[Professor S.F. Wise, Department of History, Carleton
University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada]
One of the most controversial aspects of the American Revolution continues to be the role played in it by the Indians, and particularly those employed by the British. One of the blackest charges brought by the framers of the Declaration of Independence against George III was that he had “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in America, has usually been blamed for bringing the Indians into the War.1 Eventually both sides employed Indian auxiliaries, though vastly more were associated with the British than with the rebels. Gage, however, was hardly responsible for this state of affairs. Though British arms and presents were inducements for some Indian peoples to take part, for many others the Revolution represented an opportunity to continue the long struggle against the encroachment of white settlement. That meant some form of alliance with Britain.
Indian motives, complex though they were and varying greatly from people to people, are not the subject of this paper. We are concerned here with the attitude of those British regular officers charged with the prosecution of the war towards working in concert with Indian forces. Though it is well known that the use of Indians by European states was as old as the earliest contests between colonial powers in North America, to most British professional soldiers the Revolution was a special case. Putting the matter at its simplest, for most of them it was one thing to employ Indians against the French, quite another, as the Earl of Chatham said, to “loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties and religion, endeared to us by every tye that should sanctify humanity”.2 To soldiers accustomed to the controls normally placed upon the conduct of armies by the rules of warfare, customary Indian practices awoke feelings that ranged from distaste to horror. Most of them believed, with Edmund Burke, that Indians fought merely to indulge their native cruelty and for “the glory of acquiring the greatest number of scalps… the gratification arising from torturing, mangling, roasting alive by slow fires and frequently even devouring their captives”.3
The decision to use Indians was a political one, taken by the home government. No senior British officer questioned this decision, yet for most of them the ethical problem was not dismissed lightly. It is significant that many regular officers found it necessary at some point to justify the use of Indians, usually in terms similar to those expressed by Lord George Germain, who argued that “either they would have served against us, or … we must have employed them”. 4
Joined to their revulsion for Indian practices in war was the conviction that the Indians were useless for most forms of military operation. Their value as scouts and guides was generally recognized, and some officers were also pre-pared, under proper controls, to use them as weapons of terror. But the Indians were commonly seen as undependable, undisciplined, incapable of organized tactics, ineffective against all but the rawest of militia and inordinately expensive to maintain in the field.
Nevertheless, from the outset of the Revolution there were powerful pressures upon British commanders to make the fullest possible use of Indian auxiliaries. As the prospect for some political solution to the rebellion evaporated and the attitude of the home government hardened, ministers responsible for the prosecution of the war insisted upon the use of “all the means that God and nature put into our hands” to suppress a rebellion that was itself unnatural.5 Adver-sity and the shortage of regular forces wore down scruples, and, especially on the northern and western frontiers, military and economic necessity appeared to dictate a more extensive employment of Indian manpower.
Just as General Gage has been charged with responsibility for initiating the policy of enlisting the Indians on the British side, so also the earliest plans for their use are attributable to him. In June 1775, in the course of advising the home government on the nature and size of the forces which would be required to put down the rebellion, Gage recommended the employment of large bodies of Indians with regular forces in two of the three theatres of operations he foresaw. New England, he thought, would require an army of 15,000, “a large part of which should be good Irregulars, such as Hunters, Canadians, Indians, etc.” In the Lake Champlain-Hudson River borderland another 7,000 troops would be needed, including “a large Corps of Canadians and Indians”.6 Although he did not specify the military role he intended for the Indians, it is probable that he wished them to be used as scouts and along lines of communications, as they had been employed during the Seven Years’ War.
The home government accepted Gage’s recommendation that the Indians be drawn into the war, and gave him a free hand to deploy them as he saw fit. In July the Secretary of State, the Earl of Dartmouth, ordered the active recruitment of the Indians. “The unnatural rebellion now raging,” he told Guy Johnson, acting superintendent in the Indian Department, “calls for every effort to suppress it, and the Intelligence His Majesty has received of the rebels having excited the Indians to take a part, and of their actually having engaged a body of them in arms to support their rebellion, justifies the resolution His Majesty has taken of requiring the assistance of his faithful adherents the Six Nations”.7 Johnson was instructed to induce the Six Nations to take up the hatchet immediately, and to engage them in operations in conformity with Gage’s plans for them.
Nothing came of these early intentions, for the evacuation of Boston by the British and the seizure of Crown Point and Ticonderoga by the Americans changed the shape of the war before any of the commander-in-chief’s plans could be put into operation. Instead, for the first year or more of the war in the northern theatre, the nature and degree of Indian participation was determined by Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec. Unlike Gage, Carleton had small confidence in the military effectiveness of the Indians, he believed that their use would be impolitic and he had a profound dislike for their manner of warfare. Before the commencement of hostilities Gage had asked him to raise Indian forces as well as units of the Canadian militia. Though Carleton was enthusiastically in favour of raising Canadian battalions (and was to be sorely disappointed) he was distinctly tepid with respect to the Indians, merely assuring Gage that the Canada Indians and their neighbours were available for service “whenever you are pleased to call upon them, and what you recommend shall be complied with”. 8
That Carleton wished to place severe limits upon the use made of Indians emerged clearly in July 1775 when a council involving a number of Indian nations was held at Montreal. There he laid down that only small bodies of Indians would be used to gather intelligence, that British officers would always accompany them and that they were to be confined operationally within the province of Quebec “as he did not think it prudent to let them go beyond the 45th deg. of Lat: or over the Province Line”.9 Initially he justified this policy to Dartmouth on the ground that Indians were “not to be depended upon, especially by those who are in a weakly situation”, adding that neither the Indians nor the Canadians were as formidable as they had been in 1759, except “in Idea”. 10 Some weeks later he offered a further explanation that had moral and probably political implications. “I would not even suffer a savage to pass the frontier, though often urged to let them loose on the rebel provinces”, he wrote to Dartmouth, “lest cruelties might have been committed and for fear the innocent might have suffered with the guilty”.11
As a result of this policy few Indians served with Carleton’s small forces during the American invasion of Canada and their subsequent withdrawal. Yet one of the most notable small successes of this campaign was won by a party of Indians operating with a detachment of the 8th Regiment when in May 1776, a force of Americans was defeated at the Cedars, on the St. Lawrence above Montreal, and several hundred prisoners were taken. So thoroughly imbued were Carleton’s subordinates with the principles he had set down to govern the use of Indian auxiliaries that the officers commanding the regular detachment paroled all the American prisoners rather than risk an unfortunate incident. He explained his conduct as follows:
After the maturest deliberation of the Customs and Manners of the savages in War, which I find so opposite and contrary to the Humane disposition of the British Government and to all Civilized Nations; and to avoid the in-evitable consequences of the Savages Customs in former Wars (which by their Threats and Menaces I find is not changed) that of putting their Prisoners to death to disincumber themselves in case of being attacked by their enemy; I therefore in compliance with the above disposition in Government, and the dictates of Humanity thought fit to enter into….Articles of Agreement with Mr. Arnold in the Name of the Power he is employed by.12
For militant members of the Six Nations, to whom the war was more than a quarrel between the British and their colonists, Carleton’s policy was deeply disappointing. In late 1776 an attack upon it was made by Joseph Brant, a Mo-hawk warrior who was to be one of the most effective Indian partisans of the Revolution. In a letter circulated through the villages of the Indians of Quebec, he urged them to break free from the restrictions imposed upon them and to join him in an expedition against American frontier settlements. “I do not think it right”, he wrote, “to let my brothers go to war under the command of General Carleton, as General Carleton expects and trys to have the Indians under the same command as the regular Troops, but it will be the best method for us to make war our own way.”13 In sending copies of this intercepted letter to commandants of the interior posts, Carleton ordered them to do all in their power to prevent the Indians from taking the war into their own hands, and in doing so summed up explicitly his own position:
However proper and justifiable it may be to make use of the Indians in a defensive War, or to chastize the real criminals — yet true policy as well as humanity forbids indiscriminate attack, such as intended by the Savages, wherein Women and Children, aged and infirm, the innocent as well as the guilty, will be equally exposed to their fury. I desire therefore that all means may be used to prevent this, and to turn the force of the Indians to the use which will be most for the King’s interest and their own good, by acting in concert with the troops.14
Carleton’s policy was repudiated in late 1776 by Lord George Germain, Dartmouth’s successor as Secretary of State for the colonies, who remained the minister chiefly responsible for the conduct of the war until 1782. Germain, both from Carleton’s correspondence and from letters reaching him from Indian Department officials opposed to the restricted use of Indians, was aware that little use had been made of them. As early as August 1776 he called for the embodiment of “large Parties” of Indians to work with regular forces. Then, in early 1777, he utterly reversed the course Carleton had followed by ordering the recruitment of substantial numbers to serve with the army General John Burgoyne was to lead from Canada into New York, and directed as well that attacks upon American settlements be launched by Indian parties accompanied by white officers from Forts Niagara and Detroit. 15
Burgoyne was optimistic enough to believe that he could control the Indians under his command and at the same time use them as a psychological weapon against the Americans. In a foolish proclamation he enjoined the rebels to lay down their arms, declaring that “I have but to give stretch to the Indian Forces under my direction and they amount to Thousands, to overtake the hardened Enemies of Great Britain and America… wherever they may lurk”. Should they fail to do so, he would use the Indians in “executing the vengeance of the state against the wilful outcasts”, bringing down “devastation, famine and every concomitant horror”. 16 At the same time, in a speech to the several hundred Indians of Canada and the upper lakes who had been assembled for him, he made a number of inflammatory statements. Congratulating them for the restraint they had exercised to that point in the war, he unleashed them from the restrictions under which they had been placed:
It remains for me, the General of one of his Majesty’s armies, and in this council his representative, to release you from those bands which your obedience imposed. Warriors, you are free. Go forth in the might of your valour and your cause. Strike at the common enemies of Great Britain and America.17
It is true that he also urged upon them respect for persons not in arms and for-bade them to take scalps except from the dead, but the general effect of the speech was quite contrary.
The manner in which Burgoyne chose to make use of the Indians was a contributory factor in the disastrous outcome of his campaign. His propaganda backfired, helping to bring out the thousands of militia who united to oppose him. The Indians themselves committed a number of acts, including the famous murder of Jane McCrae, which afforded the American cause a most powerful propaganda weapon. In actual operations they proved disappointing, though some of the difficulties undoubtedly arose from the unfamiliarity of Burgoyne’s regulars with Indian tactics. As Burgoyne’s army made its fateful way towards Saratoga, his Indian complement gradually melted away. Well before this stage had been reached, however, Burgoyne himself had become completely disillusioned. He told Germain:
Your Lordship will have observed that in my publick I have made little mention of the Indians, nor indeed were they of any use in the pursuit. When plunder is in their way, which was the case at Ticonderoga, it is impossible to drag them from it. I do all I can to keep up their terror but in many cases I find they are little more than a name. Under the management of their interpretors and conductors they are indulged, for interested reasons, in all the humours of spoiled children…. Were they left to them-selves, enormities too horrid to think of would ensue; guilty and innocent, women and infants would be a common prey.18
In a subsidiary operation on the right flank of the main force, a body led by Col. St. Leger and including a large number of warriors from the Six Nations achieved a notable success over the New York militia at Oriskany. Yet the les-son drawn by regular officers from this operation was not the effect of tactical surprise achieved by the Indians but their refusal to help in the attack upon Fort Stanwic, an action which compelled the lifting of the siege. 19 The outcome of Indian participation in the Burgoyne campaign served only to reinforce most British professional soldiers in the low opinion they already held of the effectiveness of such allies.
Nor did this failure deter Germain from his other stated objective, the launching of Indian attacks upon American frontier settlements from the interior posts. The immediate cause of Germain’s decision was a despatch from Lieutenant-Governor Henry Hamilton at Detroit. Hamilton had proposed attacks upon the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers by white-led parties of Indians, but Carleton had forbidden any such activity even though Hamilton had assured him that the interior tribes were eager for war. In ordering Carleton to undertake offensive operations from the posts, Germain showed his willingness to use Indian resources to the full.
There can be little doubt that the Indians … will readily and eagerly engage in any enterprise in which it may be thought fit to employ them under the direction of the King’s officers; and as it is His Majesty’s Resolution that the most rigorous efforts should be made and every means employed that Providence has put into His Majesty’s Hands for crushing the Rebellion and Restoring the Constitution it is the King’s Command that you should direct Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton to assemble as many of the Indians of his District as he conveniently can, and placing proper persons at their Head… to conduct their parties and restrain them from committing violence on the well-affected and Inoffensive Inhabitants and employ them in making a Diversion and exciting an alarm upon the Frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania.20
This despatch was the charter under which the Indian and Loyalist raids upon the northern and western frontiers were conducted. Beginning in late 1777, the raids continued well past the conclusion of formal hostilities on the seaboard. Memories of them, and the horrors and “massacres” associated with them, are firmly entrenched in the American mythology of the Revolution, and just as firmly en-trenched is the view that such raids were made possible only through the support of hypocritical British professional soldiers who protested their humanity but connived in butchery.
This is not altogether a just view. Prime responsibility for the direction of these operations rested, not with Carleton, for whom such warfare would have been uncongenial, but with his successor, Major-General Frederick Haldimand. Haldimand’s outlook was in no way different from that of Carleton, but he lacked Carleton’s rigour and firm authority. Nevertheless, from the first he insisted that raiding take place only upon legitimate military objectives, that non-combatants be spared, that prisoners receive the protection accorded by the us-ages of war, and that war parties always be accompanied by white officers. In the course of the border war, however, most of these regulations were bent or broken, no matter how frequently Haldimand and his subordinates at the interior posts insisted upon their observance. They were, in fact, virtually unenforceable; once the decision was taken to launch a frontier offensive, to support it with arms and supplies and to offer the protection of the posts to the dependents of the Indians, the means of control diminished. There were never enough regular officers to accompany Indian bands; normally they were led by officers of the Indian Department or by the largely Loyalist Reserve Rangers. Some at least of these had no more concern for European usages of war than did the Indians. Legitimate military objectives, in a war of this nature, were not merely stockaded posts and blockhouses, but houses, outbuildings, crops and livestock. There was little that combatants could do to prevent the taking prisoner of women and children. Periodically, after excesses against non-combatants had been committed, or prisoners slaughtered, there were threats to withdraw support from the Indian raiding parties.
But in the end Haldimand and his officers were forced to recognize that the Indians — and their Loyalist allies — had become as vital to the maintenance of the British position in the interior, as to the fur trade, the latter still the chief support of the province of Quebec. As Haldimand wrote to Germain in 1779, when the Six Nations came under attack from American regular forces, “should they be forced to yield upon this occasion and from their weakness, as well as our inability, to support them, from the difficulty of pushing up Provisions, be obliged to come into the Terms of the Rebellious Colonies, Niagara, the Upper Country $ Fur trade will go”.21 In the end, Haldimand reached the point of concluding that the Indians, through their pin-prick war — a form of war which ear-lier had won nothing but contempt from the professionals — had pushed back the frontier and saved the posts for Britain. As a result, he was convinced of the peculiar injustice of a peace treaty that did not take the Indian contribution into account:
…I am fully satisfied of the indispensable Necessity of keeping the Indians attached to the British Cause, knowing that by their Alliance, we have hitherto, with a handful of Troops, kept possession of the Upper Posts, and that without their cordial assistance, it will be impossible to maintain that Country — therefore Policy, as well as gratitude, demands of us an attention to the Suffering and future Situation of these Unhappy People involved, on our account, in the Miseries of War with an implacable Enemy.22
References
1. Indictments of Gage for his part in bringing the Indians into the Revolu-tion can be found, in descending order of vehemence, in Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution, (Boston, 1934 repr. New York, 1968) 403-10; J.M. Sosin, “The use of Indians in the war of the American Revolution: a reassessment of responsibility”, Canadian Historical Re-view, XLVI, 1965, 101-21; D.R. Higginbotham, The War of American In-dependence: Military Attitudes, Policies and Practice, 1763-1789 (New York, 1971), 319-22. The inevitability of Indian participation is argued in S.F. Wise, “The American Revolution and Indian History”, in J.S. Moir (ed) Character and Circumstance: Essays in Honour of Donald Grant Creighton, (Toronto, 1970) 182-200.
2. T.C. Hansard, Parliamentary History of England From the Earliest Times to 1803, XIX, London, 1914, 18 Nov. 1777, 370.
3. Ibid., 6 Feb. 1777, 694-9.
4. Ibid., 700-1.
5. Ibid., 18 Nov. 1777, 368.
6. Public Archives of Canada, CO 5, Vol. 92, Gage to Dartmouth, 12 June 1775, 94.
7. E.B. O’Callaghan (ed.) Documents Relevant to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 15 vols., Albany, 1853-1887, VIII, Dartmouth to Guy Johnson, 24 July 1775, 596.
8. A. Shorts and A.G. Doughty (eds.), Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759-1791, Part II, 2nd and rev. ed., Ottawa, 1918, Gage to Carleton, 4 Sep 1774, 583-4; ibid., Carleton to Gage, 20 Sep 1774, 584.
9. O’Callaghan, NY Docs, VIII, Journal of Col. Guy Johnson from May to November, 1775, 659.
10. P.A.C., Q Series, Vol. 11, Carleton to Dartmouth, 14 Aug 1775, 223.
11. Ibid., same to same, 25 Oct 1775, 270-1.
12. Ibid., Vol. 12, Capt. Forster’s Agreement, 27 May 1776, in Carleton to Germain, 2 June 1776, 57-9.
13. P.A.C., BM Add Mss, Haldimand Papers, B 39, Joseph Brant to Indians of Lake of Two Mountains, 28 Dec 1776.
14. Ibid., B 18, Carleton to Capt. Lernoult, 9 Feb. 1777.
15. Q Series, Vol. 12, Germain to Carleton, 22 Aug 1776, 92; Haldimand Papers, B 37, Germain to Carleton, 26 March 1777.
16. Hadden, J.M. Journal Kept in Canada and Upon Burgoyne’s Campaigns in 1776 and 1777, Albany, 1884, 20 June 1777, 59-62.
17. Q Series, Vol. 13, Speech of Lt. Gen. Burgoyne to the Indians in Congress at the Camp Upon the River Bouquet, 21 June 1777, 292-5.
18. Ibid., Burgoyne to Germain, 11 July 1777, 370.
19. Ibid., Vol. 14, St. Leger to Burgoyne, 11 Aug 1777, 223; St. Leger to Carleton, 27 Aug 1777, 135-43.
20. Haldimand Papers, B 37, Germain to Carleton, 26 March 1777. See also Hamilton to Dartmouth, 2 Sep 1776, Q Series, Vol. 12, 218-221; Haldimand Papers, B 121, Carleton to Hamilton, 2 Feb. 1777. On 26 Sep 1777, Carleton wrote to Hamilton that “The conduct of the war has been taken entirely out of my hands, and the management of it upon your frontier has been assigned to you, as you have seen by a letter from Lord George…. I can therefore only refer you to that”. (Ibid., B 40).
21. Ibid., B 54, Haldimand to Germain, 14 Sep 1779.
22. Ibid., B 56, Haldimand to Townshend, 14 Feb 1783.
