Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

In the middle of July, 1684, Lord Howard, governor of Virginia, summoned a council of the sachems of the Five Nations to Albany. He was attended by two of his council and by Governor Dongan of New York, and some of the magistrates of Albany. Howard charged upon the savages the butcheries and plunderings which they had committed seven years previous in Virginia and Maryland, “belonging to the great king of England.” He told the sachems that the English had intended at once to avenge those outrages, but through the advice of Sir Edmund Andros, then governor-general of the country, had sent peaceful messengers to them. The sachems had proved perfidious to the pledges they then gave, and the governor, after threatening them, demanded from them conditions of future amity. After their usual fashion of shifting responsibility and professions of regret and future fidelity, the sachems renewed their covenants. Under the prompting of Governor Dongan they asked that the Duke of York’s arms should be placed on the Mohawk castles, as a protection against their enemies, the French. Doubtless the Indians, in desiring, or perhaps only assenting to, the affixing of these English insignia to their strongholds, might have had in view only the effect of them in warning off the French. They certainly did not realize that their English guests would ever afterwards, as they did, regard this concession of the tribes as an avowal of allegiance to the king of Great Britain, and as adopting for themselves the relation of subjects of a foreign monarch.

The experience gained by many previous attempts to secure the fidelity of the tribes, thenceforward known as the Six Nations by the incorporation into the confederacy of the remnant of the Tuscaroras, was put to service in three succeeding councils for treaty-making, held respectively at Philadelphia in 1742, in Lancaster, Pa., in 1744,[1347] and at Albany in 1746.[1348] Much allowance is doubtless to be made in the conduct of the earlier treaties for the lack of competent and faithful interpreters in councils made up of representatives of several tribes, with different languages and idioms. Interpreters have by no means always proved trustworthy, even when qualified for their office.[1349] The difficulty was early experienced of putting into our simple mother-tongue the real substance of an Indian harangue, which was embarrassed and expanded by images and flowers of native rhetoric, wrought from the structure of their symbolic language, but adding nothing to the terms or import of the address. It was observed that often an interpreter, anxious only to state the gist of the matter in hand, would render in a single English sentence an elaborately ornate speech of an orator that had extended through many minutes in its utterance. The orator might naturally mistrust whether full justice had been done to his plea or argument. There is by no means a unanimity in the opinions or the judgments of those of equal intelligence, who have reported to us the harangues of Indians in councils, as to the qualities of their eloquence or rhetoric. The entire lack of terms for the expression of abstract ideas compelled them to draw their illustrations from natural objects and relations. Signs and gestures made up a large part of the significance of a discourse. Doubtless the cases were frequent in which the representation of a tribe in a council was made through so few of its members that there might be reasonable grounds for objection on the part of a majority to the terms of any covenant or treaty that had been made by a chief or an orator. Of one very convenient and plausible subterfuge, or honest plea,—whichever in any given case it might have been,—our native tribes have always been skilful in availing themselves. The assumption was that the elder, the graver, wiser representatives of a tribe were those who appeared on its behalf at a council. When circumstances afterwards led the whites to complain of a breach of the conditions agreed on, the blame was always laid by the chiefs on their “young men,” whom they had been unable to restrain.

During the long term of intermittent warfare of the French and English on this continent, with native tribes respectively for their foes or allies, the conditions of the conflict, as before hinted, were in general but slightly affected by the alternative of peace or war as existing at any time between their sovereigns and people in Europe. Some of the fiercest episodes of the struggle on this soil took place during the intervals of truce, armistice, and temporary treaty settlements between the leading powers in the old world. When, in the treaties closing a series of campaigns, the settlement in the articles of peace included a restoration of the territory which had been obtained by either party by conquest, no permanent result was really secured. These restitutions were always subject to reclamation. Valuable and strategic points of territory merely changed hands for the time being; Acadia, for example, being seven times tossed as a shuttlecock between the parties to the settlement. The trial had to be renewed and repeated till the decision was of such a sort as to give promise of finality. The prize contended for here was really the mastery of the whole continent, though the largeness of the stake was not appreciated till the closing years of the struggle. Indeed, the breadth and compass of the field were then unknown quantities. Those closing years of stratagem and carnage in our forests correspond to what is known in history as the “Seven Years’ War” in Europe, in which France, as a contestant, was worsted in the other quarters of the globe, as in this. Clive broke her power in India, as the generals of Britain discomfited her here. The French, in 1758, held a profitable mercantile settlement on five hundred miles of coast in Africa, between Cape Blanco and the river Gambia. It is one of the curious contrarieties in the workings of the same avowed principles under different conditions, that just at the time that the pacific policy of the Pennsylvania Quakers forbade their offering aid to their countrymen under the bloody work going on upon their frontiers, an eminent English Quaker merchant, Thomas Cumming, framed the successful scheme of conquest over this French settlement in Africa.[1350]

The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, seemed to promise a breathing-time in the strife between the French and English here. In fact, however, so far from there being even a smouldering of the embers on our soil, that date marks the kindling of the conflagration which, continuing to blaze for fifteen years onward, comprehended all the decisive campaigns. The earliest of these were ominous and disheartening to the English, but they closed with the fullness of triumph. We must trace with conciseness the more prominent acts and incidents in which the natives, with the French and English, protracted and closed the strife.

When Europeans entered upon the region now known as Pennsylvania, though its well-watered and fertile territory and its abounding game would seem to have well adapted it to the uses of savage life, it does not appear that it was populously occupied. The Delawares, which had held it at an earlier period, had, previously to the coming of the whites, been subjugated by the more warlike tribes of the Five Nations, or Iroquois. Some of the vanquished had passed to the south or west, to be merged in other bands of the natives. Such of them as remained in their old haunts were humiliated by their masters, despised as “women,” and denied the privileges of warriors. While the Five Nations were thus potent in the upper portion of Pennsylvania, around the sources of the Susquehanna, its southern region was held by the Shawanees. The first purchase near the upper region made by Europeans of the natives was by a colony of Swedes, under Governor John Printz, in 1643. This colony was subdued, though allowed to remain on its lands, by the Dutch, in 1655. In 1664, the English took possession of all Pennsylvania, and of everything that had been held by the Dutch. Penn founded his province in 1682, by grant from Charles II., and in the next year made his much-lauded treaty of peace and purchase with the Indians for lands west and north of his city. The attractions of the province, and the easy opening of its privileges to others than the Friends, drew to it a rapid and enterprising immigration. In 1729 there came in, principally from the north of Ireland, 6,207 settlers. In 1750 there arrived 4,317 Germans and 1,000 English. The population of the province in 1769 was estimated at 250,000. The Irish settlers were mostly Presbyterians, the Germans largely Moravians. It soon appeared, especially when the ravages of the Indians on the frontiers were most exasperating and disastrous, that there were elements of bitter discord between these secondary parties in the province and the Friends who represented the proprietary right. And this suggests a brief reference to the fact that, as a very effective agent entering into the imbittered conflicts of the time and scene, we are to take into the account some strong religious animosities. The entailed passions and hates of the peoples of the old world, as Catholics and Protestants, and even of sects among the latter, were transferred here to inflame the rage of combatants in wilderness warfare.[1351] The zeal and heroic fidelity of the French priests in making a Christian from a baptized and untamed savage had realized, under rude yet easy conditions, a degree of success. In and near the mission stations, groups of the natives had been trained to gather around the cross, and to engage with more or less response in the holy rites. Some of them could repeat, after a fashion, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Creed. Some had substituted a crucifix or a consecrated medal for their old pagan charm, to be worn on the breast. When about to go forth on the war-path, their priests would give them shrift and benediction. But, as has been said, it was no part or purpose of this work of christianizing savages to impair their qualities as warriors, to dull their knives or tomahawks, to quench their thirst for blood, or to restrain the fiercest atrocities and barbarities of the fight or the victory. On the well-known experience that fresh converts are always the most ardent haters of heresy, these savage neophytes were initiated into some of the mysteries of the doctrinal strife between the creed of their priests and the abominated infidelity and impiety of the English Protestants. Some of the savages were by no means slow to learn the lesson. Mr. Parkman’s brilliant and graphic pages afford us abounding illustrations of the part which priestly instructions and influence had in adding to savage ferocity the simulation of religious hate for heresy. With whatever degree of understanding or appreciation of the duty as it quickened the courage or the ferocity of the savage, there were many scenes and occasions in which the warrior added the charge of heretic to that of enemy, when he dealt his blow.[1352]

Almost as violent and exasperating were the animosities engendered between the disciples of different Protestant fellowships. The Quakers, backed by proprietary rights, by the prestige of an original peace policy and friendly negotiations with the Indians, and for the most part secure and unharmed in the centralized homes of Philadelphia and its neighborhood, imagined that they might refuse all participation in the bloody work enacting on their frontiers. The adventurous settlers on the borders were largely Presbyterians. The course of non-interference by the Quakers, who controlled the legislature, seemed to those who were bearing the brunt of savage warfare monstrously selfish and inhuman. There was a fatuity in this course which had to be abandoned. When a mob of survivors from the ravaged fields and cabins of the frontiers, bringing in cartloads of the bones gathered from the ashes of their burned dwellings, thus enforced their remonstrances against the peace policy of the legislature, the Quakers were compelled to yield, and to furnish the supplies of war.[1353] But sectarian hatred hardly ever reached an intenser glow than that exhibited between the Pennsylvania Quakers and Presbyterians. Meanwhile, the mild and kindly missionary efforts of the Moravians, in the same neighborhood, were cruelly baffled. Their aim was exactly the opposite of that which guided the Jesuit priests. They sought first to make their converts human beings, planters of the soil, taught in various handicrafts, and weaned from the taste of war and blood.

When the frontier war was at its wildest pitch of havoc and fury, the Moravian settlements, which had reached a stage giving such promise of success as to satisfy the gentle and earnest spirit of the missionaries who had planted them, were made to bear the brunt of the rage of all the parties engaged in the deadly turmoil. The natives timidly nestling in their settlements were regarded as an emasculated flock of nurslings, mean and cowardly, lacking equally the manhood of the savage and the pride and capacity of the civilized man. Worse than this, their pretended desire to preserve a neutrality and to have no part in the broil was made the ground of a suspicion, at once acted upon as if fully warranted, that they were really spies, offering secret information and even covert help as guides and prompters in the work of desolation among the scattered cabins of the whites. So a maddened spirit of distrust, inflamed by false rumors and direct charges of complicity, brought upon the Moravian settlers the hate and fury of the leading parties in the conflict.[1354]

It is noteworthy that the most furious havoc of savage warfare should have been wreaked on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, the one of all the English colonies in America whose boast was, and is, that there alone the entrance of civilized men upon the domains of barbarism was marked and initiated by the Christian policy of peace and righteousness. Penn and his representatives claimed that they had twice paid the purchase price of the lands covered by the proprietary charter to the Indian occupants of them,—once to the Delawares residing upon them, and again to the Iroquois who held them by conquest. The famous “Walking Purchase,” whether a fair or a fraudulent transaction, was intended to follow the original policy of the founder of the province.[1355]

In the inroads made upon the English settlements by Frontenac and his red allies, New York and New England furnished the victims. The middle colonies, so far as then undertaken, escaped the fray. Trouble began for them in 1716, when the French acted upon their resolve to occupy the valley of the Ohio. The Ohio Land Company was formed in 1748 to advance settlements beyond the Alleghanies, and surveys were made as far as Louisville. This enterprise roused anew the Indians and the French. The latter redoubled their zeal in 1753 and onward, south of Lake Erie and on the branches of the Ohio. The English found that their delay and dilatoriness in measures for fortifying the frontiers had given the French an advantage which was to be recovered only with increased cost and enterprise. In an earlier movement, had the English engaged their efforts when it was first proposed to them, they might have lessened, at least, their subsequent discomfiture. Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, in 1720 had urged on the British government the erection of a chain of posts beyond the Alleghanies, from the lakes to the Mississippi. But his urgency had been ineffectual. The governor reported that there were then “Seven Tributary Tribes” in Virginia, being seven hundred in number, with two hundred and fifty fighting-men, all of whom were peaceful. His only trouble was from the Tuscaroras on the borders of Carolina.[1356]

The erection of Fort Duquesne may be regarded as opening the decisive struggle between the French and the English in America, which reached its height in 1755, and centred around the imperfect chain of stockades and blockhouses on the line of the frontiers then reached by the English pioneers.