Conceived in Liberty (254 page)

By late 1778, the year’s campaign was supposed to be over. The New York and Pennsylvania frontiers had suffered devastating losses, including the destruction of potential supplies for the American army. Sporadic Indian raids had also been severe on the southern frontier. But for the energetic young Tory Walter Butler, who had replaced his ailing father John as head of Butler’s Rangers, the year’s work was
not
over. He persuaded Brant and the Indians, infuriated by the barbarities of the American raids, to join him in a winter march on strategic Fort Alden in the New York Cherry Valley. Butler failed to keep his advance a complete surprise, but this did not matter. Colonel Ichabod Alden, commandant of the fort, not only refused to heed warnings of the Tory-Indian approach, but also refused to allow anyone to take refuge inside the walls of his command. He and his top officers heedlessly lived outside the fort, and paid for this carelessness with their lives when Butler swept down to attack on November 11, 1778.

Butler, however, at once lost control of his Indian troops, especially the Seneca and the Cayuga, who preferred to attack the defenseless residents of Cherry Valley rather than the armed fort. The defenders, meanwhile, remained in the safety of their garrison. This time it truly was a massacre, as lives were no longer spared in the general devastation. Even the Wells family, old friends of Brant and Butler, were slaughtered by the rampaging Indians without their commanders’ knowledge. Only when the British forces reassembled did Butler and Brant prevail over the bitter objections of the Indians, and set free the prisoners taken at Cherry Valley.

The Cherry Valley massacre, occurring so close to the center of population and late and isolated in the winter campaign, also found an important
place in the public consciousness, and in American propaganda against the British—and with more justice than the Wyoming incident.

The next year, 1779, Congress decided upon total retaliation against the Iroquois. Washington placed in command of this massive expedition Gen. John Sullivan. The plan was to devastate the Indian country on the New York-Pennsylvania frontier by sending in three divisions of troops. The main body of three brigades under Sullivan was to advance north from Easton, Pennsylvania, through the Wyoming Valley and up the Susquehanna River to Tioga. Gen. James Clinton was to take another brigade southwest from the Mohawk and down the Unadilla River to join Sullivan at Tioga. In the meantime, Col. Daniel Brodhead was to march northeast from Pittsburgh up the Allegheny toward Tioga.

The campaign began inauspiciously as Clinton sent a force of nearly 600 to attack and devastate the Onondaga country. A swift surprise force in late April dutifully burned three Onondaga towns. The difficulty here was that the Onondaga had been the least warlike of the Iroquois tribes, and had yearned for peace; now they resolved to fight the Americans. By late June, Clinton had assembled 1,600 troops at Lake Otsego, and was ready to go. But Sullivan was having his troubles. Not only was Pennsylvania still reluctant to defend the Connecticut settlers of the Wyoming Valley, but his long unpaid New Jersey troops began to mutiny. Furthermore, he kept insisting upon ever more troops and supplies for the campaign. Sullivan was not ready to march until the end of July.

The British and allied forces knew of the developing American plans and for their part the Iroquois, always oriented to New York rather than to the west, were undaunted by the news of Clark’s capture of Hamilton at Vincennes. Brant and Butler tried flank attacks on New York settlements, but Sullivan refused to be lured into defending the frontier areas; only aggression, not mere defense, he argued, could eliminate the Indian menace for good and all. He joined forces with Clinton at Tioga and, on August 26, they marched west with a huge force of 4,000 veteran Continental troops intent on totally devastating the Indian villages and farms. Guarding against surprise attack were veteran frontiersmen, Oneida scouts, and Morgan’s former rifle unit. His force, numbering only 750, Butler was obviously no match for this massive troop and he assumed a defensive position at the Indian village of Newtown. He counted on surprise, however, and surprise he did not have. He and Brant were smashed at the Battle of Newtown on August 29, and were forced to flee posthaste westward to the Genessee. The bodies of the Indian fallen were savagely mutilated by the American forces. The entire heartland of the powerful Iroquois Nation lay open to total destruction, to which Sullivan applied himself with a will. It was to be so devastating as to eliminate any capacity of the Iroquois to make war or even to subsist in their homeland.
Towns, substantial wooden and stone houses with windows, cornfields, gardens, orchards, livestock, storehouses—all were burned to the ground. There were few prisoners or hostages taken and few Indian lives lost, as the despairing Indians fled before Sullivan’s advance. Meanwhile, during late August and early September, Brodhead’s force of over 600 devastated Seneca and Mingo towns on the Allegheny, burning eleven towns and returning to Pittsburgh without losing a single man.

Sullivan reached the Genessee on September 15 and levelled the Great Seneca Castle, the mighty stronghold of the Seneca tribe. Lacking supplies to press on to Niagara, he turned back to finish off those towns and farmlands overlooked in the previous devastation; no captives were taken despite Washington’s desire for hostages. They did manage to burn alive a very aged squaw and a crippled Indian child, whom they had taken prisoner.

Returning, he was hailed throughout the country for his achievements. His policy of brutal devastation of Indian houses and property, his sweeping attacks on Indian villages, seemed to have reaped great fruits and to have justified the risk of employing a large chunk of Washington’s Continental Army. The Tory-Iroquois military force had been routed: forty-one Iroquois towns and surrounding farms had been mercilessly burned to the ground, leaving only one town left standing in the entire Iroquois region. Thousands of distraught Indian men, women, and children were homeless and starving. The Indians were surely impressed by the invincibility of the American forces. And all this achieved with the loss of only forty Americans dead! The end of 1779 thus saw the Americans victorious on the two frontier fronts, New York and the Ohio Valley, and seemingly in command of both frontier regions. (For his efforts, Sullivan was rewarded by Congress by what was fast becoming an American tradition: he was forced into retirement. In Sullivan’s case, however, it was because of his chronic complaining.)

There was a fatal flaw, however, in these seemingly coldly realistic calculations which ignored the fate of innocent Indian women and children. The Indians’ property was devastated, but they were still alive, thirsting for vengeance. Now based at the English stronghold at Niagara, they were utterly dependent on English supplies, both food and munitions. The Americans their absolute and total enemy, they were irrevocably wedded to the English war effort. The aggrieved Iroquois could—and did—strike back. The victories of 1779 turned out to be mere delaying actions, delays forming a prelude to mighty British offensives of 1780.

The resurgence in 1780 of Indian attacks on the New York frontier rapidly demonstrated the ultimate pragmatic failure of the Sullivan campaign. As early as April, Joseph Brant was back, wreaking havoc up and down the frontier. The pro-American Oneida were severely punished by
his forces and he took particular satisfaction in the destruction of his old birthplace of Canajoharie. This town had had to be evacuated by the Mohawks at the outbreak of the war, when their places were taken by white settlers who received their comeuppance when Brant emulated Sullivan by burning their grain fields as well as their horses and livestock. In the meantime, Sir John Johnson, taking over from Butler as head of the Tory rangers, burst down from Crown Point to capture his old home town of Johnstown, and used this as his headquarters for pillaging and burning the lower Mohawk Valley and killing many of its inhabitants. By the time Governor Clinton had gathered enough militia to march against him, Johnson had burned Johnstown to the ground before abandoning it to return safely to Crown Point and thence to Canada.

George Washington, who had spared a huge force the previous year for Sullivan’s brutal and ultimately inconclusive offensive, now felt that he could spare no one for the worthier task of defending the frontier settlements. Though worried about diminishing supplies, he made no attempt to save the principal sources of his provisions.

The next series of incursions on the New York frontier was a more organized and systematic effort. In a miniature of the two-pronged attack of 1777, Maj. Guy Carleton, nephew of the former Canadian governor, advanced down Lake Champlain in October 1780 with 800 men, including 600 British regulars; at the same time, Johnson and Brant burst upon the frontier with 1,200 men further south near the headwaters of the Scoharie River. This was supposed to coincide with a thrust by Gen. Sir Henry Clinton up the Hudson from New York City, upon the delivery of West Point by Benedict Arnold. Carleton managed to capture Forts Ann and George, but was forced to turn back after capturing Ballston, near Saratoga. Johnson and Brant laid waste the Scoharie River region, but turned west from Albany and, avoiding American forts, devastated the Mohawk Valley and crushed several militia units. Johnson was finally defeated on October 19 at Klock’s Field by 1,500 Hudson Valley militia under Gen. Robert Van Rensselaer. Pursued only briefly by the sluggish Van Rensselaer, who thereby gave up the chance of a smashing victory, Johnson’s forces fled westward to return to Oswego on Lake Ontario and thence to Canada. The revived English threat of capturing Albany and uniting on the Hudson had been easily thwarted; but at the end of 1780 the whole New York frontier west of Schenectady was a smoking desert for whites and Indians alike.

One amusing incident of the Johnson-Brant foray was the singlehanded saving of the Middle Fort by Morgan’s crack rifleman, Timothy Murphy, the same man who had shot General Fraser at the Battle of Bemis Heights. When Johnson demanded that the fort surrender, the cowardly Major Melanchthon Woolsey was quickly ready to comply; he was prevented
several times by Murphy, who threatened to kill anyone, including Woolsey, who attempted to carry out such a surrender. Murphy was backed in this courageous mutiny by the militia, and the Tory-Indian units moved on.

In the West, the British launched an attack southward in 1780 similar to the invasion of the year before. Again the proximate goal was to conquer Illinois and Kentucky; the ultimate goal, to capture the entire West. Spain had entered the war against Britain in 1779, and this time the British hoped to use their base at Pensacola in West Florida to sweep the Spanish out of Louisiana, the land west of the Mississippi.

It was, this time, a three-pronged invasion of armies of Indians stiffened by Tories, French-American militia, and a few English regulars. One force of nearly a thousand, commanded by Capt. Emanuel Hesse, set forth from Mackinac, then down the Wisconsin and the Mississippi. A second and smaller force, commanded by Capt. Charles Langlade, sailed down Lake Michigan from Mackinac and thence down the Illinois to meet Hesse at the Mississippi. Langlade’s force was to serve as a distraction from the main Hesse column. The third and largest English troop of over a thousand men marched south from Detroit under Capt. Henry Bird, south down the Miami River Valley and into Kentucky. The Bird force carried with it two huge cannon to breach American fortifications. This three-pronged blow at the American West got smoothly under way in early May of 1780.

The defense against this formidable threat devolved again upon George Rogers Clark, whose already small force had been decimated by the staggering depreciation of the inflated paper dollar. His supply system from Spanish New Orleans was undone by Virginia’s refusing to honor his requisitions, a pattern that was to be set for the remainder of his life. He was now virtually reduced to the local militia of the scattered towns of the Illinois and Kentucky areas.

In late May, Clark was suddenly informed of Hesse’s march down the Mississippi and its grave threat to Cahokia and to the Spanish town of St. Louis on the other side of the Mississippi River. Rushing up north his few men from Fort Jefferson, which Clark was constructing near the mouth of the Ohio, Clark happily reached Cahokia on May 25, the day before Hesse’s assault. The British confidently launched twin attacks on Cahokia and St. Louis; Clark repulsed the assault on Cahokia, while Spanish soldiers and French natives managed to repulse the major action against St. Louis. As usual when facing any rebuff, Hesse’s Indians became intensely discouraged and began to melt away, unhappy in any event because of the military despotism enforced in the British army. Hesse was forced to retreat rapidly, pursued eagerly by a Franco-Spanish-American volunteer
force organized by Clark. He was chased as far as the Rock River, while Langlade’s force, its Indian support also crumbling, was pursued back to Lake Michigan.

Clark had to deny himself the pleasure of leading the pursuit, for he had to race eastward to save Kentucky from Bird’s army. To evade capture by Chickasaw Indians besieging Fort Jefferson, Clark and two companions disguised themselves as Chickasaws and rushed 300 miles through the wilderness to reach Harrodsburg in time to organize Kentucky against the coming invasion.

In late June, Bird struck directly at populous central Kentucky, quickly storming the stockade at Ruddle’s Station by devastating use of his big cannon. Bird personally guaranteed the safety of the surrendered Americans, but as the gate opened the Indians ignored their commander and rushed in to massacre and mutilate most of the helpless prisoners, including women and children. Next, the smaller stockade at Martin’s Station quickly fell to the British. But the Indians were getting out of hand, and were increasingly restive at Bird’s attempts to save the lives of his prisoners. Moreover, their range-of-the-moment attitude toward food supply (e.g., immediate slaughter of all captured cattle) caused food shortages in Bird’s army. The final straw came when the Indians learned that George Rogers Clark, of whom they were already in great awe, had miraculously turned up to lead the Kentucky defense. They began to melt away and the disillusioned Bird had no option but to leave Kentucky as fast as he could, dismiss the remaining Indians, and return hastily to Detroit. The great English invasion of the West in 1780 had been repulsed and driven back—virtually the singlehanded achievement of George Rogers Clark.