The Revolution Within: Native Nations and the War for America, 1775-1783

In May 1775 the apple blossoms were rotting in the wet grass at Fort Johnson when a messenger came up the Mohawk River road with news of Lexington and Concord. The man it was meant for had died the July before. For thirty years Sir William Johnson had kept the Covenant Chain between the Crown and the Six Nations in repair with councils, gifts, wampum belts and a Mohawk family of his own. His son had the title, the stockaded stone house and the red coat, but none of the credit his father had built.

The Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, had always read the chain differently. Their Two Row Wampum showed two vessels on one river, each steered by its own law. When king and Congress both came asking for warriors, the question split the council at Onondaga. Most Mohawk, Seneca and Cayuga fought for the Crown. The Oneida and many Tuscarora sided with the rebels.

So at Oriskany in August 1777, Oneida men marching with the rebel militia walked into an ambush laid by Loyalists, Seneca warriors and Joseph Brant's Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee killed Haudenosaunee in a wooded ravine. Two years later Sullivan's army burned some forty of their towns with the orchards and cornfields around them. Out west, from the Shawnee towns at Chillicothe to the British Indian Department at Detroit, the war outlived Yorktown.

When Britain made peace at Paris in 1783, the treaty did not mention a single one of its Native allies. The Six Nations were left to make their own peace, at Fort Stanwix the next year, with a republic that called them conquered.