perhaps more shrewdly measured, than the Mohawks. Because Indian nations in this period remained autonomous powers, historians have often resisted labeling those who fought for the British as “loyalists” instead of “allies.” But the Mohawks’ connection with Britain ran especially long and deep. In their own telling and that of their white peers, they could be considered loyalists too.
Part of a confederacy of Iroquois nations known as the Six Nations, the Mohawks had an alliance with Britain dating back to well before the revolution. The “Covenant Chain,” as the Anglo-Iroquois alliance was called, was anchored both in treaties and in transformative personal relationships. For nearly twenty years it had been nurtured by Sir William Johnson, the enormously influential superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern department. The archetype of a successful Irish immigrant, Johnson had arrived in New York in 1738 with little more than a good connection (his uncle was a prominent admiral) and a dozen families he had recruited to settle on his uncle’s lands. He ended up building a sprawling personal empire of 400,000 acres stretching across the Mohawk Valley. At his manor house, Johnson Hall, Sir William lived in neo-feudal splendor surrounded by hundreds of tenant farmers. At the same time, in partnership with his third wife, Mary “Molly” Brant, a prominent Mohawk, he presided over a multicultural domain. The couple raised their eight half-white, half-Mohawk children in a house built in the best Georgian style, where they were served by black slaves and surrounded by white and Indian visitors. At regular Indian councils the Johnsons hosted sumptuous feasts for hundreds, to negotiate and seal deals around the council fire. Johnson’s commanding influence among colonists and Indians alike allowed him to broker the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, which established a firm boundary between British and Indian lands in New York and Pennsylvania.
Johnson died in 1774, on the eve of his world’s disintegration. But “Johnson” remained a name to conjure with in upstate New York. The office of superintendent would be assumed by his son-in-law Guy Johnson and his son Sir John Johnson in turn; another son-in-law acted as deputy superintendent. And while the Johnsons privileged the Mohawks in British policy, the Mohawks privileged the British in turn. When war erupted just months after Sir William’s death, Molly Brant, the powerful doyenne of Johnson Hall, actively worked to rally the Iroquois to the British cause. Loyalism, to her, was the obvious stance: personal connections and anti-settler animosity, as well as considered self-interest, all pointed toward the British. The other Six Nations members followed the Mohawks’ choice—with one notable exception. Acting on a calculation that the patriots might win the war, the Oneida Indians opted to join the other side. The American Revolution thus divided the Iroquois confederacy against itself, breaking the Six Nations into five versus one; it also split nations from within, with some villages remaining neutral while others went to war.50
Molly Brant’s actions convinced the British that “one word from her is more taken Notice of by the five Nations than a thousand from any white Man without exception.”51 As such, the British repeatedly offered her special favors, such as houses and allowances to the tune of three to four thousand pounds per year.52 New York patriots, meanwhile, provided different testament to Brant’s influence. “Mary Brant (alias Johnson)” was one of only five women recorded on a list of loyalists formally stripped of their property under the New York State confiscation act. (The other four women were all Johnsons.)53 However she may have characterized her own position, these British and American actions clearly portrayed Molly Brant as a loyalist.
But the relationship between the British and the Mohawks would be embodied most visibly in Molly’s forty-year-old brother Thayendanegea—or as his non-Indian friends preferred to call him, Joseph Brant.54 In Mohawk Thayendanegea means “two sticks,” or “he who places two bets,” and it was an apt name for a man who had come of age between cultures, welcomed into the mixed community of Johnson Hall by his sister Molly and treated almost as an adoptive son by Sir William. At the age of eighteen, Joseph, already a decorated veteran of the Seven Years’ War, set out under Johnson’s patronage for the well-known “Indian school” in Connecticut run by missionary Eleazer Wheelock. He later self-deprecatingly described his command of English, which he perfected at the school, as “half English half Indian,” but there was some truth to the label, for Wheelock’s school also helped Brant cement a double status.55 Thanks to his ancestry and marriages, Brant enjoyed a high position in Mohawk society and politics, and lived in comfort on his parents’ farm in the Mohawk Valley. At the same time, he associated easily with whites, became a devout Christian, and acted as interpreter to the Anglican missionary to the Mohawks, John Stuart.56
The revolution set Brant’s cross-cultural role on an international stage. Soon he became chief sachem of the Mohawks, as Thayendanegea, and held a military commission as Captain Joseph Brant, the highest-ranking Indian in British service. He also learned to play the part of Anglo-Mohawk to dazzling perfection. In late 1775, Brant accompanied the superintendent of Indian affairs, Guy Johnson, to London, hoping to earn support for Mohawk land claims through a direct appeal to the king. “When he wore the ordinary European habit,” a contemporary newspaper noted, “there did not seem to be anything about him that marked preeminence.” But he knew how to make himself stand out. He sat for the popular society portraitist George Romney, crowned with a plume of scarlet feathers, cloak balanced over his left hand and tomahawk in his right, crucifix and gorget glinting around his neck. He charmed James Boswell, was presented at court, and was inducted into a celebrated Masonic lodge. As for his own impressions of London, it was the ladies that impressed him most, he said—and the sleek, swift horses.57
Spearheaded by the Brants, and building on the Johnson legacy, Mohawk participation in the Revolutionary War represented a genuine merging of multinational interests under the banner of the British Empire. As loyalists, the Mohawks would be able to call on a larger degree of support and patronage from the British than any other Indian nation. The British in turn relied on them to help secure the Canadian borderlands, the longest Anglo-American frontier. But loyalism did not ultimately shield the Mohawks when the war started to go against them.
The summer of 1777 was a savage one in the Mohawk Valley, as ferocious battles ripped the Iroquois confederacy apart. Patriot and Oneida forces sacked Molly Brant’s home village of Canajoharie and looted her house; one officer made repeated visits to haul off wagonloads of her silk gowns and gold and silver ornaments. Patriots moved into the Mohawks’ handsome houses and feasted on their stores of corn, cabbage, and potatoes.58 But that year would be remembered more for another British offensive in New York. This campaign, led by General John Burgoyne, was designed to divide the colonies and win the war for Britain. In the event, things turned out quite differently. An unfortunate incident during the course of the British advance portended worse to come, when a young American woman was killed and scalped by British Indian allies. The episode fueled patriot hysteria against the British, linking the redcoats ever more closely with the red-skinned “savages” they deployed.59 Volunteers massed to the patriots, while Burgoyne’s position steadily deterioriated. By October, the British army had dwindled from about eight thousand men to five thousand, and was confronted by an American force twice the size. Chased and bothered by American attacks, they reached the New York village of Saratoga, near Albany, so exhausted that they dropped to the sodden ground and slept through a heavy rain. On October 17, 1777, completely surrounded and under constant fire, General Burgoyne surrendered his army to the patriots.60
The British surrender at Saratoga was a turning point in the American Revolution. The top British commanders resigned in humiliation; the British government in Westminster became irreversibly divided. Most significantly, Saratoga brought America a crucial European ally, when France entered the war on America’s