He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has 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 (United States “Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1776).
The British and the colonists each worked hard to keep the Iroquois on their side during the colonial rebellion that became the War of Independence. In 1775, the Continental Congress sent a delegation to the Iroquois in Albany to ask for their neutrality in the coming war against the British while, on the other side, the British argued that the colonists were essentially naughty children. The Iroquois agreed to be neutral on the condition that their hunters be allowed free passage during the war and that actions be limited to the coast. There was some involvement of small groups of Iroquois warriors on both sides, but for the most part the Iroquois kept a low profile. In late 1775, a Mohawk person was killed by a Continental soldier and the next year other Mohawk warriors joined the British against the rebels. In the next two years the neutrality policy gradually disintegrated as both sides exhorted the Iroquois to take up arms for their respective causes.
In 1777 the Six Nations disagreed about their role in the American Revolution. The oneida and Tuscarora decided to support the continental rebels while the rest of the League, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk and Seneca supported the British in large numbers on the condition that Iroquois land claims be adjudicated (Wallace 1970: 149-83; Tooker 1978a: 434-5). The disagreement resulted in the League “putting out the fire” in Onondaga and dividing the wampum records of their agreements between the two sides. Iroquois nation met Iroquois nation on August 8,1777 in battle for the first time in more than 300 years at Oriskany, New York (Jennings 1993: 301).
The Iroquois nations that fought for the British did well, and in some battles the Iroquois fielded more troops and suffered more casualties than the red coats. At the battle in Oriskany, ninety-one Iroquois and 33 British died on the British side; at Wyoming Valley on July 3, 1778 the Iroquois fielded 500 combatants, the British 400; at Cherry Valley on November 11,1778 the Iroquois provided 500 warriors and the British sent 200 (Clodfelter 1992: 199-200).
General Washington, clearly distressed by their role, urged that the Iroquois allied with the British be “destroyed” (quoted in Wright 1992:139), and part of the Continental army attempted to do just that. Wright notes, “In 1779, General John Sullivan cut down orchards and crops, burning 500 [Iroquois] houses and nearly a million bushels of corn. Colonel Daniel Brodhead, in an infamous attack that became known as the ‘squaw campaign’, dodged Indian armies but slaughtered women and children” (ibid.). Despite the Continental Army’s efforts, in 1781 the Governor of New York had to admit to the Congress that the Iroquois deprived them of “a great portion of our most valuable and well inhabited territory” (ibid.; see also Mann 2005; Williams 2005).
At the conclusion of the war, the Continental army claimed that it also defeated the Native nations that backed the British, and no provisions for the Iroquois were made in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The young United States’ colonies crowded the individual Iroquois nations in a westward expansion, acquiring Iroquois land by various means including treaties, purchase, swindle, and force (Wallace 1970: 141-48). The Iroquois were gradually confined to reservations in New York, Canada, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. The League was renewed in the late eighteenth century at both Six Nations Reserve in Canada and on the Buffalo Creek Reservation in upstate New York and continues to operate in both the US and Canada (Tooker 1978b: 449-65).
In sum, what should be clear from this short history of Iroquois war after the arrival of European traders is that the severity and probably the frequency of war and diplomacy changed dramatically because of the desire to replace those lost to epidemics and because of the new mix of motives introduced by the European - Native American fur trade. Despite opportunities for the League of the Iroquois to fall apart as a security regime, it remained intact. Individual members of the League were threatened by the increased strength of their neighbors and those nations’ direct alliance with the French, who also worked to dissolve the League. The Iroquois responded to these pressures with both insistent diplomatic efforts and by taking up arms against both the French and their Native trading partners. The Iroquois League members’ relationship with the Dutch and later the British was less overtly conflictual and quite advantageous to the British. What is interesting is the fact that the League did not dissolve under these pressures, despite the fact that there were differences between League members over relations with the Europeans.
World History
