Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  The first sign of problems in the relationship between the Indians and the soon-to-be ascendant British imperial government came in Cherokee country, well before the signing of the Peace of Paris. The Cherokees by 1758 had a population of 10,000 to 12,000 living west of South Carolina. Their alliance with the British had been strong ever since the Yamasee War and they had provided significant assistance in Forbes's campaign against Fort Duquesne during the summer of that year. On their way home from that operation the Cherokees were savagely attacked by some of the backcountry settlers, who had begun to encroach on Cherokee lands. Some of the Cherokees retaliated, and a series of frontier skirmishes followed. South Carolina's government responded by seizing and executing a group of moderate chiefs who were trying to negotiate a truce. By January of 1760 the Cherokees were in a full-scale rebellion. A Scottish Highland regiment, first under Colonel Montgomery in 1760 and then under Colonel Grant in 1761, marched into the Cherokee heartland together with some provincial forces and suppressed the rebellion. In the brutal fashion of eighteenth-century Anglo-Saxon warfare, they destroyed first the lower and then the middle Cherokee towns. In the absence of a rival power able to supply them with arms and ammunition, the Cherokees had little leverage. They agreed to peace in 1761.

  By 1762 new problems were emerging in the North and West. Having reached new agreements with the British in the waning years of the war, many of the Great Lakes and Ohio peoples expected the British to recognize their land claims and to trade with them on the terms they had once enjoyed in trading with the French. However, the victorious British government soon began to make it clear that it felt no need to stay on good terms with the Indians. The British insisted on keeping soldiers garrisoned at the French forts and trading posts they had taken over during the war, which convinced the Indians that the British were about to repudiate the Easton Treaty and take their land. To make matters worse, General Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander in charge of the western forts, had decided that trading relationships with the Indians were too expensive for the British government to maintain. He issued a new set of regulations that limited the amount of trade goods, particularly ammunition, which the Indians could receive from British traders. This limit was deeply galling, not only violating established trading norms but also starving the Indians of the ammunition they needed in order to hunt.18

  Other major issues emerged as well. British commanders had promised during the war that the land claims of British-allied Indians would be respected. However, speculators quickly began to move surveyors and settlers into Indian land in northern New York, central Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley as soon as the fighting ceased. The British were also demanding that the Ohio and Great Lakes tribes return captives taken during the war. However, the Indians had adopted these captives and regarded them as family members.

  Unhappy about the terms being imposed on them by the British, the Indians now faced the question of how best to resist. One strategy that seemed to hold some promise was a pan-Indian alliance. The Iroquois had long understood the value of intertribal coalitions, and thus it is not surprising that the first to propose a pan-Indian alliance against the British were two Seneca chiefs, Tahaiadoris and Kiashuta. They met with tribal leaders in the Ohio Valley in June 1761 to propose an ambitious plan that would unite the Ohio and Great Lakes peoples with the Cherokees and the Iroquois to attack British forts west of the Alleghenies. Although British officials discovered the plan before it could be carried out, other tribal leaders were also beginning to think along the same lines.

  In the West, many Native American peoples had started to think of themselves as Indians who shared common interests with other Indians, rather than as members of discrete tribes with separate interests. This new identity, which had been developing for many years, coalesced during the war as peoples from different tribes fought side by side to defeat the British. During the 1750s and 1760s the idea that Native Americans shared a pan-Indian identity came to be expressed by religious leaders, particularly by a series of Native American prophets who had emerged in the Ohio Valley calling for a nativist revival. A young Delaware named Neolin explained that the “Master of Life” had made the land for the Indians, who had sinned by allowing white people to come into their land and corrupt them with their guns, iron trade goods, and alcohol. Now the Indians had two choices. Either they could continue down the path of alliances with the whites, a path which would lead to suffering and starvation, or they could cleanse themselves of white men's ways and drive the British out of their country. Among those listening to Neolin's message was an Ottawa chief named Pontiac. Soon Pontiac and other leaders were exchanging warbelts throughout the Great Lakes and Ohio region, each agreeing to take action against British forts provided the others would do so too as news of the hostilities arrived. Through a series of surprise attacks beginning in May 1763 the Indians captured all the smaller posts at Michilimackinac, St. Joseph, Miami, Ouiatenon, LeBoeuf, Sandusky, Presque Isle, and Venango, putting many of the garrisons' troops to death. At the same time they laid siege to the main forts at Pittsburgh and Detroit while threatening the communications with Niagara. The only northern Indians who did not join Pontiac's coalition were the Catholic mission Indians from Canada, who remained on the sidelines.19

  By the end of 1763 the rebellion had succeeded in utterly destabilizing the West. The western Indians took numerous forts, and cut off communications and supply lines to those they could not conquer. They raided British settlements along the western roads, terrifying settlers who fled back east of the Alleghenies. In Pennsylvania the Indians attacked the farms of British settlers who had begun moving into lands in the Susquehanna Valley in violation of the Easton Treaty of 1758. Eventually the British organized an opposition with help from the Iroquois and convinced the Indians in the Ohio Valley to lay down their arms. Further west, peace took years to achieve. Pontiac agreed to stop fighting after meeting with George Croghan in July 1765, and a more formal peace agreement was reached with the Great Lakes nations in August. However, the British did not obtain real control in the Great Lakes region at any time before the American Revolution.

  One result of the new instability in the West was to poison the relationship between Indians and colonists in western Pennsylvania, each of whom was increasingly coming to define their identity in terms of their antagonism towards the other. Late in 1763 a number of westerners, mainly Scots-Irishmen from the township of Paxton, sought revenge on the Indians after protesting vociferously that the Pennsylvania legislature had failed to protect them. Christian Indians, living close to white settler communities, were especially vulnerable even though they had maintained peaceful relations with the British throughout the war. In December 1763 a party of some 60 “Paxton Boys” attacked the Indian settlement at Conestoga, murdering six of the inhabitants; the rest took refuge in the Lancaster jail. Despite a proclamation by the governor denouncing the atrocity, the group returned a few days later, broke into the jail, and butchered the remaining 14 Conestogas, who went to their deaths praying to a Christian God for their salvation. The Paxton Boys accused them of having secretly conspired to help the western Indians attack settler communities on the frontier. In January 1764 the Paxton Boys marched to Philadelphia with their supporters, threatening to take over the government. It was a sad end to William Penn's “peaceable kingdom.”20

  With these crises unfolding, the British government realized they would need a new policy for managing their new territories and restoring peaceful relations with the Indians peoples in the West. The Proclamation of 1763 prohibited all settlement beyond a line running along the watershed of the Alleghenies, that area being reserved solely for the Indians. The proclamation was designed to centralize control over western lands and to channel new settlement into borderland regions where more British citizens were needed as a buffer against large populations of French and Spanish. An additional object was to reassure the Indians that the British intended to honor their treaties.21 Two superintend
ents were appointed to supervise relations with the southern and northern Indians. To meet the costs of these troops being stationed in the West, the Treasury sought a way to raise additional revenue. Since taxpayers at home in Britain were already heavily taxed, the Treasury began to consider ways to make the colonists pay their fair share. It seemed sensible; after all, the military protection being provided in the West would benefit the colonists by making their borders more secure. Unfortunately for the British government all of its new policies began to be announced at a moment when the British North American colonists were looking forward to greater freedom and economic growth.

  The British government in 1763 faced an unprecedented challenge. Having tried unsuccessfully to create an empire of conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it had succeeded by 1700 in creating an empire of trade. In 1763 that empire of trade was suddenly augmented by vast new territories in North America, acquired by conquest. Meanwhile the inhabitants of these new territories, including both French settlers and Native Americans, had interests fatally at odds with the interests of the settlers in the 13 original British colonies. Maintaining peace across this enormous area would be a difficult and costly affair.

  By now the Indians east of the Mississippi had gained considerable experience in organizing resistance strategies to protect their ways of life. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of Pontiac's Rebellion, they had lost a considerable portion of their populations to the casualties of war, starvation, and disease. Their range of options for resisting European encroachments upon their homelands was growing narrower as a result. Ironically the British government's policies in the West, if they had succeeded, might have allowed the Indians to retain some of their autonomy and to coexist with the settlers for many generations. Sadly, however, those policies offered a weak foundation for their hopes.

  British North American colonial leaders had already begun predicting the creation of an American empire extending all the way to the Pacific. And all too soon, these same leaders would begin arguing that Parliament was depriving them of their constitutional rights and privileges, commencing the long debate that would lead the 13 British mainland colonies to declare their independence from the empire. Once they managed to break free of Great Britain, the settlers' governments would have little incentive to respect the Indians' territorial claims.

  Eventually, European American settlers and their descendents would build ranches and farms and cities on the hunting grounds and the cornfields that had sustained the lives of the earliest Americans for thousands for years. Native American peoples would be forced to adapt, retreating west or onto reserves where their claims to the land and its resources could be conveniently forgotten. And yet they would persist and their stories will continue to be told.

  1. Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill, 2011).

  2. The debate over the suitability of deploying British regulars has generated a substantial literature. Most nineteenth-century writers like Francis Parkman argued that the regulars were unsuitable for warfare in America, unlike the colonists who had been brought up to wilderness fighting from birth; this view was also adopted by many more recent writers, notably Howard H. Peckham, The Colonial Wars, 1689–1762 (Chicago, 1964; and Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763 (New York, 1973). The contrary view is argued by Stanley M. Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (New Haven, 1933); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, Vol. 6: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757; Vol. 7: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1946, 1949); Peter E. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740–1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 629–52; Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, 1989); and most recently by Guy Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (Amherst, 2003). For sympathetic accounts of Braddock, see Stanley M. Pargellis, “Braddock's Defeat,” American Historical Review, 41 (1936), 253–69; Lee S. McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, 1986); and Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 105–7, who points out that Washington never criticized Braddock for the disaster.

  3. See for this point W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, rev. edn (Albuquerque, 1983), 173. Eventually many Acadian refugees resettled in southern Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns.

  4. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008), shows that fear created by the Indian attacks in western Pennsylvania not only produced a political crisis in the colonial government but also helped to generate a general hostility towards all Indians along with a new sense of white racial solidarity among the ethnically diverse Pennsylvania settlers.

  5. Cadwallader Colden to Peter Collinson, August 23, 1758, Colden Papers, New York Historical Society Collections, Vol. 5 (New York, 1921), 253.

  6. American popular culture has purveyed a myth that the North American settlers excelled in warfare because they had abandoned conventional European tactics and adopted Indian fighting methods. Guy Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness, finds that in fact settlers performed poorly in warfare because of their lack of experience and organization. Colonial military efforts (and later the British government) succeeded only when they managed to organize logistical support for large-scale, long-lasting conventional warfare.

  7. For an analysis of the colonial soldier, see Fred W. Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (Chapel Hill, 1984). See also Fred W. Anderson, “Why Did Colonial New Englanders Make Bad Soldiers? Contractual Principles and Military Conduct during the Seven Years' War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 38 (1981), 395–417. In War and Society, Selesky challenges the view that colonial soldiers came from middle-ranking colonial families, arguing that most of the volunteers were from the lowest stratum of society.

  8. The admission of Pitt to the ministry has traditionally been seen as the beginning of a more dynamic conduct of the war. See Peckham, The Colonial Wars; and Leach, Arms for Empire. In a more critical analysis, Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America, suggests that Pitt interfered unnecessarily. For a contrary evaluation of Pitt's war leadership, see Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt–Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years' War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, 1985). He argues that many of the policies ascribed to Pitt were already in operation before his admission to office and that his powers as a war minister were circumscribed by constitutional constraints.

  9. The incident was traditionally used to portray French and native savagery, the implication being that Anglo-Saxon methods were more civilized. This attitude long typified British and American accounts of their various wars. See especially Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (Boston, 1884), comparing his account of the massacre at Fort William Henry with the attack by Rogers's rangers on the St. Francis Indians in 1759. For a critical analysis of Parkman, see Francis Jennings, “Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables,” William and Mary Quarterly, 42 (1985), 305–28. Recent accounts of the episode are more sympathetic to the Indians, explaining their point of view and motivations for the attack. See Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York, 1990), as well as Anderson, Crucible of War, ch. 19.

  10. The central importance of the Treaty of Easton is discussed in Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 4; and Anderson, Crucible of War, 267–85.

  11. For the importance of the Iroquois decision to fight with the British at Niagara, see Anderson, Crucible of War, 330–9. For the sequence of events in this battle, see Richard Middleton, Pontiac's War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences (New York, 2007), 10.


  12. For the importance of the West in Spanish calculations, see Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire.

  13. The traditional view was laid out in Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, Vol. 6: The Years of Defeat, 1755–1757; Vol. 7: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1946, 1949). The same argument is implicit in Leach, Arms for Empire.

  14. This newer historiography considers not only the Anglo-American but also the French experience in the war. Important contributions include Eccles, The Canadian Frontier; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York, 1994); and Anderson, Crucible of War. Recent work typically treats the Indians as central players in the war. See, for example, Matthew Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years' War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, 2003). The traditional view was based on an assumption that because the Indians were clan-based rather than state-based societies, they were unable to wage war effectively. Recent experiences around the world with highly destructive wars waged by nonstate actors (such as al-Qaeda) have provoked a rethinking about this assumption. See, for example, Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, “Amerindian Power in the Early Modern Northeast: A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 61 (2004), 77–106, which argues that the Abenaki Indians effectively waged war against New England for nearly 50 years after the end of King Philip's War.