BRITISH FAILURES PREPARING FOR AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE.
THE versatile Johnson, turning from military to civil duties, remained
in New York during the whole of the month of January, 1756. The men then
in control of the British government, with their usual obtuseness, sent
another sailor to do the work of a statesman. Sir Charles Hardy, after
appointing October 2 as a day of public thanksgiving for the victory at
Lake George, celebrated it himself by starting on a visit to Albany. He
proposed to effect such a resumption of active military operations as
would secure the main object of the great expedition,—the capture of
Crown Point. His presence, however, was fruitless, and he returned to
New York, November 26. Then, on the 2d of December, he met his little
Parliament, and told them all about the victory of General Johnson or
Baron Dieskau. The stolid Dutchmen and others were unable, as the Indian
orators would say, “to see it in that light.” They could not do other
than anticipate the verdict of the critical scholarship of this
generation, for they looked upon the whole affair as “a failure
disguised under an incidental success.” Further, instead of hearing that
the English flag waved over Crown Point, and that English cannon guarded
the narrows of Lake Champlain, they were asked to pay for Fort William
Henry and Fort George, both of which were but an ordinary day’s
horseback-ride from Albany. At the same time Sir Charles demanded in
King George’s name a permanent revenue, with which to pay governors,
judges, and the general expenses of the government.
To the first proposition, to pay their share of expense for forts in
which all the colonies were interested, the Assembly at once responded
favourably. To the second they gave a flat refusal, declaring that the
idea of a permanent revenue was in direct opposition to the public
sentiment of the colony.
On the same day on which the Assembly met, Governor Shirley arrived in
New York. Being, by the death of Braddock, the king’s chief military
representative in America, he summoned a congress of colonial governors
to meet in New York December 12. With his usual extraordinary mental
activity, he was full of schemes, one of which was a midwinter campaign
against Ticonderoga. The congress approved of it; but the hard-headed
members of the Assembly, the people generally, and Johnson, did not.
With all admiration for the fussy politician, who planned superbly on
paper, but somehow failed in the field, they had a sincere respect,
which was, however, tempered by excellent common-sense.
As for Shirley and Johnson, they seemed always unable to work
harmoniously together, the latter resenting what he believed to be the
needless interference of the other. Shirley found Johnson more than a
match for him in the rather acrid correspondence conducted in New York
during January. Living but a few rods apart, the liveried coloured
servants of these colonial dignitaries kept their soles warm in carrying
despatches. In jealousy of each other, the two gentlemen were as
incompatible as Siamese twins, their only common ligament being loyalty
to the Crown. Johnson was determined to get and hold his commission from
the Crown, and not be subject to colonial governors or assemblies. He
laid the whole matter before the Lords of Trade, and aided by his
friends at Court, secured a flattering verdict in his favour. In July,
1756, there came to him from his Majesty’s Secretary, Fox, a commission
as Colonel, Agent, and sole Superintendent of all the affairs of the Six
Nations, and other Northern Indians, with an annual salary of six
hundred pounds. By orders from the same august source, the Northern
colonies were prohibited from transacting business with the Indians, so
that the whole matter was settled in Johnson’s hands.
Being now well intrenched in his office and authority, Johnson, with his
usual versatility and vigour, turned from the duties of the desk and
council-room to the activities of the field. The frontiers of New
Hampshire had been harassed during the winter by prowling bands of
savages, but the French now attempted a more ambitious raid. Warned by
Indian runners, who had made the first part of their journey on
snow-shoes from Fort Bull at the Oneida “carry,” he at once sent
ammunition to the garrison of thirty men. On skates from Montreal to
Fort Presentation, and thence on snow-shoes to the Oneida portage, the
party of nearly three hundred Frenchmen, after ten days of gliding and
stepping, appeared before the wooden fort, March 27. Their demand for
surrender was met by a volley, which in return was answered by a charge,
a crushing in of the gate, and a massacre of all but five of the
garrison. Among the military stores destroyed were two tons of powder.
About the same time the ship-carpenters at Oswego became the prey of
raiding Indians from Niagara, who returned with three prisoners and
twelve scalps. Forays were made by Canadian savages, even into Ulster
and Orange Counties, within a day’s horse-ride of New York.
The winter was unusually mild, which caused the utter abandonment of
Shirley’s expedition to Crown Point; while the numerous petty successes
of the French and Indians turned the faces of the vacillating members of
the Iroquois cantons toward Canada as the winning side.
Yet strange as it may seem, the New York Assembly was slow in voting
supplies. The ultra-loyalists who supported Hardy, who was backed by the
king and his council, now vented their maledictions upon the
“foreigners” who made the cosmopolitan population of the province, and
their representatives in the Assembly. All this seems strange to the
average historiographer, especially to the copyist of loyalist or other
writers who rely on such men as Colden, Smith, Jones, Washington Irving,
and the like, for their ideas of Colonial New York and her people. There
was good reason for the stubbornness of the legislators. The fact is,
that the people of the province of New York were mostly descendants of
the sturdy Republicans who had fought under William the Silent. They
believed that the encroachments of monarchy—that is, one-man
power—were more dangerous than the raids of hostile Indians. The Dutch,
Germans, Scots, Irish, Huguenots, were almost a unit in their democratic
ideas. This province, unlike others of the original thirteen, was not
settled by people of aristocratic England, in which a republic, once
begun, had gone to pieces inside of twelve years, but by men long
trained in self-government and in a republic. Even their forms of church
life were as nurseries for the training of men in democratic principles.
To the loyalist historian, Jones, a Presbyterian seems to be a synonym
for rebel, of whatever name or strain of blood. Congregationalists, fed
on the rhetoric and oratory of Forefathers’ Day, find it hard to believe
that the democratic idea in Church and State flourished anywhere outside
of New England. The New York men were determined at all hazards—even
the hazards of savage desolation—to resist any further trenching upon
their rights by King George, or his subservient Parliament, or his
bullying governor.
England had sent over, after Clinton, another illiterate sailor to
enforce a fresh demand,—even the passage of a law for settling a
permanent revenue on a solid foundation; said law to be indefinite and
without limitation of time. The descendants of the Hollanders who had
long ago, even against mighty Spain, settled the principle of no
taxation without consent, and had maintained it in a war of eighty
years, were resolved to fight again the same battle on American soil.
They now set themselves resolutely to resist the demands of the Crown,
and this whether Indians were in Orange County or at Niagara. Despite
the protests of such incorrigible Tories as Smith, Colden, and others in
the Executive Council, the people’s representatives persevered.
It is needless to say that the Assembly gained their point, and that the
greatest and most lasting victory of the people in the long story of
American liberty was won. A few months after, at the autumn session, the
joyful news reached New York that the Crown had virtually repealed the
instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, which had made the colonists of New
York set themselves in united array of resistance to “their most
gracious sovereign.”
The war had thus far been carried on without profession or declaration.
The diplomatists of London and Versailles had been as polite and full of
smooth words as if profound peace reigned. The English were following
their old trade of piracy, and had captured hundreds of French vessels,
and imprisoned thousands of French sailors. The French, on the other
hand, were doing with England as they did with China in 1885, when they
bombarded cities, treacherously got behind forts in the Pearl River, and
killed thousands of Chinese, while all the time professing to be at
peace. At length the British went through the formality of declaring
war, May 17. On the French side, the necessary parchment, red tape, and
seals were prepared, and the official ink flowed two years after blood
had flowed like water.
Now at last, in Pitt, England had a premier who knew something about the
geography of America; and “geography,” as Von Moltke teaches, “is half
of war.” William Pitt thought the time had come for intelligent and
active operations looking to the conquest of North America by the
English. His first selection of men, however, was not particularly wise
or evident of genius. Listening to the word of Johnson, and others in
New York, he removed Shirley from the chief command, and sent out,
successively, Colonel Webb, General Abercrombie, and Lord Loudon,—all
of them, as it proved, failures.
The three men appointed were alike in their supercilious contempt for
American militia and officers, and were all destined, through their
ignorant pride, to disgust Americans with English ways, and steadily to
determine them toward independence. Abercrombie, on his arrival, at once
began to cast firebrands of discontent among the colonial troops by
nullifying the intelligent and well-laid plans of Shirley, and
promulgating the exasperating order that all regular officers were to be
over those in the colonial service of the same rank. General Winslow
fortunately succeeded in dissuading the Britisher from his madness,
before desertions and threatened resignations became too numerous; but
with the compromise that the imported soldiers should garrison the forts
while the Americans went to the front. In other words, the provincials
were to see and do the severest service. Abercrombie further showed his
obstinacy and ignorance of affairs by billeting ten thousand soldiers on
the citizens of Albany, instead of at once advancing to Oswego. He thus
unwittingly helped to create that sentiment against the outraging of
American homes by the forced presence of soldiers which, later, found
expression for all time in the amendment to the Constitution of the
United States. Abercrombie wasted the whole summer at Schenectady, which
now became the headquarters of the armies. It was determined to build
forts at all the portages between this town and Oswego, as well as at
South Bay, to protect Fort Edward. While the boat-yards along the Mohawk
River were in full activity, and stores were being collected, he
employed his men part of the time in teaching the people of Albany and
Schenectady how to build earthworks in European style, in digging
ditches, and in putting up heavier stockades around the two towns.
One of the good things done by Parliament at this time was the formation
of the Royal American Regiment of four battalions, each a thousand
strong. Of the fifty officers commissioned, nearly one third were
Germans and Swiss. Most of the rank and file were Palatine and
Swiss-Germans in America, who enlisted for three years. None of the
officers could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and the Earl
of Loudon was appointed first colonel-in-chief. Loudon was succeeded in
1757 by Abercrombie, and in 1758 by Lord Amherst. Until the
Revolutionary War, this cosmopolitan regiment did noble service under
Stanwix, Bouquet, Forbes, Prideaux, Wolfe, and Johnson. From 1757 to
1760 we find one or more battalions of the regiment in active service in
the various parts of New York. The famous Rev. Michael Schlatter, the
organizer of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, was the
regimental chaplain. On the 15th of June, 1756, the forty German
officers who were to raise the recruits arrived, one of the ablest being
Colonel Bouquet. This Swiss officer, with the Germans, at Bushy Run in
Pennsylvania largely retrieved the disasters caused by Braddock’s
defeat, and restored the frontiers of Pennsylvania to comparative safety
and comfort.
While Abercrombie, who was one of those military men whose reliance is
less upon the sword than the spade, was digging ditches in Albany,
Johnson was arranging for a great Indian council at his house on the
Mohawk. He had in view the double purpose of winning the Delawares and
other Pennsylvania tribes from war against the English colonists, and of
inducing all the Northern Indians to join in the expedition against the
French posts on Lake Ontario. Braddock’s defeat had been the signal for
the Delawares, under the direct influence of the French, to break the
peace of more than seventy years, and to scatter fire and blood in
Pennsylvania, from the Monongahela to the Delaware. The solemn treaty of
Penn—which Voltaire, with more wit than truth, declared was “never
sworn to and never broken”—was now a thing of the past. The wampum was
unravelled, and the men with hats and the men with scalp-locks were in
deadly conflict. While the Friends remained at their Philadelphia
firesides, the German and Scotch settlers on the frontier bore the brunt
of savage fury. When public action was taken, it was in the double and
contradictory form of peace-belts of wampum sent by the Friends, and a
declaration of war by Governor Morris. In this mixed state of things it
was hard for Johnson to know what to do. Through his influence the
Iroquois, uncles and masters, had summoned by wampum belts their nephews
and vassals to the great conference which was opened at his house in
February, 1756. To prepare for this, Johnson had made a journey to the
council-fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga, arriving June 15. There he
succeeded in neutralizing in part the work done by the French, and
obtained an important concession. The Iroquois voted to allow a road to
be opened through the very heart of their empire to Oswego, and a fort
to be built at Oswego Falls.
These severe exertions cost Johnson a fit of sickness; but on the 7th of
July he met the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawanese at his house. After
the usual consumption, on both sides, of wampum, verbosity, and rum, all
the Indians were won over to the English cause. The covenant chain of
peace was renewed, the war-belts were accepted by the sachems, and
medals hung around their necks by Johnson himself. The Delawares had
“their petticoats taken off,”—or, in other words, they were no longer
squaws in the eyes of the Iroquois, but allies, friends, and men.
Without detracting from Johnson’s reputation, it is probable that the
possession by many of the Delawares of the rifles made by the
Pennsylvania Swiss and Germans, which gave them such an advantage over
Dutch and English smooth-bores, had much to do with winning the respect
of the Iroquois.
Through Johnson’s influence two councils were held in Pennsylvania, at
Easton, when the Delawares under their great chief, Teedyuscung, met
delegations of the Iroquois and Governor Denny. Teedyuscung had for his
secretary “the Man of Truth,” Charles Thompson, master of the Friends’
Free School in Philadelphia. The proceedings lasted nine days; Denny by
his tact being able “to put his hand in Teedyuscung’s bosom and draw out
the secret” of his uneasiness. The council was adjourned to Lancaster in
the spring of 1757, when, however, the Delaware chief failed to appear.
Nevertheless peace was obtained on the Pennsylvania borders, the credit
for which was claimed by the Senecas.
To turn now to the field of war, we find that Governor Shirley had
organized a corps of armed boatmen, and had sent them under Colonel
Bradstreet to Oswego. Bradstreet was successful in thus provisioning the
forts with a six months’ store for five thousand men. After his
brilliant exploit he was attacked on his way back, three leagues from
the fort, by De Villiers with eleven hundred men. Despite the sudden
fury of the attack, Bradstreet beat off the enemy with loss, only a
heavy rain preventing his gaining a greater victory. Reaching Albany, he
urged General Abercrombie to march at once to the forts. A large
expedition under Montcalm was already on its way to remove these, the
chief obstacles to their plans of empire. Johnson in person seconded
Bradstreet’s appeal, urging that if Oswego fell, the Iroquois would be
sure to join the French. Abercrombie stupidly refused to move until Lord
Loudon’s arrival, and the golden opportunity was lost.
This slow-minded personage, Lord Loudon, the Scotsman, reached Albany on
the 29th of July; but correct ideas as to the situation percolated into
his brain with difficulty. Indeed, as with Sydney Smith’s proverbial
joke about the Scotchman’s skull, it seemed necessary to perform a
surgical operation in order to show him how needful it was to march at
once to Oswego, notwithstanding that Montcalm with his host was daily
approaching.
While Loudon was fooling away his time in jealousy of the provincial
militia, and sending a force in the wrong direction at Crown Point,
Montcalm with three thousand troops and plenty of cannon, part of which
had been captured from Braddock, settled himself before Oswego. Of the
three forts garrisoned by Shirley’s and Pepperell’s regiments of New
England men, only one was able to stand a protracted siege. All
assembled in this fort, Ontario, and fought gallantly until Colonel
Mercer was cut in half by a cannon-shot. Then a panic ensued. The one
hundred women in the fort begged that the place should be surrendered,
and the white flag was shortly afterward hoisted. The forts were burned,
and the place left a desolation, in which the priest, Picquet, set up a
lofty cross, and beside it the arms of France. The French were now
masters of Lake Ontario, and of the passages by land and water to the
Ohio, and free to attack the Lake George forts. They found themselves
enriched to the extent of sixteen hundred prisoners, one hundred and
twenty cannon, six ships of war, three hundred boats, three chests of
money, besides a great quantity of provisions and the stores of war. The
destruction instead of the occupation of the forts was a master stroke
of policy in favor of conciliating the Six Nations.
In this affair Montcalm showed the nobility of his nature in protecting,
at the hazard of his life, the prisoners from massacre. When the
Indians, filled with rum, had turned into devils, and were sinking their
hatchets in the brains of the unarmed, Montcalm, as the eyewitness John
Viele of Schenectady on his return testified before Johnson, ordered out
his troops and fired on the brutes. Six of the drunken savages were shot
dead. The murdering ceased at once, and there was no massacre.
Loudon the lazy had finally awaked to the situation, and sent General
Webb with twelve hundred men to reinforce Oswego. At the Oneida portage
Webb heard of the surrender, and hoping to delay the French who were
advancing, as he supposed, on Albany, he had some trees chopped down to
delay their boats. He then hastily retreated to the fort at German
Flats. Johnson, at Albany, heard the news August 20, and under Loudon’s
orders, with two battalions of the Valley militia and a corps of three
hundred Indians, hastened to reinforce Webb. Remaining in camp fifteen
days, until hearing of the removal of the French, he dismissed the
militia and returned home.
So passed another year of failure. John Campbell, Scotsman, otherwise
called Earl of Loudon, had been sent out as the representative of Lord
Halifax and of the Lords of Trade. Having decided to unite all the
colonies under military rule, and force them to support a standing army,
they selected this man, who was strong in the idea of colonial
subordination, but was vacillating, incapable, vain, wasteful, and lazy.
His first winter campaign consisted chiefly in scolding Shirley, and
making the Massachusetts governor the scapegoat for his own
shortcomings; in disgusting the people of New York by billeting his
officers upon them; and in both New York and Boston diligently hastening
the separation of the colonies from Great Britain by making a fool of
himself generally.
With the regulars in winter quarters, the militia dismissed to their
homes, the whole frontier, except in the Lake George region, open and
exposed, five of the Six Nations practically alienated from the English
and already making terms with the French, the outlook was dark.
However, the Mohawks were faithful; and Johnson took heart, believing he
could yet win and hold the Iroquois. Sending his captains, the two
Butlers, and Jellis Fonda to the various castles, and to the fireplace
of the Confederacy at Onondaga, he appointed a great council to meet,
June 10, 1757. Meanwhile he sent the Mohawks out upon the war-path, and
had the satisfaction of hearing of the repulse of the French and the
safe defence of the Fort William Henry which he had built two years
before at Lake George. Major William Eyre, the ordnance officer who had
served the guns so efficiently at the battle of Lake George against
Dieskau’s regulars, was in command of the fort, with four hundred men.
The commander of the American rangers, with Eyre, was John Stark. The
long and dreary winter was nearly over, and Saint Patrick’s Day was at
hand. The French knew as well that the Irish soldiers would be drunk on
the 18th of March, as Washington knew that the Hessians would be unfit
for clear-headed fighting the day after Christmas. Fortunately, through
the thoughtfulness of the future hero of Bennington, his own rangers
were kept sober by enforced total abstinence, and the Irish had the rum
and drunkenness all to themselves. The French force of fifteen hundred
regulars, wood-rangers, and savages came down the lakes on the ice,
dragging, each man, his sledge containing provisions, arms, and various
equipments, among which were three hundred scaling-ladders. They began a
furious attack at sunrise on the 18th, expecting easy victory; but Eyre
used his artillery with such deadly effect that despite four separate
attacks within twenty-four hours, the expedition ended in total failure.
Seized with a panic, the besiegers fled, leaving their sledges and much
valuable property behind, besides their dead.
Johnson first heard of this event in a letter from Colonel Gage,—him
who married an American wife, and afterward occupied Boston with the
redcoats, only to be compelled to leave it at the request of Washington,
his old comrade-in-arms on Braddock’s Field. It is a curious coincidence
that Colonel Gage has unwittingly furnished Yankee Boston with a public
holiday in honour of Ireland’s patron, Saint Patrick,—which the Irish
majority in the Boston City Council first inaugurated in 1890, under the
disguise of “Evacuation Day.” The date which the Frenchmen chose for
their approach to Fort William Henry was the date also on which Gage, in
1775, sailed away to the land whence the Canadians had come in 1757.
Johnson’s tremendous energies now shone forth. He at once summoned the
Mohawk Valley militia, and sent his trusty interpreter, Arent Stevens,
to rouse the Mohawks. The meeting-place was at his house. The news came
on Sunday the 24th; and on Monday, at daylight, the column of twelve
hundred militia and the Indians were on the march which in less than
four days brought them to Fort William Henry.
Finding the enemy gone, Johnson allowed his men two days’ rest, and was
about to start homeward, when hearing that the French meditated a blow
on the frontier village of German Flats, he kept in the saddle all
night, reaching home at four A. M. Fortunately the news was not
confirmed; but he nevertheless ordered the militia to Burnet’s Field,
and made his headquarters there. This energetic action had a good effect
upon the Iroquois who had been invited to the grand council at Fort
Johnson, as his house was now called, and on the 10th of June the
proceedings were duly opened. The result of the ten days’ conference was
that the neutrality of the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas was secured;
while the three other tribes—the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Mohawks—were
heartily enlisted to fight for the English against the French.
Summer passed away in Johnson’s despatching Indian parties to Canada; in
Governor Hardy’s returning to the more congenial quarter-deck,
exchanging civil for naval life; in Loudon’s making a grand failure at
Louisburg, as usual blaming the colonial officers and troops for his own
blunders; and in the shameful loss of Fort William Henry through the
cowardice of General Webb.
Johnson had warned Webb of the coming of Montcalm with nearly eight
thousand men, including a body of Indians said to be gathered from
forty-one tribes. On the 1st of August, while holding a council with the
Cherokees at his house, he received news from General Webb that Montcalm
was moving down upon Colonel Monro, who with two thousand men occupied
the fort and adjoining camp. Johnson at once adjourned the council, and
summoning the militia and Mohawks, quickly reached Fort Edward, and
begged to be sent to reinforce Monro. The double-minded Webb at first
consented, and then ordered him back. Within sound of the cannon, Webb
held back his whole force, and sent Monro a note advising him to
surrender. Only when his ammunition was nearly exhausted, his heavy
cannon burst, three hundred of his men killed or wounded, many others
helpless with small-pox, and the outlook hopeless, did Monro surrender.
As usual, the Indians, many of them from tribes utterly unused to any
control, got at the rum-barrels, and were converted into devils, whom
Montcalm in vain endeavoured to control, until after they had butchered
scores of Monro’s unarmed people, including women and children. The fort
and barracks were burned, and on great heaps of the fuel thus obtained
the bodies of the slain were given cremation.
Webb, almost scared out of his wits, would have moved southward to West
Point, but that Lord Howe, who had arrived with reinforcements, calmed
him. Almost as a matter of course, the blame was laid by the British
officers and regulars on the provincial troops. This military bigotry,
and the inveterate prejudice of the regulars against volunteers had a
tremendous effect in making the native-born militia suspect that they
could some day do without the supercilious and conceited king’s
servants. They saw that most of the hard fighting had been done by
militiamen at the front, who, notwithstanding the immense resources of
Great Britain, were not properly supported at the right time. They were
tired of being led to the slaughter by fussy, incompetent, and often
cowardly commanders. They noted, also, that the regulars were mostly
kept in garrison, while the militia were sent to the front, where,
usually in battle with the Indians, the Americans stood their ground,
fighting behind trees, while the handsomely uniformed regulars were
flying to the rear. Further yet, the regulars stationed in the forts in
the Mohawk Valley were so arrogant and conceited as to look—as the
average Englishman is so apt to do—upon the Dutchmen and Germans as a
sort of inferior cattle. The consequence was that they were practically
useless as defenders.
Johnson was so heartily disgusted with the state of affairs that it is
probable that his sickness in October and November was a direct result
of exposure in camp, and distraction of mind. He knew that the French
would now at the first opportunity strike the western frontier. He
therefore wrote to Abercrombie in September, to reinforce the Valley
forts and send scouts and rangers to German Flats. All such warnings,
however, were like “an east wind in an ass’s ears.” Abercrombie and his
men drilled, drank, swore, gambled, dug ditches, and caricatured the
Dutch people in church, and otherwise amused themselves in Albany. At
German Flats the long strain of duty in watch and ward resulted in the
inevitable reaction; and when the danger was greatest and nearest, the
nerves relaxed, the midnight lantern went out, and the sentinel and
people alike slept. The friendly Oneidas informed the Germans, fifteen
days in advance, of the enemy’s movements. A week later, a chief came in
person to warn them; but the people took it as a joke, laughed in his
face, and sent no word to Johnson. Tired of hearing the cry of “wolf,”
they neglected to provide for their sheep. Despite the fort, the
block-houses, and the militia company of one hundred men, the blow fell.
Fortunately the minister and some of his people heeded the friendly
warning of the Oneidas, and the day before the attack, crossed the river
to a place of safety. Those left were infatuated until the last moment.
It was on the morning of Nov. 13, 1757, that the Canadian, Belletre, and
his three hundred white and red savages surrounded the doomed village,
raised the yell, and began the attack. The people were dazed. After some
fitful musketry-firing, the Indians succeeded in setting the houses on
fire, and in tomahawking and scalping the people as they rushed out of
the flames. One of the block-houses was surrendered by the head man of
the village, who asked for quarter. Numbers of the people were killed as
they ran out to the fording-place of the river to escape to the opposite
side, or were shot while in the water. The settlement was totally
destroyed. Of the three hundred people, a sixth were killed and one half
taken prisoners; the remainder escaped, or had already fled to Fort
Herkimer. The abundant live-stock was destroyed or driven off, and the
place left in ashes. All this was done almost under the eyes of the
commander of Fort Herkimer, but a short distance off, across the Mohawk
River. Having a small garrison, he, though fully warned by Oneida
Indians of the coming blow, was unable to send assistance, and perhaps
anticipated an attack on his own post.
The people of Stone Arabia and Cherry Valley were excited, and prepared
to leave these places when the escaped refugees brought the news. Lord
Howe, with his reinforcements, though too late for action, prevented the
depopulation of the settlements.
The sage Lord Loudon heard of this latest disaster while in Albany, and
his conduct was characteristic. Eager to find a victim on whom to vent
his rage and to bear his own and his officers’ shortcomings, he blamed
the Iroquois, and even proposed to make war against them. It was,
probably, only by the active persuasion of Johnson that he was turned
from his madness.
Imagination vainly seeks to picture the results had Loudon, the grand
master of Great Britain’s resources, even begun his folly, and broken
the peace league which Van Curler had made, Schuyler extended, and
Johnson perfected. Had he practically betrayed his country by turning
the whole Indian power of the continent over to the French, the history
of this country would have been vastly different from that we know. Had
Johnson done nothing else than prevent this, he would deserve a high
place among the Makers of America.