SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON
AND
The Six Nations
“MAKERS OF AMERICA”
SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON
AND
The Six Nations
BY
WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS
AUTHOR OF “THE MIKADO'S EMPIRE,” “COREA THE HERMIT
NATION,” “MATTHEW CALBRAITH PERRY,” ETC.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD, AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1891
By Dodd, Mead, and Co.
All rights reserved.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
Dedication.
Like my friend, the late Judge John Sanders, of Scotia,
Schenectady County, N. Y., who took off his hat when meeting
descendants of the heroes of Oriskany, the bloodiest, the most
stubbornly contested, and perhaps the decisive battle in the War
of the American Revolution, the writer makes his bow to the
people of the Mohawk Valley, and to them, and to the memory
of their brave ancestors, dedicates this sketch of one of the Makers
of America.
P R E F A C E.
THE Mohawk Valley in which Sir William Johnson spent his adult life
(1738–1774) was the fairest portion of the domain of the Six Nations of
the Iroquois Confederacy. In this valley I lived nine years, seeing on
every side traces or monuments of the industry, humanity, and powerful
personality of its most famous resident in colonial days. From the
quaint stone church in Schenectady which he built, and in whose canopied
pews he sat, daily before my eyes, to the autograph papers in possession
of my neighbours; from sites close at hand and traditionally associated
with the lord of Johnson Hall, to the historical relics which multiply
at Johnstown, Canajoharie, and westward,—mementos of the baronet were
never lacking. His two baronial halls still stand near the Mohawk. I
found that local tradition, while in the main generous to his memory,
was sometimes unfair and even cruel. The hatreds engendered by the
partisan features of the Revolution, and the just detestation of the
savage atrocities of Tories and red allies led by Johnson’s son and
son-in-law, had done injustice to the great man himself. Yet base and
baseless tradition was in no whit more unjust than the sectional
opinions and hostile gossip of the New England militia which historians
have so freely transferred to their pages.
In the following pages no attempt at either laudation or depreciation
has been made. My purpose has been simply to set forth the actions,
influence, and personality of Sir William Johnson, to show the character
of the people by whom he was surrounded, and to describe and analyze the
political movements of his time. I confess I have not depicted New York
people in the sectional spirit and subjective manner in which they are
so often treated by New England writers. The narrow and purely local
view of some of these who have written what is called the history of the
United States, greatly vitiates their work in the eyes of those who do
not inherit their prejudices. Having no royal charter, the composite
people of New York, gathered from many nations, but instinct with the
principles of the free republic of Holland, were obliged to study
carefully the foundations of government and jurisprudence. It is true
that in the evolution of this Commonwealth the people were led by the
lawyers rather than by the clergy. Constantly resisting the invasions of
royal prerogative, they formed on an immutable basis of law and right
that Empire State which in its construction and general features is, of
all those in the Union, the most typically American. Its historical
precedents are not found in a monarchy, but in a republic. It is less
the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.
Living also but a few yards away from the home of Arendt Van Curler, the
“Brother Corlaer” of Indian tradition, and immediately alongside the
site of the old gate opening from the palisades into the Mohawk country,
I could from my study windows look daily upon the domain of the
Mohawks,—the places of treaties, ceremonies, and battles, of the
torture and burning of captives, and upon the old maize-lands, even yet
rich after the husbandry of centuries. Besides visiting many of the
sites of the Iroquois castles, I have again and again traversed the
scenes of Johnson’s exploits in Central New York, at Lake George, in
Eastern Pennsylvania, and other places mentioned in the text. With my
task is associated the remembrance of many pleasant outings as well as
meetings with local historians, antiquarians, and students of Indian
lore. I have treated more fully the earlier part of Johnson’s life which
is less known, and more briefly the events of the latter part which is
comparatively familiar to all. I trust I have not been unfair to the red
men while endeavouring to show the tremendous influence exerted over
them by Johnson; who, for this alone, deserves to be enrolled among the
Makers of America.
My chief sources of information have been the Johnson manuscripts, which
have been carefully mounted, bound, and are preserved in the State
Library at Albany. They were indexed by my friends, the late Rev. Dr. H.
A. Homes, and Mr. George R. Howell, the accomplished secretary of the
Albany Institute. To the former I am especially indebted. The printed
book to which I owe special obligations is Mr. William L. Stone’s “Life
and Times of Sir William Johnson, Bart.” These two superbly written
octavo volumes, richly annotated and indexed, make any detailed life of
Johnson unnecessary, and form a noble and enduring monument of patient
scholarship.
For generous assistance at various points and in details, I have to
thank, and hereby do so most heartily, Mr. Edward F. De Lancey, of New
York; Mr. William L. Stone, of Jersey City; Prof. A. L. Perry, of
Williams College; Mr. Berthold Fernow, keeper of the State Archives,
Albany; Rev. J. A. De Baun, D. D., of Fonda; Rev. J. H. Hubbs, of Grand
Rapids, Mich.; Rev. Henry R. Swinnerton, of Cherry Valley; Mr. R. A.
Grider, the chief American specialist and collector of powder-horns and
their art and literature; Mr. A. G. Richmond, archæologist in Indian
relics, of Canajoharie, N. Y.; Mrs. I. E. Wells of Johnson Hall at
Johnstown; Mr. Ethan Akin, of Fort Johnson at Akin near Fonda; James
Fuller, Esq., of Schenectady, N. Y.; and Major J. W. MacMurray, U. S.
N.; besides various descendants of the militiamen who served under the
illustrious Irishman who is the subject of the following pages.
W. E. G.
Boston, Mass.,
May 21, 1891.
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.
=1400–1600 A. D.= Occupation of the region between
the Niagara and the Hudson
River by the Indian tribes
of the Long House.
{ July 29. Defeat of the Iroquois near
{ Ticonderoga, N. Y., by
{ Champlain.
=1609=, { Sept. 1-23. Hendrick Hudson explores the
{ river as far as the Mohawk.
=1613.= Hollanders build on Manhattan and Nassau
Islands.
=1617.= Iroquois form an alliance with the Dutch.
=1623.= Jesse De Forest and the Walloons settle and
found New York City.—Fort Orange
built.—Settlement at Albany.
=1630.= Patroon Kilian Van Rensselaer.—Arrival of
Arendt Van Curler.
=1642.= Van Curler enters the Mohawk Valley and
ransoms Isaac Jogues.
=1661.= Van Curler founds the city of Schenectady.
=1664.= English Conquest of New Netherlands.
=1667.= Kryn leads the Caughnawaga Indians to Canada.
=1690.= Massacre at Schenectady.
=1710.= Palatine Germans in New York.
=1713.= The Tuscaroras join the Iroquois Confederacy.
=1715.= Sir William Johnson born.
=1722.= Palatines settle in Mohawk Valley.—Oswego
founded.
=1738.= Johnson settled at Warrensburgh, N. Y.
=1740.= Johnson made head of the Indian Department.
=1754.= The Congress and Council at Albany.
=1755.= Battle of Lake George.
=1757.= Massacre at German Flats.
=1759.= Surrender of Niagara to Johnson.—Fall of
Quebec and the French power in America.
=1763.= Conspiracy of Pontiac.—Johnstown founded, and
Johnson Hall built.
=1768.= Treaty at Fort Stanwix.
=1770.= January 18, First bloodshed of the
Revolution.
=1771.= First battle of the Revolution at Alamance,
N. C.
=1772.= Division of Albany County.—Johnstown made the
county-seat of Tryon County.
=1774.= Death of Sir William Johnson.
=1777.= Battle of Oriskany.
=1778.= Massacre at Cherry Valley.
=1779.= Brant at Minnisink.—General Sullivan’s
Expedition against the Six Nations.
=1782.= New York’s Western lands transferred to the
nation.
=1783.= Tories banished from the Mohawk Valley.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PREFACE vii
CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE xi
I. THE FIRST SETTLERS OF THE MOHAWK VALLEY 1
II. JOHNSON AS AN INDIAN TRADER 11
III. THE SIX NATIONS AND THE LONG HOUSE 35
IV. THE STRUGGLE FOR A CONTINENT 61
V. A CHAPTER IN THE STORY OF LIBERTY 80
VI. A TYPICAL FRONTIER FIGHT WITH INDIANS 92
VII. AT THE ANCIENT PLACE OF TREATIES 109
VIII. THE BATTLE OF LAKE GEORGE 132
IX. BRITISH FAILURES PREPARING FOR AMERICAN 146
INDEPENDENCE
X. THE “HEAVEN-BORN GENERAL” 167
XI. DECLINE OF THE INDIAN AS A POLITICAL FACTOR 178
XII. LIFE AT JOHNSON HALL 194
XIII. JOHNSON’S FAMILY; LAST DAYS; EUTHANASIA 206
INDEX 223
CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST SETTLERS OF THE MOHAWK VALLEY.
THE MOHAWK VALLEY was first settled by men escaping from feudalism. The
manor-system, a surviving relic of the old days of lordship and
villeinage, had long cursed England, Germany, and Holland, though first
outgrown and thrown off in the latter country. It was from this system,
almost as much as from Church laws, that the Pilgrim Fathers were glad
to escape and find free labour as well as liberty of conscience in
Holland,—the land where they “heard,” and found by experience, “that
all men were free.”
The Netherlands was the political training-school of the Pilgrims, and
of most of the leaders of the Puritans, who before 1640 settled New
England. In America they were more fortunate than their more southern
neighbours, in that they were freed from the semi-feudalism of the Dutch
Patroons and the manor-lords of Maryland and Virginia. The Hollanders,
on coming to New Netherland and settling under the Patroons, enjoyed far
less liberty than when in their own country. They were practically under
a new sort of feudalism unknown in their “Patria.” Their Teutonic
instincts and love of freedom soon, however, drove them to relinquish
their temporary advantages as manor-tenants, and to purchase land from
the Indians and settle in the “Woestina,” or wilderness. These Dutch
farmers cheerfully braved the dangers and inconveniences of “the bush,”
in order to hold land in fee simple and be their own masters.
It was this spirit of independence that led a little company of worthy
sons or grandsons of men who had fought under William the Silent, to
settle in the “Great Flat,” or Mohawk Valley. They were led by Arendt
Van Curler, who, though first-cousin of the absentee Patroon Van
Rensselaer, of Rensselaerwyck, had educated himself out of the silken
meshes of semi-feudalism. Finding men like-minded with himself, who
believed that the patroon or manor-system was a bad reversion in
political evolution, he led out the Dutch freemen, and founded the city
of Schenectady. On the land made sacred to the Mohawks for centuries, by
reason of council-fires and immemorial graves, this free settlement
began. Here, not indeed for the first time in New Netherlands, and yet
at a period when the proceeding was a novelty, the settlers held land in
fee simple, and demanded the rights of trade.
It was before 1660 that these men, who would rather have gone back to
Patria, or Holland, than become semi-serfs under a manor-lord, came to
Van Curler, or “Brother Corlaer” as the Iroquois called him, and asked
him to lead them westward. In Fort Orange, July 21, 1661, in due legal
form, by purchase from and satisfaction to the Mohawk Indian chiefs, the
Indian title was extinguished. Thus, by a procedure as honourable and
generous as William Penn’s agreement with the Lenni Lenapes under the
great elm at Shackamaxon, was signalized the entrance of Germanic
civilization in the Mohawk Valley.
Early in the spring of 1662 Van Curler led his fourteen freemen and
their families into their new possession. Travelling westward, up what
is now Clinton Avenue in Albany, until they reached Norman’s Kill, they
struck northward, following the Indian trail of blazed trees, until
after a circuit of twenty miles they reached their future home, on a low
plateau on the banks of the Mohawk. On this old site of an Indian
village they began the erection of their houses, mill, church, and
palisades. The aboriginal name of the village, from which the Mohawks
had removed, pointed to the vast piles of driftwood deposited on the
river-flats after the spring floods; but not till after the English
conquest did any one apply the old Indian name of the site of
Albany—that is, “Schenectady”—to Van Curler’s new settlement. Both
French and Indians called the village “Corlaer,” even as they also
called the Mohawk River “the river of Corlaer,” and the sheet of water
in which he was drowned, not after its discoverer, Champlain, but
“Corlaer’s Lake.” Nevertheless, since the Mohawks had already retired
from the Hudson River, and “the place outside the door of the Long
House” was no longer Albany, but “Corlaer,” they and the Europeans, soon
after 1664, began to speak of the new settlement as “Schenectady;”
especially, as by their farther retirement up the valley, “Corlaer” was
now the true “Schenectady;” that is, outside the door of the Iroquois
confederacy or Long House. Schenectady enjoys the honour of being more
variously spelled than any other place in the United States; and its
name has been derived from Iroquois, German, and Japanese, in which
languages it is possible to locate the word as a compound. It is a
softened form of a long and very guttural Indian word.
Then was begun, by these Dutch freeholders, the long fight of fifty
years for freedom of trade with the Indians. Their contest was against
the restrictive jealousy of Albany, including both Colony and Manor.
With Dutch tenacity they held on, until victory at last crowned their
persistence in 1727.
In a word, in its initiation and completion, the opening of the Mohawk
Valley to civilization forms a noble episode in the story of American
freedom. One of the first places in New York on which the forces
representing feudalism and opposed to freeholding of land, and on which
mediæval European notions arrayed against the ideas which had made
America were beaten back, was at Schenectady, in the throat of the
Mohawk Valley. Here was struck by liberty-loving Hollanders a key-note,
of which the long strain has not yet ceased.
The immigrants who next followed the Dutch pioneers,—like them, as real
settlers, and not as land-speculators and manor-builders,—and who
penetrated still farther westward up the valley, were not English, but
German. These people, who, as unarmed peasants in the Rhine Valley, had
been unable to resist the invasion of Louis XIV. or to face the rigours
of poverty in their desolated homeland, made the best sort of colonists
in America. Brought by the British Government to settle on remote
frontiers, to bear the brunt of contact with Indians, Spaniards, and
Frenchmen, these sturdy Protestants soon proved their ability, not only
to stand their ground, but to be lively thorns in the sides of despotic
landlords, crown-agents, and governors.
The “first American rebel” Leisler, born at Mannheim in Germany, was a
people’s man. In his own rude way he acted with the intent of making
ideas dominant then, which are commonplace now. His “rebellion” grew out
of a boast made by the British Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson, that the
Dutch colonists were a conquered people, and not entitled to the right
of English citizenship. Hanged, by order of a drunken English governor,
near the site of the Tribune Building, May 16, 1691, it is more than
probable that he will yet have his statue in the metropolitan city of
America. He belongs to the list of haters of what is falsely named
aristocracy, the un-American state-church combination, and other relics
of feudalism which survive in England, but which had been cast off by
the Dutch Republic, in whose service as a soldier he had come to
America. His place in the list of the winners of American liberty is
sure.[1]
Under Governor Hunter’s auspices, in 1710, nearly three thousand Germans
from the Palatinate settled along the Hudson and in New York. By a third
immigration, in 1722, ten per cent was added to the population by the
Palatines, who settled all along the Mohawk Valley, advancing farther
westward into the “Woestina.” At German Flats and at Palatine Bridge
their “concentration” was greatest. So jealous were the money-loving
English of their wool-monopoly, that these Germans were forbidden under
extreme penalties to engage in the woollen manufacture. The same intense
jealousy and love of lucre which, until the Revolution, kept at home all
army contracts that could possibly be fulfilled in Great Britain,
prescribed the ban which was laid on the Mohawk Valley Palatines. With
chains thus forged upon the Germans, who were expected to furnish “naval
stores,” there was no encouragement for them to raise sheep or improved
stock. In this way it happened that Sir William Johnson was later
enabled to boast that he was the first who introduced fine sheep and
other live-stock in the Mohawk Valley.
The characteristics of these Germans were an intense love of liberty,
and a deep-seated hatred against feudalism and the encroachments of
monarchy in every form. The great land-owners, both Dutch and English,
who wished to use these people as serfs, found that they possessed
strange notions of liberty. Poor as they were, they were more like
hornets to sting than blue-bottles to be trapped with molasses. The
Hessian fly had a barb in his tail. Loyal to the Crown, they refused to
submit to the tyranny of the great landlords. It was one of these
Germans, a poor immigrant, that first fought and won the battle of the
freedom of speech and of the press. Now, intrenched in the Constitution
of the United States, it is to us almost like one of the numerous
“glittering generalities” of the Declaration of Independence, at which
Englishmen smile, but which Americans, including the emancipated
negroes, find so real. Then the freedom of the press was a dream. In
1734 John Peter Zenger, who incarnated the spirit and conscience of
these Palatine Germans, was editor of the “New York Weekly Journal.” He
was reproached as a foreigner and immigrant, for daring to criticise the
royal representatives, or ever to touch upon the prerogatives of
Governor Cosby, the king’s foolish representative. Zenger was
imprisoned, but managed to edit his paper while in jail. At his trial he
was defended by Hamilton, a lawyer from a colony whose constitution had
been written by the son of a Dutch mother, in Holland, where printing
had been free a century or more before it was even partially free in
England. James Alexander Hamilton was the Scottish lawyer who had left
his European home, to the detriment of his fortune, in order to enjoy
richer liberty in Pennsylvania. He it was who first purchased
Independence Square in Philadelphia, for the erection thereon of the
State House, in which the Liberty Bell was to hang, and “proclaim
liberty to all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” Going to
New York at his own expense, he, without fee, defended Zenger and
secured his acquittal. This event marks an important point in the making
of America and in the story of American freedom. It was in its effects
as significant as the skirmish at Lexington. The doctrine, novel at that
time in England but not in Holland, was advanced, that the truth of the
facts in the alleged libel could be set up as defence, and that in this
proceeding the jury were judges both of the law and the facts.
Though hundreds of Germans left New York for the greater advantage of
land and the liberty of Pennsylvania, which had been settled under
republican influences, yet those Palatines who rooted themselves in the
Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys proved one of the best stocks which have
made the American people. They were never popular with the men or women
who wanted to make America a new London or a new England, with courts
and castles, aristocracy and nobles, so called, entail and
primogeniture, the landlords of feudal domain, and other old-world
burdens. Honest, industrious, brave, God-fearing, truthful, and clean,
they soon dotted the virgin forest with clearings, farms, and churches.
Whatever else in their wanderings they lost or were robbed of, they
usually managed to hold to their hymn-books and Bibles, and, in the case
of the Reformed Churchmen, their Heidelberg Catechism. Their brethren in
Pennsylvania—the holy land of German-Americans—published the first
Bible in America, printed in a European tongue; and many early copies
found their way northward. They lived on terms of peace with the
Indians, treating these sons of the soil with kindness, and helping them
in generous measure to the benefits of Christianity. The most honest and
influential of Johnson’s Indian interpreters were of Dutch or German
stock.
Though other nationalities—Scottish, Irish, English—afterward helped
to make the Mohawk Valley at first polyglot, and then cosmopolitan, it
was by people of two of the strongest branches of the Teutonic race that
this fertile region was first settled. The dominant idea of these people
was freedom under law, reinforced by hearty contempt for the injustice
which masquerades under the forms of prerogative and of “majesty.” For
all the self-styled, insolent vicegerents of God, in both Church and
State, they felt a detestation, and were glad to find in America none of
these. If found, they felt bound to resist them unto the end. Theirs was
the democratic idea in Church and State, and they expressed it strongly.
It was this spirit which explains the rude and rough treatment, by
Germans of both sexes, of arrogant royal agents and landlords in the
Schoharie Valley, and which at the erection of churches built by public
money, in which only a liturgical sect could worship, led to turbulence
and riot. Certain historic old edifices now standing were once finished
only after the king’s bayonets had been summoned to protect masons and
carpenters from people who hated the very sight of an established or
government church, built even partly by taxation, but shut to those of
the sects not officially patronized.
Among such a people, strong in the virtues of unspoiled manhood;
exhilarant with the atmosphere and splendid possibilities of the New
World; trained in the school of Luther’s Bible and the Heidelberg
Catechism; taught by Dutch laws commanding purchase of land from the
aborigines, and by the powerful example of Van Curler and their domines
or pastors, to be kind to the Indians,—Sir William Johnson, one of the
greatest of the makers of our America, came in 1738. It was the daughter
of one of the people of this heroic stock that he married. At a
susceptible age he learned their ideas and way of looking at things,
especially at their method of justly treating the Indians of the Six
Nations, who were looked upon as the rightful owners of the soil. Among
these people Johnson lived all his adult life. He was ever in kindly
sympathy with them, never sharing the supercilious contempt of those who
were and who are ignorant alike of their language, abilities, and
virtues.
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[1] See “The Leisler Troubles of 1689,” by Rev. A. G. Vermilye, D.D. New
York. 1891.