Chapter 30: The Biggest Losers: The American Indians. One sad inconsistency of the American Revolution is that the revolutionaries felt they had the right to fight the British over the mere issue of taxes, yet they didn't feel the Indians had the right to fight for their very existence. The white man had taken the Indians' land and deprived many of them of the right to live as free people. By the time of the Revolution, some of the Eastern Indian nations had already been brought to the verge of extinction.
So the Indians were fighting not only for the independence they had enjoyed for centuries before the white man arrived, but also for their land itself and for their survival as a people. For this reason, most of the Indians sided with the British during the American Revolution. Remember, one of the issues between the colonists and the British was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which protected the Indians' land west of the Appalachians.
Britain had even set up forts on the western frontier to make sure their promise was honored. The Indians realized that if the colonists won their revolution, there would be nothing to stop the white settlers from pouring over the Appalachians and taking all of their land. The Mohawks were one tribe of Indians who sided with the British. When the Revolution broke out, the Mohawks began to attack the colonists who lived on the Pennsylvania frontiers. Various colonial militias fought back against the Indians.
It was one of the ugliest parts of the Revolutionary War, with both sides committing bloody atrocities. Eventually, George Washington ordered the total annihilation of the Mohawk villages and confiscation of their property. His order didn't stop with the Mohawks, but he extended it to all of the villages and lands of the other members of the six Iroquois nations. In response to Washington's orders, in the summer of 1779, the colonial armies burned down 40 Indian villages.
They destroyed all the corn and grain and took axes to every fruit tree they could find. Thousands of men, women, and children were massacred. The survivors fled to Canada, where their descendants still live to this day. Nowadays, what the colonists did would be called a war crime and ethnic cleansing. However, the colonists hailed it as a glorious achievement. Somehow, it never occurred to the colonists that the Indians were fighting for the very thing that the revolutionaries were fighting for, and so much more.
Gnadenhutten. Sadly, even a village of non-resistant, peaceful Indians in Ohio suffered a horrible fate at the hand of the colonists. Before the war, Moravian missionaries had converted a number of Lenape Indians to Christianity. Those Indians embraced all of Jesus' teachings, forever laying down their tomahawks and bows.
These Christian Indians established a village in Ohio that they called Gnadenhutten, which means "Huts of Grace." At Gnadenhutten, these Moravian Indians adopted a quiet agricultural life, renouncing war. As Kingdom Christians, these Indians remained neutral during the American Revolution. However, this made the Indians allied with the British suspicious of them. These Indian allies wondered if perhaps the Indians at Gnadenhutten were really on the side of the colonists.
Because Gnadenhutten was situated in an area where much of the frontier fighting was raging, in September of 1781, some of the Indian tribes forced these Moravian Indians to move to a new location near Lake Erie, where they would be away from the fighting. Unfortunately, these Moravian Indians had been given insufficient rations for the winter, so they were on the brink of starvation.
As a result, in February of 1782, about a hundred of them returned to Gnadenhutten to harvest the crops left behind there and to collect stored food and other goods they had been forced to abandon. While these peaceful Indians were still at Gnadenhutten, a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militia led by Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson came upon them. These militia men rounded up the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhutten and accused them of taking part in raids in Pennsylvania.
The Indians immediately denied the charges and explained to the militia that they were non-resistant Christians and had remained neutral during the war. Despite learning this, the militia held a council and voted to massacre them all. When they were told of their impending fate, the Moravian Indians asked the soldiers for an hour to spend in prayer and in seeking reconciliation with one another.
One of their Indian elders counseled his people to die without hatred in their hearts, in imitation of Jesus when he died on the cross. Although the militia had witnessed these Indians praying and singing hymns, they still tied up the Indians, scalped them, and then murdered them. In all, they slaughtered 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children. Not one of the Indians offered resistance. Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, managed to escape and tell others of the massacre.
After slaughtering everyone, the soldiers looted the village, gathering things such as furs, pewter, and clothing. Before leaving, the soldiers piled the dead bodies in the mission buildings and burned the village to the ground. They also burned down the other abandoned Moravian villages in the area. When news of the massacre got out, many urban Americans were outraged. However, most of the frontier settlers supported the militia's actions.
Despite talk about bringing the murderers to justice, no criminal charges were ever filed against them. After the war, these soldiers were never punished or even tried for their war crimes. Treaty of Fort Pitt. Before leaving the subject of the Indians, I should mention that some of the Indians sided with the colonists during the Revolution. The Continental Congress had sent out emissaries to various Indian nations, seeking to persuade them to side with the colonists.
Among the Indian nations that agreed to join the revolutionists were the Delawares. The colonial agents indicated to these Indians that if they joined the revolutionary cause, the Americans would create a separate state for the Delaware Nation once the colonists won their independence. So in 1778, in the middle of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress entered into a treaty with the Delaware Nation known as the Treaty of Fort Pitt.
Among the terms of the treaty was a provision that each side would fight on behalf of the other. It also required the Delawares to allow the American armies to pass through their lands to build forts on the western frontier.
Article 6 of the treaty contains the following promise: "The United States do engage to guarantee to the aforesaid Nation of Delawares and their heirs all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner, as it has been bounded by former treaties, as long as they, the said Delaware Nation, shall abide by and hold fast to the chain of friendship now entered into.
And it is further agreed on between the contracting parties, should it for the future be found conducive for the mutual interest of both parties to invite any other tribes who have been friends to the interest of the United States to join the present Confederation and to form a state whereof the Delaware Nation shall be the head and have a representation in Congress, provided nothing contained in this article is to be considered as conclusive until it meets with the approval of Congress." Sadly, by signing this
treaty, the Delawares opened themselves up to attack from the British and from other Indian tribes.
Nevertheless, the Delawares remained firm to their promise, even though Congress never gave them the protection it guaranteed. But after the war was over, Congress betrayed them. It never even considered giving the Delawares a separate state, despite what had been said in the treaty. Congress and the American people ignored the treaty. They would do the same thing over and over again in the future with other Indian treaties until the white settlers eventually took all the Indians' land.
One of the provisions of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the American Revolution was that Britain ceded to the United States the lands lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. This was the very land that had been set aside for the Indians in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The 19th-century Canadian historian, J.
Castell Hopkins, wrote the following about the treatment of the Indians by the United States: "The New England colonists had never treated the Indians upon their borders well, and the result had been a long series of reprisals and devastating war. Greedy traders and unscrupulous speculators in land had robbed the Indians of their intellect by brandy and of large tracts of land by fraud.
The American colonies, indeed, claimed the whole soil, and without British permission, though in the king's name, they made frequent and large grants of Indian territory to European settlers. They then seemed surprised when the tomahawk and scalping knife were used in response by the untutored savage. Finally, land regulations were made by the British Home Government, which to some extent stopped this sort of lawlessness.
They were respected in Canada, though they were more or less disregarded in the Thirteen Colonies as the spirit of local revolt developed. Sir William Johnson of the Mohawk Valley in New York was appointed Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, and he did his best to enforce these regulations. Indirectly, these regulations were one great cause of the subsequent rebellion, that is, American Revolution, because of the dissatisfaction created among masses of traders and border settlers.
After the Revolution, it may be said here, they were repealed by the Americans, and the course of unwise oppression entered upon, which has made the modern history of the Indian a standing reproach to the United States and a blood-red blot upon its annals. In Canada, they were maintained." What he wrote was the exact truth. Over and over again, our American forefathers stole land from the Indians, broke treaties, and slaughtered those Indians who tried to fight back.
Near the beginning of this book, we read John Winthrop's prophetic words, "We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us." Those words proved to be true with regard to the Americans' treatment of the Indians. The European nations took note of what the Americans did, and they used it to justify their own land grabs from weaker people.
For example, when Frederick the Great seized West Prussia from the Polish people in 1772, he referred to the native inhabitants as "slovenly Polish trash." He likened them to the Iroquois, whose land the American settlers had taken. He even gave the new German settlements American names such as Saratoga. This motif of equating the Poles and other Slavic people to American redskins continued in German politics all the way from the time of Frederick to that of Hitler.
The Germans admired the hardy American white settlers and believed the Americans had been justified in taking land away from the Indians because the white settlers were a "superior race." When Hitler seized the lands of the Slavic Eastern Europeans, he brought in German settlers to settle in the land. Not surprisingly, many of the Slavic partisans fought back.
In 1942, Hitler proclaimed, "There is a struggle here with the partisans as in the Indian wars in North America." In boasting that he would annihilate the Slavs who fought back, Hitler declared, "This will become a real Indian war." Like the Slavs of Hitler's day, the Indians were the big losers of the American Revolution. They were betrayed at the hands of professing Christians who did not trust in God and his methods. But there were other losers.