The loyalists of America and their times

by Egerton Ryerson

"A simultaneous expedition from Pittsburg ascended the Alleghany, and visited with similar devastation all the villages along the river. Pending these operations, and to prevent any aid from Canada, divers artifices were employed by Washington to create the belief of an intended invasion of that province."[95]

The account of this expedition given by Dr. Ramsay corresponds, with some additional particulars, with that given by Dr. Andrews, as above quoted, and almost in the same words. He says:

"The Indians who form the confederacy of the Six Nations, commonly called Mohawks, were the objects of this expedition. They inhabit that immense and fertile tract of country which lies between New England, the Middle States, and the Province of Canada. * * The Indians, on hearing of the expedition projected against them, acted with firmness. They collected their strength, took possession of proper ground, and fortified it with judgment. General Sullivan, on the 29th of August, attacked them in their works. They stood a cannonade for more than two hours, but then gave way. This engagement proved decisive. After the trenches were forced, the Indians fled without making any attempt to rally. The consternation occasioned among them by this defeat was so great, that they gave up all ideas of further resistance. As the Americans advanced into their settlements, the Indians retreated before them, without throwing any obstruction in their way. General Sullivan penetrated into the heart of the country inhabited by the Mohawks, and spread desolation everywhere. Many settlements in the form of towns were destroyed. All their fields of corn, and whatever was in a state of cultivation, underwent the same fate. Scarcely anything in the form of a house was left standing, nor was an Indian to be seen.

"To the surprise of the Americans, they found the lands about the Indian towns well cultivated, and their houses both large and commodious. The quantity of corn destroyed was immense. Orchards, in which were several hundred fruit trees, were cut down; and of them many appeared to have been planted for a long series of years. Their gardens, replenished with a variety of useful vegetables, were laid waste."[96]

From this review of the invasions and contests between the Americans and Indians, it is clear that the Indians were the greater sufferers in life and property. The mutual hatreds of former years, when the colonies were warring with the French (instead of being, as now, in alliance with them), and the Indians were in the interest and service of the French, seems to have been perpetuated on both sides, and to have become more intense on the part of the Americans after the failure of their efforts to secure the Indians to their side. The old contests between the Southern colonists and the Indians were renewed and repeated with intense bitterness; and in the Northern colonies the policy of Congress and its agents was to crush and exterminate the Indians altogether. In acts of individual cruelty, their historical and characteristic mode of war, the Indians exceeded the Americans; but in acts of wholesale destruction of life and property, the Americans far outdid the Indians, adopting the Indian instead of a civilized mode of warfare, and including in their sweep of destruction women and children as well as men.

The employment of Indians at all on the part of Great Britain against the colonists, is, in our opinion, the blackest crime recorded in the annals of the British Government, prompted apparently by the cowardly and execrable General Gage, but condemned by Generals Carleton and Burgoyne, as well as by General Howe. The use, however, which the Americans sought to make of the Indians, and their cruel and exterminating mode of warfare against them, leave them no ground of boasting on the score of humanity against either the British Government or the Indians.

To this may be added the unfortunate condition and treatment of the Loyalists or "Tories" among the Indians. For adhering, or suspected of adhering to the faith of their fathers, and even of the present persecution down to within less than six years, they were, however peaceably they might be living, driven from their homes and their property seized and alienated, and they left no place for the soles of their feet except among the Indians, and then termed monsters and treated as traitors, for joining their protectors in the defence of their places of refuge, and, as far as possible, for the recovery of their homes. What else, as men, as human beings, could they do? They were denied and banished from the homes which they had, unless they would reverse their political faith and oath of allegiance, and forswear allegiance, to enrol themselves in arms against the country of their forefathers and of their affection. They could not but be chafed with the loss of their freedom of speech and of conviction of their citizenship and their property, and of being driven into exile; and they must have been more or less than men had they not acted loyally and to the best of their ability with their protectors, however abhorrent to their views and feelings were many acts of the Indians—acts imitated and even excelled, in so many respects, by the Americans themselves, in their depredations into the Indian territories.

Colonel Stone's Account, in Detail, of General Sullivan's Expedition of Extermination of the Six Nations of Indians.

In his Life of Brant, including the Border Wars of the American Revolution, Colonel Stone gives a much more elaborate account of this expedition of destruction against the Six Nations, or rather the Five Nations, for the Oneidas and some of the Tuscaroras joined the Americans. Colonel Stone narrates the progress and work of General Sullivan from place to place. We will add a few extracts from his narrative, after some preliminary explanations.

Colonel Stone corrects a very common error, which views the whole race of North American Indians as essentially alike—"all as the same roving, restless, houseless race of hunters and fishermen, without a local habitation and with scarce a name." He gives examples of the varieties of Indian character, not less marked than between the English and the French—some following the buffalo in his migrations, others finding a precarious subsistence in the forest chase, others again fishing and trapping; tribes who pass most of their time in canoes, while others, woodland tribes, cultivate the soil, and gradually become organized, and acquire a higher state of civilization, and present a marked difference of character and taste from the hunter and fishermen tribes. "This higher state of social organization among the Six Nations," says Colonel Stone "greatly increased the difference. They had many towns and villages giving evidence of perseverance. They were organized into communities whose social and political institutions, simple as they were, were still as distinct and well-defined as those of the American Confederacy. They had now acquired some arts, and were enjoying many of the comforts of civilized life. Not content with small patches of cleared lands for the raising of a few vegetables, they possessed cultivated fields and orchards of great productiveness at the West. Especially was this the fact with regard to the Cayugas and Senecas. The Mohawks having been driven from their own rich lands (in the valley of the Mohawk and Susquehanna rivers), the extensive domains of the westernmost tribes of the confederacy (in the Genesee country) formed the granary of the whole. And in consequence of the superior social and political organization just referred to, and the Spartan-like character incident to the forest life, the Six Nations, though not the most numerous, were beyond doubt the most formidable of the tribes then in alliance with the Crown. It was justly considered, therefore, that the only way to strike them effectively would be to destroy their homes and the growing produce of their farms, and thus, by cutting off their means of supply, drive them from their own country deeper into the interior, and perhaps throw them altogether upon their British allies for subsistence."