How many here knew that George Washington ordered slaughter of Indians during Revolutionary War?

[wnylib]

30. What he said is true. I have known about this

all my life. My grandmother had Seneca, Mohawk, and English ancestry. She was a descendent of Chief Cornplanter's half brother, Handsome Lake.

Washington ordered the Sullivan Campaign, which was responsible for destroying Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) villages and crops. NY students learn about the Sullivan Campaign in their history courses about NY. I grew up in PA, but heard about it from my family, in general terms. I learned the details much later as an adult from reading about it.

The British and Haudenosaunee Confederacy were allies in a "covenant chain" prior to the American Revolution. When war broke out, the Haudenosaunee leaders tried to keep the Confederacy neutral. But Joseph Brandt, a Mohawk who had a British education and a sister married to the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, took the British side and persuaded several other members of the Confederacy to join the British.

The Sullivan Campaign was utterly ruthless. Every crop and village in the Haudenosaunee territory was burned to the ground, leaving the people with no shelter or food. Thousands died. Clan leaders (women) were lost. The whole structure of their society was destroyed.

After the war, the American government divided up the Haudenosaunee territory in NY into lots to be given to American war vets as compensation in lieu of money owed to them which the new government did not have. The rest of the Haudenosaunee territory was sold to land developers who divided it into lots to sell to New Englanders who wanted to move west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The Haudenosaunee people were pushed onto small territories in "negotiations." Disease, malnutrition, psychological depression, and alcoholism were rampant. There was almost no social organization left.

Then Handsome Lake, an alcoholic himself, went into a trance during a drunken stupor and had a "vision" of what the Haudenosaunee should be and how they should live. He founded the Longhouse religion based on a series of trances. The religion preserved basic traditions of the people, instructed them on how to live in their daily lives, and incorporated some aspects of Euro-Ametican culture, like Euro type farming with livestock instead of total reliance on hunting for meat. It spread throughout the Seneca and on to some of the other Haudenosaunee tribal nations. The people pulled themselves together with new pride and dignity.

Meantime, his brother, Cornplanter, invited some Quaker missionaries to teach the people some Euro-American ways in order to survive in the new nation. The Quakers and Haudenosaunee had always had good relations. The two brothers had some serious disputes over adaptation vs. preservation, but between them, they revitalized the Seneca people. Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to them praising their recovery.

Cornplanter, whose mother was Seneca but father was Dutch, preserved peace between the US and Native nations farther west who were organizing an allied war against the new US, using negotiations and threats. As a reward, Washington awarded a large plot of land in northwestern PA for Cornplanter, his band of followers, and their descendants "in perpetuity, as long as the grass shall grow." In 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers built Kinzua Dam which flooded all of that land and parts of Seneca territory up into NY State. The Cornplanter village and his grave site are now at the bottom of Kinzua Lake. The remains of Cornplanter and others buried there were removed before the flooding.

Johnny Cash sang a song about Kinzua. (The people pictured in the visual are from various Native nations, not just Seneca.)