The Impact of the American Revolution
The American Revolution was a political and economic disaster for the Haudenosaunee. Already under duress for land, they were pressed by the Patriots and British pressuring them for military alliances, and the League began to splinter. Under the leadership of the legendary warrior Joseph Brandt, the Mohawks decided to fight with the British. They were joined by a portion of the Senecas and Cayugas -- but the Oneidas sided with the Patriots. During the 1777 Battle at Oriskany, Nations in the Confederacy began fighting amongst themselves. Mohawks and Senecas joined British forces in that battle; first in an attack on a colonial settlement, then in setting fire to and gutting a series of Oneida villages.
"The colonial response came in 1779. The Clinton-Sullivan campaign swept down Tioga, up the Cattaraugus into the lake country, destroying all the major villages of the Cayuga and the Seneca. Thirty villages were burned out, the people made refugees on British charity at Niagara for the rest of the war. Ely Parker himself put it best: he said the Sullivan campaign destroyed the longhouse so completely that it could never be reconstituted.
The Revolution itself is over officially by the Peace of Paris in 1793, by which the British Empire recognizes the independence and sovereignty of the new United States. The boundaries of the new U.S. are drawn to include all of Haudenosaunee territory, and they are offered little or no protection in that treaty, none by the British. They are left thus to deal as a scattered people, with the U.S. and its several states. The U.S., at the treaty at Ft. Stanwix, begins the process of refusing to recognize the League as a league, and negotiating instead from a position of power with each Native nation. In a series of treaties, they sign away most of the western lands, those beyond the boundaries of what is now New York and Pennsylvania. And by the early 19th Century, their enormous territory -- which once extended over nearly a quarter of colonial America -- is now reduced to a few hundred square miles in New York State."
Stephen Saunders Webb, Ph.D.
Maxwell School
Syracuse University
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase was the first salvo in America's expansion; before 1850, the nation's territorial holdings would almost triple. Advancements in transportation and communication helped white settlers push the U.S. frontier further and further west. Pioneers clamored for more land and, in 1830, Congress answered with the Indian Removal Act. It authorized the federal government to forcibly move Indian Nations from their homelands in the east, to designated territories west of the Mississippi. Within the next decade, over 60,000 American Indians were "removed;" thousands of them died, either from the harsh journey and lack of supplies, or diseases at their point of destination.
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New York State's Erie Canal fueled removal threats against the Seneca. The water route linked trade and transportation between New York City and the Great Lakes - and it made nearby Haudenosaunee lands very attractive to land speculators. In 1838, officers from the Ogden Land Company persuaded some Six Nations chiefs to sign the Treaty of Buffalo Creek. Strong historical evidence indicates the chiefs were bribed with promises of land, and persuaded to sign in a drunken state. The result was a treaty that would force the Tonawanda Senecas, among other Haudenosaunee, to remove to Kansas.
"WHEREAS, the Six Nations of New York Indians not long after the close of the war of the Revolution, became convinced from the rapid increase of the white settlement around, that the time was not far distant when their true interest must lead them to seek a new home among their red brethren in the West: And whereas, this subject was agitated in a general council of the Six Nations as early as 1810, and resulted in sending a memorial to the President of the United States, inquiring whether the Government would consent to their leaving their habitations and their removing into the neighborhood of their western brethren, and if they could procure a home there, by gift or purchase, whether the Government would acknowledge their title to the lands so obtained in the same manner it had acknowledged it in those from whom they might receive it."
1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek
"The moment of the disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty in 1838, the despair was palpable, women cried in the fields. This treaty is so fraudulent, so exploitative, so unfair that a growing body of white, we would call it liberal opinion, led by Quaker missionaries, raise a groundswell of public outrage which forces a compromise treaty of 1842, whereby the Senecas get back three small reserves, but they still have lost the big reserves at Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda."
Stephen Saunders Webb, Ph.D.
Maxwell School
Syracuse University
"The compromise treaty of 1842 decreed that the Senecas at Tonawanda had to assess all the improvements on their land. They would submit the assessment to Washington, then they had two years, after that was sent, before they had to move to Kansas.
The Senecas were outraged, not only because they felt they didn't have to give up their land, they didn't vote for the treaty - but they had also learned from other Nations who had been removed, that during the process of removal they had lost people through exposure - they had lost people to disease. And that once they got to their destination, the new territories, they often had to fight the other Native groups that were out there. So they felt that if they were going to be forced to remove, there was every chance they were going to lose who they were, that their culture was going to die, and the Senecas would be no longer."
Jare Cardinal
Rochester Museum & Science Center
"The Tonawanda Senecas refused to accept the compromise treaty. They have two grounds: one, they insist that the treaty calls, as it does, for paying them for their improvement, on their houses and barns, their livestock, their fencing - they refuse to accept payments for the improvements -- they refuse to allow assessors onto their land, they physically keep them off."
Stephen Saunders Webb, Ph.D.
Maxwell School
Syracuse University
Tonawanda chiefs John Blacksmith and Jimmy Johnson (Ely Parker's great uncle) led the fight for the Senecas. Theirs was a multi-dimensional and sophisticated approach that included court action as well as state and federal lobby efforts. Unfortunately, Blacksmith and Johnson could not read or speak English so they looked to Ely Parker who was excelling in his English studies at Yates Academy. In 1842, at the age of 14, Ely began interpreting and signing correspondence between the Tonawanda Senecas and government leaders in Albany and Washington.