1775 (63 page)

W
hatever he penned in the Declaration of Independence, in practice Thomas Jefferson did not believe that liberty, equality, and inalienable rights were for everyone. Indians, for example, were in the way of western expansion. In mid-1776, he wrote to a friend that “nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country,” and later he was more vituperative in a letter to George Rogers Clark: “the end proposed [for upper Ohio Indians] should be their extermination or their removal beyond the Illinois River…the same world will scarcely do for them and us.”
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Fortunately for the United Colonies, however, 1775 was a year during which a cautious Congress emphasized negotiations and peace with Indians, although wars would bloody the backcountry again by 1777.

In the South, wariness of slave revolts also ran high. From Maryland to Georgia, black populations were large enough that militia units often had
a second role as slave patrols. One respected historian saw the colonies in “a panic, after 1772, about the imminence of a slave insurrection in regions where blacks already outnumbered whites. This was not idle speculation. Three ferocious and bloody rebellions were already underway, in Surinam, St. Vincent and Jamaica, and all were widely and apocalyptically reported in the North American press.”
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In racial matters, the year 1775 unfolded on tenterhooks.

In parts of the Chesapeake region, white indentured servants were equally suspect. George Washington, for one, worried continually about recapturing his dozen or so if they ran away, which some did. His plantation manager wrote in December 1775 of both blacks and whites that “there is not a man among them but would leave us if they believ’d they could make there [sic] escape…Liberty is sweet.”
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The general did not favor liberty for white indentured servants; they were property under Virginia law and had been paid for.

Officials in Britain counted multiple opportunities. Disaffection could be encouraged, and military alliances or enlistments could be obtained from each group: the roughly 200,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River; the 50,000 to 75,000 present and former white convicts and indentured servants; and perhaps most rewardingly, the nearly 500,000 black slaves.

Incitement had to be tempting. With the free white population of British North America numbering only 2.1 million or so, roughly 750,000 others whose attitudes ranged from restive to enslaved and hostile could tilt the political and military balance in some areas. Patriot leaders, many of them prominent militia officers, employers, or slave owners, understood that potential vulnerabilities outweighed the limited opportunities. For British strategists, the reverse applied. By spring and early summer 1775, Jefferson and Washington knew that one ranking Briton, Virginia’s Dunmore, was advancing plans to enlist black slaves and white indentured servants. He also counted on Great Lakes Indians to attack the Ohio and Virginia frontier. No other royal governor was so free in his discussions, and Britain paid for his candor.

Most colonies had one or two of these vulnerabilities, and Virginia, uniquely, had all three. Save for Rhode Island and Delaware, each colony had at least a small Indian frontier. Two had fought minor Indian wars in 1774—Virginians with the Shawnee, Georgians against the Creeks. Settlers in northern New England uneasily watched the Canadian Caughnawaga
and Abenaki, New Yorkers the vaunted Iroquois, North and South Carolinians the nearby Cherokee. For nearly a century, most tribes of the Great Lakes and Appalachian interior had raided the westward-moving white settlements—now the United Colonies—in loose alliance with the friendlier European power (hitherto France, now Britain) that purchased their furs, sold them trade goods, and encouraged their attacks from a perch in thinly settled Canada.

A less obvious possibility—that the sizable indentured servant populations in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were disaffected enough to furnish a fifth column—had gained attention during the French and Indian War. Representatives of the French government later asserted that servants in several colonies—Catholics especially—had in fact been ripe for a revolt against their English and colonial masters.
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Black slave uprisings had been feared during the French wars, and two additional decades had enlarged the dangers. Between 1750 and 1775, the combined slave population in Maryland and Virginia had doubled, climbing from 150,000 to nearly 300,000. The numbers in South Carolina had almost tripled. Further roiling the waters, a limited but influential antislavery movement was gaining headway in England and, to a lesser extent, in the American colonies. Emancipation talk grew after June 1772, when Lord Mansfield, Britain’s former attorney general, now chief justice of the Court of the King’s Bench, held in the famous
Somerset
decision that a slave in England could not be held captive by his master. That ruling, somewhat hedged, said nothing about North America or the West Indies. Indeed, another 61 years would pass before Parliament emancipated the slaves in the West Indies. Nevertheless, the British government in the early 1770s remained supreme and entitled to invalidate any legislation enacted in America. Dozens of newspapers held forth on what the
Somerset
case might mean. Conceivably, British officials could interfere with slavery in the thirteen colonies.
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Belief in help from Britain was certainly spreading among slaves in America. “Uncle Sommerset” was a presence on the grapevine.
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In late November 1774, James Madison, the future president, voiced white fear: “If America and Britain should come to a hostile rupture I am afraid an Insurrection among the slaves may and will be promoted.”
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He also noted that some blacks were choosing captains to lead them to the king’s army when it came. Many slaves were psychologically prepared for what they soon heard from Dunmore.

Of all the North American colonists, those in plantation country were most at risk—and those in Virginia perhaps most of all.

1775: A Serious Contest for Native American Loyalties

Much of eastern North America was still Indian country, and borders could be fluid. Visiting Iroquois, Cherokee, and Pamunkey or Nottoway tribesmen were common on the streets of Albany, Charleston, and Williamsburg. In parts of New England and upper New York, white and native American settlements overlapped. Some Iroquois villages were surprisingly prosperous. In 1775, by one account, the Fort Hunter Mohawks lived “much better than most of the Mohawk River farmers,” and some Oneida Indians “cooked in metal kettles and frying pans, ate with spoons from pewter plates at meals illuminated by candlesticks.” Voters in biracial Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for some years elected both Yankee and Indian selectmen (from the Mohican, Wappinger, Nipmuck, and Tunxis tribes).
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Toward the Great Lakes, Shawnee, Mingos, Wyandots, Hurons, Ottawas, and other tribes had until 1760 or so been allies of the French. By the 1770s, they were more aroused than ever before against encroaching white colonial settlers. Even so, they retained doubts about the still-unfamiliar British. Could King George’s chiefs continue to provide gifts, trade goods, and protection as the French had for so long? If the king’s men were strong enough to subdue their wayward colonists, as they insisted, why in recent years had the red-coated soldiers abandoned so many of their old forts in western Pennsylvania and Ohio—as well as others recently taken from the French, like several on the Great Lakes and Fort Chartres in Illinois (vacated in 1772)? And how had England’s soldiers been penned up on Boston’s small peninsula? If the two English-speaking peoples fought, perhaps the Indian peoples should remain neutral.

The outbreak of war in April 1775 generated bewilderment and uncertainty among most tribes, not ochre face paint and eager war dances. If any tribesmen reacted to the fighting at Lexington and Concord by quickly taking up muskets and hatchets, it was the “Stockbridge” Indians of Massachusetts. During the winter of 1774–1775, although just 300 strong, they had formed their own minuteman company, winning praise from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Wappingers in their ranks had quit New York’s Hudson Valley in the 1760s after difficulties with Sir William Johnson and Tory landowners, which gave them old scores to settle. When
hostilities began in April, seventeen Stockbridge volunteers marched off to join the Patriot forces at Cambridge. In the words of chronicler Colin Calloway, “while the Shawnees and Delawares, the supposed terrors of the Ohio frontier, clung to a precarious neutrality, the Christian Stockbridges preached war and presented the western tribes with a war belt and tomahawk.”
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The Stockbridges drew attention, arguably too much. Peeved English officers opined that the tribesmen had been brought to Boston especially to mock the Royal Navy: “On purpose to insult them, and were taught, by turning up their backsides, to express their defiance of them.” General Gage soon contended that the Americans had been the first to employ Indians. In a September letter to John Stuart, the British Indian superintendent in the South, he argued that “the Rebells have themselves open’d the Door; they have brought down all the savages they could against us here, who with their Rifle men are continually firing on our advanced sentries.”
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In fact, Gage had already made several proposals of his own for British employment of Indians.

As noted in
Chapter 6
, New Englanders got off to a fast start with the local tribes in 1775, enlisting Pigwacket, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy in the north and Mohegan and Pequot in the South. George Washington personally welcomed a half dozen chiefs to his camp in Cambridge that summer, most prominently Chief Swashan and Chief Louis of the Abenaki.
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Both Abenaki leaders promised to help if the Americans decided to invade Canada.

Circumstances in New York were less auspicious. In July, both the Continental Congress and the New York body named General Philip Schuyler to deal with the six Iroquois tribes. An Albany merchant, he had decades of trading experience and some credibility, particularly with the pro-American Oneida. However, because of Mohawk and Seneca commitment, the overall Iroquois tilt to the British was unbudgeable. Schuyler’s negotiations with the “Iroquois” in the summer of 1775 had limited scope, so that the resultant Treaty of Albany reflected the views of Oneida, Tuscarora, and a few other pro-American minorities. While adherents pledged only neutrality, not support, for some even that stance would not continue past 1776.
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Guy Johnson, appointed in 1774 to succeed his uncle, Sir William, as head of the British Northern Indian Department, sacrificed influence by fleeing the Mohawk Valley in June 1775. But he largely regained that loss by the summer of 1776 as American forces retreated from Canada in disarray.
Still, the Iroquois had mounted only one substantial attack during 1775—in September, within sight of Fort St. John near Montreal. A contingent of 100 or so painted Mohawks and Mohawk Valley Tories attacked a wing of the invading American force. When a heavy bombardment from the fort revealed unexpected British strength, General Schuyler—never much of a field commander—withdrew 30 miles southward. The Mohawks justifiably crowed.
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In general, Congress’s woodlands diplomacy was sober and effective. If keeping the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Canadian Indians neutral through the war verged on impossibility, even its temporary accomplishment in 1775 and well into 1776 was impressive. On July 12, 1775, just as George Washington took command of the new army, the Congress had established Middle and Southern Indian departments, as well as the Northern given to Schuyler. It was hoped that they would be counterweights to the British Northern and Southern Indian departments under Johnson and John Stuart. Much credit belonged to Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress selected in 1774. Besides displaying backstage skills, for which he was called the Samuel Adams of Pennsylvania, Thomson had also, over a quarter century, earned the confidence of the province’s Delaware Indians. In a solemn ceremony, they had likewise given him a name: Wegh-wu-law-mo-end, “The Man Who Talks the Truth.”
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Few Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish were so favored.

The Middle Department, in which Thomson took a particular interest, dealt with the Appalachian and Ohio Valley Indian frontiers of both Pennsylvania and Virginia. Here the key tribes were the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo. To complicate relations, a dispute existed between the two provinces over title to Pittsburgh and the Forks of the Ohio River. To officials in Williamsburg, the district was West Augusta County, Virginia; to frontier watchers in Philadelphia, it was Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. After Dunmore’s brief war with the Shawnee in October 1774, Virginia had occupied the contested area. Dunmore left a 75-man garrison in Fort Pitt (renamed Fort Dunmore) under Major John Connolly, as well as small detachments in two other new posts: Fort Fincastle (Wheeling) and Fort Blair (Point Pleasant). After obtaining land concessions from the defeated Shawnee in a preliminary agreement, the ambitious governor intended to follow up with a major Indian conference and peace treaty in the spring of 1775.