When the American Revolution erupted, both the English and the colonists initially sought guarantees of neutrality from Indian tribes. Neither side wanted Indians to join their ranks; given their history of abuses against Indian peoples, they did not trust armed warriors to attack only the enemy.
Yet the thousands of fighting men Indian groups could recruit proved too attractive not to exploit. As in the French and Indian War, Indian tribes were soon pressured to become involved in a non-Indian conflict. Although the colonists and the English made active efforts to woo powerful Indian groups, tribes generally chose sides less on the basis of their promises of friendship than on the Indians’ own sense of which group posed them the smaller threat.
The tribes most affected by the revolution were those of the Iroquois Confederacy. Most Iroquois, including notably the Mohawk led by Joseph Brant, sided with the English, with whom they had a longstanding trade relationship. When factions of the Oneida and Tuscarora broke ranks and became allies of the colonists, the unity of the centuries-old Iroquois Confederacy was endangered. Ironically, the American Revolution nearly destroyed the very political organization that Benjamin Franklin had proposed as a model for the union of states the colonial rebels hoped to establish.
At the end of the war, the new United States made no distinction between their Indian allies and those of the English. All tribes were treated as defeated enemies, and their lands were increasingly seen by Americans as part of the fruits of their victory. Immediately threatened were the tribes of the Northwest Territory (now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and portions of Minnesota).
Despite the swarm of settlers into their lands, the Shawnee, Miami, Potawatomi, Ojibway, and other tribes living north of the Ohio River continued to resist encroachment. To drive the Indians out, President George Washington launched three full-scale military campaigns. A massive number of troops led by “Mad” Anthony Wayne finally defeated the Indian forces in 1794. As a result, the following year the Indian combatants were compelled by the Treaty of Greenville to sign away
25,000 square miles of land in the Ohio country.
The new U. S. government had finally won its battle for Ohio, but victory had come at an enormous price. Facing a possible conflict with the English, who refused to abandon American lands completely, the Washington administration was hesitant to expend any more of its meager resources on fighting longterm and costly Indian wars. Instead, it sought to extinguish Indian land claims through treaties. Toward the same end, the government also launched an effort to end collective Indian resistance by assimilating individual Indians into American society. Its so-called civilization programs focused on creating Indian schools and encouraging Indians to adopt the settled way of life of the non-Indian farmer. Except for among some large southeastern tribes, these programs were largely unsuccessful. Just as Indians did not want to relinquish their lands, they had little interest in giving up their own cultures in exchange for “civilization.”
In the Jeffersonian era, an alternative solution to end Indian resistance to white encroachment emerged. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased from France the Louisiana Territory—an 828,000-square-mile tract stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. One of Jefferson’s reasons for making the purchase was to provide an area to which tribes living east of the Mississippi could be relocated. In his mind, tribes pressured by increasing white settlement would voluntarily elect to leave their homelands for new territory to the west. Soon, however, Americans eager for Indian land would insist that tribes be expelled from the East by force.
Fear of forced relocation and anger at the government’s misguided assimilation efforts rekindled the spirit of rebellion in the Northwest Territory. There, among the Shawnee, a spiritual leader named Tenskwatawa drew a devoted following by preaching that Americans were evil. He told the faithful that they should preserve their traditional ways and shun any contact with whites.
As Tenskwatawa’s influence spread, his brother Tecumseh began to transform the religious movement into a political alliance dedicated to preserving the Indians’ control over their remaining lands. Tecumseh traveled throughout the East for three years, garnering increasing support for his Indian confederacy. His dream faded, however, after Tenskwatawa initiated an ill-fated attack on American forces sent out to subdue his supporters. The defeat of Tenskwatawa’s warriors disillusioned many of the prophet’s followers, irrevocably dampening enthusiasm for a united Indian front. By 1813, when Tecumseh was killed by American troops, his vision of an Indian confederacy was also dead.
Tecumseh’s influence was still felt, however, among a faction of the Creek Indians known as the Upper Creeks of the Red Sticks, who were particularly inspired by the Shawnee leader’s message. They launched a year-long military campaign against the Americans in their midst, but in the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend their warriors were crushed by a much larger force of American soldiers led by Andrew Jackson.
Jackson’s victory over the Red Sticks had ramifications not only in Creek territory but throughout Indian country. Now revered as an intrepid Indian fighter, Jackson began to draw broad political support from land-hungry settlers impatient with the federal government’s attempts to eliminate Indian presence in the East by peaceful means. In the light of Tecumseh’s demise, these whites believed that the era of armed Indian resistance had come to an end. Rallying behind Jackson, they would demand that eastern Indians—weakened and demoralized by war, disease, and their ever-shrinking territory—be banished once and for all from the lands the settlers had come to see as their own.
World History
