Nothing, however, could exceed the terror which these events diffused among the inhabitants, not only of Northern New-York, but of the New England States. The consternation was, moreover, increased by the reported murders and the cruelties of the savages—since all the efforts of General Burgoyne to dissuade them from the perpetration of their cruel enormities were ineffectual. Restrain them he could not; and it was admitted by the British writers of that day, that the friends of the Royal cause, as well as its enemies, were equally victims to their indiscriminate rage. It was even ascertained that the British officers were deceived by their treacherous allies, into the purchase of the scalps of their own comrades.
Among other instances of cruelty, the well-known murder of Miss Jane McCrea, which happened in the early part of the campaign, filled the public mind with horror. Every circumstance of this unnatural and bloody transaction—around which there lingers a melancholy interest to this day—served to heighten alike its interest and its enormity. Many have been the versions of this bloody tale. General Gates, who had at this juncture been most unjustly directed to supersede General Schuyler in the command of the Northern Department, assailed General Burgoyne in the newspapers with great virulence upon the subject of these outrages. After charging the British commander with encouraging the murder of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children, by paying the Indians a stipulated price for scalps, Gates, in a letter addressed to General Burgoyne, thus spoke of the case now specially under consideration:—"Miss McCrea, a young lady, lovely to the sight, of virtuous character and amiable disposition, engaged to an officer of your army, was, with other women and children, taken out of a house near Fort Edward, carried into the woods, and there scalped and mangled in the most horrid manner. Two parents, with their six children, were treated with the same inhumanity, while quietly resting in their own happy and peaceful dwelling. The miserable fate of Miss McCrea was particularly aggravated, by being dressed to receive her promised husband; but met her murderer, employed by you. Upward of one hundred men, women, and children, have perished by the hands of the ruffians to whom, it is asserted, you have paid the price of blood."
General Burgoyne replied, and repelled with indignation the charge of encouraging, in any respect, the outrages of the Indians. He asserted that from the first he had refused to pay for scalps, and had so informed the Indians at their council. The only rewards he gave them were for prisoners brought in, and by the adoption of this course he hoped to encourage a more humane mode of warfare on their part. In this letter Burgoyne said:—"I would not be conscious of the acts you presume to impute to me, for the whole continent of America, though the wealth of worlds was in its bowels and a paradise upon its surface." [FN-1] In regard to the hapless fate of Miss McCrea, General Burgoyne remarked:—"Her fall wanted not the tragic display you have labored to give it, to make it as sincerely abhorred and lamented by me as it can be by the tenderest of her friends. The act was no premeditated barbarity. On the contrary, two chiefs, who had brought her off for the purpose of security, not of violence to her person, disputed which should be her guard, and in a fit of savage passion in one, from whose hands she was snatched, the unhappy woman became the victim. Upon the first intelligence of this event, I obliged the Indians to deliver the murderer into my hands; and though to have punished him by our laws, or principles of justice, would have been perhaps unprecedented, he certainly should have suffered an ignominious death, had I not been convinced, from my circumstances and observations, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that a pardon under the terms which I presented and they accepted, would be more efficacious than an execution, to prevent similar mischiefs. The above instance excepted, your intelligence respecting the cruelty of the Indians, is false." [FN-2]
[FN-1] While these pages are passing through the press, the author has fallen upon a letter written from Montreal, and published in the Remembrancer for 1777, in which it was stated that a party of the Indians had returned to Montreal in a high state of dissatisfaction, because of the severity of Burgoyne's discipline toward them, and his refusal to tolerate their mode of warfare, or pay them their accustomed bounty for scalps. It was further stated that they waited upon Sir Guy Carleton with their complaints—liking their old "Father" much better than their new.
[FN-2] Vide Marshall's Life of Washington, Vol. I, Appendix.
The British commander doubtless labored to make the best of his case, and in respect to Miss McCrea, his statement was much nearer to the truth than that of General Gates. The actual circumstances of the case, stripped of its romance, were these:—Miss McCrea belonged to a family of loyalists, and had engaged her hand in marriage to a young refugee named Jones, a subordinate officer in the British service, who was advancing with Burgoyne. Anxious to possess himself of his bride, he despatched a small party of Indians to bring her to the British camp. Her family and friends were strongly opposed to her going with such an escort; but her affection overcame her prudence, and she determined upon the hazardous adventure. She set forward with her dusky attendants on horseback. The family resided at the village of Fort Edward, from whence they had not proceeded more than half a mile before her conductors stopped to drink at a spring. Meantime the impatient lover, who deserved not her embrace for confiding her protection to such hands, instead of going himself, had despatched a second party of Indians upon the same errand. The Indians met at the spring; and before the march was resumed, they were attacked by a party of the Provincials. At the close of the skirmish the body of Miss McCrea was found among the slain—tomahawked, scalped, and tied to a pine tree, yet standing by the side of the spring, as a monument of the bloody transaction. The name of the young lady is inscribed on the tree, the trunk of which is thickly scarred with the bullets it received in the skirmish. It also bears the date 1777. "Tradition reports that the Indians divided the scalp, and that each party carried half of it to the agonized lover." [FN] The ascertained cause of her murder was this. The promised reward for bringing her in safety to her betrothed, was a barrel of rum. The chiefs of the two parties sent for her by Mr. Jones, quarreled respecting the anticipated compensation. Each claimed it; and, in a moment of passion, to end the controversy, one of them struck her down with his hatchet.
[FN] Silliman's Tour from Hartford to Quebec. Vide, also, Marshall, Gordon, and others.
The tale was sufficiently painful according to the simple facts of the case, and its recital produced a thrill of horror wherever it came—enlarged and embellished, as it was sure to be in its progress, by every writer who could add to the eloquence of the narrative or the pathos of its catastrophe.