Matters looked dark indeed. Yet when Mohawk runners, despatched by Johnson on a scouting expedition to Crown Point, arrived, bringing news of French preparations for a descent upon Schenectady and the Valley, and possibly upon Albany, the governor was unable to see the imminent danger. He still waited; he still believed wholly in the defensive policy, and seemed satisfied, because for the fort on the Hudson at Saratoga, now Easton, a sum equal to about eight hundred dollars had been voted by the Assembly. This sum enabled the colonial engineers to build a palisade one hundred and fifty feet long, with six redoubts for barracks, all of timber, and to mount on platforms twelve cannon of six, twelve, and eighteen pound calibre. In this way the summer was wasted in waiting; for the Indians came not, and Clinton’s ambition to be a powerful diplomatist with the Indians was for the present baffled.
Believing this was a matter between French and English alone, strongly inclining to neutrality, and diligently persuaded thereto by the French Jesuits, the Iroquois sulked at home. Not only did they flatly refuse to meet the governor, but some of the chiefs went openly over to the French.
Meanwhile the white settlers were, according to Johnson’s report, abandoning their farms along the Mohawk, and concentrating in the block-houses or palisaded towns. Besides having sent Indian scouts to the Champlain country, Johnson wrote urgent letters to Clinton stating the case, and asking him to open his eyes to the facts. To protect Johnson’s stores of eleven thousand bushels of grain, while standing his ground, the governor sent a lieutenant and thirty men. Another militia company was despatched to the upper Mohawk Castle. Having done these things, Clinton, who had as early as the 4th of August officially notified Governor Shirley of Massachusetts that he would proceed against Crown Point with the warriors of the Five Nations, was at his wits’ end. He had alienated Colonel Schuyler and the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, mostly faithful and trusted men well known in the provinces. In the quarrel of the governor with De Lancey, these ranged themselves on the side of the chief justice.
It is too clumsy an attempt at explanation of the difficulty between the king’s agent, Clinton, and the Board of Indian Commissioners, to ascribe the causes chiefly or entirely to the “rascality” of the commissioners, who “abused their office for private peculation,” or to the ambition of De Lancey. It is not necessary in one who appreciates the great abilities of Johnson to describe him as a white lily of honesty and purity. English authors, the Tory historians of the Revolution, and the prejudiced writers of American history, who reflect their own narrowness and sectional views, take delight in maligning the character of the men of colonial New York simply because they were Dutch. As matter of unsentimental fact, there is much to be said on both sides. The people of New York were not anxious to send the Indians on the war-path, nor to furnish white soldiers to guard their squaws and pappooses while they were away from their villages. They were not at all persuaded of the superior honesty either of the governor or his advisers and appointees. The greater facts are also clear, that the New York Assembly was vigilantly jealous of the people’s liberties, and was determined at all hazards to limit the royal prerogative as far as possible. Since his quarrel with De Lancey, the governor had shown excessive zeal in maintaining the rights of the king. On the other hand, most of the steps necessary to make New York an independent state had, as the British Attorney-General Bradley declared, already been taken by his Assembly, which of twenty-seven members had fourteen of Dutch descent. These men were determined to teach the king’s agent that he must bow to the will of the people, who were more important than king and court, and make no advance in monarchical ideas. They saw that the governor was under the close personal influence of Cadwallader Colden, a radical Tory, who they suspected prepared most of Clinton’s State papers; and they set themselves in array against this intermeddler on royalty’s behalf. Again the petty jealousy which burned steadily in all the colonies made these Dutchmen enjoy paying back the New Englanders in their own coin some of the slights and insults of the past. The former had long looked down in contempt on the settlers of New Amsterdam, and their sons now repaid them in kind, and were on the whole rather glad to snub Shirley and to annoy Clinton for so deferring to the wishes of the latter. Clinton seemed lacking in tact, and was unable to conciliate the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, who one and all, led by Schuyler, resigned.
In a word, Clinton had begun his administration by trying to bully and drive the Dutchmen. Now, those who know the men of this branch of the Teutonic race have always found by experience that when their hearts are won they are easily led. All attempts to drive them, however, usually result as Alva’s and Philip’s plans resulted in the Netherlands, where three hundred thousand Spaniards were buried; or as in South Africa, where Dutch boers hold their own against British aggression. It took Clinton some years to learn the lesson, but it was the same experience of failure and retreat.
At his wits’ end, Governor Clinton turned to the man for the hour. William Johnson was offered the appointment of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and at once accepted. Thus, at thirty-one years, opened in full promise the splendid career of the Irish adventurer.
While no man in the province or continent comprehended more clearly the gravity of the situation, no one better understood all the elements in the case, the ground of faith in the immediate improvement of affairs, and the ultimate supremacy of the British cause. Johnson was a man of continental ideas. Without losing an instant of time he at once set himself to the task of getting hold of the chief men of the Six Nations. He first sent wampum belts to the Pennsylvanian Indians and the Esopus tribe, asking their co-operation with the Albany Council. He put on Indian dress, and for weeks gave himself up to their pastimes. Sparing not paint, grease, ochre, feathers, games, or councils, he arrayed himself as one of their own braves. He encouraged them to get up war-dances, in order to excite their martial spirit. He was speedily successful in turning the tide of opinion in one whole canton of the Confederacy in favour of attending the Albany Convention.
It was probably about this time that Johnson was formally adopted into the Mohawk tribe, made a chief, and received that name which was ever afterward his Indian title. This habit of the Iroquois, of especially and significantly naming prominent personages, is still in vogue. When some Dakota Indians visited Boston in 1889, after seeing Charlestown and Bunker Hill Monument, they called on Governor Brackett, and named him the “Great Rock in the Clouds.”
The title which the Mohawks gave their new white chief and leader in 1746, was, according to the anarchic and unscientific spelling of the time, War-ragh-i-yah-gey. The term may be translated “Chief Director of Affairs.” It may with economy of vocables be spelled Wa-ra-i-ya-gé.
Other matters contributed to this success, and utilized the work of others. Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvanian German interpreter, had been recently among the tribes as far as Ohio, influencing them in favour of the English. A happy accident—the coming of a delegation of Chickasaws from the West and South to invade Canada, and to invite the Senecas to take part and pilot them—awoke this most western division of the Iroquois Confederacy to the importance of the accession. The simultaneous offers of alliance and aid by other scattered tribes led to a complete change of views. In a word, the Senecas resolved to sit at the Albany caucus. With the tribes at each end, the west and the east of the Long House, thus in substantial accord, Johnson directed the Mohawks to send out runners to the whole confederation. Thus the work of winning over the other few tribes, at least so far as attendance at Albany was concerned, proved to be comparatively easy.