Military historian Douglas Edward Leach has called 1689 the
“year of the great divide, marking as it does the beginning of a series of four
major wars whose outcome would shape the whole future of North America.” That
year saw the start of the titanic struggle between predominantly Protestant
Britain and Catholic France that lasted for seven bitter decades. In America,
the long series of skirmishes, pitched battles, and anxious truces would be
popularly remembered as the French and Indian Wars, a name implying that the
Indians were pawns of their European allies.
They were not. Caught between two warring nations whose
customs were equally incomprehensible to them, the North American natives were
again and again forced to pick sides. Some tribes chose to fight with the
French, and some with the English, but all the tribes fought for their own best
interests as they saw them. And although the war was a clash between European
rivals, Indians were in it from the first; in fact, the war actually began in
America in 1688, while Europe was at peace and England still had a Catholic
king.
Although it had at first been sluggish in colonizing the New
World, by the 1680s France had established strong bases in Montreal, Port
Royal, and Quebec. The British had forestalled French expansion north of Quebec
by opening a trading post at Hudson Bay in 1670, but the St. Lawrence and
Ottawa rivers gave France access to the immense reaches of land in the interior
of the continent. The English had a long Atlantic coastline, but the French
meant to see that their ancient rivals stayed behind the Appalachian mountain
barrier.
The English, in turn, were ever on guard against French
encirclement, and none was more vigilant than the autocratic Sir Edmund Andros,
who as New York’s governor had persuaded the Mohawks to side with his English
settlers during King Philip’s War. James II of England had appointed Andros
governor of all the northern colonies from New Jersey to Maine, with orders to
prevent any French encroachments. This Andros did with hawkish efficiency.
In April 1688, he moved north with a company of soldiers to
Penobscot Bay, where Frenchman Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, baron de Saint-Castin
kept a trading post at what is now Castine, Maine. Saint-Castin had established
his post on land Andros felt had been granted to the duke of York and had
gotten rich from the fur trade. He had married the daughter of a chief and was
well loved by members of the Abnaki confederacy of eastern Indians. As an
observer wrote in 1684, they were the “most powerfull, politick, warlike and
numerous nation of Indians since the Narragansetts are broken, and influence
and steer all others that inhabit the English Plantations or Colonies.”
The Abnakis were furious when Andros and his men descended
on their friend Saint-Castin’s trading post, plundered his home, and demanded
his submission to James II. When, a little later, English settlers at Saco,
Maine, seized sixteen Indians in retaliation for the killing of some cattle at
nearby North Yarmouth, the natives responded by capturing as many settlers as
they could lay hands on.
In September, the nervous English began erecting fortified
stockades at North Yarmouth. Having received a report that a large number of
natives were approaching, the soldiers fled, only to stumble onto the party of
Indians, who had brought a number of English captives along, evidently for the
purpose of negotiating a settlement of their grievances. Although nobody wanted
a fight, the English tried to free the captives, and in the scuffling “one
Sturdy and Surly Indian,” as the indefatigable Puritan chronicler Cotton Mather
described him, “held his prey so fast, that one Benedict Pulcifer gave the
Mastiff a Blow with the Edge of his Broad Ax upon the Shoulder, upon which they
fell to’t with a Vengeance, and Fired their Guns on both sides, till some on
both sides were Slain.” In this manner, Mather said, “the Vein of New-England
first opened, that afterwards Bled for Ten years together!” Blood had been
spilled, however blindly and unnecessarily; by the values of both Indians and
settlers, blood spilled had to be avenged.
The Indians attacked the outlying settlements, burned,
killed, captured, and plundered. With the onset of winter, they withdrew into
the woods. Governor Andros arrived on the scene with 1,000 men in November and
built forts at Pemaquid and what is now Brunswick. But, as Mather noted in
disgust, Andros’s men killed no Indians until the spring, when Andros returned
to Boston, where he was promptly deposed in the backwash of a Protestant revolt
in England that dethroned the Catholic king James II. Andros went home to
Britain, and the war whose opening moves he had managed continued without him
under the name of King William’s War, after the new English monarch.
Meanwhile, France sought to bolster its situation in America
by appointing a vigorous governor for New France. The choice was Louis de
Buade, comte de Frontenac, a tough old soldier and a good one (he had been made
a brigadier general at the age of twenty-seven). Frontenac had been governor
once before, in 1672 – court gossip said he had gotten the job because he
became too intimate with the king’s favorite mistress. He had handled his
duties with energy and skill, but he was quarrelsome and overbearing and in ten
years made himself so thoroughly unpopular that he had been recalled. Now,
however, the situation demanded Frontenac’s knowledgeable toughness, and the
French king reappointed the seventy-year-old autocrat.
Frontenac set sail from France armed with an ambitious
battle plan: to invade the English colonies through Lake Champlain and Lake
George to Albany, where, after concluding an alliance with the Iroquois, he was
to move down the Hudson and with the help of a French fleet capture New York.
But the old commander never got the chance to put this grand design into
operation.
When he arrived at Quebec, Frontenac found the colony
stunned by a savage Iroquois attack that had devastated the settlement of
Lachine, six miles upriver from Montreal, during the night of July 25-26. The
settlers, taken in their beds, had had no time to resist; the Indians killed
200 of them immediately and took another 120 prisoner. The ferocity of the
attack was typical of the Iroquois. When Jacques Bruyas, the French missionary
to the Iroquois, told his charges that all their desires would be satisfied in
heaven, they badgered him with “impertinent questions as that they would not
believe that there were no wars in heaven; if one would meet human beings there
and if there one would be looking for scalp locks.” Bruyas deplored their
“passion to kill,” so that “they are willing to travel 300 leagues to have the
opportunity of taking a scalp lock.”
Demoralized by so ruthless an enemy, the French had
abandoned their fort at Cataraqui on Lake Ontario. Frontenac, far from being
able to send a campaign roaring down the Hudson Valley, had to content himself
with small-scale sallies against English settlements on the frontier, a
strategy he called la petite guerre – which we would call guerrilla warfare. To
fight his “little war,” Frontenac began to forge such Indian allies as he had into
efficient units that attacked under the direction of French officers.
In the meantime, the English continued to have their share
of Indian trouble. After Andros’s departure from Maine, the Indians continued
their assaults on outlying settlements and then mounted a major expedition
against Dover, New Hampshire. There they killed thirty English, among them the
trader Major Richard Waldron, an old enemy from King Philip’s War. Local
Indians of the Pennacook, Ossipee, and Pigwacket tribes attacked the seventy-five-year-old
patriarch. While he lay dying, they cut off his fingers, one by one, asking him
mockingly whether his fist, which he had often put onto the scales as a
makeweight against their furs, would weigh a pound now. Then they took turns
slashing his chest, saying, “See! I cross out my account.”
The Indians maintained the pressure on the frontier
throughout the summer until finally the English abandoned all their posts east
of Falmouth (present-day Portland). The general court at Boston sent 600 soldiers
north to help secure the frontier, but the expedition accomplished little more
than Andros had the year before.
Then, as winter came on, Frontenac, with characteristic
energy, decided to add to the English miseries with a three-pronged attack on Albany
and the borders of New Hampshire and Maine. The Albany party, composed of 160
Canadians and 100 Indians, set off from Montreal early in 1690. In arctic
weather, they struggled down Lake Champlain to the frozen southern tip of Lake
George, then took to the woods. By the time, the French and Indians reached the
Hudson, they decided that Albany was too difficult a prize and instead chose to
attack the closer settlement of Schenectady. Even so, they had a dreadful march
through half-frozen swampland before they got within striking distance on the
afternoon of February 8. They waited until dark and then approached the
village, where, to their astonishment, they found the open gates guarded only
by two snowmen.
The party swept into the sleeping town and for two hours
hacked men, women, and children to pieces. When the carnage ended, sixty
villagers were dead. “No pen can write, and no tongue express,” said one
contemporary, “the cruelties that were committed.”
Frontenac’s other two blows fell with equal strength, at
Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, where thirty-four died, and in mid-May at
Falmouth, where hundreds of Abnaki Indians joined the French in an attack on
Fort Loyal. After a stiff defense, the commander of the fort surrendered on the
promise that the garrison would not be harmed, then marched out to see 100
English murdered by the Indians.
By the time Fort Loyal fell, the English colonies had
managed to mount a counterattack in the form of a naval assault on Port Royal
in Acadia under the command of Sir William Phips. A curious figure, Phips was
the twenty-first child of a Massachusetts farming family and had made his
fortune by recovering a huge treasure from a Spanish ship sunk in the Bahamas.
His flotilla of fourteen vessels easily took Port Royal, and Phips went home a
hero, whereupon he was immediately given command of a far larger expedition
against Quebec. He got the fleet there, but then the operation fell apart. The
English could not dislodge the French defenders – who commented in journals that
they were watching the bumblings of a bunch of amateurs – and in November, with
smallpox spreading among his men, Phips went home. Fortunately for him, the
authorities chose to blame the debacle on the “awful frown of God” rather than
on any possible mismanagement by Phips.
The English did better the next year with a land campaign
against the Maine frontier, in which Massachusetts enlisted the indestructible
Benjamin Church. This old warrior had grown quite fat in the fifteen years
since he brought down King Philip, but like Frontenac, he retained his vigor
and his military judgment. Arriving in Saco with 300 soldiers in September
1691, Church harried the Indians so effectively that most of them retired
inland. Although his men fought no decisive battles, they shook their opponents
badly. In October, several Abnaki sachems sued for a truce, and on November 29,
they signed a document by which they agreed to bring in all English captives,
warn the English about French plots, and do them no harm until May 1, 1692.
Whatever relief the treaty gave the weary, frightened
settlers did not last long. On February 5, 1692, Indians and Canadians fell
upon the town of York in Maine, killed forty-eight inhabitants, and took about
seventy prisoners. From this fresh beginning, the savage dialogue of raid and
counterraid, deception, and bad faith continued for years. New Hampshire,
Maine, and Massachusetts all suffered as the Indians burned towns and butchered
settlers with a sort of ghastly monotony, which the great nineteenth-century
historian Francis Parkman described as “a weary detail of the murder of one,
two, three or more men, women or children, waylaid in fields, woods and lonely
roads, or surprised in solitary cabins.”
On March 15, 1697, a party of Abnakis struck the town of
Haverhill, Massachusetts, in a raid different from a score of others only
because it marked the beginning of the extraordinary saga of a farm woman named
Hannah Dustin. Mrs. Dustin’s eighth child had been born the week before, and
she was resting in her house when the attack came. Her husband, who was working
in the fields nearby, told his children to run to a fortified house and then
tried to fight his way through to his wife. He failed, and the natives carried
off Mrs. Dustin, her baby, and the nurse who was caring for them.
As the Indians escaped with their captives silently through
the forest, the infant began to cry, and in a cruel but characteristic
response, a warrior grabbed the child and smashed its head against a tree. A
little later, the Indians killed some of the captives and divided up the rest
amongst themselves, Mrs. Dustin and the nurse were handed over to a group of
two warriors, three women, and seven children. This party led them north
through the woods for more than a month. The Indians, who were Catholic, paused
twice a day to say their rosaries.
At last, on the night of March 29, Mrs. Dustin and the nurse
rose silently from the campfire, got hold of hatchets, and set about murdering
their sleeping captors. They killed all but two, an old woman and a boy who
fled into the forest. Mrs. Dustin must have been an extremely practical woman:
Massachusetts was offering a bounty on dead Indians, and so, despite her
six-week ordeal and the horror of the recent butchery, she carefully scalped
all her victims. Then she and the nurse made their way home to Haverhill, where
Mrs. Dustin found that her husband and children had also survived the raid.
Massachusetts gave her £25 for her night’s work.
Though the European end of the war between France and
England wound down with the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick in September 1697,
in the colonies, spasms of frontier violence continued. Part of the reason for
the continuing hostilities was the English colonists’ very real horror of their
opponents. In the Puritan cosmology, civilized Europeans and barbarous Indians
represented opposite and antagonistic poles. Thus, to see Frenchmen not only
living the life of the native warrior, but united with him in some sort of
spiritual brotherhood, appalled and bewildered the English. Cotton Mather, in
Decennium Luctuosum (Woeful Decade), his account of the war, speaks grimly of
the “Half Indianized French, and Half Frenchified Indians.” The terror and awe
that these mixed parties inspired is clearly shown in the way individual
accounts of English captives dominate Mather’s narrative. Writing of the ordeal
of one woman taken by the Indians, Mather intoned: “Read these passages without
Relenting Bowels, thou thyself art as really Petrified as the man at Villa
Ludovisia (an Italian statue). . . . I know not, reader, whether you will be
moved to tears by this narrative; I know I could not write it without weeping.”
In 1702, Europe began to fight anew, and the deadly raids in
the colonies turned back into a full-scale war, named this time after Queen
Anne, who had just taken the throne upon William’s death. As before, New
England bore the brunt in America. (New York escaped the worst horrors because
of the protection provided by its Iroquois subjects – as New Yorkers referred
to the Indians when they were out of earshot – or allies, a nicety of phrasing
employed during negotiations.)
The worldly, power-loving Joseph Dudley, Massachusetts’s new
governor, had been made responsible for keeping peace with the Abnakis, which
he did in schizophrenic fashion, alternately wooing and scorning them. At a
conference in Casco, Maine, he claimed to have 1,250 men under arms and
compared the Indians to wolves, able to disturb men but not capable of doing
any real harm. “I value them not,” he said, “no more than the paring of my
nails,” Then, changing his tune, he announced that several chiefs among the
Indian delegations “are fit to be made Officers to bear commission from the
Queen of England, to bear Rule among you, who shall be my Officers, and shall
be Rewarded from time to time. . . .” Several of the Indian leaders declared
that they would resist the overtures of the French, but the meeting broke up
with the peace still fragile.
Then in August 1703, a party of Englishmen plundered the
house of Saint-Castin’s son, an Abnaki chief. Enraged by this affront, the
Indians responded. Less than six weeks after Dudley’s peace conference, 200
miles of New England frontier were in flames.
Despite his boasts, the best Dudley could do was to field an
army of 360 men, which advanced as far as Saco, with the Indian forces melting
away before it unharmed while the raids continued unabated. To the staggered
colonists, it all seemed a repetition of King William’s War. Indeed, many of
the same towns suffered, among them Deerfield, Massachusetts, the northernmost
settlement of the string of villages along the Connecticut River.
Deerfield had already had its share of grief. Almost wiped
out during King Philip’s War and badly mauled during King William’s, by the
winter of 1704, the community had recovered and become a prosperous village of
forty-one houses and some 270 people.
Remembering the past, the townspeople had posted a sentry,
but he was either asleep or absent on the last night of February 1704, when a
party of fifty French and 200 Abnakis and Caughnawagas trudged toward the
village through deep snow. They attacked two hours before dawn and killed many
settlers in their beds. But some villagers, awakened by the screams and
shouting, fought back. The militia sergeant, Benoni Stebbins, had time to order
his seven men to barricade the windows of his house, which had been otherwise
bulletproofed by means of brick walls. The militiamen drove off an attack of
about fifty Indians, and though Stebbins died at the window where he had posted
himself, his house withstood the onslaught. Most of the villagers, however,
thrown into panic by the whooping death that had come on them out of the night,
died or were captured. By dawn, the fighting had ended, leaving some fifty
settlers dead and more than 100 prisoners.
The French and Indians bullied their captives north along
the forest trails toward Canada. Among the survivors of the brutal trek was
John Williams, a Deerfield clergyman whose immensely popular account of his
sufferings, Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, kept alive the memory of the
Deerfield raid long after similar atrocities had been forgotten. His wife, who
had just borne a child, was too weak to keep up with the rest of the party.
When Williams tried to help her, the Indians drove him away, and they killed
her a little later when she flagged trying to cross an icy river. But another
Indian carried Williams’s daughter Eunice nearly every step of the 300-mile
journey. Eventually, the French ransomed most of the prisoners, but Eunice
Williams never came home. Adopted by the Caughnawagas, she married the warrior
who had saved her life. Years later, she visited her one-time neighbors in
Deerfield, but the gulf had grown too wide, and she returned to the forest.
The news of the Deerfield raid brought Benjamin Church stamping
into Boston, furiously demanding that Dudley give him a force to lead against
Acadia. By this time, Church was so old that he had to have a soldier walking
beside him to help him over fallen logs along the line of march. But he got 550
men up into French territory, where he terrorized some settlements, telling the
inhabitants that if any more English villages suffered Deerfield’s fate he
would return with 1,000 Indians to repay the compliment to the French. Church
wanted to attack Port Royal, but his officers restrained him, and he sailed
back to Boston after throwing some bombastic threats at the well-defended
French stronghold.
The English colonists took another ill-fated stab at Port
Royal in 1706 and then appealed to the mother country for help. Committed as
she was to a costly European land war, Queen Anne had few troops to spare.
Finally, in hopes of generating some sympathy and publicity, the colonists sent
several Mohawk chieftains to the English court in 1710. Outfitted by a London
theatrical costumer in what he thought barbarian warlords should wear, the four
Indians made a magnificent spectacle. The queen was delighted with them, the
archbishop of Canterbury gave them Bibles, fashionable artists of the day
painted their portraits, crowds followed them through the streets, and the
nobility vied for the privilege of entertaining them. The next summer, the
long-awaited troops arrived from England, and in September, Port Royal fell and
with it Acadia.
Emboldened by their success, the British moved against
Quebec the next year, but they had to retire at the end of a timid and badly
mismanaged campaign. Despite this British fiasco, old King Louis XIV of France,
tired and debt-ridden, ended the war by accepting the Treaty of Utrecht in
1713. The treaty ceded Hudson Bay and Acadia to the English, but left the
bounds of France’s Canadian empire in doubt. By a treaty of July 13, 1713, the
Eastern tribes sued for a separate peace with the New Englanders, acknowledging
their “past rebellions, hostilities, and violations of promises” and promising
to become loyal subjects to Queen Anne. The Abnakis, however, had little idea
of what being a British subject meant, and their oath of loyalty was too
tenuous a thing to withstand the English incursions on their land that began
nearly as soon as the treaty was signed.
While the Northern colonies enjoyed the brief respite from
frontier raids that came with the Treaty of Utrecht, warfare was ripping
through the Carolinas. The white traders there had done much to bring the
fighting on themselves. Like Indian traders everywhere, they tended to be
rough, unprincipled men who duped the Indians and debauched them with liquor.
Adding to these abuses, the traders also sold Indians as slaves. The
Tuscaroras, who had settled inland along the coastal rivers of North Carolina,
suffered most, and though they did not at first retaliate, their discontent was
obvious enough to make the settlers uneasy. By 1710, relations had become so
tense that the Tuscaroras sent messengers to Pennsylvania asking permission to
migrate there. The Pennsylvania authorities said that they could settle
provided they had a note from the North Carolina government attesting to their
previous good conduct. The Carolinians refused outright.
Less than a year later, a group of Swiss colonists organized
by a promoter named Baron Christoph von Graffenried went to occupy a tract of
land at New Bern, at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers in North
Carolina, only to find an Indian town on the site. Von Graffenried complained
to the surveyor-general, who told him that the colonists held clear title to
the land and suggested they drive off the Indians without payment. That was
poor advice; on September 22, 1711, the Tuscaroras responded with a dawn attack
on settlements between the Neuse and Pamlico Sound. During the bloody morning,
they killed nearly 200 settlers, among them, eighty children. The survivors
fled to the coastal towns, and the usual sequence of raids and counterraids
began. Von Graffenried had earlier been captured, and in order to spare New
Bern from attack – and as a condition of his release – he promised not to make
war on the Indians. But one of his settlers, a foolish man named William Brice,
decided that the baron’s pledge showed contemptible softheartedness and took
matters into his own hands by capturing the chief of one of the smaller tribes
allied with the Tuscaroras and roasting him alive. The Indian attacks increased
in fury.
North Carolina sent to South Carolina for help, which
arrived in the form of Colonel John Barnwell, a tough Irish-born soldier, who
came leading a force of thirty settlers and 500 Indians. Barnwell handily
neutralized the resistance of tribes allied with the Tuscaroras and devastated
their communities. In March 1712, with his forces strengthened by a contingent
of North Carolinians, Barnwell launched an assault on the fort of the Tuscarora
king Hancock, which failed when the North Carolina men panicked and broke. Then
the Indians exposed some of their white prisoners in view of Barnwell’s lines
and tortured others in hopes of forcing the Carolina troops to negotiate.
Barnwell agreed to call off his men if the prisoners were released. He took
fifty of them safely back to New Bern, where he discovered that the North
Carolina assembly was vexed because he had not destroyed the Tuscarora fort.
Whereupon Barnwell went back, forced the Tuscaroras into a treaty and then, on
his way home, immediately violated it by seizing a group of Indians as slaves.
So the war broke out afresh in the summer of 1712.
Again North Carolina begged its southern neighbor for help,
and in November, a seasoned Indian fighter named Colonel James Moore arrived
with thirty-three whites and 1,000 friendly natives. Joining with North
Carolina troops, he struck the main Tuscarora force late in March of 1713 and
smashed it. Moore’s men killed several hundred Indians and captured 400 more,
whom he sold into slavery at £10 each to help pay for the campaign. Most of the
surviving Tuscaroras began a long, slow retreat to the north, where they
eventually joined the Iroquois confederacy.
The last feeble Indian resistance in the Carolinas ended
when Tom Blount, the chief of the Tuscarora faction loyal to the English,
signed a peace treaty on February 11, 1715. But no sooner had peace come to
North Carolina than war began in South Carolina. Like the Tuscaroras, the
Yamassees, a Muskhogean tribe that had moved into South Carolina, had suffered
the exploitation of traders. On Good Friday, April 15, they avenged themselves
in a well-coordinated attack similar in every respect to the great Virginia
massacre of 1622. The assault left the outlying settlements north of
present-day Savannah, Georgia, in flames and took the lives of 100 settlers,
South Carolina’s governor Charles Craven, commanding his colony’s militia,
moved quickly and by June had driven the Yamassees from their villages. That
autumn, on a follow-up expedition, he hit them so hard that they fled to
Spanish Florida. The English appropriated the Yamassee lands for the new colony
of Georgia.
Although he had gotten the Yamassees out of the way, Craven
still feared the powerful Creeks and tried to counterbalance them by inducing
the equally strong Cherokee nation to join the English. Although divided into
two factions, the proud Cherokees, under the prodding of the English, broke
with their southern neighbors and joined the Carolinians in curbing the Creeks.
Thus, a measure of peace returned to the Carolinas.
