1782

 

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“A faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.” 

Ovid.

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NOTE TO TEACHERS: Will students understand what happens to paper money, if a government collapses?

SIR HENRY CLINTON and British forces continue to occupy New York City, all during the year.

 

    Enlistments in the American army run out, and the number of men under arms gradually declines.

 

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January 23: According to the diary of Abner Weston, recently recovered, Deborah Sampson attempts to enlists in the Continental Army, not earlier, as she would later claim. Weston himself had served in the Massachusetts militia and in his diaries (he created three) talks about being sent to Rhode Island to help defend that state in 1780.

 

    On this date, he wrote: “Their hapend a uncommon affair at this time, for Deborah Samson of this town dress her self in men’s cloths and hired her self to Israel Wood to go into the three years Servis. But being found out returnd the hire and paid the Damages.”

 

    Caught once, in May she tried again, shifting her plan to Bellingham, forty miles away. This time, in a town where no one knew her, she succeeded, enlisting under the name of Robert Shurtleff.

 

    The New York Times notes:

 

    Dressing as a man was considered a crime in Massachusetts at the time, and Sampson’s audacity later invited the wrath of the Baptist church. In September 1782, while she, long gone, served with her unit under an assumed name, church elders, still reeling from her earlier attempt to enlist, excommunicated her, citing her for “dressing in men’s cloths and inlisting” and other conduct they considered “loose and unChristian like.”

 

    After the war, Sampson fought to get a veteran’s pension, a partially successful battle in which she had the aid of Paul Revere and John Hancock

 

    As The New York Times explains, his third diary, just found, “is a hand-stitched, 68-page account of the period between March 28, 1781 and August 16, 1782, which Weston updated while back home in Middleborough, Mass., where Sampson also lived.”

 

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Step forward, if “inclined toward mercy.”

 

March 8: The Lenni Lenape (or Delaware Indians) living in Ohio face a difficult decision. They have already moved west once, to remove themselves from the path of the settlers, and also to put distance between themselves and their bitter enemies, the Iroquois.

 

    With the outbreak of the Revolution, they must decide whether to throw in their lot with the British or the Americans.

 

    Like the Americans, themselves, who split, Patriot, Tory, and neutral, the Lenni Lenape divided. A Christian group, having learned pacifism from Moravian missionaries, like David Zeisberger (who had been working with the natives since 1771) settled at Gnadenhutten. Many Lenape living near Coshocton joined the fighting against the settlers; but a punishing raid against the Ohio tribes in 1781 did not molest the Indians at Gnadenhutten, largely due to the refusal of Col. Daniel Brodhead to allow his troops to destroy the Christian Indian towns.

 

    The missionaries continued to worry about being dragged into the war. Passing warriors from other tribes and even some Lenni Lenape, who had decided to join the British side, tried to convince men at Gnadenhutten to give up the path of Christianity and join them in battle.

 

    As Zeisberger put it,

 

Satan rages … not only from without, but also from within. For in the church there were people who upheld them [the warlike natives] in their false dispositions and applauded them, who wished to establish by force that wicked life of his and heathenism. If we oppose them they become angry and set on the wild Indians against us … Such a change has now come in the Indian church that the bad, wicked people can not be cast out, but they wish to be there and to cause harm in the church, for they in the wild towns have occasion enough therefor and no one would say any thing to them about their sinful life.”

 

    Suspecting that Zeisberger was secretly supplying the Americans with information, the British forced the Christian Indians to move north to what became known as “Captives Town.” They were not fed well, and in February 1782 returned to Gnadenhutten to harvest crops and gather food stored there. A native raiding party that had attacked settlements in Pennsylvania passed by on their way home, telling the Christian Indians that they had impaled two prisoners, a woman and child, on the western bank of the Ohio River. Soon after, the Moravian community was surprised by a force of frontier militia, led by Lt. Col. David Williamson. The soldiers gathered together 96 Lenni Lenape, and argued about what should be done with them. Williamson lined his men up, told any of more than a hundred men present to step forward if “inclined to mercy.”

 

    Only 16 or 18 stepped forward and it was decided: All the prisoners would be killed.

 

    The prisoners were divided in two buildings, one for men, one for women and children. After they were told of the vote, they spent the night praying and singing hymns.

 

    Several of the militia men refused to take part in any killing. One who voted against it was Obadiah Holmes Jr. He described what happened the next day:

 

one Nathan Rollins & brother [who] had had a father & uncle killed took the lead in murdering the Indians, ...& Nathan Rollins had tomahawked nineteen of the poor Moravians, & after it was over he sat down & cried, & said it was no satisfaction for the loss of his father & uncle after all.

 

    The toll included 28 men, 29 women and 39 children, most victims having been scalped. At least one boy, some say two, escaped to tell the story. One survivor was supposedly scalped, but lived.

 

    Another account says 34 victims were children.

 

    Ben Franklin heard news of the massacre even in faraway France. In a letter to a friend in England, he wrote:  

 

the abominable Murders committed by some of the frontier People on the poor Moravian Indians, has given me infinite Pain and Vexation. The Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason. I cannot comprehend why cruel Men should have been permitted thus to destroy their Fellow Creatures.

 

    Three decades later, Tecumseh could still remind General William Henry Harrison of the heartless murder of the Moravian Indians. “You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans,” he said in 1810, “and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”

 

    In 1889, Theodore Roosevelt could call the massacre “a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away.”

Picture from Wikipedia.

 

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    Col. William Crawford, a friend of George Washington, was captured by Lenape warriors a few months later. He had had no hand in the attack at Gnadenhutten.

 

    A friend of Crawford’s, Dr. Knight, also taken prisoner at that time, told the writer James B. Finley what happened. The unfortunate Crawford was tied to a pole in the middle of their village and preparations made for torture.

 

a loud whoop burst from the Indians, and they all rushed at once upon the unfortunate Crawford. For several seconds the crowd was so great around him that Knight could not see what they were doing. But in a short time they had spread out, and he had a view of Colonel Crawford.

 

    His ears had been cut off, and the blood was streaming down each side of his face. A terrible scene of torture now began. The warriors shot charges of gunpowder into his naked body, starting at the calves of his legs, and continuing to his neck. The boys snatched burning hickory poles and stuck them on his flesh. As fast as he ran around the stake [where he was tied by a 15-foot rope] to avoid one group...he was met...by another party. They used burning poles, red-hot irons, and rifles loaded with powder only. In a few minutes nearly one hundred shots of powder had been fired into his body, which had become black and blistered in a dreadful manner. The squaws would take up quantities of coals and hot ashes and throw them upon his body, so that in a few moments he had nothing to walk on but fire.

 

    [After two hours]...Crawford had become much exhausted. He walked slowly around the stake, speaking in a low tone. He [begged] God to look with pity upon him, and pardon his sins. His nerves had lost much of their feeling, and he no longer shrunk [away] from the fire-brands with which he was constantly touched. At last he sunk in a fainting fit upon his face and lay motionless. Instantly an Indian sprung upon his back, kneeled lightly on one knee, and made a circular cut with his knife upon the top of Crawford’s head. Clapping his knife between his teeth, he tore the scalp off with both hands. Hardly had this been done when an old woman approached with a board full of burning embers, and poured them upon the crown of his head, now laid bare to the bone. The Colonel groaned deeply, arose, and again walked slowly around the stake. But why continue a description so horrible? Nature at length could stand no more, and at a late hour in the night Crawford was released by death from the hands of his tormentors.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I sometimes paired these two incidents and tried to show students how one atrocity led to another, in a chain of events, until it became almost impossible to see who was to blame. Usually, the innocent suffered for the sins of the guilty, on both sides of the fighting.

 

    I called it the “Cycle of Violence.” I think the same cycle plays out in gang warfare in American cities, in clashes between Bosnians and Serbs, and for many years did also in Northern Ireland, between Protestant and Catholic.

 

    You can pick all kinds of examples: Israeli vs. Palestinian, Hindu vs. Muslim in India, etc.