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The Sullivan Indian Expedition: One Man’s Victory Is Another’s Ethnic Cleansing

John Sullivan led one of the most successful, least acknowledged campaigns of the American Revolution: the Sullivan Indian Expedition in the summer of 1779.

The New Hampshire native laid waste to 40 Iroquois towns in northern New York. The expedition broke the power of the Six Nations from central New York to the Great Lakes, diminished the threat of British offensives from the west and opened the land for settlement by white people after the war.

Sullivan figured he’d get a promotion for his efforts. He did get a lot of monuments.

Prelude to the Sullivan Indian Expedition

In 1778, the American Revolution was at a stalemate, centered on British-controlled New York City. The British had lost the Battle of Saratoga, which convinced the French to join the war on the American side. But the French had yet to arrive.

Meanwhile, British Loyalists waged a guerilla war against frontier settlements in northern New York and Pennsylvania with their allies from the Six Nations. Those included Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida and Tuscarora, along with some Lenape.

Joseph Brant

Mohawk leader Joseph Brant led a force of Loyalists and Iroquois, primarily Mohawk, in raids on Cobleskill and German Flatts. Then Seneca warriors, led by Cornplanter and Sayenqueraghta, along with a Loyalist militia, attacked a settlement in the Wyoming Valley. They lost only two men but killed about 300, all armed.

Loyalist leader John Butler reported they left women and children alone. But word spread that the Seneca warriors had butchered noncombatants. That angered the Seneca, and during their next battle they did attack women and children.

Cornplanter

The Seneca and Loyalist militia then attacked Cherry Valley in November 1978. They killed 30 settlers, mostly women and children, and took 80 more prisoner.

A patriot, Capt. Benjamin Warren, described the Cherry Valley massacre as, “a shocking sight my eyes never beheld before of savage and brutal barbarity.”

Launching the Sullivan Indian Expedition

Commander-in-Chief George Washington had enough. He decided to launch an expedition. In his orders, he wrote,

The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

The Sullivan Indian Expedition would include 4,500 soldiers, militia and Oneida, with supplies moved by bateaux and pack horses. It took place from June 1779 to October 1779 against Loyalists and the Iroquois nations, also known as the Haudenosaunee. Washington put Maj. Gen. John Sullivan in charge of the expedition and Gen. James Clinton second in command.

Washington trusted Sullivan, but he annoyed him with his constant complaining. Sullivan had been a lawyer before the Revolution, and was both arrogant and obsequious. John Adams couldn’t stand him, once saying he wished a bullet fired at the Battle of Long Island had gone through Sullivan’s head. After the war, Sullivan served as New Hampshire governor.

Maj. Gen. John Sullivan

Sullivan assembled three brigades in Easton, Pa., and marched west along the Susquehanna River to meet another brigade commanded by Clinton. They were to converge in Tioga, now Athens, Pa.

Clinton marched his brigade from what is now Cooperstown, and eventually began marching 154 miles south to Tioga. He torched cornfields and villages along the way. Clinton and Sullivan finally met at Fort Sullivan and marched out into Six Nation Territory on August 26.

The Battle of Newtown

Three days later they fought the Battle of Newtown, near present-day Elmira. The Iroquois and Loyalists made a stand, but the superior patriot forces defeated them easily.

Newtown battlefield monument

Afterward, an old Cayuga woman was discovered in the woods. She told the Americans,

…on the night after the battle of Newtown, the enemy, having fled the whole time, arrived there in great confusion early the next day; that she heard the warriors tell their women that they were conquered and must fly; that they had a great many killed and vast numbers wounded.

For the next three weeks, Sullivan’s army continued to march, burning cornfields, orchards and villages in its path. They found the villages abandoned, sometimes with stew still boiling over a fire.

A Soldier’s Journal

A number of soldiers kept journals during the expedition, including Lt. Thomas Blake of the 1^st New Hampshire Regiment. Blake described a typical two days of marching and burning and trying to stay alive:

Sept 13–after marching 2 miles we came to a town called Keneghses where the army halted to build a bridge over a large sunken place for the troops to cross. In the meantime, part of the riflemen went forward to the next town. On their return within about a mile of the army, they were fired upon by the enemy who had posted themselves on a hill ready to give us a shot as soon as we came out of the swamp. They killed 3 of the riflemen and took two prisoners. Our men being alarmed by the fire, the light troops marched to their relief, on the appearance of which the enemy quit the ground leaving 70 of their packs. After this we marched to Gaghaheywarahera; the whole of our march to day being 9 miles.

A Loyalist militiaman in the unit known as Butler’s Ranger

Sept. 14–We marched 2 miles and forded the chinesee river, then 3 miles down the river to a large town called chinesee castle, and here found the two men that had been taken the day before cut to pieces in the most barbarous and inhuman manner possible to be conceived. In this town were 180 houses and an exceeding large field of corn, which took the army until the middle of the afternoon next day to destroy, after which we marched about 4 miles.

As Sullivan and Clinton laid waste to the Iroquois villages, Col. Daniel Brodhead left Fort Pitt on August 14. With a small force he destroyed 10 more villages in Seneca and Lenape territory in northwestern Pennsylvania and southwestern New York.

Mohawks Arrested

A detachment led by Peter Gansevoort went to a town called Teantontalago, the “Lower Mohawk Castle,” and arrested every Mohawk man. Gansevoort wrote, “the Indians live much better than most of the Mohawk River farmers, their houses [being] very well furnished with all [the] necessary household utensils, great plenty of grain, several horses, cows, and wagons”.

The patriots incarcerated all the Mohawk men at Albany until 1780 and then released them. White settlers, dispossessed by the war, were allowed to move into the Mohawk houses. At least one of Washington’s generals objected because the local Mohawk had agreed not to fight with the British, and many sided with the patriots.

Aftermath

When Sullivan ended the expedition, he sent a report to Washington. In it, he said his army burned 40 Iroquois villages and lost only 40 men. They had also destroyed 160,000 bushels of corn as well as other provisions. By October more than 5,000 Indian refugees had fled to Fort Niagara, held by the British. Half of them died of hunger and exposure in the harsh winter of 1779-80.

Sullivan’s victory broke the back of the Iroquois League and it broke the hearts of the Six Nations people, wrote historian Allan W. Eckart.

But Sullivan didn’t bring back prisoners, and he didn’t bring back a peace treaty.

After his return, he expected Congress to promote him. It didn’t happen. He retired at the end of 1779 and went home to New Hampshire.

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

He had only done what Washington ordered him to do. The commander in chief had told him to “not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment.”

During the middle of the expedition, Washington had also written to Sullivan:

The advantages we have already gained over the Indians, in the destruction of so many of their settlements is very flattering to the expedition. But to make as conclusive as the state of your provisions and the safety of your army will countenance I would mention two points which I may not have sufficiently expressed in my general instructions, or if I have, which I wish to repeat.

The one is the necessity of pushing the Indians to the greatest practicable distance from their own settlements and our frontiers; to the throwing them wholly on the British enemy. The other is the making the destruction of their settlements so final and complete as to put it out of their power to derive the smallest succor from them in case they should attempt to return this season.

Criticism

Cornplanter, years later, placed the blame elsewhere. He gave a speech to President George Washington.
“When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you Town Destroyer,” he said. “And to this day when that name is heard our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.”

If Sullivan didn’t get a promotion, he at least got plenty of historical markers.

Historical marker commemorating the Sullivan Indian Expedition at Warrior Run Church, Pennsylvania

For example, in Neahwa Park in Oneonta, N.Y., the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1912 erected a historic marker that commemorates the Sullivan Indian Expedition,

…which destroyed Indian Savagery and opened the westward pathway of civilization…

In 1929, the State of New York erected 35 highway markers marking the route Sullivan took 150 years earlier. They were a little more neutral. For example,

Routes of the armies of
General John Sullivan
and
General James Clinton

1779
An expedition against the hostile Indian nations which checked the aggression of the English and Indians on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania, extending westward the dominion of the United States.

A commemorative plaque in Lodi, N.Y.

Local people now want those markers replaced, or they want “counter markers” with the Indian perspective erected.

Images: Newtown Battlefield State Park: By Lvklock – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4749454. Historical marker in Warrior Run Church, Pennsylvania, By FJThomas1945 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113982495.

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Joseph Brant, Mohawk Leader, Goes to Dartmouth (Before It Was Dartmouth)

On Aug. 1, 1761, three teenaged Mohawk boys arrived on horseback at Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon (now Columbia), Conn. Two, Nickus and Senter, wore practically no clothes. The third, Joseph Brant, wore full Indian dress – probably a white tunic shirt, leggings, breechcloth and moccasins. All three were dirty from their trip from New York and covered with lice.

Their headmaster, Eleazar Wheelock, found them remarkably backward. Only Joseph spoke English, and just a little at that. The boys sat on the ground like children, and they cared for cleanliness as much as children. They had no concept of English furniture and utensils, and thought a wineglass as durable as a hand iron. “They are as unpolished & uncultivated within as without,” wrote Wheelock.

Joseph Brant by Charles Willson Peale

Lebanon was just a wide place in the road in 1761, and Moor’s Charity School just a couple of houses. But two years at the school gave Joseph Brant the tools he needed to move comfortably in elite European circles. What he learned in Lebanon would serve him well as a Mohawk leader navigating a place for his people in the changing transatlantic world.

In 1769, Moor’s Charity School removed to Hanover, N.H., and became Dartmouth College. Generations of uncouth boys went to Dartmouth (and the other Ivies, for that matter) for the same reason Joseph did. They sought the education, polish and social connections that would help them succeed in life.

Young Joseph Brant

Brant was born somewhere along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio in March 1743. His name was Thayendanegea, which in the Mohawk language means, “He places two bets together.”

He belonged to the Six Nations confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee people.

He had Iroquois Christian parents named Peter and Margaret Tehonwaghkwangearahkwa. His father died when he was young, and his mother moved with him and his sister Mary, or Molly, to Canajoharie, a Mohawk village on the Mohawk River in New York. Margaret gathered and sold the ginseng that grew there, for export to Europe and China.

Fort Johnson today

Canajoharie then was a frontier town, but a multicultural one where Mohawk families coexisted with German and British immigrants. As a boy, Joseph hunted and fished with English boys his own age. His family had ties to William Johnson, a wealthy Irishman and nephew of naval hero Peter Warren. Johnson built a mansion along the Mohawk River and served as Britain’s superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs.

William Johnson

When his older sister Molly became William Johnson’s common-law wife, Joseph moved in with them.

In 1758, 15-year-old Joseph followed Johnson into action during the French and Indian War. He served as a scout during the assault on Fort Carillon (renamed Ticonderoga) and watched the French rout the British. He joined Johnson in the Battle of Fort Niagara in 1759 and Jeffery Amherst‘s expedition to Montreal. The British gave Joseph a silver medal for his military service.

And so 18-year-oldJoseph Brant rode up to Moor’s Charity School as a decorated military veteran.

Moor’s Charity School

Seven years earlier, the Puritan minister Eleazar Wheelock had started Moor’s Charity School, a free school for Indian boys. He aimed to turn out Indian missionaries who would Christianize the American Indians. The Boston board of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge paid for their schooling.

Eleazar Wheelock

Only a few Indian students lived at the school when Joseph arrived: a Mohegan, a Montauk and some Delawares. Some white boys, intent on going into missionary work, also attended the school. The sight of the Indians shocked one white boy.

“I was struck with horror at the sight of these wild indians, a sight of one I had never seen before,” he wrote. Some, like Joseph, were nearly grown men, others were his own age, he noted. “These last could not speak a word of english and still had on their indian costume, from my first sight at these indians it gave me such a shock that I determined that I never should be willing to spend my life with such people as they were.”

Upon the arrival of the three Mohawks, Wheelock immediately gave them each a pair of English pants and a shirt. He thought Joseph came from noble birth, because William Johnson – now a baronet known as Sir William – had gotten him the place at the school. So Wheelock gave Joseph a better shirts and a pair of pants with checks on them. Joseph liked those pants and took good care of them. Wheelock also gave each of the boys a book – Joseph’s cost more – and combs. Joseph got his own, but the others had to share one.

Curriculum

Wheelock at first found Joseph a bit sulky—not surprising that an 18-year-old Mohawk fresh from the battlefield would chafe at the strict Puritan regimen. But plentiful food improved Joseph’s mood. Lunch, for example, consisted of boiled meat, Indian pudding, bread, milk and sweet cakes.

The students slept and studied on the second floor of Wheelock’s home. They had to have wakened and dressed by six when Wheelock prayed over them on the first floor. Then breakfast and free time until 9:00.

In the schoolhouse next door, they learned reading, writing, English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, along with civility and good manners. Then lunch, and then more lessons from 2 pm to 5 pm. They said prayers at the end of the school day and at sundown, then they studied until sleep time.

Wheelock liked Joseph, calling him a “considerate, modest and manly spirited youth.” He let Joseph, Sander and Nickus go home for a visit in November. Joseph returned to the school the next month, but Sander died and Nickus stayed behind to get married.

Progress

At Moor’s Charity School, Brant learned to speak English, to read and to write with a decipherable hand. He could read the New Testament and discuss Homer’s Odyssey. He also developed a preference for English clothes, which he wore except when posing or portraits.

Joseph Brant by Gilbert Stuart

“Brant’s ability to move between communities is key to his career,” wrote historian Elizabeth Hutchinson.

Wheelock wanted to send him to Princeton to study with one of his proteges, but he couldn’t get permission from Joseph’s family quickly enough. Sir William wanted to send him to Columbia (King’s College), but Pontiac’s Rebellion broke out. Joseph had to leave school to fight another war.

The Rest of the Story

He worked as a translator and for British officials, including his brother-in-law, Sir William Johnson. He also translated a catechism and the Gospel of Mark into Mohawk.

In 1775, Joseph Brant joined Sir William’s nephew, Guy Johnson, on a trip to London to seal his appointment as his uncle’s successor as superintendent of Indian affairs. Brant pledged Haudenosaunee support for the British during the American Revolution. In exchange, the British agreed to compensate the Iroquois for property taken, both in the past and future. He made a splash in London society and with King George III, who invited him to join the Masonic brotherhood. Though he usually wore English clothes, he wore Indian garb to have his portrait painted by the English portrait painter George Romney.

Joseph Brant by George Romney

He served as a captain in the British Army during the Revolution, and after the war emerged as an Indian leader. He negotiated for land for the Haudenosaunee along the Grand River in Ontario, and he helped form the Western Confederacy of Indian tribes.

For the rest of his life Joseph Brant worked to preserve and protect Six Nations control over Iroquois lands.

Conflicting Views

The Haudenosaunee people have conflicting views of his legacy. Some say he bargained away Indian land for his own purposes and helped destroy the traditional culture by espousing Christianity. His legacy is also tarnished by his ownership of black slaves.

But others say his negotiating ability gave his people sovereignty over their own land.

He died after a short illness in his home in Burlington, Ontario, on Nov. 24, 1807 at the age of 64. Legend has it that he said to his nephew while on his deathbed, “Have pity on the poor Indians; if you can get any influence with the great, endeavor to do them all the good you can.”

With thanks to Elizabeth Hutchinson in “The Dress of His Nation”: Romney’s Portrait of Joseph Brant in Winterthur Portfolio, Summer/Autumn 2011. And special thanks to Joseph Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds By Isabel Thompson Kelsay. This story last updated in 2021.

Images: Fort Johnson By Webmasteratfort at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Matthiasb using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6840563.

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