The Six Nations Confederacy in the American Revolution

The Great League

The Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk — the Five Nations — joined in a confederacy about A.D. 1200, under the "Great Tree of Peace", each pledging not to make war on the others. Around 1720 the Tuscarora joined as the sixth nation.

The members called themselves Haudenosaunee, "the People of the Longhouse", and saw the confederacy as a symbolic longhouse stretching across most of today's New York State:

With a matriarchal hierarchy and a men's council, the Six Nations governed themselves and others with great skill. They held the headwaters of the Ohio, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Chenango, Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers — the passage into the interior of the continent. Military success made many other nations their tributaries, and at one time their reach ran north to the Sorel River in Canada, south to the Carolinas, west to the Mississippi and east to the Atlantic. They were the dominant Indian confederacy of the northeast and northwest.

Europeans, trade and war

The Europeans' arrival let the Six Nations extend their influence as a major force in the fur trade. Their first main partners were the Dutch, then the English after the Dutch gave up their American claims to England in 1660. Relations with France were poor from the start, because France had allied with the Abenaki, long-time enemies of the confederacy, and swung between peace and violence.

When the French and Indian War came in 1755, both France and England courted the Six Nations. The French had some early success, especially among the Seneca, but the confederacy sided with the English — largely through Sir William Johnson, a poor Irish immigrant who built an empire in the Mohawk Valley trading with the Indians. He immersed himself in their culture, was adopted into the Mohawk Nation, and became Superintendent of Indian Affairs for most of the thirteen colonies and Canada; all his life he was a trusted friend, mediator and adviser to the Six Nations.

The alliance helped the English build Fort Stanwix in 1758 on traditional Oneida land. The confederacy shielded English frontier settlements in New York and joined many British expeditions against the French, which led in the end to English victory.

The peace was short. Colonists kept pushing into Indian lands, and in 1768 English colonial and Six Nations leaders met at Fort Stanwix to set a firm boundary between Indian and European lands. The Six Nations also signed for the Shawnee, Delawares, Mingoes and others, with or without their consent. The treaty did little to stop settlement.

A war they did not want

The war between England and its colonies brought the confederacy new trouble. The Six Nations did not fully understand why the English were quarreling among themselves, and had no wish to be drawn into what they saw as a civil war. Early on, Oneida leaders told the governor of New York that they would take neither side: they loved both Old England and New, would refuse either if asked for help, and could find nothing like this quarrel in their ancestors' traditions.

Neutrality could not last. Pressure grew from both England and the thirteen states, and the English above all insisted that the confederacy honor its alliance. Unable to agree, the confederacy split — nation against nation, and individuals within each nation on different sides. Because of old alliances, and the belief that their lands were safer under the English, most nations supported England in some way. Only the Oneida and Tuscarora gave major support to the Americans.

Confederacy members on the English side, among them Joseph and Molly Brant, helped their allies make many devastating raids on the frontier settlements of New York and Pennsylvania. The Oneida and Tuscarora served the Americans as scouts and guides, and for a short time even sent men to the Continental Army. Each side raided and destroyed the other's villages.

National Park Service.

Peace without victory

The Treaty of Paris ended the war in 1783, but neither the English nor the Americans made any provision for their Six Nations allies. The confederacy had to sign a separate treaty with the United States in 1784, at the ruined Fort Stanwix, in which its England-allied members gave up large parts of their traditional lands; in the end it bound no more than the 1768 treaty had. The Oneida and Tuscarora got little compensation for their support of the United States.

The war brought the Haudenosaunee on both sides peace, but no victory. It left their confederacy and culture shattered and their lands and villages devastated, and many of its wounds have yet to heal.

Sources

Based on "The Six Nations Confederacy During the American Revolution," Fort Stanwix National Monument, National Park Service, part of the series Native History of the Oneida Carry; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse University Press, 1972), and the park's research article "Indians at Fort Stanwix"; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Misspellings in the source ("Delewares", "bought the war to an end") are corrected.