1775 (34 page)

This partial success is typically lost in 1776-centered portraiture. In the autumn of 1775, for example, some 40 Abenaki joined the American invasion of Quebec! Once those expeditions came undone, though, so did the interest of Canadian tribes in an alliance. Indian support for the British reemerged in 1776, although the Penobscot, Passamaquoddys, and Stockbridge of New England remained American allies.

To the west, northern New York’s Mohawk Valley also became contested ground. Sir William Johnson, superintendent of the Northern Indian Department, who long kept much of the Iroquois nation loyal to Britain, had died in 1774, leaving shoes no one could fill. His nephew and successor, Colonel Guy Johnson, fled to Canada in 1775 and ran the Northern department from there. Many of the Johnson family’s Scottish and Palatine German supporters and tenants took the Crown’s side, moving north. Hundreds abandoned their properties to join Loyalist regiments. The valley stayed divided, with many Tories remaining and assisting the British in later invasions.

In July 1775, Patriots also sent emissaries to the embattled Iroquois Confederacy. But of the six tribes, only one wound up on the American side—the Presbyterian-missionary-influenced Oneida. For many months, apprehension that invasion through the Champlain corridor and the Mohawk Valley might restore British control kept some ambivalent New Yorkers on the fence. Only in the autumn of 1777, after two separate British expeditions were defeated at the Battles of Bennington, Oriskany, and Saratoga, did the balance tilt to the American side. Even then, the valley remained torn by a local civil war.

A battleground where loyalties more clearly turned on the Indian threat was central and western Pennsylvania. As we have seen, Quaker policy had been to stay on good terms with the Indians—a relationship that sometimes included selling them hatchets and muskets—rather than extending settlement westward and undertaking major defense outlays. The far west of Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and the Forks of the Ohio, was claimed in 1775 by both Pennsylvania and Virginia. By early summer, perceptions as to which side would better protect the region swung on impressions of Virginia’s mercurial governor.

By November, Lord Dunmore’s plan to bring the Indians down on Virginia had damned him. A largely Indian force was to be led through Ohio and western Virginia by British and Loyalist officers. After traveling down the Potomac, it was to link up with Dunmore in April 1776 at the port of Alexandria. Gage in Boston had at first approved the idea, but public exposure that autumn turned the issue of Indian danger against the British in both colonies, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

For the most part, a different set of tribes menaced the southeastern frontier in the Carolinas and Georgia. Here, too, the question was which side would offer better protection. The British government’s Southern Indian Department, under Superintendent Stuart and his key deputies, Alexander Cameron (who dealt with the Cherokee), Charles Stuart (with the Choctaw), David Taitt (the Creeks), and Farquhar Bethune (the Chickasaw), was both Loyalist and Scottish, as were many of the Indian traders in the southeast.
²⁵
By late 1775 and 1776, these relationships suggested that when the frontier burst into flame, the Cherokee and the Creeks would be British allies. Opposing Indian dangers might unite backcountry whites who otherwise would have been more divided politically.

In both Georgia and South Carolina, the Patriot faction initially kept open lines to both Creeks and Cherokee, even working to ensure delivery of the usual annual supplies of arms or ammunition counted on by the tribes. In Georgia, the gunpowder promised to the Creeks during the autumn was not brought until February 1776.
²⁶
In South Carolina, Patriot leaders attempted delivery in late October 1775, sending a wagon loaded with some lead and a thousand pounds of gunpowder for the Cherokee’s winter hunt. However, that wagon was waylaid and captured in the backcountry by Tory irregulars, who thereupon cited the supplies as evidence that
Patriots
sought to arm the Cherokee against the Loyalists.
²⁷

Frontier memories made that explanation too illogical to succeed. South
Carolina’s 1759–1761 war with the Cherokee, as we have seen, had been a training ground for many future Patriot military leaders. Many backcountrymen had also been left unhappy over its inconclusive result and distrustful of the British as too attentive to the Cherokee.
²⁸
In consequence, when a South Carolina Patriot militia, in December 1775, defeated several hundred armed Tories, Indian traders, and Scovilites camped across the Indian Line on Cherokee land, they tapped into old frontier and vigilante psychologies. Whig historian David Ramsey, writing a decade later, concluded that “the names of the Scovilites and Regulators were insensibly exchanged for the appellation of Tories and Whigs, or the friends of the old order and the new order of things.”
²⁹
This evocation, said historian Tom Hatley, scored a Whig “propaganda victory” by “tapping deep-seated anti-tribal fears among the backcountry farmers.”
³⁰

After deciding on full-scale war during the spring, the Cherokee, in company with hundreds of Indian-connected Loyalists, on July 1 attacked the settlements along a broad front from Virginia to Georgia. After initial shock and white flight, troops from all four colonies counterattacked, in numbers that ultimately reached 6,000 men. This campaign, which broke the strength of the Cherokee nation, produced a great psychological victory. Historian Ramsey wrote that “several who called themselves Tories in 1775 became active Whigs in 1776 and cheerfully took up arms against the Indians, and in the second, against Great Britain, as the instigator of their barbarous devastations.”
³¹

The Cherokee became a Whig recruiting poster. A chronicler more sympathetic to the British and Indians agreed that “the Cherokee attacks promoted unity among most backcountry inhabitants, regardless of their political persuasion…[Loyalist] Robert Cunningham ‘would not at first believe that the British Administration were so wicked as to Instigate the Savages to War against us.’ When he realized it was true, Cunningham and other Loyalists imprisoned in Charleston offered to serve against the Cherokee and the Council of Safety released them from confinement.”
³²
Would-be neutrals in the backcountry changed their minds after seeing Loyalists painted like Indians among their attackers, enabling Patriots to consolidate firm political control that lasted almost four years until the British turned south in 1780 and invaded South Carolina in force.

In Georgia, many frontier settlers had at first believed claims by Governor Wright and his friends that British strength and influence would best safeguard them from nearby Creek Indians able to put several thousand
“gunmen” in the field. But these Indian-hating “Crackers”—a term Wright himself used—changed their minds after becoming convinced that “their [British] rulers preferred the Indians and the Indian trade to the interests of the settlers.” In 1775, these inhabitants came to believe that John Stuart, the Indian superintendent, was planning to bring the Cherokee down on them. In the words of one Georgia historian, “the rumor, false though it was, was the most effective weapon the liberty faction could have used to win over the people of the frontier. Fear of Indians kept the frontier loyal in 1774; fear of Indians would sever that loyalty in 1775.”
³³

One irony was that by beating the Cherokee so decisively, troops in both Carolinas reduced their menace to no more than an occasional small raid. Loyalists could no longer easily be tied to Indians when the more serious civil war unfolded in 1780 and 1781.

A few British officials in the southern colonies—Virginia’s Dunmore was obviously one—had argued in 1775 it would be best to quickly mobilize the Indians as allies. But Stuart, the superintendent, remembering South Carolina’s Cherokee War of 1759–1761, understood better. Unless the Indians operated with British troops and were kept somewhat under their control, he thought, Cherokee or Creek depredations would benefit the rebels.
³⁴

In this early stage of the war, Patriot victories over the Cherokee between July and October 1776 were anticlimactic. Their defeat in South Carolina had been preordained when the Snow Campaign of December 1775 united the white settlers. As for Virginia, defeat of the Cherokee in the new state’s far southwest also came after Dunmore’s credibility had been all but lost with his late July evacuation of Gwynn’s Island, just off the mouth of the Rappahannock River.

The effect that anti-Indian feeling had on southern backcountry psychologies was not lost on Patriot politicians. Thomas Jefferson had been anti-Indian in 1775, but as governor in 1781, he issued especially harsh instructions to George Rogers Clark and his Virginia troops for dealing with the upper Ohio Indians: “The end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the [Great] lakes. The same world will scarcely do for them or us.”
³⁵
So much for the endowment of all men with inalienable rights.

Religious Refugees and Evangelical Insurgents

Among the migrants to the backcountry were some fleeing war or escaping civic obligation. Others were forsaking state churches and patriotism for a
charismatic religion of salvation and oneness with a personal God. Most of the second category were evangelicals, children and grandchildren of the Great Awakening, not a few of whom had little use for a revolution allied with Whig town or county governments and churches with an educated clergy.

The North Carolina backcountry, besides Separate Baptists, had a small but politically combustible admixture of disowned and fallen-away Quakers who had left Pennsylvania. In northern New England, many evangelicals were at religious and political odds with the Puritan cultural hearth of greater Boston. Many were poor and uneducated. While not Tories, they disliked Congregationalism’s “God is an American Patriot” military commitment and theology. Some New Lights and “Inner Lights” (Quakers or fallen-away Quakers) believed that God held a different set of priorities. The true role of the American Revolution, or so they explained, would be to disestablish southern and New England state churches, making way for the new direct-relationship creeds through which God truly made himself known.
³⁶

This was certainly the view of many Baptists. Those in Rhode Island and Connecticut got along reasonably well with their relatively democratic and Baptist-friendly Patriot governments. However, in Massachusetts (including its Maine district) and in New Hampshire, Baptists assailed established Congregationalism and its political allies for denying them religious and tax-related rights akin to those that Americans were insisting on from Britain. In Massachusetts proper, Patriot leaders worked out an arrangement whereby most Baptists supported the Revolution and were willing to bear arms.
³⁷
But across New England’s northern roof, where both government power and the war were distant, an emotional immersion in religion—the kiss of charity instead of militia duty—tilted a sizable minority of Separate Baptist preachers and their adherents toward neutralism.
³⁸

The future Vermont, with no local church establishment, would become a famous seedbed of prophets and sect organizers, including the families of Mormons Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida community; and William Miller, the founder of the Adventists. If any part of the northern backcountry matched Maine for sects and religious quirkiness, it was Vermont.
³⁹

Even so, the most powerful religious yeast of 1775 was bubbling in the southern colonies, where Anglicanism’s final, fading decade as a gentry-dominated, established church promised to open a wide door for
itinerant-led, emotional religion. To be fair, Virginia Anglicans did a better job than other colonies, organizing dozens of Anglican churches in the backcountry. Lutheran and Presbyterian churches were also allowed, and dozens thrived. Even so, a large vacuum existed, and by the 1760s Separate Baptists had taken particular hold in Southside counties close to the North Carolina border. The years just before the Revolution saw the largest growth. By 1774, Virginia had 54 Separate Baptist churches or chapels, up from 14 in 1771 and just 7 in 1770.
⁴⁰

North Carolina’s burgeoning hinterland was thinly churched. Although a royal governor made concerted efforts on behalf of the established church during the 1760s, by 1775 only two Anglican churches had been built west of the fall line—in Hillsborough and Salisbury. In Charlotte, the largely Presbyterian community had successfully demonstrated against an Anglican church there.
⁴¹
As for Separate Baptists, whereas their seedbed in Virginia circa 1775 involved a half dozen Southside counties, in North Carolina most of the Piedmont was in the grip of dissenting denominations—Baptist, Presbyterian, German Reformed, Quaker, Dunkard, and Moravian. Baptists probably constituted a plurality.

Anglican weakness against a powerful tide was equally obvious in South Carolina, where as of 1775, only three parishes, St. Mark’s, St. Matthew’s, and St. David’s, served the entire backcountry. By 1777, as districts replaced parishes as state political units, a report to the Commons House listed 91 dissenting churches or meetinghouses versus only 25 Anglican churches and chapels.
⁴²
In Georgia, Anglicans had only two major churches—Christ Church in Savannah and St. Paul’s in Augusta. In a colony less than 40 years old, most denominations were just getting started.

The vestry Anglican leadership of Virginia and the Carolinas, as we have seen, was generally latitudinarian and rarely high church in theological matters. This was especially true for many prominent Patriots. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and the Lees in Virginia, along with Christopher Gadsden, William H. Drayton, Henry Laurens, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in South Carolina, were all Anglicans who personally supported disestablishment. Others, while less amenable, nevertheless saw disestablishment as political handwriting on the Patriot wall. As war broke out, these flexibilities permitted Patriot outreach to local Presbyterians (easy) and to Baptists (more complicated). Religion, like politics, was evangelizing and democratizing. The only question was how much.