Conceived in Liberty (253 page)

Rodney’s predation was condemned by the British liberals and merchants;
Horace Walpole condemned the plunder as setting a “savage and dangerous precedent,” and the West Indies planters and merchants protested that the seizure “injured several contracts, which are founded on the law of nature, and which form the most sacred bond of society.”
*

*
See Joseph Dorfman,
The Economic Mind in American Civilization
(New York: Viking Press, 1946), I:194, 210.

*
See Piers Mackesy,
The War for America, 1775–1783
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 417.

The war in the West, as in the North, largely consisted of a series of terror raids. But here the essence of the war was not a series of raids by heavily armed counter-revolutionary forces at war with the populace itself; here the main pro-British forces were the Indians, understandably deeply hostile to the settlers who had pushed back their territory. Indian raids were proportionately more massive; and warfare in the West was a guerrilla war on
both
sides, a genocidal war between two hostile peoples. Of course, another difference in the western war was the vast amounts of unoccupied land and the scarcity of inhabitants, that made the war in the West relatively unimportant and overlooked in the scale of the war as a whole. Its ultimate and long-range importance, however, was considerable, for the ultimate disposition of the vast western territory was at stake.

The region north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, captured by the British from the French in the Seven Years’ War, was virtually unoccupied. This region, as well as what is now northern and western New York, was controlled during the Revolution by the British. The two strong British forts commanding the region, Detroit on Lake Michigan and Niagara in western New York, were the hub of operations for British regulars, Tory bands, and Indians against the frontier. The mutual devastation, especially in more populated upstate New York, was enormous.

The story of the Revolutionary War in the West is essentially the story of the brilliant young Virginia frontiersman George Rogers Clark. It has already been shown that Clark played a large part, in the early phases of the war, in saving the Kentucky settlers from the domination of the Transylvania Company. He had also been appointed as a major in the Virginia militia and the head of its forces in Kentucky.

Clark conceived a truly daring scheme: with his handful of Kentuckians he would strike, secretly and swiftly, at the French towns in what is now southern Illinois, towns that could serve as sources of attack upon the Kentuckians by Illinois Indians. The complacent British had left these French towns virtually undefended. Approving of Clark’s plan, Gov. Patrick Henry made him a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to proceed. By the time Clark reached the last lap of his expedition—the departure from the Falls of the Ohio on June 26, 1778—his force had dwindled to considerably fewer than 200, and he had estimated 500 men as his minimum need! His command would be outnumbered five to one by the resident militia of the French towns and more than that by the Indians of the region. Nevertheless, he characteristically paid little attention to the odds: “The more I reflected on my weakness the more I was pleased with the enterprise.” Sailing down the Ohio to the mouth of the Tennessee River by June 30, Clark marched up quietly through the Illinois country. On the night of July 4, the hungry little band reached and captured the French town of Kaskaskia without firing a shot; the surprise had been complete.

Clark shrewdly spared the people of Kaskaskia from any military reprisals or plunder, and also told them of the French entry into the war. Led by Father Pierre Gibault, the French now hailed the American forces as liberators. The nearby towns of Cahokia and Prairie du Rocher fell as painlessly.

It was clear that to safeguard the newly captured towns, the next objective would have to be Vincennes, another French town 180 miles to the east. Vincennes, on the Wabash River, was a key town commanding the great portage and river route from the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and Detroit, down to the Wabash and thence to the Ohio River. Vincennes, too, was left in the hands of French militia and undefended by British troops. Father Gibault rushed to Vincennes and persuaded the French population to change sides, and the people of Vincennes readily agreed. A single American platoon was enough to occupy the town. Clark’s meager force, now dwindled to 100, was scattered among the four French towns and was kept supplied from Spanish-held New Orleans. Through bravery and bluff, Clark’s charismatic personality and his ability to appear out of the blue deeply impressed the powerful Indian tribes of the region, and he was not only able to occupy the four towns of the Illinois-Indiana region, but also to neutralize the massive Indian power on which the British had counted to move against the American frontier.

At this point, British Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, commandant of Detroit, embarked upon the reconquest of the Illinois-Indiana region. Ultimately he hoped to join with British agent John Stuart and
southern Indians to sweep away all traces of Americans west of the Appalachians. Setting out in early October 1778, Hamilton expected to attract thousands of Indians along his march. He reached Vincennes on December 17 with 600 men, and marched in and took the town without opposition. The French militia, seeing on which side their bread was now buttered, had quickly shifted back to the English side.

The winter weather was extremely bad, and so Hamilton decided to wait until spring to rendezvous with Stuart’s southern Indians on the Tennessee River. Clark, of whom Hamilton had just heard for the first time, and the town of Kaskaskia could be attended to in due course. Confidently, Hamilton sent home most of his force to winter more comfortably in Detroit, and sent out his Indians on various raids; he remained at the Vincennes fort with 80 men, awaiting the great assembly and advance the following spring.

An ordinary American commander would have taken advantage of this respite to hightail it out of the Illinois area, but Clark was no ordinary commander. To Clark the situation was clear. In the spring, Hamilton would be able to assemble enough men at Vincennes not only to capture Illinois, but Kentucky and perhaps Pittsburgh, able, indeed, to sweep the Americans out of the West. Now Hamilton was weak, and the only course for the Americans was an immediate surprise attack against an overconfident British force, who would never expect an American attack in the midst of the vile midwinter weather.

Clark decided on a joint attack by land and by water, the latter consisting of one warship which proved unable to reach Vincennes in time for the fray. To supplement his fewer than ninety Americans, Clark attracted about eighty Frenchmen to the cause by a display of enormous confidence and assurance. He launched his seemingly quixotic expedition on February 5. Slogging through intense rains and rising floods, his little band was able to reach Vincennes undetected by the enemy by February 23.

Replacing surprise by bluff, Clark won over the opportunistic French townspeople, none of whom ever dared to inform the British garrison in the fort of the arrival of the Americans. He swiftly occupied the town, added eager French militia to his force, and laid siege to the British fort. He continued to employ daring and braggadoccio to cripple the morale of the British forces, so impressing the French half of the garrison that they were ready to surrender. The gamble had succeeded with hardly the loss of a single man. Stunned at the sudden reversal of his fortunes, the intimidated Hamilton was induced to surrender on February 25. Universally hated by the frontiersmen for buying American scalps from the Indians, he was almost killed several times
en route
to his prison, where he was treated very badly for nearly two years by his Virginia captor, the usually humane Gov. Thomas Jefferson.

At this point Clark’s remarkable and intuitive daring temporarily deserted him; it was now, with the British demoralized and the French population of Detroit on the verge of rebellion, that Clark could have taken his 200 men and struck at the heart of British power in the West: Detroit. But he allowed himself to be guided by more conventional military considerations, and waited for expected reinforcements, most of which never arrived. By June, the opportunity to seize Detroit was lost.

Even so, his achievement was still monumental, for he had stopped in its tracks the mammoth British invasion southward that would have conquered the West. By early spring of 1779, five British expeditions, picking up hundreds of French and Indians
en route,
were on the way to meet Hamilton in Illinois. Two expeditions left southwestward from Lake Erie, and three set forth from Mackinac, at the head of Lake Michigan. The electrifying news of Hamilton’s capture totally demoralized the French and Indians, who deserted
en masse.
All the columns were forced to return home, and the British timetable for conquest in the West was completely disrupted. The 1779 campaign was finished. In addition, thousands of frontiersmen and settlers were so buoyed by Clark’s victory as to pour into Kentucky and add to its defenses. Others erected completely new settlements at the bend of the Tennessee River.

To the northeast, on the New York frontier, the density of the population of American settlers and of Indian villages led to a more genocidal form of warfare than on the sparsely populated frontier of the Ohio Valley region. With the failure of the Burgoyne and St. Leger expeditions of 1777, it was clear that the brunt of fighting on the New York frontier thereafter would have to be borne by the Iroquois and by the Tories. Taking charge of the Indian effort was the brilliant, well-educated, and fiercely pro-British Mohawk chieftain, young Joseph Brant; the Tory forces were led by Butler’s Rangers, organized by Sir John Johnson’s old deputy Indian agent, Col. John Butler. In the late spring of 1778, the two agreed that Butler would launch an attack on the Wyoming Valley, while Brant would launch a series of covering raids further north in New York. The lush and isolated Wyoming Valley, in northeastern Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River, had been populated by settlers from Connecticut who, with some logic, claimed it on behalf of their home state. But Pennsylvania’s bitter hostility to the settlers and to Connecticut’s claims weakened the defense of the valley and gave Butler and his Tories an easy target for mayhem and plunder.

In late June (about the same time Clark left Kentucky for Illinois) Butler set forth from his camp at Unadilla, from which he could strike north and east at New York or south at Pennsylvania. With 200 Tory rangers and 500 Indians, he marched down the valley, forcing two stockades to surrender.
He then trapped the main American defense force in a clever ambush on July 3 and massacred the fleeing defenders. With several hundred Americans slaughtered in the battle, and only three losses to the Tory-Indian force, the remainder of the garrison and settler families surrendered at the main stockade of Forty Fort. The terms of the surrender called for their being disarmed and then released unharmed in return for their promise that they would not fight any further in the American cause. Butler and his Indians were surprisingly scrupulous in keeping the agreement, even though the valley’s homes, mills and livestock were burned, plundered, and destroyed. But in their hysteria, the Wyoming refugees confused the disastrous battle with the later surrender, and convinced everyone, even the British, that Butler and the Indians had conducted a horrible massacre in the Wyoming Valley. Such was the power of atrocity propaganda that the Wyoming campaign became well known as the Wyoming Valley Massacre. Actually, the breaking of agreements cut the other way, for most of the survivors promptly broke their promise, unhappily for Americans captured in later campaigns.

Butler’s successful devastation of the Wyoming Valley had strategic significance. Congress had just authorized Gen. Lachlan McIntosh, commandant at Pittsburgh, to march westward to capture the critical British base of Detroit. But Butler’s strike near home ended that expedition, and this relief of pressure enabled Hamilton to embark on his autumn campaign against Vincennes and the Shawnee Indians to attack settlements in Kentucky.

In the meantime, beginning at the end of May 1778, Joseph Brant conducted a spectacular series of covering raids in the Mohawk Valley on the New York frontier. Fighting with him were some 300 Indians, plus a floating number of eager Tories of whatever neighborhood he happened to be in. Employing mobile and elusive guerrilla tactics, he marched back and forth for two months among the villages and farmlands of the Mohawk, the Susquehanna, and the Delaware watersheds, burning, plundering, destroying, terrorizing American patriots (especially the leaders), and rescuing and recruiting Tories. But while Brant systematically destroyed American property, depriving Washington’s army of the important Mohawk Valley source of wheat and meat, he took care not to murder indiscriminately. There were no complaints, in an age when such protests readily arose, of his killing or maltreating American civilians; the only Americans he killed were armed men in the heat of battle. Most prisoners were released after Brant lectured them on their wickedness as rebels against King George.

Aided by the Butler Rangers, Brant went on to strike a devastating blow in mid-September to the most fertile part of the Mohawk Valley, the German Flats district in the west valley. While the citizens of the community
huddled safely but helplessly in Forts Herkimer and Dayton, the 500 Indians and Tories thoroughly and methodically burned and destroyed all the homes and property of that region.

The American military authorities decided that counter-raids of vengeance and collective punishment upon the Indian communities were in order. The most important of these took place in early October, when Col. William Butler led four companies of Continental riflemen upon Indian towns on the upper Susquehanna River. Only defenseless women and children were to be found in these villages, and the Americans added mass rape of the captured Indian women to the usual plundering and devastation of property on both sides. This gratuitous sexual brutality greatly shocked the Indians and led to escalating counter-brutalities in subsequent Indian attacks upon New York. All that Butler and the other American raiders had accomplished was to goad the Indians into greater and more destructive attacks.