The First Casualty: Native Neutrality

When the Continental Congress sent commissioners to negotiate with the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee in 1775, the nations offered a clear answer. The conflict between Britain and the colonies was a family quarrel. They wished to sit still and watch. The documents recording that declaration, and the pressures that made it impossible to maintain, are in the Journals of the Continental Congress at the Library of Congress.

In the summer of 1775, the Continental Congress appointed commissioners to treat with the Native nations of the northern department. The commissioners met with representatives of the Six Nations at German Flats in August 1775. The Haudenosaunee position was stated plainly. The war between Britain and the colonies was, in the language of the proceedings, a family quarrel. The Six Nations wished to sit still and not take sides. They asked both parties to leave them in peace.

The commissioners recorded the proceedings in detail. The Journals of the Continental Congress for 1775 contain the resolutions authorizing the northern department treaty commission, the appointment of its members, and subsequent reports on the state of relations with the Six Nations. The record shows that both American commissioners and British Indian Department officials exerted continuous pressure on the Haudenosaunee to abandon neutrality. The Continental Congress passed resolutions in 1775 seeking to secure the friendship or at least the neutrality of the Native nations on the frontier. The British sought active alliance.

The pressure came from multiple directions. The British Indian Department, operating out of Fort Niagara and Montreal, worked to bring the Haudenosaunee into active military alliance against the Americans. American commissioners warned that the nations could not remain between the two fires without eventually being forced to choose. Events on the frontier made the choice increasingly unavoidable. By 1777, the Confederacy had fractured. Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga sided with Britain. Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. What had been a confederacy of six was now a confederacy divided against itself.

The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix had established a boundary line between colonial settlements and Native territory. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, which preceded it, had prohibited colonial settlement west of the Appalachian ridge. Both documents had been designed, at least in part, to stabilize the frontier. By 1775, colonial settlement had violated both lines repeatedly. The question for Native nations was not whether to support Britain or the Americans in the abstract. The question was which side posed the more immediate threat to their lands and their way of life.

For most of the Haudenosaunee, the answer was the Americans. Colonial settlers were the ones crossing the treaty lines. British policy, whatever its motivations, had at least attempted to restrain them through the Proclamation and the 1768 treaty. The British Indian Department supplied trade goods, maintained relationships through the Johnson family network, and promised to defend existing Native territory if the war was won. The Americans offered promises of friendship that the settlement patterns on the ground contradicted.

The Oneida made a different calculation. Missionary relationships, particular trade connections, and specific political grievances led the Oneida and Tuscarora toward the American side. Their decision was their own, made for their own reasons. The result was that the Great League of Peace, which had bound the Six Nations together for generations, broke apart along the fault lines of a war that neither side had consulted them about.