The Glorious Cause, page 70
Some sense of the meaning of the Revolution for American Indians can be gained from the only reference to them in the Declaration of Independence, as merciless savages. That term provides one sort of benchmark in their eighteenth-century history. Another is the Treaty of Paris (1783) in which, as part of the peace, Britain ceded all the lands east of the Mississippi River to the new United States, without consulting the Indians.
Most Indians did not want any part of the Revolution and the war between Britain and her colonies. The tribes had a long experience with dealing with the colonies and with Britain and France. They knew that if they were to retain a measure of autonomy, they would have to come to terms with these European powers and their colonies. To protect themselves from the political dominance of Britain and France called for policy, sometimes evasion, and sometimes force that drew one or the other of these European states into a relationship that gave political shelter from the other. The Indians’ most oppressive enemy was clear: the land-hungry settlers in the British colonies. Just before the revolutionary crisis threatened, Britain seemed to play the role of a protector, most clearly in issuing the Proclamation of 1763, which sought to bar settlement in the trans-Appalachian West. Britain’s policy arose from a desire to establish stability in that region and, most important, to protect its trade in furs with the Indians. The colonial settlers, whose interest was in cultivating the land, not in fur-bearing animals, were, in their numbers and in their habits of putting in farms, the enemies of the beaver. They had little use for the Indians whom they regarded as uncivilized and as obstacles to progress.54
Given these circumstances, though the Indians did not wish to join a war between Britain and her colonies, most favored the British side. Favoring it did not necessarily mean fighting for their British friends, however. The Indians recognized that usually their safest posture was sitting on their hands, for their British ally had few troops along the western frontier when the war began. The British held Forts Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac in the north and northwest. The Illinois country belonged to them by virtue of Fort Kaskaskia. To the south there were British posts at Mobile and Pensacola. Their most secure holds were in the Canada they had recently taken from the French. But nowhere in the rim around the settlements of the thirteen colonies did they have large numbers who might have rallied and helped direct the tribes most friendly to the Crown.
The war that was fought in the West, then, was not decisive in affecting the outcome of the Revolution. But it was bloody and full of horror for whites and Indians alike. In the South the Cherokees, who claimed around 22,000 members early in the century (a number that had shrunk by about half when the war began in 1775), soon suffered additional declines. Feeling increasing pressures on their lands by encroaching whites, and encouraged by a small delegation of warriors from northern tribes—among them Delawares and Mohawks—they attacked white settlements in 1776. Their raids brought a heavy response of militia from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. The years that followed long after peace was made in 1783 were disastrous ones, as the bloodshed continued accompanied by the loss of lands.55
The Cherokee experience was repeated by other tribes, at least in the deaths of these peoples, the devastations of their villages, and the disappearance of the territory they had long inhabited. To be sure, Indian tribes everywhere exacted a price in white American lives even as they lost their own and their villages and farming and hunting grounds.
For the most part, state militias and organizations of settlers conducted the fight against the Indians. In the struggles up and down the wide arc in the West, the Indians often set the fighting off with raids against settlers who usually proved defenseless. Retaliation then followed—sometimes mad, brutal action against the first available target. The massacre at Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, of almost one hundred Delawares was among the worst of such affairs. These Delawares had accepted Christianity and were innocent of any hostile movement against their white neighbors. Most of those killed were women and children; they were forced into two cabins, then slashed and scalped to death. Soon afterward the Delawares at Sandusky committed a similar outrage, apparently in response to the murders of their kinfolk.56
The war was fought on a larger scale in the old Northwest and in upstate New York. George Rogers Clark, a hero and subject of myths in western Virginia, Kentucky, and in the Northwest, led the way in summer 1778 in the Illinois country. With around 200 frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee, Clark pushed the British and their Indian allies temporarily out of Vincennes. The Indians, in particular the Shawnees, were not subdued, however. The country in the Ohio Valley remained contested ground until after the formal end of the war of the Revolution.57
The Iroquois too made life miserable for Americans in western New York and along the Pennsylvania border. For a time, Joseph Brant, a distinguished Mohawk leader, raided settlements and before long commanded the ground. Brant, an extraordinary man, was born around 1742 in the Ohio Country and educated by missionaries to the Iroquois where he may have learned to write his language in the form taught by missionaries. He also learned English from missionaries in a school somewhere along the Mohawk River; the final bit of his formal education came in Eleazar Wheelock’s school for Indians in Lebanon, Connecticut. Sometime in the years immediately before the Revolution, he began serving as an interpreter for missionaries, and for Sir William Johnson, the first Indian superintendent, who managed the intricate diplomacy linking the British to the Iroquois. Brant’s sister, Mary, lived with Sir William, who took an interest in her brother. Sir William Johnson died just before the Revolution, and his nephew, who assumed his post as superintendent, recognized Brant’s unusual qualities. In fact, he took Brant to England with him in 1775, an experience that clearly broadened Brant’s understanding of the world and, in particular, of the Englishmen with whom he would deal. His choice to fight for the British and to take many of the Iroquois with him seemed preordained. He proved to be a skillful commander, working well with the British army and with non-Mohawk Iroquois. Until late 1779, the Iroquois, led by Brant, and their British allies, terrorized much of upstate New York and Pennsylvania. But in August of that year General John Sullivan, with a much superior force, defeated them at Newtown. Full control was denied to the victors, however, and this part of the West remained contested ground long after the end of the war.58
One tribe, the Catawba Nation in the South Carolina Piedmont, actually took part in the Revolution and survived the experience surprisingly well. Its experience was uncommon. The Catawba counted only a few thousand people on the eve of the Revolution, most living in villages surrounded by white settlements. No doubt the proximity of the colonists had something to do with the Catawbas’ decision to support the revolutionaries.
The Catawbas’ relations with the whites had been fairly tranquil for a number of years before the war.59 When the war began they were drawn into the revolutionaries’ orbit by an offer from the Charleston Council of Safety to pay Indians who served the American cause. The Council also explained the reasons for the colony’s resistance to British measures while reminding the Catawbas of the history of good relations between Indians and whites. And, to make certain that there was no misunderstanding of Carolina’s intentions, the Council added that “If you do not mind what we say, you will be sorry for it by and by.” It did not take the Catawbas long to declare their allegiance to the colonial cause.60
At the most Catawba warriors numbered only a few hundred, and these men fought no major battle by themselves. But they did take part in significant engagements in the backcountry, including at Ninety-Six and Stono. They also provided supplies to partisan forces under Thomas Sumter. After Charleston fell in May 1780, the British, using brutal measures, made the Indians pay for their help to the Americans. Lord Rawdon, the British leader, burned their villages to the ground, destroying houses and crops while the Indians fled to North Carolina and Virginia. In a most unusual act the South Carolina legislature came to the Indians’ aid after the British withdrawal. It sent corn to them early in 1782, and it gave £299 for Catawba assistance in the war. The Indians’ action in supplying cattle to Sumter in the dark days just past was also recognized with a reimbursement of £125. These actions had no echoes elsewhere in the American colonies.
Rather, the common thread in Indian experience in the Revolution was loss. Many Indians lost their lives in the fighting all along the western rim, and probably even more as the result of loss of food supplies and housing. The Indians’ losses stretched far beyond the end of the war, of course, as the pressure of white expansion on their lands resumed after the Treaty of Paris. A few Indians simply escaped: Joseph Brant and hundreds of his Iroquois followers found new homes in Canada. Most Indians had no such refuge, and their dismal fate in the new republic seemed inescapable.
22
Yorktown and Paris
On May 15, 1781, five days before Cornwallis and his army reached Petersburg, Virginia, Major General William Phillips, commander of forces in the Chesapeake, died of a tidewater fever. Cornwallis had looked forward to seeing him again, an old comrade who with Clinton and himself had cut his combat teeth in Germany in the Seven Years War. British officers who fought in Germany felt set apart from those who had not, felt superior, in fact, to all others. When they were much younger, Phillips, Clinton, and Cornwallis had dreamed of commanding together—”How we should agree, how act, how triumph, how love one another.” Clinton and Cornwallis had long since fallen out, and Phillips and Clinton were no longer close. But Cornwallis remained fond of Phillips, whose death dampened the pleasure he felt at arriving in Virginia.1
Phillips, a fat and comfortable man, might have steadied Cornwallis. And at this moment Cornwallis needed some ballast. He was tired from a long and depressing campaign, and he was looking for excuses for the abandonment of the Carolinas. He was also looking for direction. He had made it to Virginia with a thousand men who had seen too much combat, but once there even he did not quite know what he should do.
Benedict Arnold greeted him, but Cornwallis could not have taken much satisfaction in Arnold’s presence. The 5000 troops, present and fit for duty now in his command, offered much more reassurance. A week later reinforcements arrived which he divided between his own force and the post at Portsmouth. He also pondered the orders under which Phillips had operated and which of course were now his; he was to establish a post on the Chesapeake. Clinton had also instructed Phillips to cooperate with Cornwallis but not to undertake a major campaign of his own.2
Clinton himself continued to display his customary restlessness and disinclination to act. He had no knowledge of Cornwallis’s move to the north until late in May. He had spent much of the winter fretting over Arbuthnot and considering strikes against the French at Newport or a possible raid against Philadelphia in order to relieve Phillips in the Chesapeake. Nothing came of his ruminations, nothing could as long as Arbuthnot held command of the navy. The two chiefs had long since passed the point where they could plan, let alone carry out, joint operations. In March, Arbuthnot exerted himself to pursue the Chevalier Destouches, who had succeeded Ternay as French naval commandant at Newport. Destouches had taken a French squadron to the Chesapeake with an attack against Arnold in mind. Arbuthnot intercepted him on March 16 and though the British tactics were hardly flawless in the engagement that followed, they discouraged the French. Arnold’s force was saved, and Arbuthnot was responsible for their safety.3
Near the end of May, Clinton learned of Cornwallis’s march to Virginia. The news did not please him but he did not react decisively. What should he do now? Washington did not appear to offer an immediate threat to New York and seemed unlikely to be able to strengthen his army. American public finances and, Clinton supposed, American morale had nearly collapsed. The French at Newport were more of a threat, for they had ships as well as troops. The navy had them pretty well confined, however, in a tough and dreary blockade, and the navy would have to deal with Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse who, with twenty ships of the line, had sailed from Brest on March 22. Clinton had been warned of his coming by the ministry but could do little about it except pass on the news to George Rodney, naval commander in the West Indies. Grasse’s force gave the French naval superiority in North America, a circumstance of immense importance but one which the ministry ignored until it was too late. No attempt was made to stop him in European waters and no reinforcement of ships was sent to America until June, and that reinforcement was hardly worth the name, consisting as it did of three ships of the line. As for Cornwallis, in June Clinton sent instructions that he was to develop a base in the Chesapeake capable of sheltering warships. Clinton also wrote warningly that soon orders would be sent for the return of troops in Cornwallis’s army—to join in projected operations along the Delaware. These instructions went out from New York on June 11 and 15 and reached Cornwallis on the 26th. Before they did, he had disrupted life in Virginia by first driving Lafayette from Richmond and then turning loose Lt. Colonel John Simcoe and the Queens Rangers for a strike against Baron von Steuben at Point of Fork, the juncture of the Rivanna and Fluvanna rivers. Steuben had to run before this raid—his men would not fight—and Simcoe captured arms and ammunition. Cornwallis next sent Tarleton after the Virginia legislature at Charlottesville which he reached on June 4. On this swift cut Tarleton nearly captured Governor Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Jefferson escaped by a mere ten minutes.4
The day after Cornwallis reached Williamsburg he read the letters Clinton had written two weeks before. They informed him that he was not to conduct a major campaign, though he might harass the enemy, and he was to construct a naval station. Clinton by this time was attempting to ready himself for several possibilities, a Franco-American attack on New York, or a push into Pennsylvania to upset the enemy. Hence he urged Cornwallis to send troops to New York, six regiments of infantry, plus cavalry and artillery.5
These orders disgusted Cornwallis and perhaps confused him. At any rate, he immediately looked for a site for a naval base, first reconnoitering Yorktown. Deciding against establishing himself there, he began a march to Portsmouth, from which the troops would be sent to New York. Before he left Williamsburg he dispatched a letter to Clinton in which he virtually declared his unwillingness to remain in Virginia—under the conditions his chief had laid down—and requested permission to retire to Charleston, South Carolina. Until he heard from Clinton, however, he would remain in Virginia and scout out a naval station.6
The move from Williamsburg began leisurely on July 4. Lafayette followed and on July 6 sent Anthony Wayne to hit what he thought was the British rear guard near Jamestown. Cornwallis in force lay in ambush at Greenspring. Wayne led his men forward and the British sprang the trap. Lafayette helped extricate Wayne, but when it was over there were 145 dead Americans on the field. Cornwallis then led his army across the James.7
Before Cornwallis arrived at Portsmouth fresh letters from Clinton found him—and kept finding him—with instructions to get the troops scheduled for New York ready for a Pennsylvania expedition instead. Then as he loaded troops for Philadelphia, he was ordered to hold the Williamsburg Neck and to keep back troops for New York. Then he seemed to be instructed to fortify Old Point Comfort or Yorktown but to send any troops to New York that he no longer needed.8
By the end of July, Cornwallis had decided to abandon Portsmouth, keep his entire force, and fortify Yorktown. And on August 2, he began putting his troops ashore there. Clinton did not object when he learned of this disposition.
While Clinton and Cornwallis thrashed about in confusion and indecision, Washington tried to sort out his problems and to assess his possibilities. His army still dressed itself in rags and suffered from shortages of every description. The rate of desertion may have slowed but was still high. His allies, the French, sat in Newport awaiting reinforcements and eyeing the English ships that blockaded them. The naval commander, the Comte de Barras, new on the scene in May, was an unknown quantity, but Rochambeau, the lieutenant general who led the French army, had made a favorable impression since his arrival in July 1780.9
Rochambeau was seven years older than Washington. He had served with distinction in France’s European wars, but he did not know America and he spoke no English. He had good military ability, however, and his personal qualities, honesty and tact, made him an ideal choice for command. And his acceptance of his subordination to Washington added to his value.
In May 1781, Rochambeau and Washington decided on operations around New York City, if possible in such force as to compel Clinton to recall troops from Virginia. Rochambeau would bring the French fleet to Boston where it might more easily be protected. When Washington learned in June that Admiral Grasse had sailed from Brest for the West Indies and would be coming to the American mainland during the summer, he did not give up his plans for an attack on New York City. He did not know the size of Grasse’s force, nor did he know where Grasse intended to use it.10
Early in July the Franco-American operations around New York began but enjoyed no great success. There was little fighting around the city in these days largely because the allies had trouble getting into positions from which to attack. While they maneuvered, the commanders speculated about Grasse’s intentions. Would he come to New York or Virginia, and would he give them naval superiority? On August 14, Washington received a letter from Barras with the answers—Grasse had left the West Indies for the Chesapeake with twenty-nine ships and over three thousand troops.
Although Grasse’s naval strength was formidable it did not guarantee to the French supremacy in American waters. But it might lead to full control, and Washington decided almost immediately to act as if it would. He therefore informed Rochambeau that the two armies must move to the Chesapeake as rapidly as possible. Five days later, on August 19, he had the Continentals in motion with the French coming along soon afterwards. To conceal these movements from Clinton was impossible, but Washington could throw sand into his eyes—and proceeded to by faking preparations for an attack on New York from New Jersey. He had the roads and bridges in New Jersey near the city repaired and a large oven for baking bread constructed. Then near the end of August he started three columns marching toward the city as if positioning themselves for an attack. Clinton watched apprehensively and did not guess the destination of the allied force until September 2, when the American army passed through Philadelphia. The French, following a route recommended by Washington, marched through in the next two days.11
