred militiamen from Washington County in Pennsylvania marched to the village of Gnadenhütten, which means “huts of grace” in German. They rounded up the inhabitants, separated the men and the women and children into two houses, and debated how to put them to death. A proposal to set fire to the houses and burn them alive was rejected: some thought this “too Barbarous”; others “did not think it tormenting enough.” Instead, the next day, the militia bound the Indians together in pairs, systematically bludgeoned them to death with wooden mallets, and then scalped and burned them. Ninety-six men, women, and children perished. Having “no further Opportunity of murdering innocent People, and no Stomach to engage with warriors,” the militia headed back to Pittsburgh with “a great haul” of furs, horses, and other plunder, killing several more peaceful Indians on the way.84

  When the killers arrived with scalps and plunder, the post commander, William Irvine, did nothing. In reality, he knew he could do nothing. He communicated news of the massacre to Washington and to his wife. In his letter to his wife, he said the perpetrators spared neither age or sex. “What was more extraordinary, they did it in cold blood, having deliberated three days, … fell on them while they were singing hymns and killed the whole. Many children were killed in their wretched mothers’ arms. Whether this was right or wrong, I do not pretend to determine.” Irvine understood that people who had had “fathers, mothers, brothers or children, butchered, tortured, scalped by the savages” felt very differently about killing Indians than did people who lived farther east in “perfect safety.” He implored his wife, whatever her own opinions might be, to keep them to herself, lest any sentiments she expressed be attributed to him. “No man knows whether I approve or disapprove of killing the Moravians,” he said.85 Irvine asked Washington for assistance to alleviate the suffering of some friendly Indians who took refuge at Fort Pitt, and Washington took steps to provide it.86 But when George Croghan’s son, William, arrived at Fort Pitt in April, he found “the Country taulks of Nothing but killing Indians, & taking possession of their lands.”87 Irvine gave in to demands for another expedition against Sandusky.

  News of Gnadenhütten spread like wildfire through Indian country and to the British at Detroit.88 Delawares who had moved repeatedly to find a safe place to live saw once again, in the words of David Zeisberger, that “the world is on all sides too narrow for us.” Many moved again, across the Mississippi to Spanish-held territory or north to Canada.89 Others stiffened their resistance. Citing American attacks that killed women and children in Shawnee and Onondaga towns and the slaughter of Delawares at Gnadenhütten, Indian speakers told the British at Niagara they would not sit back and wait for the same fate to befall them. They would redouble their attacks on the Americans, treat them as they were treated, and show them no mercy.90

  When Washington heard what had happened at Gnadenhütten, he warned soldiers in the western theater not to let themselves to be taken alive. The expedition against Sandusky was already under way: 480 mounted volunteers commanded by Colonel William Crawford, with David Williamson, the perpetrator of the Gnadenhütten massacre, as second-in-command. Many of the militia had been with Williamson at the slaughter. Irvine’s instructions were “to destroy by fire and sword (if practicable) the Indian town and settlements at Sandusky, by which we hope to give ease and safety to the inhabitants of this country.”91 In other words, Crawford was to do in northern Ohio what Washington had sent Sullivan to do in Iroquois country. The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder said it was “strongly suspected that the object of the expedition was to complete the work begun at Gnadenhütten” and finish off the Moravian Indians living on the Sandusky River. The men took coils of rope with them to pack plunder and secure horses.92 After a two-hundred-mile march, Crawford’s army reached the Sandusky in early June.

  This time, instead of finding a village of Moravian pacifists, they ran into Wyandot, Delaware, and other warriors, supported by British rangers. The Americans lost more than fifty men, and retreat turned into rout. Williamson and most of the soldiers escaped. Crawford was not so fortunate. He and nine or ten others—including his son-in-law William Harrison, his nephew William (Valentine’s only son), Dr. John Knight, a Scottish surgeon with the expedition, and a guide named John Slover—were captured and taken back to Sandusky. Indian women and boys tomahawked five of the captives. They stripped the others and painted their faces painted black, marking them for death by torture.

  Even in murder and torture, this was a world where killers and victims often knew each other. According to Heckewelder, Crawford called for a Delaware chief named Wingenund who lived in a nearby village and who in more peaceful times had been his friend and visited him in Pittsburgh. Wingenund was “a great and good man” known for his humanity, but he replied that by associating with the murderer Williamson, Crawford had made it impossible for him to interfere.93 Captain Pipe, whom Brigadier General Josiah Harmar described as “much more of a gentleman than the generality of these frontier people,”94 and who had pledged perpetual peace with Crawford four years earlier at the Treaty of Fort Pitt, now presided over his execution. He made a speech, and then the Delawares exacted grim retribution for the slaughter of their relatives at Gnadenhütten. They shot Crawford with burning powder, scorched his body with firebrands, scalped him, and poured hot coals on his raw head before burning him at the stake. A baptized Moravian named Joseph did the scalping. Crawford’s son-in-law and nephew were tortured to death as well. “So it was that Colonel Crawford … made atonement for Williamson’s crime,” said Heckewelder. Major John Hardin, who reported Crawford’s death to the Virginia authorities, agreed: “How can you expect any other[?]” he asked; the Moravian killings were “Every day Retaliated for.”95 Indians told the British Crawford was “the principal Agent in the Murder of the Moravians, and he was burned with Justice and according to our Custom.”96

  When Irvine first wrote, on June 16, 1782, to tell Washington of the disaster, he had not learned the details of Crawford’s fate, only that he was missing. Washington was saddened by “the loss of Colonel Crawford, for whom I had a very great regard.” (He later offered to loan money to Crawford’s widow so she would not have to sell her slaves to meet her dead husband’s debts.)97 But then Dr. John Knight made it back to Pittsburgh, emaciated and barely able to speak. Knight had witnessed Crawford’s torture and execution and fully expected to receive the same treatment himself, but managed to escape. The guide John Slover also escaped and staggered in a week later. Both told a harrowing tale and gave grisly details of Crawford’s execution. Knight said Simon Girty, the former Indian captive and Seneca adoptee who went over to the British in 1777, was present, and Crawford had begged him to shoot him, but Girty ignored the request. There was little he could have done. William Harrison, Crawford’s son-in-law, was quartered and burned. The reason the Indians gave for “this uncommon barbarity” was “retaliation for the Moravian affair.”98

  Washington was shocked. But even in his sorrow, he recognized the I
ndians were incensed by “the treatment given their Moravian friends.” Any Americans who fell into their hands could expect “the extremest tortures that could be inflicted by savages.” No one, he warned Irvine again, should let himself be taken alive.99 He did not acknowledge, and perhaps did not allow himself to think, that he and Crawford had helped create the violence and hatred to which Crawford fell victim.

  Contemporaries understood, and historians have acknowledged, that Crawford’s torture and execution was an act of revenge, but they often implied that since Crawford was not at Gnadenhütten, he was simply the wrong man in the wrong place. The culturally mandated vengeance to which Crawford fell victim did not require that the perpetrator of past deeds be the one to suffer for them. On another level, however, the retribution was personal. Pipe and the Delawares knew Crawford, and they knew what he stood for. The spirits of the slain Moravians cried for vengeance, but the Delawares also vented their outrage on a surveyor, land speculator, and soldier who had threatened their lands and lives for years.

  by the closing years of the Revolution, Washington’s efforts to keep the western tribes neutral or even win their alliance by diplomacy were in shambles. In the early years of the war, Guyasuta, Cornstalk, White Eyes, and George Morgan had worked hard to preserve peace; Delaware leaders had visited Washington and Congress, stayed at Morgan’s home, pledged peace and friendship with the United States at the Treaty of Fort Pitt, and reaffirmed their alliance by sending their sons to school. Now Cornstalk and White Eyes lay dead at American hands, Gnadenhütten lay in ruins, and American actions drove more and more Indians over to the British. The cycle of savagery and revenge that played out at Gnadenhütten and Sandusky continued. Atrocity begat atrocity, and unrestrained violence became a way of life on the frontier.100 Ohio Indians ramped up their attacks after Gnadenhütten. Guyasuta, who had worked so hard to stay out of the war, attacked Hannastown in western Pennsylvania in July 1782 and burned it to the ground.101 Shawnee war parties ranged the frontier. In August they attacked Bryan’s Station at present-day Lexington, Kentucky, and then ambushed a Kentuckian force that included Daniel Boone at Blue Licks on the Licking River, killing more than seventy of them, including Boone’s son Israel.102 George Rogers Clark invaded Shawnee country again in the fall. He burned five villages, destroyed their corn, and spread desolation. The Shawnees refused to be drawn into open battle and suffered few casualties, although they said “the white Savages Virginians” committed atrocities.103 With each American invasion, Shawnees moved their villages farther north, away from the Ohio River. On the other side of the Ohio, outrage at Crawford’s torture produced volunteers “who pant[ed] after revenge” and threatened to “continue for years a scene of mutual bloodshed.”104

  Washington and the British both denounced and distanced themselves from the atrocities.105 Writing to Irvine, Washington blamed the frontier inhabitants. Writing to Congress, he suggested the violent actions were “conducted with the approbation at least, if not the Authority of individual States.” None of the atrocities were “committed under my Direction, or by any parties of Continental Troops; nor have they been sanctified by any Orders from me,” he said. Indeed, “my Mind revolts at the Idea of those wanton Barbarities which both sides have in too many Instances, been the unhappy Witnesses to.” Writing to Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander, he blamed the Indians, who had in some measure brought things on themselves by their own barbarous conduct. As for the Indians’ claims that Crawford’s death was justified, Crawford “was not in the least concerned in the unhappy Massacre of the Moravian people.” Washington repeated that none of the atrocities were carried out by his orders. “The Cruelties exercised on both Sides are intirely repugnant to my Ideas,” he assured Carleton.106

  The vicious border warfare of the Revolution produced atrocities on both sides, but Americans placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Indians and their British backers. As in the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War, the violence and terror they experienced in fighting Indians united whites in fearing and hating Indians. Crawford’s torture and execution joined a host of reports of Indian atrocities, real or imagined, that appeared in American newspapers, fueled American propaganda, and made killing Indians a patriotic act.107 Indians saw what was happening. The Americans charged them with many acts of cruelty that they never committed and publicized them in “their false Papers” as “a pretence to hurt & murder us,” they told the British; “if we had the means of publishing to the World the many Acts of Treachery & Cruelty committed by them on our Women & Children, it would appear that the title of Savages would with much greater justice be applied to them than to us.”108

  Thomas Jefferson had depicted Indians in the Declaration of Independence as merciless savages doing the bloody work of a tyrannical king without regard to age or sex. The story of the capture and torture of William Crawford, Washington’s friend, helped imprint Jefferson’s image in the national memory of the war in years to come. The slaughter at Gnadenhütten was downplayed, and the desperate diplomacy of White Eyes, Cornstalk, and Guyasuta as they tried to keep the peace was all but forgotten. Indians had fought like savages to kill the nation at its birth; now the nation was alive and growing, they must atone for their crimes by forfeiting their lands.109

  While Washington’s efforts to achieve peace and order in the West disintegrated into a nightmare of violence, his efforts to acquire Indian lands continued unabated long after Yorktown secured victory in the East. Washington had no way of knowing what victory would mean in territorial terms when peace was signed. After all, the British government had drawn boundary lines over enormous swaths of territory before and had included the Ohio country within the borders of Quebec in 1774. Quebec did not rebel and fight for independence from the empire. What if Britain insisted on keeping the Ohio country as part of Quebec? During peace talks in Europe, mediating neutral powers suggested an armistice on the basis of uti possidetis, letting each side keep the territory it controlled at the time peace was made.110 Indians, most of whom were now allied with the British, controlled the Ohio country, and Britain might, as it did in later years, propose establishing the trans-Appalachian West as an Indian buffer against American expansion, something France and Spain also favored.111

  The United States was unable to establish its authority over the Ohio country and struggled to keep pace with the violence perpetrated against Indians.112 But while Washington decried the violence, he knew that military strikes against the Indians—whether conducted by federal forces or local militias—were necessary to establish a demonstrable claim to the western lands he had long coveted for himself and now coveted for the new nation. This was the basis of Clark’s “conquest” of the Northwest for the United States. In the contest for Indian lands between eastern elites and western settlers, building homes and planting fields established and reinforced claims to possession; destroying Indian homes and cornfields likewise weakened their claims to possession.113 Washington certainly authorized expeditions into the Ohio country to preempt or retaliate for Indian attacks, but driving Indian people from their homes and fields was more important than killing them. In 1779 Washington had adamantly opposed a joint Franco-American invasion of Canada; in 1782, with Yorktown won and peace talks in Paris well under way, he now proposed such an invasion to General Rochambeau, depicting the annexation of several Canadian provinces as “matters of great moment” that would help sever the British-Indian connection. He left little doubt, writes the historian John Ferling, “that he saw the acquisition of this vast region as important for those who wished to speculate in, or settle on, the frontier lands of New England, New York, and the trans-Appalachian West.”114 Nothing came of his suggestion, but Washington knew what the Indians knew: the war in the West was a war for Indian land.

  Never expecting to be betrayed by their British allies in the peace terms, Indians repelled American invasions with increasing unity of purpose.115 Then, suddenly it seemed to them, the war was over. When
Washington received news of the preliminary terms of peace, he sent three Oneidas in the spring of 1783 with a message to Brigadier General Allan Maclean, the British commander at Fort Niagara, asking him to prevent the Indians from committing acts of cruelty “disagreeable to them and to inhabitants of the United States.” Maclean wrote back in anger asking Washington why, if he really wanted to prevent “disagreeable consequences,” he had condoned attacks on Indians from Fort Pitt, and why did he allow newspapers to print lies that were a disgrace to any nation and served only to inflame tempers? Maclean would observe the cease-fire, but he awaited official confirmation.116 When the definitive Peace of Paris was signed in September 1783, Britain not only recognized American independence but also ceded to the United States all territory east of the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes and north of Florida. The peace did not mention Indians. British diplomats in Paris had handed Washington and his new nation the rich Ohio country they had been unable to win during the war.

  meanwhile, far beyond the west that Washington knew, the trans-Mississippi West was also experiencing revolutionary upheaval, albeit brought about by germs, not men. At the siege of Boston, with smallpox in the city, Washington had worried that the British would use the disease as “a weapon of Defence,” and there were rumors of plots to unleash germ warfare. Smallpox hit the American army retreating from Canada in 1776. John Adams told Abigail it was “ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indians together.”117 Washington had thousands of his soldiers inoculated in 1777, but smallpox continued to flare up, and it plagued Philadelphia, Charleston, and other cities as well as Boston. It struck Onondaga in the winter of 1776–77; the Creeks and Cherokees in the fall of 1779; Chickamaugas in the spring of 1780; Oneidas in December 1780; Senecas in the winter of 1781–82. Yet the death tolls in the East were nothing compared to the horrors unfolding in the West. Smallpox broke out in Mexico City in September 1779; by December it had killed eighteen thousand people. From there it spread in all directions, reaching the silver-mining districts of northern Mexico and mission villages in California and New Mexico. Indians who visited San Antonio and Santa Fe to trade for horses became infected and spread the disease along well-traveled trade routes across the Great Plains. The great trading villages of Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras on the Great Bend of the upper Missouri became death traps. The Arikaras, who numbered around twenty-four thousand in the mid-eighteenth century, lost 75 to 80 percent of their population. People who came to the Missouri River villages to trade passed the disease to neighbors. Sioux winter counts—calendars of significant events drawn on hides—recorded the epidemic in 1779–80. On the southern plains, Comanches said two-thirds of their people died. Shoshonis likely carried the disease home from Spanish settlements in New Mexico. They infected the Blackfeet. It spread to the Crees, Assiniboines, and Ojibwas. An estimated thirty thousand Indian people died on the Canadian plains. On the shores of Hudson’s Bay, traders reported Indians dying every day in the winter of 1783–84. Smallpox reached the Columbia River and spread among the dense populations along the Northwest Coast. In 1793 the English explorer George Vancouver saw Indians with pockmarked faces, abandoned villages littered with bones, and skeletons scattered along the beach.118