Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations

by William Elliot Griffis

Through Johnson’s influence two councils were held in Pennsylvania, at Easton, when the Delawares under their great chief, Teedyuscung, met delegations of the Iroquois and Governor Denny. Teedyuscung had for his secretary “the Man of Truth,” Charles Thompson, master of the Friends’ Free School in Philadelphia. The proceedings lasted nine days; Denny by his tact being able “to put his hand in Teedyuscung’s bosom and draw out the secret” of his uneasiness. The council was adjourned to Lancaster in the spring of 1757, when, however, the Delaware chief failed to appear. Nevertheless peace was obtained on the Pennsylvania borders, the credit for which was claimed by the Senecas.

To turn now to the field of war, we find that Governor Shirley had organized a corps of armed boatmen, and had sent them under Colonel Bradstreet to Oswego. Bradstreet was successful in thus provisioning the forts with a six months’ store for five thousand men. After his brilliant exploit he was attacked on his way back, three leagues from the fort, by De Villiers with eleven hundred men. Despite the sudden fury of the attack, Bradstreet beat off the enemy with loss, only a heavy rain preventing his gaining a greater victory. Reaching Albany, he urged General Abercrombie to march at once to the forts. A large expedition under Montcalm was already on its way to remove these, the chief obstacles to their plans of empire. Johnson in person seconded Bradstreet’s appeal, urging that if Oswego fell, the Iroquois would be sure to join the French. Abercrombie stupidly refused to move until Lord Loudon’s arrival, and the golden opportunity was lost.

This slow-minded personage, Lord Loudon, the Scotsman, reached Albany on the 29th of July; but correct ideas as to the situation percolated into his brain with difficulty. Indeed, as with Sydney Smith’s proverbial joke about the Scotchman’s skull, it seemed necessary to perform a surgical operation in order to show him how needful it was to march at once to Oswego, notwithstanding that Montcalm with his host was daily approaching.

While Loudon was fooling away his time in jealousy of the provincial militia, and sending a force in the wrong direction at Crown Point, Montcalm with three thousand troops and plenty of cannon, part of which had been captured from Braddock, settled himself before Oswego. Of the three forts garrisoned by Shirley’s and Pepperell’s regiments of New England men, only one was able to stand a protracted siege. All assembled in this fort, Ontario, and fought gallantly until Colonel Mercer was cut in half by a cannon-shot. Then a panic ensued. The one hundred women in the fort begged that the place should be surrendered, and the white flag was shortly afterward hoisted. The forts were burned, and the place left a desolation, in which the priest, Picquet, set up a lofty cross, and beside it the arms of France. The French were now masters of Lake Ontario, and of the passages by land and water to the Ohio, and free to attack the Lake George forts. They found themselves enriched to the extent of sixteen hundred prisoners, one hundred and twenty cannon, six ships of war, three hundred boats, three chests of money, besides a great quantity of provisions and the stores of war. The destruction instead of the occupation of the forts was a master stroke of policy in favor of conciliating the Six Nations.

In this affair Montcalm showed the nobility of his nature in protecting, at the hazard of his life, the prisoners from massacre. When the Indians, filled with rum, had turned into devils, and were sinking their hatchets in the brains of the unarmed, Montcalm, as the eyewitness John Viele of Schenectady on his return testified before Johnson, ordered out his troops and fired on the brutes. Six of the drunken savages were shot dead. The murdering ceased at once, and there was no massacre.

Loudon the lazy had finally awaked to the situation, and sent General Webb with twelve hundred men to reinforce Oswego. At the Oneida portage Webb heard of the surrender, and hoping to delay the French who were advancing, as he supposed, on Albany, he had some trees chopped down to delay their boats. He then hastily retreated to the fort at German Flats. Johnson, at Albany, heard the news August 20, and under Loudon’s orders, with two battalions of the Valley militia and a corps of three hundred Indians, hastened to reinforce Webb. Remaining in camp fifteen days, until hearing of the removal of the French, he dismissed the militia and returned home.

So passed another year of failure. John Campbell, Scotsman, otherwise called Earl of Loudon, had been sent out as the representative of Lord Halifax and of the Lords of Trade. Having decided to unite all the colonies under military rule, and force them to support a standing army, they selected this man, who was strong in the idea of colonial subordination, but was vacillating, incapable, vain, wasteful, and lazy. His first winter campaign consisted chiefly in scolding Shirley, and making the Massachusetts governor the scapegoat for his own shortcomings; in disgusting the people of New York by billeting his officers upon them; and in both New York and Boston diligently hastening the separation of the colonies from Great Britain by making a fool of himself generally.

With the regulars in winter quarters, the militia dismissed to their homes, the whole frontier, except in the Lake George region, open and exposed, five of the Six Nations practically alienated from the English and already making terms with the French, the outlook was dark.

However, the Mohawks were faithful; and Johnson took heart, believing he could yet win and hold the Iroquois. Sending his captains, the two Butlers, and Jellis Fonda to the various castles, and to the fireplace of the Confederacy at Onondaga, he appointed a great council to meet, June 10, 1757. Meanwhile he sent the Mohawks out upon the war-path, and had the satisfaction of hearing of the repulse of the French and the safe defence of the Fort William Henry which he had built two years before at Lake George. Major William Eyre, the ordnance officer who had served the guns so efficiently at the battle of Lake George against Dieskau’s regulars, was in command of the fort, with four hundred men. The commander of the American rangers, with Eyre, was John Stark. The long and dreary winter was nearly over, and Saint Patrick’s Day was at hand. The French knew as well that the Irish soldiers would be drunk on the 18th of March, as Washington knew that the Hessians would be unfit for clear-headed fighting the day after Christmas. Fortunately, through the thoughtfulness of the future hero of Bennington, his own rangers were kept sober by enforced total abstinence, and the Irish had the rum and drunkenness all to themselves. The French force of fifteen hundred regulars, wood-rangers, and savages came down the lakes on the ice, dragging, each man, his sledge containing provisions, arms, and various equipments, among which were three hundred scaling-ladders. They began a furious attack at sunrise on the 18th, expecting easy victory; but Eyre used his artillery with such deadly effect that despite four separate attacks within twenty-four hours, the expedition ended in total failure. Seized with a panic, the besiegers fled, leaving their sledges and much valuable property behind, besides their dead.

Johnson first heard of this event in a letter from Colonel Gage,—him who married an American wife, and afterward occupied Boston with the redcoats, only to be compelled to leave it at the request of Washington, his old comrade-in-arms on Braddock’s Field. It is a curious coincidence that Colonel Gage has unwittingly furnished Yankee Boston with a public holiday in honour of Ireland’s patron, Saint Patrick,—which the Irish majority in the Boston City Council first inaugurated in 1890, under the disguise of “Evacuation Day.” The date which the Frenchmen chose for their approach to Fort William Henry was the date also on which Gage, in 1775, sailed away to the land whence the Canadians had come in 1757.