USA > New York > Fulton County > The border warfare of New York, during the revolution; or, The annals of Tryon county > Part 16
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Letter to the Mohawk Chief, Ahyonwaeghs, commonly called John Brant, Esq. of the Grand River, Upper Canada, from Thomas Campbell.
" London, January 20, 1822. " SIR,
" Ten days ago I was not aware that such a person existed as the son of the Indian leader, Brant, who is
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mentioned in my poem, "Gertrude of Wyoming." Last week, however, Mr. S. Bannister, of Lincoln's Inn, called to inform me of your being in London, and of your having documents in your possession which he believed would change my opinion of your father's memory, and induce me to do it justice. Mr. Bannister distinctly assured me that no declaration of my sentiments on the subject was desired, but such as should spontaneously flow from my own judgment of the papers that were to be submitted to me.
" I could not be deaf to such an appeal. It was my duty to inspect the justification of a man whose memory I had reprobated, and I felt a satisfaction at the prospect of his character being redressed, which was not likely to have been felt by one who had wil- lingly wronged it. As far as any intention to wound the feelings of the living was concerned, I really knew not, when I wrote my poem, that the son and daugh- ter of an Indian chief were ever likely to peruse it, or be affected by its contents ; and I have observed most persons to whom I have mentioned the circum- stance of your appeal to me, smile with the same sur- prise which I experienced on first receiving it. With regard to your father's character, I took it as I found it in popular history. Among the documents in his favor, I own that you have shown me one which I regret that I never saw before, though I might have seen it; viz. the Duke of Rochefoucault's honorable mention of-the chief in his travels .* Without mean-
* The following testimony is borne to his fair name by Rochefou- cault, whose ability and means of forming a correct judgment will not
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ing, however, in the least to invalidate that noble- man's respectable authority, I must say, that even if I had met with it, it would have still offered only a general and presumptive vindication of your father, and not such a specific one as I now recognize. On the other hand, judge how naturally I adopted accusations against him which had stood in the Annual Register of 1779, as far as I knew, uncontradicted, for thirty years. A number of authors had repeated them with a confidence which beguiled at last my suspicion, and I believe that of the public at large. Among these authors were Gordon, Ramsay, Marshall, Belsham, and Weld. The most of them, you may tell me, perhaps, wrote with zeal against the American war. Well, but Mr. John Adolphus was never suspected of any such zeal, and yet he had said in his history of England, &c. (Vol. III, p. 110,) ' a force of sixteen hundred savages and Americans in disguise, headed by an Indian, Col. Butler, and a half-Indian of extra- ordinary ferocity, named Brant, lulling the fears of
be denied. "Colonel Brant is an Indian by birth. In the American war he fought under the English banner, and he has since been in England, where he was most graciously received by the king, and met with a kind reception from all classes of people. His manners are semi-European. He is attended by two negroes ; has established him- self in the English way ; has a garden and a farm ; dresses after the European fashion, and, nevertheless, possesses much influence over the Indians. He assists at present (1795) at the Miami treaty, which the United States are concluding with the western Indians. He is also much respected by the Americans ; and, in general, bears so excellent a name, that I regret I could not see and become acquainted with him."-Rochefoucault's Travels in North America.
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the inhabitants (of Wyoming) by treachery, suddenly possessed themselves of two forts and massacred the garrison.' He says farther, 'that all were involved in unsparing slaughter, and that even the devices of torment were exhausted.' He possessed, if I possessed them, the means of consulting better authorities ; yet he has never, to my knowledge, made any atonement to your father's memory. When your Canadian friends, therefore, call me to trial for having defamed the warrior Brant, I beg that Mr. John Adolphus may be also included in the summons. And, after his own defense and acquittal, I think he is bound, having been one of my historical misleaders, to stand up as my gratuitous counsel, and say-' Gentlemen, you must acquit my client, for he has only fallen into an error which even my judgment could not escape.'
" In short, I imbibed my conception of your father from accounts of him that were published when I was scarcely out of my cradle. And if there were any public, direct, and specific challenge to those ac- counts in England, ten years ago, I am yet to learn where they existed.
" I rose from perusing the papers you submitted to me, certainly with an altered impression of his charac- ter. I find that the unfavorable accounts of him were erroneous, even on points not immediately connected with his reputation. It turns out, for instance, that he was a Mohawk Indian, of unmixed parentage. This circumstance, however, ought not to be overlooked in estimating the merits of his attainments. He spoke and wrote our language with force and facility, and had enlarged views of the union and policy of the In-
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dian tribes. A gentleman who had been in America, and from whom I sought information respecting him in consequence of your interesting message, told me, that though he could not pretend to appreciate his character entirely, he had been struck by the naiveté and eloquence of his conversation. They had talked of music, and Brant said, ' I like the harpsichord well, and the organ still better ; but I like the drum and trumpet best of all, for they make my heart beat quick.' This gentleman also described to me the enthusiasm with which he spoke of written records. Brant projected at that time to have written a history of the Six Nations. The genius of history should be rather partial to such a man.
" I find that when he came to England, after the peace of 1783, the most distinguished individuals of all parties and professions treated him with the utmost kindness. Among these were the late Bishop of Lon- don, the late Duke of Northumberland, and Charles Fox. Lord Rawdon, now Marquis of Hastings, gave him his picture. This circumstance argues recom- mendations from America founded in personal friend- ship. In Canada the memorials of his moral charac- ter represent it as naturally ingenuous and generous. The evidence afforded induces me to believe that he often strove to mitigate the cruelty of Indian warfare.
" Lastly, you affirm that he was not within many miles of the spot when the battle which decided the fate of Wyoming took place, and from your offer of reference to living witnesses, I cannot but admit the assertion. Had I learned all this of your father when I was writing my poem, he should not have figured
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in it as the hero of mischief. I cannot, indeed, an- swer by anticipation what the writers who have either to retract or defend what they may have said about him, may have to allege; I can only say that my own opinion about him is changed. I am now in- clined exceedingly to doubt Mr. Weld's anecdote, and for this reason : Brant was not only trusted, consulted, and distinguished by several eminent British officers in America, but personally beloved by them.
" Now I could conceive men in power, for defensi- ble reasons of state politics, to have officially trust- ed, and even publicly distinguished at courts or levees, an active and sagacious Indian chief, of whose private character they might nevertheless still enter- tain a very indifferent opinion. But I cannot imagine high-minded and high-bred British officers, forming individual and fond friendship for a man of ferocious character. It comes within my express knowledge that the late Gen. Sir Charles Stuart, fourth son of the Earl of Bute, the father of our present ambassador at Paris, the officer who took Minorca and Calvi, and who commanded our army in Portugal, knew your father in America, often slept under the same tent with him, and had the warmest regard for him. It seems but charity to suppose the man who attracted the esteem of Lord Rawdon and Gen. Stuart, to have possessed amiable qualities, so that I believe you when you affirm that he was merciful as brave. And now I leave the world to judge whether the change of opinion, with which I am touched, arises from false delicacy and flexibility of mind, or from a sense of honor and justice.
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" Here, properly speaking, ends my reckoning with you about your father's memory ; but, as the Cana- dian newspapers have made some remarks on the sub- ject of Wyoming, with which I cannot fully coincide, and as this letter will probably be read in Canada, I cannot conclude it without a few more words, in case my silence would seem to admit of propositions which are rather beyond the stretch of my creed. I will not, however, give any plain truths which I have to offer to the Canadian writers, the slightest seasonings of bitterness, for they have alluded to me, on the whole, in a friendly and liberal tone. But when they regret my departure from historical truth, I join in their regret only in as far as I have unconsciously misunderstood the character of Brant, and the share of the Indians in the transaction, which I have now reason to suspect, was much less than that of the white men. In other circumstances, I took the liberty of a versifier, to run away from fact into fancy, like a school-boy, who never dreams that he is a truant when he rambles on a holyday from school. It seems, however, that I falsely represented Wyoming to have been a terrestrial paradise. It was not so, say the Canadian papers, because it contained a great number of Tories ; and undoubtedly that cause goes far to ac- count for the fact. Earthly paradises, however, are but earthly things, and Tempe and Arcadia may have had their drawbacks on happiness as well as Wyo- ming. I must, nevertheless, still believe that it was a flourishing colony, and that its destruction furnished a just warning to human beings against war and re- venge. But the whole catastrophe is affirmed in a
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Canadian newspaper to have been nothing more than a fair battle. If this be the fact, let accredited signa- tures come forward to attest it, and vindicate the in- nocence and honorableness of the whole transaction, as your father's character has been vidicated. An error about him by no means proves the whole ac- count of the business to be a fiction. Who would not wish its atrocities to be disproved ? But who can think it disproved by a single defender, who writes anonymously, and without definable weight or autho- rity ?
"In another part of the Canadian newspapers, my theme has been regretted as dishonorable to England. Then it was, at all events, no fable. But how far was the truth dishonorable to England ? American settlers, and not Englishmen, were chiefly the white men, calling themselves Christians, who were engaged in this affair. I shall be reminded, perhaps, that they also called themselves Loyalists. But for Heaven's sake, let not English loyalty be dragged down to pal- liate atrocities, or English delicacy be invoked to con- ceal them. I may be told that England permitted the war, and was therefore responsible for its occurrences. Not surely, universally, nor directly. I should be un- willing to make even Lord North's administration answerable for all the actions of Butler's Rangers ; and I should be still more sorry to make all Eng- land amenable either for Lord North's adminis- tration or for Butler's Rangers. Was the Ameri- can war an unanimous and heartfelt war of the people ? Were the best patriots and the brightest luminaries of our senate for, or against it? Chat-
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ham declared, that if America fell she would fall like the strong man-that she would embrace the pillars of our constitution, and perish beneath its ruins. Burke, Fox, and Barre kindled even the breasts of St. Stephen's Chapel against it ; and William Pitt pro- nounced it a war against the sacred cause of Liberty. If so, the loss of our colonies was a blessing, compared with the triumph of those principles that would have brought Washington home in chains. If Chatham and Pitt were our friends in denouncing the injustice of this war, then Washington was only nominally our foe in resisting it ; and he was as much the enemy of the worst enemies of our constitution, as if he had fought against the return of the Stuarts on the banks of the Spey or the Thames. I say, therefore, with full and free charity to those who think differently, that the American war was disgraceful only to those who were its abettors, and that the honor of Englishmen is redeemed in proportion as they deprecate its princi- ples and deplore its details. Had my theme even in- volved English character more than it does, I could still defend it. If my Canadian critic alleges that a poet may not blame the actions of his country, I meet his allegation and deny it. No doubt a poet ought not forever to harp and carp upon the faults of his country, but he may be her moral censor, and he must not be her parasite. If an English poet un- der Edward III. had only dared to leave one generous line of commiseration to the memory of Sir William Wallace, how much he would have raised our estima- tion of the moral character of the age! There is a present and a future in national character, as well as
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a past ; and the character of the present age is best provided for by impartial and generous sentiments re- specting the past. The twentieth century will not think the worse of the nineteenth for regretting the Ameri- can war. I know the slender importance of my own works. I am contending, however, against a false principle of delicacy, that would degrade poetry itself if it were adopted ; but it will never be adopted.
" I therefore regret nothing in the historical allu- sions of my poem, except the mistake about your fa- ther. Nor, though I have spoken freely of American affairs, do I mean to deny that your native tribes may have had a just cause of quarrel with the American colonists. And I regard it as a mark of their grati- tude that they adhered to the royal cause, because the governors acting in the king's name had been their most constant friends, and the colonial subjects possibly, at times, their treacherous invaders. I could say much of European injustice toward your tribes, but in spite of all that I could say, I must still de- plore the event of Christians having adopted their mode of warfare, and, as circumstances then stood, of their having invoked their alliance. If the Indians thirsted for vengeance on the colonists, that should have been the very circumstance to deter us from blending their arms with ours. I trust you will un- derstand this declaration to be made in the spirit of frankness, and not of mean and inhospitable arro- gance. If I were to speak to you in that spirit, how easily and how truly could you tell me that the American Indians have departed faster from their old practices of warfare, than Christians have departed
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from their habits of religious persecution ! If I were to preach to you about European humanity, you might ask me how long the ashes of the Inquisition have been cold, and whether the slave-trade be yet abolished ? You might demand how many-no, how few generations have elapsed since our old women were burned for imaginary commerce with the devil, and whether the houses be not yet standing from which our great grandmothers may have looked on the hurdles passing to the place of execution, whilst they blessed themselves that they were not witches ? A horrible occurrence of this nature took place in Scotland during my own grandfather's lifetime. As to warlike customs, I should be exceedingly sorry if you were to press me even on those of my brave old ancestors, the Scottish Highlanders. I can neverthe- less recollect the energy, faith, hospitality of those ancestors, and at the same time I am not forgetful of the simple virtues of yours.
" Considering the filial motives of the young chief's appeal to me, I am not afraid that any part of this letter, immediately relating to him, will be thought ostentatious or prolix. And, if charitably judged, I hope that what I have said of myself and my poem will not be felt as offensive egotism. The public has never been troubled with any de- fense of mine against any attacks on my poetry that were merely lit- erary, although I may have been as far as authors generally are from bowing to the injustice of hostile criticism. To show that I have not been over-anxious about publicity, I must mention a misrepresentation respecting my poem on Wyoming, which I have suffered to remain uncorrected for ten years. Mr. Washington Irving, in a biographical sketch prefixed to it in an American edition, described me as having injured the composition of the poem, by showing it to friends, who struck out its best passages. Now I read it to very few friends, and to none at whose suggestion I ever struck out a single line. Nor did
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" I have been thus special in addressing you, from a wish to vindicate my own consistency, as well as to do justice to you in your present circumstances,"which are peculiarly and publicly interesting. The chief of an aboriginal tribe now settled under the protection of our sovereign in Canada, you are anxious to lead on your people in a train of civilization that is already begun. It is impossible that the British community should not be touched with regard for an Indian stran- ger of respectable private character, possessing such useful and honorable views. Trusting that you will amply succeed in them, and long live to promote im- provement and happiness amidst the residue of your ancient race,
I remain your sincere well-wisher, THOMAS CAMPBELL."
I ever lean on the taste of others with that miserable distrust of my own judgment which the anecdote conveys. I knew that Mr. Irving was the last man in the world to make such a misrepresentation in- tentionally, and that I could easily contradict it; but from aversion to bring a petty anecdote about myself before the world, I forbore to say anything about it. The case was different when a Canadian writer hinted at the patriotism of my subject. There he touched on my principles, and I have defended them, contending that on the supposi- tion of the story of Wyoming being true, it is a higher compliment to British feelings to reveal, than palliate or hide it."
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NOTE D.
SKENANDO.
THE following account of the death of this chief was published in the Utica Patriot, March 19, 1816 :
" Died at his residence, near Oneida Castle, on Monday, 11th inst., Skenando, the celebrated Oneida chief, aged 110 years; well known in the wars which occurred while we were British colonies, and in the contest which issued in our independence, as the undeviating friend of the people of the United States. He was very savage and addicted to drunk- enness* in his youth, but by his own reflections and the benevolent instruction of the late Rev. Mr. Kirk- land, missionary to his tribe, he lived a reformed man for more than sixty years, and died in Christian hope. From attachment to Mr. Kirkland he had always ex- pressed a strong desire to be buried near his minister
* In the year 1755, Skenando was present at a treaty made in Albany. At night he was excessively drunk, and in the morning found himself in the street, stripped of all his ornaments and every article of clothing. His pride revolted at his self-degradation, and he resolved that he would never again deliver himself over to the power of strong water.
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and father, that he might (to use his own expression) ' go up with him at the great resurrection.' At the approach of death, after listening to the prayers which were read at his bedside by his great grand- daughter, he again repeated the request. According- ly, the family of Mr. Kirkland having received infor- mation by a runner that Skenando was dead, in com- pliance with a previous promise sent assistance to the Indians, that the corpse might be carried to the village of Clinton for burial. Divine service was attended at the meeting-house in Clinton on Wednes- day at two o'clock, P. M. An address was made to the Indians by the Rev. Dr. Backus, President of Ham- ilton College, which was interpreted by Judge Deane, of Westmoreland. Prayer was then offered and ap- propriate psalms sung. After service, the concourse which had assembled from respect to the deceased chief, or from the singularity of the occasion, moved to the grave in the following order :
STUDENTS OF HAMILTON COLLEGE, CORPSE, INDIANS, MRS. KIRKLAND AND FAMILY,
JUDGE DEANE, REV. DR. NORTON, REV. MR. AYRE, OFFICERS OF HAMILTON COLLEGE, CITIZENS.
" After interment, the only surviving son of the de- ceased, self-moved, returned thanks, through Judge Deane as interpreter, to the people for the respect 12*
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shown to his father on the occasion, and to Mrs. Kirk- land and family for their kind and friendly attention.
" Skenando's person was tall, well made, and robust. His countenance was intelligent, and displayed all the peculiar dignity of an Indian chief. In his youth he was a brave and intrepid warrior, and in his riper years one of the noblest counsellors among the North American tribes ; he possessed a vigorous mind, and was alike sagacious, active and persevering. As an enemy he was terrible. As a friend and ally he was mild and gentle in his disposition, and faithful to his engagements. His vigilance once preserved from massacre the inhabitants of the little settlement at German Flats. In the Revolutionary war his influ- ence induced the Oneidas to take up arms in favor of the Americans. Among the Indians he was distin- guished by the appellation of the 'white man's friend.'
" Although he could speak but little English, and in his extreme old age was blind, yet his company was sought. In conversation he was highly decorous, evincing that he had profited by seeing civilized and polished society, and by mingling with good compa- ny in his better days.
" To a friend who called on him a short time since, he thus expressed himself by an interpreter : ' I am an aged hemlock. The winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches ; I am dead at the top. The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me; why I live the great Good Spirit only knows. Pray to my Jesus that I may have pa- tience to wait for my appointed time to die.'
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"Honored chief ! His prayer was answered ; he was cheerful and resigned to the last. For several years he kept his dress for the grave prepared. Once and again, and again he came to Clinton to die; longing that his soul might be with Christ, and his body in the narrow house near his beloved Christian teacher.
" While the ambitious but vulgar great look princi- pally to sculptured monuments and to riches in the temple of earthly fame, Skenando, in the spirit of the only real nobility, stood with his loins girded, waiting the coming of the Lord. His Lord has come, and the day approaches when the green hillock that covers his dust will be more respected than the Pyra- mids, the Mausolea, and the Pantheons of the proud and imperious. His simple turf and stone will be viewed with veneration when their tawdry ornaments shall awaken only pity and disgust.
' Indulge my native land, indulge the tear That steals impassioned o'er a nation's doom ; To me each twig from Adam's stock is dear, And sorrows fall upon an Indian's tomb."
Clinton, March 14th, 1816."
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NOTE E.
MOSES YOUNGLOVE.
DR. YOUNGLOVE, after his return from captivity, wrote a poem describing some of the scenes which he had witnessed, and detailing his wanderings and suf- ferings. I shall make some extracts from this poem, not that they contain many poetic beauties, but be- cause they delineate some striking customs of the Indians. The poem comes from the pen of the hero himself, who might with truth exclaim, " pars magna fui." The first extract is a description of the battle of Oriskany.
The time and place of our unhappy fight, To you at large were needless to recite ; When in the wood our fierce, inhuman foes, With piercing yell from circling ambush rose : A sudden volley rends the vaulted sky ; Their painted bodies hideous to the eye ; They rush like hellish furies on our bands, Their slaughter weapons brandished in their hands.
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