Thayendanegea, known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, was born in the Ohio Country in 1743. He was educated in Connecticut, baptized Anglican, served as secretary to the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and commanded Mohawk and Loyalist forces throughout the Revolutionary War. George Washington wrote about him repeatedly. The correspondence is at Founders Online. So are the orders Washington issued in direct response to Brant's campaigns.
Joseph Brant did not side with Britain out of sentiment. He sided with Britain because British policy, as embodied in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, was the only existing legal framework that restricted colonial expansion into Haudenosaunee territory. American revolutionary rhetoric promised liberty. American settlement patterns promised something else entirely.
Brant traveled to London in 1775 and met with King George III and Secretary of State Lord Germain. He pressed for a formal reaffirmation of Mohawk land rights in exchange for military alliance. He returned to North America as a commissioned captain in the British Indian Department. His role was as much diplomatic as military: holding the Haudenosaunee alliance together while conducting raids that disrupted the American frontier.
To defend an extensive frontier against the incursions of Indians, with the assistance of Tories and disaffected persons, is a task too great to be executed by a few troops.
By 1778 Washington had concluded that Brant's operations required a major military response. The raids on Wyoming Valley in July 1778 and Cherry Valley in November 1778, conducted by Brant's forces and Loyalist units under Butler's Rangers, killed dozens of settlers and destroyed settlements across a wide area. Washington described the scale of the problem directly to his commanders.
In May 1779, Washington gave General John Sullivan his orders for the expedition against the Haudenosaunee. The language was precise. The purpose was not to defeat Brant's forces in battle. It was to destroy the infrastructure that sustained them and end the capacity of the Six Nations to field further operations. The letter is at Founders Online.
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.
The Sullivan-Clinton Expedition destroyed over forty Haudenosaunee villages that summer. Brant's forces could not stop it. The destruction drove more than 5,000 people to Fort Niagara seeking British protection. The winter of 1779 to 1780 was severe. The suffering was extensive. Brant continued to operate through the end of the war, but the Sullivan Expedition had permanently altered the strategic position of the Haudenosaunee.
The Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended the war between Britain and the United States. It did not mention the Haudenosaunee. Britain ceded territory it did not directly control, including land that had been guaranteed to the Six Nations by treaty. Brant was furious. He spent the next two decades in diplomatic negotiations, trying to secure what the alliance had promised. Some of it was delivered: Governor Haldimand granted land on the Grand River in Ontario to Brant and his followers in 1784. Most of what had been promised was not.
The Indians are troubled in mind about the new boundary line. They think it very hard the line should be made so as to exclude them from their lands.
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