This Day in Revolutionary War History (Sullivan Defeats Indians at Battle of Newtown)

August 29, 1779—In the Battle of Newtown, near Elmira, N.Y., Continental Army Major General John Sullivan won the principal battle in a punitive campaign meant to, as a Fourth of July officers’ toast went, bring “Civilization or death to all American Savages.” How efficacious the Sullivan Expedition was, however, has become increasingly a matter of historical debate.

Just about every history you’ve ever read about the American Revolution says, rightly, how undermanned the army of George Washington was. It had to have taken much, then, for the Continental Army’s commander-in-chief to feel that he needed to part with any badly needed troops, let alone 4,000 for John Sullivan, the Irish-born soldier whose energy and ardent patriotism were only exceeded by his vainglory and impetuousness.

As a matter of fact, there was something that warranted the detachment of Sullivan’s forces at such a critical time: attacks by combined British-loyalist-Indian forces on American settlements. A veto by the Oneidas prevented the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation from joining the British as a united group, but enough entered on the side of the redcoats to make a difference.

Here were some of the strategic factors that combined to lead Washington to detach a full third of his entire army to the force led by Sullivan and Brigadier General James Clinton:

* A planned redcoat attack through Western New York, abetted by the Iroquois, that could split the colonies in two—in effect, a more successful counterpart to Barry St. Leger’s 1777 swing from Canada to the Mohawk Valley that had been designed to combine with the forces of Generals Howe and Burgoyne.

* Massacres at Wyoming in Pennsylvania and Cherry Valley in New York, which produced such fear that many Continental soldiers were reluctant to leave their families unprotected.

* Destruction of the redcoat “breadbasket”—British forces in North America were being largely fed by farms and orchards along the Finger Lakes and Genesee Valley.

Originally, Washington had offered command of the expedition to General Horatio Gates, but the man publicly acclaimed the hero of the Battle of Saratoga (the honor should, more truthfully, have gone to future American traitor Benedict Arnold) had developed a swelled head, so he turned it down.

Washington then turned to Sullivan—a subordinate he had previously described as “active, spirited, and Zealously attach’d to the Cause,” though not without “a little tincture of vanity, and…an over desire of being popular.”

Washington got right to the point in his instructions to Sullivan: "Lay waste all the settlements around, so that the country may not only be overrun, but destroyed."

If the Native-Americans expressed a desire to negotiate an end to hostilities, Sullivan had to tell them to attack Fort Niagara, then in British hands, as proof of their bona fides. Otherwise, Sullivan was to pay no mind—his commander had had enough of what he saw as broken Indian promises.

(It would not occur to Washington until after he was President, when he became aware of massive swindling of Indian land in the Southeast U.S., that Native-Americans might not view kindly the broken promises of whites, either.)

Nearly 100 years later, William Tecumseh Sherman conducted a similar campaign that laid waste to the enemy. It did what he had proclaimed it would do—make the Confederacy howl. It also effectively crippled the Confederacy for the duration of the war.

Sullivan’s expedition certainly laid waste, but for a long time white historians weren’t interested in whatever howling the affected tribes made—and the expedition had more short- than long-term effects.

Sullivan proceeded from Easton, Pa., through the Pocono Mountains and up the Susquehanna River. When he and Clinton got to the Chemung River, their scouts discovered that they were about to walk into an ambush laid by Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant and his Loyalist ally, Colonel John Butler. Once Sullivan and Clinton discovered the plan, they used their advantages in manpower and modern weaponry to beat back the Indian challenge, then proceeded on the campaign of destruction envisioned by Washington

It’s fascinating to see how the difference in just a few decades has altered the attitudes of historians—and, let’s say right now, fiction- and screenwriters—toward the Native-American opponents of the patriots.

(In the Stephen Vincent Benet tall tale “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (as well as the marvelous 1941 film adaptation starring Walter Huston as Satan), the jury enpaneled to decide the fate of Jabez Stone—and, Ol’ Scratch hopes, to ensnare the poor farmer’s lawyer, Webster—includes a veritable rogues’ gallery of those who live in American infamy, including Brant.)

In a biographical essay on Sullivan as “Luckless Irishman” in George Washington’s Generals and Opponents, the historian Charles P. Whittemore referred to “the redmen.” Whittemore believed that Sullivan’s campaign “had accomplished much,” citing the 40 villages destroyed and 160,000 bushels of beans and corn seized. (Whittemore does not say so, but this occurred on the eve of a notoriously bad winter. The Continental Army, at Morristown, reached a nadir not even glimpsed during its much-better-known Valley Forge trials. The crop devastation on the Indians would have been even worse.)

In A People’s History of the American Revolution (2002), Roy Raphael, a more recent historian, much influenced by leftist historian Howard Zinn, has a far different view—one that, on balance, I tend to agree with: “If the object of the Sullivan expedition was to make the Indians suffer, it was an unqualified success, but if the object was to subdue the warring Iroquois and secure the frontier, it was an unqualified disaster.” The Six Nations only ended up more dependent on their British allies than before, he argues persuasively.

As in the French and Indian Wars, the Native-Americans had been forced to choose sides—to decide, in effect, who would be best able to serve their long-term interests of preserving their land. In the American Revolution, most of them ended up on the losing side.