in what way was indias independence different to the u.s

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson clearly described the office of American Indians in the American Revolution. In addition to his other oppressive acts, King George III had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Inscribed in the founding document of the Usa, about a sacred text, Jefferson'south words placed Indians on the wrong side of the struggle for liberty and the wrong side of history from the very beginning of the Revolution. Thus while Americans fought for their rights and freedoms, Jefferson argued that Native Americans fought against them, the vicious pawns of a tyrannical rex.

All nations have their creation stories, where myth and history merge, and the creation story of the United states is no exception. In July 1776, the British had non—at least not even so—unleashed Indian warriors on the frontiers. In fact, the Stockbridge Indians of western Massachusetts, who were amongst the offset to get involved in the Revolution, joined Washington'south ground forces, fighting against the redcoats. Most Indians tried to stay neutral in what they saw as a British civil war—getting caught in the middle of a domestic disturbance is never a good idea. Even when, somewhen, most sided with the British, they were not fighting against freedom; like the American patriots, they fought to defend their freedom as they understood information technology. In Indian eyes, ambitious Americans posed a greater threat than did a distant king to their land, their liberty, and their mode of life. The American War of Independence was an Indian war for independence too.

This was not the first time Indians had waged a war of independence. A dozen years before American colonists rebelled confronting Britain, American Indians in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes took on the mightiest empire in the earth. In 1763, fresh from their triumphs in the French and Indian State of war, the British were behaving similar conquerors in Indian country. Baulking at the presence of British garrisons and the absence of British gifts, which the Indians believed served to cement alliances and ensure good religion relationships, Pontiac of the Ottawas, Guyashota of the Senecas, Shingas of the Delawares, and other war chiefs launched a multi-tribal assault that destroyed every British fort westward of the Appalachians except Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt. The colonial government in London responded past declaring the Appalachian Mountains the boundary between British settlement and Indian lands. This Royal Proclamation of 1763 alienated American state speculators like George Washington who had hoped to get rich by selling trans-Appalachian lands to westward moving settlers. Designed to bring social club to the American borderland, the Proclamation initiated a chain of events that culminated in revolution and independence.

When the Revolution broke out, therefore, Indian peoples knew that Indian lands were at stake. The Cherokees had every reason to be concerned. For more half a century, they had seen their lands in Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and western N and South Carolina whittled abroad in treaty subsequently treaty with the colonies, and the tempo of land loss escalated alarmingly in the late 1760s and 1770s. Young Cherokee men, frustrated past their fathers' policies of selling country, were adamant to forbid further erosion of the Cherokee homeland. They seized the outbreak of the Revolution equally an occasion to drive trespassers off their lands. Cherokee warriors attacked frontier settlements in 1776, but they did then on their own, without British back up and against the advice of British agents who urged them to wait until they could coordinate with His Majesty'due south troops. American forces immediately retaliated, called-for Cherokee towns and forcing Cherokee chiefs to sue for peace, which they did at the cost of ceding fifty-fifty more land. Many Cherokees, led by a war chief named Dragging Canoe, migrated rather than make peace with the Americans. They kept up the fight from new towns they built around Chickamauga Creek in southwestern Tennessee. American campaigns against the Chickamauga Cherokees sometimes struck the villages of those Cherokees who had fabricated peace instead because they were closer and offered easier targets. The Revolution left the Cherokee Nation devastated and divided, but the Chickamaugas remained defiant and continued to fight against American authorization until 1795.

The Revolution divided the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee too. The Six Nations of the Iroquois League in upstate New York—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras—constituted the dominant Native ability in northeastern North America. They were accustomed to exerting their influence and flexing their muscles in colonial and intertribal diplomacy, and to playing off rival colonial powers, which they had done for much of the eighteenth century. Just the Revolution shattered the unity of the League. Mohawks, led past war chief Joseph Brant and his sister, Molly Brant, supported the Crown, due in no small measure to the influence of Sir William Johnson, Molly Brant's husband. An Irish gaelic-trader-turned-Superintendent of Indian Diplomacy, Johnson had lived among the Mohawks for years and functioned as the pivotal figure in British-Iroquois relations until his death in 1774. Only the Mohawks' neighbors, the Oneidas, leaned toward the colonists, influenced by their missionary, Samuel Kirkland, a Presbyterian/Congregationalist who favored breaking with the Church of England. At the Boxing of Oriskany in 1777, Oneidas fought alongside the Americans, while Mohawks and Senecas fought with the British, a devastating development for Iroquois order that was built around clan and kinship ties.

Similar the Cherokees, many Iroquois lost their homes during the Revolution. Mohawks were driven from the Mohawk Valley and Oneidas fleeing retaliation lived in squalid refugee camps around Schenectady, New York. In 1779 George Washington dispatched General John Sullivan to conduct a scorched-earth campaign in Iroquois country. Sullivan'southward troops burned forty Iroquois towns, cut down orchards, and destroyed millions of bushels of corn. Without shelter or food to sustain them, thousands of Iroquois people fled to the British fort at Niagara. Only Niagara lay at the end of a long supply line that was closed during the winter months when vessels from Montreal and Quebec could not navigate the ice-leap Great Lakes. The refugees at Niagara endured exposure, starvation, sickness, and misery during one of the coldest winters on record. Iroquois warriors resumed attacks on American settlements on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania, to take grain and cattle every bit much equally scalps and captives.

At the stop of war, many Iroquois relocated n of the new edge into Canada rather than stay in New York and deal with the Americans. Joseph Brant and his followers settled on lands set aside for them by the British government on the Grand River in Ontario, the genesis of the 6 Nations Reserve. Others—Senecas at Tonawanda and Buffalo Creek, for example—remained on their bequeathed homeland. Formerly masters of the region, they now struggled to survive in a new world dominated past Americans.

Betwixt the Cherokees and the Iroquois, in the territory drained by the Ohio River, Indian peoples lived in a perilous situation. The Ohio Valley had been well-nigh emptied of human population because of intertribal wars in the seventeenth century. But information technology had go a multi-tribal homeland over again by the eve of the Revolution. Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and other tribes had gravitated toward the region, attracted by rich hunting grounds and growing trade opportunities, and pressured by colonial expansion in the east. European settlers were non far behind. Shawnee warriors were fighting to keep pioneers like Daniel Boone out of their Kentucky hunting grounds before the Revolution, and they fought in Lord Dunmore's State of war confronting Virginia in 1774.

The Revolution turned the Ohio Valley into a fiercely contested war zone. Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, and George Morgan, the American agent at Fort Pitt, competed for the allegiance of the tribes. Most tried to remain neutral but neutrality was not a viable option. The Shawnee principal Cornstalk, who had led his warriors in Lord Dunmore'due south War, at present counseled a neutral stance and cultivated peaceful relations with the Americans. But Cornstalk was seized under a flag of truce at Fort Randolph and murdered past American militia in 1777. Most Shawnees made common cause with the British, who had been telling them they could expect nothing less than annihilation at the hands of the Americans. However, Cornstalk'southward sis, Nonhelema, connected to work for peace and assisted the Americans. Kentucky militia crossed the Ohio River almost every yr to raid Shawnee villages. Virtually half of the Shawnees migrated west to nowadays-24-hour interval Missouri, which was claimed by Spain. Those who remained moved their villages farther and farther away from American assault. By the end of the Revolution near American Indians living in Ohio were full-bodied in the northwestern region.

Like their Shawnee neighbors, the Delawares were initially reluctant to take up artillery or support the British. In fact, the Delaware main, White Eyes, led his people in making the Treaty of Fort Pitt in 1778, the start Indian treaty made by the new nation. The Delawares and the Us Congress agreed to a defensive alliance. But American militiamen murdered White Eyes, their best friend in the Ohio Indian country. American regime put out that he had died of smallpox but the damage was done. Like the Shawnees, Delawares took up the hatchet and made United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's war their own.

Americans struck back—blindly. In 1782 a force of American militia marched into the town of Gnadenhatten. It was a community of Delaware Indians who had converted to the Moravian organized religion. They were Christians and they were pacifists. But all that mattered to the militia was the fact that they were Delawares. The Americans divided them into three groups—men, women, and children. Then, with the Indians kneeling before them singing hymns, they took up butchers' mallets and bludgeoned to expiry 96 people. Gnadenhatten means "Tents of Grace." Delaware warriors, now fighting as allies of the British, exacted brutal revenge for the massacre when American soldiers barbarous into their hands.

In the due east, the fighting between redcoats and rebels effectively concluded later Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington'south army and their French allies at Yorktown in 1781. In the west, Indians continued their war for independence and there things did not go so well for the Americans. In 1782, for example, Shawnee and other warriors ambushed and roundly defeated Daniel Boone and a force of Kentuckians at the Battle of Blue Licks. But the British had had enough. At the Peace of Paris in April 1783, Uk recognized the independence of the U.s.a. and transferred its claims to all the territory between the Atlantic and the Mississippi and between the Groovy Lakes and Florida.

There were no American Indians at the Peace of Paris and Indians were not mentioned in its terms. They were furious and incredulous when they learned that their allies had sold them out and given away their lands. Fully expecting another state of war with the young democracy, the British in Canada maintained alliances with Indians for years after the Revolution, but tribes south of the new international edge at present had to deal primarily with the U.s.. At the start of the Revolution, despite American entreaties and assurances, the Indians had worried and the British had warned that the Americans were but interested in taking their land. The worries and warnings were well founded.

Although George Washington, his secretary of war Henry Knox, Thomas Jefferson, and other expert men of the founding generation wrestled with how to bargain honorably with Indian peoples, the taking of Indian land was never in dubiousness. Later the long war against Great britain, the United states government had no money; its only resource was the land the British had ceded at the Peace of Paris—Indian land. Acquiring actual title to that land and transforming it into "public country" that could be sold to American settlers to aid fill the treasury was vital to the futurity, fifty-fifty the survival, of the new republic. Having won its independence from the British Empire, the United States turned to build what Jefferson called "an empire of liberty." In this empire, all citizens shared the benefits. Merely—and this was a question that plagued the nation and the national conscience for generations—who qualified as citizens? Did African Americans? Did women? Did Native Americans? And how could Americans claim to deal honorably with Indian peoples at the same fourth dimension as they built their nation on Indian lands?

The Declaration of Independence provided answers and justifications: hadn't Indians fought against American rights and freedoms at the moment of the nation's birth? They could non at present look to share those rights and freedoms that had been won at such a cost. The U.s.a. had no obligation to include Indians in the body politic or to protect Indian lands. Merely, the Announcement had also made clear that Indians were "savages," and Washington, Jefferson, and others believed that the United States did have an obligation to "civilize" them. The United States must and would take the Indians' lands; that was inevitable. Just it would give them culture in return, and that was honorable.

For Native Americans, this translated into a dual assault on their lands and cultures, which were inextricably linked. In the years following the Revolution, American settlers invaded Indian country. So too, at different times and places, did American soldiers, Indian agents, state speculators, treaty commissioners, and missionaries. Indians fought back: they disputed American claims to their homelands, killed trespassers, and sometimes inflicted stunning defeats on American armies. Not until General Anthony Wayne defeated the allied northwestern tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 did the Indians make peace at the Treaty of Greenville and cede most of Ohio to the United States. Then, Indians turned to more subtle forms of resistance in what remained of their homelands, compromising where they had no option, adapting and adjusting to changes, and preserving what they could of Indian life and civilisation in a nation that was intent on eradicating both.

The American nation won its war for independence in 1783. American Indian wars for independence continued long after. In their ongoing struggles for their rights, and their tribal sovereignty within the constitutional democracy that grew out of the American Revolution, some would say, Native Americans are withal fighting to realize the promise of that revolution.

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Colin M. Calloway is John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth Higher. His latest book is The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of N America (2006).

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Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/indians%27-war-independence

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