Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations

by William Elliot Griffis

The winter was unusually mild, which caused the utter abandonment of Shirley’s expedition to Crown Point; while the numerous petty successes of the French and Indians turned the faces of the vacillating members of the Iroquois cantons toward Canada as the winning side.

Yet strange as it may seem, the New York Assembly was slow in voting supplies. The ultra-loyalists who supported Hardy, who was backed by the king and his council, now vented their maledictions upon the “foreigners” who made the cosmopolitan population of the province, and their representatives in the Assembly. All this seems strange to the average historiographer, especially to the copyist of loyalist or other writers who rely on such men as Colden, Smith, Jones, Washington Irving, and the like, for their ideas of Colonial New York and her people. There was good reason for the stubbornness of the legislators. The fact is, that the people of the province of New York were mostly descendants of the sturdy Republicans who had fought under William the Silent. They believed that the encroachments of monarchy—that is, one-man power—were more dangerous than the raids of hostile Indians. The Dutch, Germans, Scots, Irish, Huguenots, were almost a unit in their democratic ideas. This province, unlike others of the original thirteen, was not settled by people of aristocratic England, in which a republic, once begun, had gone to pieces inside of twelve years, but by men long trained in self-government and in a republic. Even their forms of church life were as nurseries for the training of men in democratic principles. To the loyalist historian, Jones, a Presbyterian seems to be a synonym for rebel, of whatever name or strain of blood. Congregationalists, fed on the rhetoric and oratory of Forefathers’ Day, find it hard to believe that the democratic idea in Church and State flourished anywhere outside of New England. The New York men were determined at all hazards—even the hazards of savage desolation—to resist any further trenching upon their rights by King George, or his subservient Parliament, or his bullying governor.

England had sent over, after Clinton, another illiterate sailor to enforce a fresh demand,—even the passage of a law for settling a permanent revenue on a solid foundation; said law to be indefinite and without limitation of time. The descendants of the Hollanders who had long ago, even against mighty Spain, settled the principle of no taxation without consent, and had maintained it in a war of eighty years, were resolved to fight again the same battle on American soil. They now set themselves resolutely to resist the demands of the Crown, and this whether Indians were in Orange County or at Niagara. Despite the protests of such incorrigible Tories as Smith, Colden, and others in the Executive Council, the people’s representatives persevered.

It is needless to say that the Assembly gained their point, and that the greatest and most lasting victory of the people in the long story of American liberty was won. A few months after, at the autumn session, the joyful news reached New York that the Crown had virtually repealed the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, which had made the colonists of New York set themselves in united array of resistance to “their most gracious sovereign.”

The war had thus far been carried on without profession or declaration. The diplomatists of London and Versailles had been as polite and full of smooth words as if profound peace reigned. The English were following their old trade of piracy, and had captured hundreds of French vessels, and imprisoned thousands of French sailors. The French, on the other hand, were doing with England as they did with China in 1885, when they bombarded cities, treacherously got behind forts in the Pearl River, and killed thousands of Chinese, while all the time professing to be at peace. At length the British went through the formality of declaring war, May 17. On the French side, the necessary parchment, red tape, and seals were prepared, and the official ink flowed two years after blood had flowed like water.

Now at last, in Pitt, England had a premier who knew something about the geography of America; and “geography,” as Von Moltke teaches, “is half of war.” William Pitt thought the time had come for intelligent and active operations looking to the conquest of North America by the English. His first selection of men, however, was not particularly wise or evident of genius. Listening to the word of Johnson, and others in New York, he removed Shirley from the chief command, and sent out, successively, Colonel Webb, General Abercrombie, and Lord Loudon,—all of them, as it proved, failures.

The three men appointed were alike in their supercilious contempt for American militia and officers, and were all destined, through their ignorant pride, to disgust Americans with English ways, and steadily to determine them toward independence. Abercrombie, on his arrival, at once began to cast firebrands of discontent among the colonial troops by nullifying the intelligent and well-laid plans of Shirley, and promulgating the exasperating order that all regular officers were to be over those in the colonial service of the same rank. General Winslow fortunately succeeded in dissuading the Britisher from his madness, before desertions and threatened resignations became too numerous; but with the compromise that the imported soldiers should garrison the forts while the Americans went to the front. In other words, the provincials were to see and do the severest service. Abercrombie further showed his obstinacy and ignorance of affairs by billeting ten thousand soldiers on the citizens of Albany, instead of at once advancing to Oswego. He thus unwittingly helped to create that sentiment against the outraging of American homes by the forced presence of soldiers which, later, found expression for all time in the amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Abercrombie wasted the whole summer at Schenectady, which now became the headquarters of the armies. It was determined to build forts at all the portages between this town and Oswego, as well as at South Bay, to protect Fort Edward. While the boat-yards along the Mohawk River were in full activity, and stores were being collected, he employed his men part of the time in teaching the people of Albany and Schenectady how to build earthworks in European style, in digging ditches, and in putting up heavier stockades around the two towns.

One of the good things done by Parliament at this time was the formation of the Royal American Regiment of four battalions, each a thousand strong. Of the fifty officers commissioned, nearly one third were Germans and Swiss. Most of the rank and file were Palatine and Swiss-Germans in America, who enlisted for three years. None of the officers could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and the Earl of Loudon was appointed first colonel-in-chief. Loudon was succeeded in 1757 by Abercrombie, and in 1758 by Lord Amherst. Until the Revolutionary War, this cosmopolitan regiment did noble service under Stanwix, Bouquet, Forbes, Prideaux, Wolfe, and Johnson. From 1757 to 1760 we find one or more battalions of the regiment in active service in the various parts of New York. The famous Rev. Michael Schlatter, the organizer of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, was the regimental chaplain. On the 15th of June, 1756, the forty German officers who were to raise the recruits arrived, one of the ablest being Colonel Bouquet. This Swiss officer, with the Germans, at Bushy Run in Pennsylvania largely retrieved the disasters caused by Braddock’s defeat, and restored the frontiers of Pennsylvania to comparative safety and comfort.

While Abercrombie, who was one of those military men whose reliance is less upon the sword than the spade, was digging ditches in Albany, Johnson was arranging for a great Indian council at his house on the Mohawk. He had in view the double purpose of winning the Delawares and other Pennsylvania tribes from war against the English colonists, and of inducing all the Northern Indians to join in the expedition against the French posts on Lake Ontario. Braddock’s defeat had been the signal for the Delawares, under the direct influence of the French, to break the peace of more than seventy years, and to scatter fire and blood in Pennsylvania, from the Monongahela to the Delaware. The solemn treaty of Penn—which Voltaire, with more wit than truth, declared was “never sworn to and never broken”—was now a thing of the past. The wampum was unravelled, and the men with hats and the men with scalp-locks were in deadly conflict. While the Friends remained at their Philadelphia firesides, the German and Scotch settlers on the frontier bore the brunt of savage fury. When public action was taken, it was in the double and contradictory form of peace-belts of wampum sent by the Friends, and a declaration of war by Governor Morris. In this mixed state of things it was hard for Johnson to know what to do. Through his influence the Iroquois, uncles and masters, had summoned by wampum belts their nephews and vassals to the great conference which was opened at his house in February, 1756. To prepare for this, Johnson had made a journey to the council-fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga, arriving June 15. There he succeeded in neutralizing in part the work done by the French, and obtained an important concession. The Iroquois voted to allow a road to be opened through the very heart of their empire to Oswego, and a fort to be built at Oswego Falls.

These severe exertions cost Johnson a fit of sickness; but on the 7th of July he met the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawanese at his house. After the usual consumption, on both sides, of wampum, verbosity, and rum, all the Indians were won over to the English cause. The covenant chain of peace was renewed, the war-belts were accepted by the sachems, and medals hung around their necks by Johnson himself. The Delawares had “their petticoats taken off,”—or, in other words, they were no longer squaws in the eyes of the Iroquois, but allies, friends, and men. Without detracting from Johnson’s reputation, it is probable that the possession by many of the Delawares of the rifles made by the Pennsylvania Swiss and Germans, which gave them such an advantage over Dutch and English smooth-bores, had much to do with winning the respect of the Iroquois.