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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(Picture from blogger's collection. Feel free to use.)

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.

 

*

 

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.”

 

*

 

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 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 in the public domain.)

 

*

 

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.

1783

 

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“A thin ghost of a government.” 

Benjamin Andrews.

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Newspaper printing.

(Picture from blogger's collection. Feel free to use.)

January: In October 1781, Congress asked the states for $8,000,000 to fund the national government; in January 1783, it had received less than half a million. 

    “The war had cost about $150,000,000. In 1783 the debt was $42,000,000 – $8,000,000 owed to France and Holland, and the rest at home. … Five millions were owing to the army.” (2/162-173)

 

* 

June: “A handful of Pennsylvania troops, clamoring for their pay, besieged the doors of Congress, and that august body had to take refuge in precipitate flight.” (2/162-173) 

    The problem of pay was solved, in part, by issuing land warrants to state militia and Continental veterans, “instruments which the holder could either convert into acres of his own or sell for spot cash. In most states, this redistribution of land made the status of “freeholder” available to almost everyone. 

    Speculators did snap up many of these warrants. Still, by the end of the year, more than 25,000 settlers were living west of the Allegheny Mountains. (48/365)

 

* 

September 3: Once peace was agreed to, the Americans had to adapt from a revolutionary mindset, which is “negative,” that is fighting against that which they did not like, and build something better.

 

    Says Van Loon,

 

    Thus far the American rebels had been held together by a common ideal which consisted mostly of things they did not want to do. For example, they did not want to pay taxes to the British government. They did not want to have bishops of the official British church appointed for America . They did not want the King to tell them they must keep out of certain western lands which were supposed to be reserved for the Indians. They did not want Parliament to put a duty on their tea and on their glass and on their paint. They did not want to do this and they did not want to do that.

 

    But now the period of the “don’ts” had come to an end.

 

    The much less exciting era of the “do’s” had begun.

 

    He compares what they had done to “a surgical operation,” say, to remove a tumor, “or the destruction of an old building that has outlived its usefulness.”(124/237)

 

    It was time to build a nation.

 

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AFTER THE WAR: James Monroe “declined all recompense for his services, as he had done throughout most of the Revolution. His fortune was small, he told Jefferson, but he looked upon it as his duty to make this contribution to the common cause.” Monroe did receive a land bounty of 5,333 1/3 acres in Kentucky. In all he succeeded in patenting more than 100,000 acres. (24/33, 38)

 

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November: Attendance in Congress dwindled. “Less than twenty delegates were present, representing but seven States…” “The Government was an engine without steam.” 

    It was “a thin ghost of a government set in charge over a lot of lusty flesh-and-blood States.” (2/162-173)

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IT HAS BEEN “estimated that the reading-matter in all the forty-three papers which existed at the close of the Revolution would not fill ten pages of the New York Herald now.”  (2/26)

 

* 

December 3: In an address to the Volunteer Association and Other Inhabitants, General Washington offers this assurance: “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.”

1784

 

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“You have submitted to him as your head and superior.”

 

Elias Boudinot – advice to a niece on marriage.

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Control of this area is yet to be determined.

 

 

IN 1784 the U.S. Navy included one ship, the Alliance. Congress sold the vessel in 1785. (2/212) 

Cost-cutting was the name of the game.

 

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JOHN C. MILLER notes that in this era, “Thomas Jefferson operated on his plantation at Monticello a small nail factory in which the ‘hands’ were Negro slave children, and George Washington used slave girls to manufacture woolen, cotton and linen cloth.” (300/147)

 

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THE BARBARY PIRATES are a problem, according to the historian Benjamin Andrews. They had begun to “annoy our commerce” soon after we became an independent nation. 

The Betsy was captured in 1784, next year the Maria, of Boston, and the Dauphin, of Philadelphia, and their crews of twenty-one men carried to a long and disgraceful captivity in Algiers. 

The Dey’s bill for these captives, held by him as slaves, was:

 

3 Captains at $6,000………………….$18,000

2 Mates at $4,000……………………....8,000

2 Passengers at $4,000…………………..8,000

       14 Seamen at $1,400…  …..……....……..19,600

                                                                                                                      _________

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             $53,600

 

For custom, eleven per cent……………..5,896

                                                                                                                                         _________

           

                                                                            $59,496

 

Later, as Andrews puts it, a single cruise lost us ten vessels to “these half-civilized peoples.” (2/328-329)

 

*

 

ELIAS BOUDINOT offers his niece the following advice in a letter:

 

Your duty to man, depends in the performance of it, on the fulfillment of your duty to God. Your domestic connections will call for your particular attention. Here you must not forget that your husband should be the first object of it. By your union, you have submitted to him as your head and superior. I know that it is a favorable observation with many, that husband and wife are equal and there should be no superiority. This is not true, but a dangerous error, from whence many disagreeable consequences flow. 

 

It is true, neither in theory or practice. In point of merit, perhaps it may be strictly true, but in point of order, God has thought proper to make it otherwise, and that for the punishment of sin…

 

*

 

CALEB BINGHAM comes to Boston, and opens a school for girls., advertising that they will be taught writing, arithmetic, reading, spelling, and English grammar. He wrote the famous Young Lady’s Accidence, for his pupils, and explained to parents that “newspapers were to be introduced in the school at the discretion of the master.” (226/97)

 

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WITH the British slow to give up old posts in the Northwest, in 1784, James Monroe put forth a proposal to bolster the U.S. Army. 

    Monroe did everything he could to promote the adoption of a measure calling for a force of 450 men enlisted for three years, which David Howell of Rhode Island had introduced. This modest scheme was so alarming that only three states approved and even the Virginia delegation was inimical. (24/44)

 

    When Monroe heard he might face danger from the Indians if he went to Oswego, he remarked that he would escape by either “a little fighting or a great deal of running.” (24/46) 

    At the opening of Congress, for the 1784-1785 session, “three weeks elapsed before a quorum was present; not a delegate appeared from New England during the first two weeks of the session. Understandably an atmosphere of melancholy settled over Congress.” (24/48) 

    When Monroe visited the Northwest, he learned that the settlers believed “the eastern states were not just indifferent but were in fact actively hostile” to their interests. Monroe deemed “a great part of the territory…miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan & Erie & upon the Mississippi & the Illinois [which] consists of extensive plains which have not had from appearances & will not have a single bush on them for ages[.]” (24/53) 

    Rufus King remarked to Elbridge Gerry, that every immigrant to the West was a resident lost forever to the East.

Native Americans were decimated by smallpox and other European diseases.

Most Native Americans were happy to trade for European goods,
including steel hatchets.

 

Iroquois war club - wooden.

Letchworth State Park, New York.
Land long controlled by the Iroquois.

(Pictures from blogger's collection, unless noted otherwise.)

1785

 

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“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” 

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.

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JEFFERSON has no illusions about the curse of slavery. He knows it’s unjust. He doesn’t know what to do about it.

*

 

JOHN ADAMS is presented at the court of St. James. George III tells him:

 

    I wish you to believe (and I want what I say to be repeated to your compatriots in America) that I have done nothing during the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation. But a separation having been made and having become unavoidable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. (Van Loon, 124/234-235)

(Picture from blogger's collection. Feel free to use.)