SIR  WILLIAM  JOHNSON

AND

The  Six  Nations

Dedication.

PREFACE .

The Mohawk Valley in which Sir William Johnson spent his adult life (1738–1774) was the fairest portion of the domain of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. In this valley I lived nine years, seeing on every side traces or monuments of the industry, humanity, and powerful personality of its most famous resident in colonial days. From the quaint stone church in Schenectady which he built, and in whose canopied pews he sat, daily before my eyes, to the autograph papers in possession of my neighbours; from sites close at hand and traditionally associated with the lord of Johnson Hall, to the historical relics which multiply at Johnstown, Canajoharie, and westward,—mementos of the baronet were never lacking. His two baronial halls still stand near the Mohawk. I found that local tradition, while in the main generous to his memory, was sometimes unfair and even cruel. The hatreds engendered by the partisan features of the Revolution, and the just detestation of the savage atrocities of Tories and red allies led by Johnson’s son and son-in-law, had done injustice to the great man himself. Yet base and baseless tradition was in no whit more unjust than the sectional opinions and hostile gossip of the New England militia which historians have so freely transferred to their pages.

In the following pages no attempt at either laudation or depreciation has been made. My purpose has been simply to set forth the actions, influence, and personality of Sir William Johnson, to show the character of the people by whom he was surrounded, and to describe and analyze the political movements of his time. I confess I have not depicted New York people in the sectional spirit and subjective manner in which they are so often treated by New England writers. The narrow and purely local view of some of these who have written what is called the history of the United States, greatly vitiates their work in the eyes of those who do not inherit their prejudices. Having no royal charter, the composite people of New York, gathered from many nations, but instinct with the principles of the free republic of Holland, were obliged to study carefully the foundations of government and jurisprudence. It is true that in the evolution of this Commonwealth the people were led by the lawyers rather than by the clergy. Constantly resisting the invasions of royal prerogative, they formed on an immutable basis of law and right that Empire State which in its construction and general features is, of all those in the Union, the most typically American. Its historical precedents are not found in a monarchy, but in a republic. It is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.

Living also but a few yards away from the home of Arendt Van Curler, the “Brother Corlaer” of Indian tradition, and immediately alongside the site of the old gate opening from the palisades into the Mohawk country, I could from my study windows look daily upon the domain of the Mohawks,—the places of treaties, ceremonies, and battles, of the torture and burning of captives, and upon the old maize-lands, even yet rich after the husbandry of centuries. Besides visiting many of the sites of the Iroquois castles, I have again and again traversed the scenes of Johnson’s exploits in Central New York, at Lake George, in Eastern Pennsylvania, and other places mentioned in the text. With my task is associated the remembrance of many pleasant outings as well as meetings with local historians, antiquarians, and students of Indian lore. I have treated more fully the earlier part of Johnson’s life which is less known, and more briefly the events of the latter part which is comparatively familiar to all. I trust I have not been unfair to the red men while endeavouring to show the tremendous influence exerted over them by Johnson; who, for this alone, deserves to be enrolled among the Makers of America.

My chief sources of information have been the Johnson manuscripts, which have been carefully mounted, bound, and are preserved in the State Library at Albany. They were indexed by my friends, the late Rev. Dr. H. A. Homes, and Mr. George R. Howell, the accomplished secretary of the Albany Institute. To the former I am especially indebted. The printed book to which I owe special obligations is Mr. William L. Stone’s “Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, Bart.” These two superbly written octavo volumes, richly annotated and indexed, make any detailed life of Johnson unnecessary, and form a noble and enduring monument of patient scholarship.

For generous assistance at various points and in details, I have to thank, and hereby do so most heartily, Mr. Edward F. De Lancey, of New York; Mr. William L. Stone, of Jersey City; Prof. A. L. Perry, of Williams College; Mr. Berthold Fernow, keeper of the State Archives, Albany; Rev. J. A. De Baun, D. D., of Fonda; Rev. J. H. Hubbs, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Rev. Henry R. Swinnerton, of Cherry Valley; Mr. R. A. Grider, the chief American specialist and collector of powder-horns and their art and literature; Mr. A. G. Richmond, archæologist in Indian relics, of Canajoharie, N. Y.; Mrs. I. E. Wells of Johnson Hall at Johnstown; Mr. Ethan Akin, of Fort Johnson at Akin near Fonda; James Fuller, Esq., of Schenectady, N. Y.; and Major J. W. MacMurray, U. S. N.; besides various descendants of the militiamen who served under the illustrious Irishman who is the subject of the following pages.

W. E. G.

Boston, Mass.,

May 21, 1891.

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

The Mohawk Valley was first settled by men escaping from feudalism. The manor-system, a surviving relic of the old days of lordship and villeinage, had long cursed England, Germany, and Holland, though first outgrown and thrown off in the latter country. It was from this system, almost as much as from Church laws, that the Pilgrim Fathers were glad to escape and find free labour as well as liberty of conscience in Holland,—the land where they “heard,” and found by experience, “that all men were free.”

The Netherlands was the political training-school of the Pilgrims, and of most of the leaders of the Puritans, who before 1640 settled New England. In America they were more fortunate than their more southern neighbours, in that they were freed from the semi-feudalism of the Dutch Patroons and the manor-lords of Maryland and Virginia. The Hollanders, on coming to New Netherland and settling under the Patroons, enjoyed far less liberty than when in their own country. They were practically under a new sort of feudalism unknown in their “Patria.” Their Teutonic instincts and love of freedom soon, however, drove them to relinquish their temporary advantages as manor-tenants, and to purchase land from the Indians and settle in the “Woestina,” or wilderness. These Dutch farmers cheerfully braved the dangers and inconveniences of “the bush,” in order to hold land in fee simple and be their own masters.

It was this spirit of independence that led a little company of worthy sons or grandsons of men who had fought under William the Silent, to settle in the “Great Flat,” or Mohawk Valley. They were led by Arendt Van Curler, who, though first-cousin of the absentee Patroon Van Rensselaer, of Rensselaerwyck, had educated himself out of the silken meshes of semi-feudalism. Finding men like-minded with himself, who believed that the patroon or manor-system was a bad reversion in political evolution, he led out the Dutch freemen, and founded the city of Schenectady. On the land made sacred to the Mohawks for centuries, by reason of council-fires and immemorial graves, this free settlement began. Here, not indeed for the first time in New Netherlands, and yet at a period when the proceeding was a novelty, the settlers held land in fee simple, and demanded the rights of trade.

It was before 1660 that these men, who would rather have gone back to Patria, or Holland, than become semi-serfs under a manor-lord, came to Van Curler, or “Brother Corlaer” as the Iroquois called him, and asked him to lead them westward. In Fort Orange, July 21, 1661, in due legal form, by purchase from and satisfaction to the Mohawk Indian chiefs, the Indian title was extinguished. Thus, by a procedure as honourable and generous as William Penn’s agreement with the Lenni Lenapes under the great elm at Shackamaxon, was signalized the entrance of Germanic civilization in the Mohawk Valley.

Early in the spring of 1662 Van Curler led his fourteen freemen and their families into their new possession. Travelling westward, up what is now Clinton Avenue in Albany, until they reached Norman’s Kill, they struck northward, following the Indian trail of blazed trees, until after a circuit of twenty miles they reached their future home, on a low plateau on the banks of the Mohawk. On this old site of an Indian village they began the erection of their houses, mill, church, and palisades. The aboriginal name of the village, from which the Mohawks had removed, pointed to the vast piles of driftwood deposited on the river-flats after the spring floods; but not till after the English conquest did any one apply the old Indian name of the site of Albany—that is, “Schenectady”—to Van Curler’s new settlement. Both French and Indians called the village “Corlaer,” even as they also called the Mohawk River “the river of Corlaer,” and the sheet of water in which he was drowned, not after its discoverer, Champlain, but “Corlaer’s Lake.” Nevertheless, since the Mohawks had already retired from the Hudson River, and “the place outside the door of the Long House” was no longer Albany, but “Corlaer,” they and the Europeans, soon after 1664, began to speak of the new settlement as “Schenectady;” especially, as by their farther retirement up the valley, “Corlaer” was now the true “Schenectady;” that is, outside the door of the Iroquois confederacy or Long House. Schenectady enjoys the honour of being more variously spelled than any other place in the United States; and its name has been derived from Iroquois, German, and Japanese, in which languages it is possible to locate the word as a compound. It is a softened form of a long and very guttural Indian word.

Then was begun, by these Dutch freeholders, the long fight of fifty years for freedom of trade with the Indians. Their contest was against the restrictive jealousy of Albany, including both Colony and Manor. With Dutch tenacity they held on, until victory at last crowned their persistence in 1727.

In a word, in its initiation and completion, the opening of the Mohawk Valley to civilization forms a noble episode in the story of American freedom. One of the first places in New York on which the forces representing feudalism and opposed to freeholding of land, and on which mediæval European notions arrayed against the ideas which had made America were beaten back, was at Schenectady, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley. Here was struck by liberty-loving Hollanders a key-note, of which the long strain has not yet ceased.

The immigrants who next followed the Dutch pioneers,—like them, as real settlers, and not as land-speculators and manor-builders,—and who penetrated still farther westward up the valley, were not English, but German. These people, who, as unarmed peasants in the Rhine Valley, had been unable to resist the invasion of Louis XIV. or to face the rigours of poverty in their desolated homeland, made the best sort of colonists in America. Brought by the British Government to settle on remote frontiers, to bear the brunt of contact with Indians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen, these sturdy Protestants soon proved their ability, not only to stand their ground, but to be lively thorns in the sides of despotic landlords, crown-agents, and governors.

The “first American rebel” Leisler, born at Mannheim in Germany, was a people’s man. In his own rude way he acted with the intent of making ideas dominant then, which are commonplace now. His “rebellion” grew out of a boast made by the British Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson, that the Dutch colonists were a conquered people, and not entitled to the right of English citizenship. Hanged, by order of a drunken English governor, near the site of the Tribune Building, May 16, 1691, it is more than probable that he will yet have his statue in the metropolitan city of America. He belongs to the list of haters of what is falsely named aristocracy, the un-American state-church combination, and other relics of feudalism which survive in England, but which had been cast off by the Dutch Republic, in whose service as a soldier he had come to America. His place in the list of the winners of American liberty is sure. ^[1]

Under Governor Hunter’s auspices, in 1710, nearly three thousand Germans from the Palatinate settled along the Hudson and in New York. By a third immigration, in 1722, ten per cent was added to the population by the Palatines, who settled all along the Mohawk Valley, advancing farther westward into the “Woestina.” At German Flats and at Palatine Bridge their “concentration” was greatest. So jealous were the money-loving English of their wool-monopoly, that these Germans were forbidden under extreme penalties to engage in the woollen manufacture. The same intense jealousy and love of lucre which, until the Revolution, kept at home all army contracts that could possibly be fulfilled in Great Britain, prescribed the ban which was laid on the Mohawk Valley Palatines. With chains thus forged upon the Germans, who were expected to furnish “naval stores,” there was no encouragement for them to raise sheep or improved stock. In this way it happened that Sir William Johnson was later enabled to boast that he was the first who introduced fine sheep and other live-stock in the Mohawk Valley.

The characteristics of these Germans were an intense love of liberty, and a deep-seated hatred against feudalism and the encroachments of monarchy in every form. The great land-owners, both Dutch and English, who wished to use these people as serfs, found that they possessed strange notions of liberty. Poor as they were, they were more like hornets to sting than blue-bottles to be trapped with molasses. The Hessian fly had a barb in his tail. Loyal to the Crown, they refused to submit to the tyranny of the great landlords. It was one of these Germans, a poor immigrant, that first fought and won the battle of the freedom of speech and of the press. Now, intrenched in the Constitution of the United States, it is to us almost like one of the numerous “glittering generalities” of the Declaration of Independence, at which Englishmen smile, but which Americans, including the emancipated negroes, find so real. Then the freedom of the press was a dream. In 1734 John Peter Zenger, who incarnated the spirit and conscience of these Palatine Germans, was editor of the “New York Weekly Journal.” He was reproached as a foreigner and immigrant, for daring to criticise the royal representatives, or ever to touch upon the prerogatives of Governor Cosby, the king’s foolish representative. Zenger was imprisoned, but managed to edit his paper while in jail. At his trial he was defended by Hamilton, a lawyer from a colony whose constitution had been written by the son of a Dutch mother, in Holland, where printing had been free a century or more before it was even partially free in England. James Alexander Hamilton was the Scottish lawyer who had left his European home, to the detriment of his fortune, in order to enjoy richer liberty in Pennsylvania. He it was who first purchased Independence Square in Philadelphia, for the erection thereon of the State House, in which the Liberty Bell was to hang, and “proclaim liberty to all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” Going to New York at his own expense, he, without fee, defended Zenger and secured his acquittal. This event marks an important point in the making of America and in the story of American freedom. It was in its effects as significant as the skirmish at Lexington. The doctrine, novel at that time in England but not in Holland, was advanced, that the truth of the facts in the alleged libel could be set up as defence, and that in this proceeding the jury were judges both of the law and the facts.

Though hundreds of Germans left New York for the greater advantage of land and the liberty of Pennsylvania, which had been settled under republican influences, yet those Palatines who rooted themselves in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys proved one of the best stocks which have made the American people. They were never popular with the men or women who wanted to make America a new London or a new England, with courts and castles, aristocracy and nobles, so called, entail and primogeniture, the landlords of feudal domain, and other old-world burdens. Honest, industrious, brave, God-fearing, truthful, and clean, they soon dotted the virgin forest with clearings, farms, and churches. Whatever else in their wanderings they lost or were robbed of, they usually managed to hold to their hymn-books and Bibles, and, in the case of the Reformed Churchmen, their Heidelberg Catechism. Their brethren in Pennsylvania—the holy land of German-Americans—published the first Bible in America, printed in a European tongue; and many early copies found their way northward. They lived on terms of peace with the Indians, treating these sons of the soil with kindness, and helping them in generous measure to the benefits of Christianity. The most honest and influential of Johnson’s Indian interpreters were of Dutch or German stock.

Though other nationalities—Scottish, Irish, English—afterward helped to make the Mohawk Valley at first polyglot, and then cosmopolitan, it was by people of two of the strongest branches of the Teutonic race that this fertile region was first settled. The dominant idea of these people was freedom under law, reinforced by hearty contempt for the injustice which masquerades under the forms of prerogative and of “majesty.” For all the self-styled, insolent vicegerents of God, in both Church and State, they felt a detestation, and were glad to find in America none of these. If found, they felt bound to resist them unto the end. Theirs was the democratic idea in Church and State, and they expressed it strongly.

It was this spirit which explains the rude and rough treatment, by Germans of both sexes, of arrogant royal agents and landlords in the Schoharie Valley, and which at the erection of churches built by public money, in which only a liturgical sect could worship, led to turbulence and riot. Certain historic old edifices now standing were once finished only after the king’s bayonets had been summoned to protect masons and carpenters from people who hated the very sight of an established or government church, built even partly by taxation, but shut to those of the sects not officially patronized.

Among such a people, strong in the virtues of unspoiled manhood; exhilarant with the atmosphere and splendid possibilities of the New World; trained in the school of Luther’s Bible and the Heidelberg Catechism; taught by Dutch laws commanding purchase of land from the aborigines, and by the powerful example of Van Curler and their domines or pastors, to be kind to the Indians,—Sir William Johnson, one of the greatest of the makers of our America, came in 1738. It was the daughter of one of the people of this heroic stock that he married. At a susceptible age he learned their ideas and way of looking at things, especially at their method of justly treating the Indians of the Six Nations, who were looked upon as the rightful owners of the soil. Among these people Johnson lived all his adult life. He was ever in kindly sympathy with them, never sharing the supercilious contempt of those who were and who are ignorant alike of their language, abilities, and virtues.

There is probably no good foundation for the local tradition, mentioned by Gen. J. Watts De Peyster, in his Life of Gen. John Johnson (Preface, p. ii, note), that the family name of William Johnson was originally “Jansen, and that the first who bore it and settled in Ireland was a Hollander, who, like many of his countrymen, went over afterward with William III. in 1690, won lands and established themselves in Ireland.” The subject is not mentioned in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and but slightly treated in English works of reference, while he has been unjustly slighted by American writers of history. According to his own account, William Johnson was born in Smithtown, County Meath, near Dublin, Ireland, in 1715. ^[2] His mother was Anne Warren, sister of the brothers Oliver and Peter, who became famous officers in the British Navy; and his father, Christopher Johnson, Esq. Writers and biographers enlarge upon the ancient and honourable lineage of his mother’s family, but say little about his father’s. To an American this matters less than to those who must have a long line of known ancestry, real, reputed, or manufactured.

After some schooling at a classical academy, William was trained to a mercantile career. When about twenty-two years old, he fell in love with a lass whom his parents refused to permit him to marry. This obstacle, like a pebble that turns the course of the rivulet that is to become a great river, shaped anew his life. The new channel for his energies was soon discovered.

His uncle, Capt. Peter Warren, R. N., who had just returned from a cruise, heard of his nephew’s unhappy experience, and made him the offer of a position promising both wealth and adventure. Land speculation was then rife; and Captain Warren, like many other naval officers, had joined in the rush for lucre by buying land in the fertile Mohawk Valley. This was in addition to land which was part of his wife’s dowry, so that his estate was large, amounting, it is said, to fifteen thousand acres. He appointed young Johnson his agent, to work his farm and sell his building-lots. The young Irishman at once responded to the proposition. He crossed the Atlantic, and promptly reported in New York.

Captain Warren, then about thirty years old, had married Susan, the oldest daughter of Stephen De Lancey; and it was probably to the old house, then thirty-eight years old, which still stands (in which Washington took farewell of his generals in 1783), that the young Irishman came. He was possessed of a fine figure, tall and strong, was full of ambition and energy, with a jovial temper, and a power of quick adaptation to his surroundings. In short, he was a typical specimen of that race in which generous impulses are usually uppermost, and one of the mighty army of Celtic immigrants who have helped to make of the American people that composite which so puzzles the insular Englishman to understand.

New York and Albany people were already getting rich by inland as well as foreign trade, and the naval officer wished to invest what cash he could spare from his salary or prize money in a mercantile venture, to be begun at first on a modest scale in a frontier store. “Dear Billy,” as his uncle addressed him in his letters, was not long in discovering that the ambition of nearly every young man was to get rich, either in the inland fur or West India trade, so as to own a manor, work it with negro slaves, and join in the pomp and social splendour for which the colony was already noted. It is more than probable that the ambition to be rich and influential was strongly reinforced during his stay on Manhattan Island.

The journey north, made according to the regular custom, was by sloop up the Hudson, past the Palisades, the Highlands, the Catskills, and the Flats, to Albany. After a few days in the only municipality north of New York,—a log city with a few smart brick houses,—spent in laying in supplies, the young immigrant would pass through the pine-barrens, and after a day’s journey reach the State Street gate of palisaded Schenectady.

In the house of the tapster, or innkeeper, he would probably stay all night. He would find the Street of the Martyrs (so named after the massacre of 1690), and of the Traders, together with Front, Ferry, Church, and Niskayuna Streets, lined with comfortable, one-storied, many-gabled dwellings, with here and there neat houses, all or partly of brick. Each house stood with its cosey bivalve door, shut at the bottom to keep out pigs and chickens and to keep in the babes, and open at the top to admit light and air. The scrupulously neat floors spoke of the hereditary Dutch virtue of cleanliness. On the table could be seen a wealth of plain but wholesome food, such as few farmer-folk in the old countries of Europe could boast of. The bill of fare would include the well-cured hams for which “the Dorp” was famous, all kinds of savoury products of the hog, besides every sort of bread, pie, cake, and plain pastry, baked to a shining brown in the ample ovens of stone or brick, which swelled like domes outside of the houses, at the rear of the kitchens. Savoury and toothsome were the rich “crullers” which Captain Croll, the good church-elder and garrison-commander of Rensselaerwyck, had invented during a winter-season of meat-famine. On many a house veered iron weathercocks, especially on the few brick fronts monogrammed with dates in anchors of iron; while on the new church, only four years old, but the third in the history of the growing town, glittered the cock of Saint Nicholas in gilt. It rested over a belfry which held a most melodious bell, cast at Amsterdam, in dear old “Patria,” in the rim of which, as well-founded tradition insisted, many a silver guilder, spoon, and trinket had been melted. Perhaps Johnson, like many a European and even New England militiaman, did not understand why the Dutch built their stone fortress-like churches at the intersection of two streets. Some even hinted at stupidity; but the Dutchmen, for the same reason that they loop-holed the walls, so located their chief public buildings at the centre of the village as to be able to sweep the cross streets with their gun-fire in case of an attack by French or Indians, or both.

In Schenectady, Johnson would find that many of the men were away in the Indian country, with their canoes and currency of strouds, duffels, and trinkets, trading for furs. He would soon learn that many could speak the Indian tongue, some of the younger men and girls being excellent interpreters; while he would notice that wampum-making, or “seewant,” for money, made by drilling and filing shells, was a regular and legitimate industry. Possibly the young churchman may have stayed over a Sunday, and in the large stone edifice, capable of seating over six hundred persons, heard, if he did not understand, the learned Domine Reinhart Erichzon preach. After the liturgy and psalms, read by the clerk or fore-reader, the domine, in gown and bands, ascended the wineglass-shaped pulpit to deliver his discourse.

In any event, whether Johnson’s stay was long or short in the Dorp, we should see him making exit through the north gate, and either going landward along the Mohawk, which is hardly possible, or, as is more probable, loading his goods and outfit on one of the numerous canoes always ready, and rowing or being rowed up the river. The twenty-four miles or so of distance could be easily covered, despite the rifts and possible portages, in a single day. Evening would find him, either in camp on the new estate or hospitably lodged in some log-house of the Dutch or German settlers. He was now in the heart of what the Dutch have been wont to call the Woestina, or wilderness, but which was now too much settled to be any longer so spoken of,—the term beginning to be then, as it is now, restricted to a locality near Schenectady.

Warren’s Bush, or Warren’s Burg, was the name of the farm which the young Irishman was to cultivate. Warrensburg was the written name, but almost any new settlement was usually spoken of as “bush.” It lay on the south side of the Mohawk, some distance east of the point where the creek, fed by the western slopes of the Catskills, empties into the river, and was named Schoharie, from the great mass of driftwood borne down. No more fertile valleys than these, watered by the rain or melted snows of the Catskills and Adirondacks, exist. Besides the river-flats that were kept perennially fertile by nearly annual overflows and a top dressing of rich silt, the old maize-lands of the Mohawk were vast in extent, and all ready for the plough. The region west of Albany was then spoken of by the colonists as “the Mohawk country,” from the chief tribe of the Iroquois who inhabited it. Let us glance at the human environment of the new settler.

Besides a few small houses of white men, standing singly along the river, there were villages and fortified large towns of the Mohawks, called, in the common English term of the period, “castles.” The scattered lodges of the Indians were found near most of the settlements, such as Schenectady, Caughnawaga, Stone Arabia, or Fort Plain, and often their cabins were found inside the white men’s fortifications, as in Fort Hunter; but in the palisaded Indian towns, hundreds and even thousands were gathered together. All the white settlements along the Mohawk or Hudson were near the river, the uplands or clearings beyond the flats not being considered of much value. On the Hudson, besides Albany, were Half Moon and Saratoga, which latter stood, not over the wonderful ravine from which gushes the healing water of the mineral springs, but several miles to the eastward. Along the Mohawk were Schenectady, Crane’s Village, Fort Hunter, Warrensburg, a hamlet, Caughnawaga (or Fonda), Canajoharie, Palatine, German Flats, and Burnet’s Field, now called Herkimer. Over in Cherry Valley were, later on, Scottish settlers, and in Schoharie more Germans.

Besides Jellis Fonda at Caughnawaga (now Fonda), who was a great Indian trader, and afterward major of militia, Johnson’s most congenial neighbour was a fellow Irishman, John Butler. He had come out from the old country as a lieutenant of infantry in the ill-fated expedition for the reduction of Canada in 1711; when, through stormy weather and the ignorance of the pilots, the greater part of the fleet under Sir Hovenden Walker was destroyed in the St. Lawrence, and over a thousand men drowned. As one of the purchasers, with Governor Cosby and others, of a tract of sixty thousand acres of land, seven miles from the site, later called Johnstown, in which stood Johnson Hall, Lieutenant Butler cultivated and improved his portion. To each of his two sons, Walter and John, he gave a large farm, and both he and his sons were very influential among the Indians. The father served as lieutenant, holding the same rank for seventy years; and the two sons were afterward captains in the Indian corps, under Johnson, in the Lake George campaign. To this family the new settler, Johnson, became warmly attached; and the friendship remained unbroken until the coming of death, which the Arabs call the Severer of Friendships.

This line of settlements formed the frontier or line of outposts of civilization. On every side their frontagers were the Iroquois, or Indians of Five Nations, while right among them were the Mohawks. Only one English outpost faced Lake Ontario. This was the trading-station of Oswego. Here in 1722, the daring governor, William Burnet, aiming at the monopoly of the fur-trade, in defiance of the French, and in the face of the Seneca Indians’ protest, unfurled the British flag for the first time in the region of the Great Lakes. He built the timber lodge at his own expense, and encouraged bold young men, mostly from Albany and the valley settlements, to penetrate to Niagara and beyond. These commercial travellers—prototypes of the smart, well-dressed, and brainy drummers of to-day, and in no whit their inferiors in courage, address, and fertility of resource—went among the western Indians. They learned their language, and so opened the new routes of trade that within a twelvemonth from the unfurling of the British flag at Oswego there were seen at Albany the far-off lake tribes and even the Sioux of Dakota. Trade received such a tremendous stimulus that in 1727 Governor Burnet erected a regular fort at Oswego, where, in 1757, a French traveller found sixty or seventy cabins in which fur-traders lived. A promising settlement, begun by the Palatine Germans at Herkimer, was called Burnet’s Field, or, on the later powder-horn maps, Fort Harkiman.

The fur-trade in our day calls for the slaughter annually of two hundred million land quadrupeds; drives men to ravage land and ocean, and even to rob the water animals of their skins; sends forty million peltries annually to London alone, and is still one of the great commercial activities of the world. It was relatively much greater in Johnson’s day; and to gain a master’s hand in it was already his ambition. It was the year 1738, the date of the birth of George III. of England, whom later he was to serve as his sovereign. Arriving in the nick of time, Johnson began at once the triple activities of settling his uncle’s acres with farmers, of opening a country store, and of clearing new land for himself. This latter was rapidly accomplished, Indian fashion, by girdling the trunks one year, thus quickly turning them into leafless timber, and planting either corn or potatoes the next season, in the now sunlighted and warm ground. Or the standing timber was cut down and by fire converted into potash, two tons to the acre, which was easily leached out, and was quickly salable in Europe.

Corn or maize was the crop which above all others enabled the makers of America to hold their own and live; and corn was the grain most plentifully raised in the Mohawk Valley, though wheat was an early and steady crop. Corn meal is still sold in England as “Oswego flour,”—a name possibly invented by Johnson, who became a large exporter of grain and meal.

To be landlord’s agent, pioneer settler, farmer, and storekeeper all in one, Johnson needed assistance in various ways and resolved to have it. He had from the first come to stay for life and grow up with the country. He was probably in America less than a year before he took as his companion, Catharine, the daughter of a German Palatine settler named Weissenburg, or Wisenberg. ^[3] Kate was the only wife Johnson ever had, and the only woman with whom he lived in wedlock. She is described as a sweet-tempered maiden, robust in health, fairly dowered with mental abilities, and with a good influence over her husband. No record of the marriage ceremony has yet been found; but the couple, if not joined in wedlock by some one of the Dutch or German clergymen of the Valley, as is most likely, had their wedding before the Rev. Thomas Barclay, an English Episcopal missionary. Mr. Barclay laboured at Fort Hunter, and in the little English church officiated for years, as well as at Albany and Schenectady; but the records of Fort Hunter have not survived the accidents of time. When in 1862 the dust of this maker of America was disturbed, and his bones sealed up in granite for more honourable burial, a plain gold ring was found, inscribed on the inside, “June. 1739. 16.” This date may have been that of his marriage with “Lady” Johnson, his own lawful wife, who probably needed no title to adorn the beautiful character which tradition bestows upon her. Johnson, when a baronet with laurelled brow, and a fame established on two continents; the head of a family in which were two baronetcies, father and son,—an honour unparalleled in American colonial history,—made a will, preserved in Albany, in which he desired the remains of his “beloved wife Catharine” interred beside him. Of Molly Brant, his later mistress, he spoke and wrote as his housekeeper; of the Palatine German lawfully wedded to him, as his beloved wife.

Doubtless, also, for the first years of married life, through her exemption from family cares, though these weighed lightly in early colonial days, in the absence of the artificial life of the cities, she was enabled to attend to the store, while her husband worked in the field, rode with grist to the mill, or traded with the Indians in their villages. Their first child, John, was not born until they had crossed the Mohawk River, and occupied Mount Johnson, in 1742.

We can easily sum up the inventory of a country store on the frontier over one hundred and fifty years ago, whose chief customers were farmers, trappers, bos-lopers or wood-runners, hunters, and Indians. On the shelves would be arranged the thick, warm, woollen cloth called “duffel,” which made “as warm a coat as man can sell,” and the coarse shoddy-like stuff named “strouds;” in the bins, powder, shot, bullets, lead, gun-flints, steel traps, powder-horns, rum, brandy, beads, mirrors, and trinkets for the Indians, fish-hooks and lines, rackets or snow-shoes, groceries, hardware, some of the commonest drugs, and building articles.

In trading, a coin was rare. The money used was seewant, or wampum, but most of the business done was by barter; peltries, corn, venison, ginseng, roots, herbs, brooms, etc., being the red man’s stock in trade. The white settlers paid for their groceries and necessities of civilization in seewant, or wampum, potash, and cereals. One of the earliest in the collection of Johnson’s papers at Albany is a letter to “Dear Billy” from Captain Warren at Boston, suggesting a shipment in the spring, from the farm at Warrensburg, of grain and other produce to Boston by way of Albany.

Being of robust health, with a strong frame and commanding figure, jovial in disposition and easy in manners, Johnson was not only able to show habitual industry, but in the field-sports and athletic games to take part and make himself popular alike with the muscular young Dutch and Germans and with the more lithe red men. The famous castle or palisaded village of the Mohawks on the hill-slopes back of Auriesville, now visible to all passengers by railway, and marked by the shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, was but a short distance to the westward. Here Johnson soon became known as a friend as well as an honest trader. His simple and masterly plan was, never to lie, cheat, or deceive, and never to grant what he had once refused. To the red men much of a white man’s thinking was a mystery; but truth was always simple, and as heartily appreciated as it was easily understood.

As early as May 10, 1739, we find this man of restless activity planning to locate a branch trading-house on the Susquehanna, two hundred miles to the south. Already he had seen the advantages and prospect of speedy wealth in the fur-trade, a privilege won years before by his Schenectady neighbours. He now entered diligently into it, employing a number of runners or bos-lopers, who scoured the woods and valleys populated with Indians, in his interest, diverting the trade from Albany to his own post. This was the beginning of jealous quarrels between him and the Albanians. That his eye was keenly open to every new advantage or possibility of progress, was seen in his buying as early as 1739, after one year’s residence in the valley, a lot of land across the Mohawk, on which ran a stream of water, the Chucktununda Creek, with abundance of potential mill-power. To ride horseback with bags fifteen miles to Caughnawaga every time meal was needed, was too much loss of time and energy. The German women had long carried bags of wheat and maize from Schoharie to Schenectady, traversing the distance on foot, bearing corn in coming and grist in returning, on their backs. There was a mill at Caughnawaga, and one owned by the Dutch Church at Schenectady, both sufficiently distant. Johnson saw at once in a mill ease and revenue. The Indian name of the stream, Chucktununda, is said to mean “stone roofs or houses,” and was applied to other watercourses with banks of overhanging rocks which formed shelter during rain. This coveted spot became later the famous “Mount” Johnson, on which the stone fortress-mansion still stands, at Akin, three miles west of Amsterdam and visible to all railway travellers as they fly between the great Lake City and New York.

The appearance of the Mohawk Valley, though still unchanged in its great cosmic features of sky, mountain, and main watercourses, was vastly different a century and a half ago. On its surface were many minor features quite different from those which to-day greet the eye of traveller, denizen, or palace-car inmate. Then the primeval forest, rich in game, covered hill and dale, except along the river-flats, where were great expanses of meadow in the wide level of the valley. Here were maize-fields surrounding the Indian villages for miles.

Owing, however, to the largeness of forest area, the streams were of greater proportions and much more numerous than at present. Fish were vastly abundant, and so tame as to be easily caught, even with the hand of Indian or white skilled in wood and water craft. Animal life was rich and varied to a degree not now easily imaginable or even credible, did not the records of geology, of contemporary chronicles, and the voices of tradition all agree on this point. Then the “wild cow” or bison, though rapidly diminishing, owing to the introduction of fire-arms, was still a source of fur and food. Besides the elk, deer were plentiful on the hills, often seen drinking at night and early in the morning at the river’s brink, and occasionally were killed inside of the new settlements. A splendid specimen of elk horns from a buck shot by Johnson on his own grounds, was presented by him to Chief Justice Thomas Jones, who wrote a loyalist history of New York during the Revolutionary War, and long adorned the hall of Fort Neck mansion on Long Island. Smaller fur-bearing animals were beyond the power of arithmetic. Wolves were uncomfortably numerous, active, and noisy. To their ceaseless nocturnal music there were slight pauses of silence, except when some gory battle-field or scalping-party’s raid or unusual spoil of hunters became the storm-centre, and gathered them together from a radius of many miles. Most notable of all the animals, in physical geography, in commerce, and for clothing, was the beaver. This amphibious creature of architectural instincts was the great modifier of the earth’s surface, damming up tens of thousands of the hill streams which fed the great rivers, and thus causing a vast surface of the land, otherwise dry, to be covered with water, while it greatly changed the appearance of the landscape. There are to-day thousands of grassy and mossy dells which even the inexperienced eye sees were once the homes of the beavers, while thousands of others have long since, under the open sun, become fertile meadows. The beaver, by yielding the most valuable of the furs, furnished also the standard of value in trade. The beaver as seen on the seal of the city of York, like the prehistoric pecus , or cattle, which made pecu niary value, or the salt of the ancient sal ary or rice in old Japan, was quoted oftener than coin.

The Indian trails of New York were first obliterated by wagon-roads or metaled turnpikes, and then covered by iron rails and wooden ties. The flanged iron wheels have taken the place of the moccasin, as loco-motor and freight-carrier; but in Johnson’s time the valleys, passes, and portages or “carries” were all definitely marked, and generally easily visible, on account of the long tramping of inturned feet. There are places to-day on the flinty rock polished by long attrition of deer-leather soles; and wherever the natural features of the landscape point to the probable saving of linear space, there skilled search usually reveals the old trail. One of the first proofs of the genius of Johnson and the entrance in his mind of continental ideas was his thorough study of the natural highways, trails, and watercourses of the Iroquois empire, and the times and methods of their punctual migrations. He soon found that while late autumn, winter, and spring was their season for trapping and shooting their game, June, July, and August formed the period when the peltries were brought in for sale. In early autumn they went fishing, or their travelling-parties were on peaceful errands, such as attending those council-fires which filled all the atmosphere with blue haze. As a rule, the Indians avoided the mountains, and dwelt in the valleys and well-watered regions, where fish and game for food, osiers and wood fibres for their baskets, clay for their rude pottery abounded, and where pebbles of every degree of hardness were at hand, to be split, clipped, drilled, grooved, or polished for their implements of war, ceremony, and religion. In savage life, vast areas of the earth’s surface are necessary for his hunting and nomad habits. Agriculture and civilization, which mean the tilling and dressing of the earth, enable a tribe to make a few acres of fertile soil suffice, where one lone hunter could scarcely exist. The constant trenching upon the land of the wild hunter and fisherman, by the farmer and manufacturer, who utilize the forces of Nature, and the resistance of the savage to this process, make the story of the “Indian question.”

Apart from the pretext of religion, equally common to all, the main object of French, Dutch, and English traders was fur, as that of the New England coast men was fish. The tremendous demand of Europe and China kept the prices of peltries high, and it was in this line of commercial effort that fortunes were most quickly made, most of the early profits being reckoned at twenty times the amount of outlay. Until 1630 a strict monopoly of two trading-companies shut out all interlopers from the Indian country.

In 1639, at the foundation of Rensselaerwyck, trade was nominally thrown open to all. What was formerly done covertly by interlopers and servants of the company, became the privileges of every burgher. Though still rigidly denied to outsiders, traders’ shops soon sprung up along the muddy streets of the colony, and an immense business was done over the greasy counters. The gallon kegs of brandy, called ankers; a puncheon of beer; a pile of shaggy woollen stuffs, then called duffles, and now represented most nearly by Ulster or overcoat cloth; a still coarser fabric called strouds, for breech clouts and squaws’ clothes, with axes and beads, formed the staple of the cheaper order of shopkeepers. In the better class of dealers in “Indian haberdashery,” and in peltries, potash, and ginseng, the storehouses would have an immense array of all sorts of clothes, hats and shoes, guns, knives, axes, powder, lead, glass beads, bar and hoop iron for arrow-heads, and files to make them, red lead, molasses, sugar, oil, pottery, pans, kettles, hollow ware, pipes, and knick-knacks of all sorts. It was not long before the desire to forestall the markets entered the hearts of the Dutch as well as the French; and soon, matching the courier du bois , or hardy rangers of the Canadian forests, emerged the corresponding figure of the bos-lopers, or commercial drummers. This prototype of the present natty and wide-awake metropolitan, in finest clothes, hat, and gloves, with most engaging manners and invincible tongue, was a hardy athlete in his prime, able to move swiftly and to be ever alert. He was well versed in the human nature of his customers. Skilled in woodcraft, he knew the trails, the position of the Indian villages, the state of the tides, currents, the news of war and peace, could read the weather signs, the probabilities of the hair and skin crops, the fluctuations of the market, and was usually ready to advance himself by fair advantage, or otherwise, over his white employer or Indian producer. Rarely was he an outlaw, though usually impatient of restraint, and when in the towns, apt to patronize too liberally the liquor-seller.

In this way the market was forestalled, and the choicest skins secured by the Albany men, who knew how to select and employ the best drummers. So fascinating and profitable was this life in the woods, that agriculture was at first neglected, and breadstuffs were imported. The evil of the abandonment of industry, however, never reached the proportions notorious in Canada, where it sometimes happened that ten per cent of the whole population would disappear in the woods, and the crops be neglected. When, too, Schenectady, Esopus, and the Palatine settlements in the Mohawk Valley were fully established, the farmers multiplied, the acreage increased, and grain was no longer imported. It was, from the first, the hope and desire of the Schenectady settlers to break the Albany monopoly, and obtain a share of the lucrative trade. This was bitterly opposed for half a century, and many were the inquisitorial visits of the Albany sheriffs to Schenectady and the Valley settlements, to seize contraband goods; but usually, on account of the steady resistance of both magistrates and citizens, they who came for wool went home shorn. The foolish Governor Andros went so far as to lay upon the little village an embargo,—one of the silly precedents of the “Boston Port Bill,”—by a most extraordinary proclamation forbidding any wagons and carts to ply between the city of Albany and the Dorp of Schenectady, except upon extraordinary occasions; and only with the consent of the Albany magistrates could passengers or goods be carried to the defiant little Dutch town. All such official nonsense ultimately proved vain, and its silliness became patent even to the Albany monopolists; and Schenectady won the victory of free trade with the Indians.

This point of time was shortly after the coming of Johnson, who thus arrived at a lucky moment; and at once entering to reap where others had sown, he became a man of the new era. He found the situation free for his enterprise, which soon became apparently boundless. He cultivated the friendship not only of the Indians, but of the white wood-runners, trappers, and frontiersmen generally; and by his easy manners, generosity, and strict integrity, bound both the red and the white men to himself. He was a “hail-fellow-well-met” to this intelligent class of men, and all through his wonderful career found in them a tremendous and unfailing resource of power. Johnson laid the foundations of permanent success, deep and broad, by the simple virtues of truth and honesty. He disdained the meanness of the petty trader. His word was kept, whether promise or threat. He refused to gain a temporary advantage by a sacrifice of principle, and soon the poorest and humblest learned to trust him. His word, even as a young man, soon became bond and law. The Indians, who were never able to fathom diplomacy, could understand simple truth. Two of the most significant gestures in the sign language of the Indians are, when the index finger is laid upon the mouth and moved straight forward, as the symbol of verity; and the same initial gesture expresses with sinuosities, as of a writhing serpent, symbolical of double dealing, prevarication or falsehood. The tongue of the truth-speaker was thus shown to be as straight as an arrow, while that of the liar was like a worm, or the crooked slime-line of a serpent. In this simple, effective way Johnson’s business enlarged like his land domains from year to year, while on knowledge of the Indians and their language, and of the physical features of the Mohawks’ empire, he soon became an authority. As early as 1743 he succeeded in opening a direct avenue of trade with Oswego, doing a good business not only in furs, but in supplying with provisions and other necessaries both the white trappers and petty traders who made rendezvous at the fort. He was now well known in Albany and New York, and soon opened correspondence with the wealthy house of Sir William Baker & Co., of London, as well as with firms in Atlantic seaports and the West Indies.

He prepared for a wider sphere of influence by improving his land north of the Mohawk River. He began the erection on it of a strong and roomy stone house,—one of the very few edifices made of cut stone then in the State, and probably the only one west of the Hudson River. This house is still standing, and kept in excellent repair by its owner and occupant, Mr. Ethan Akin. It is two and a half stories high; its dimensions are 64 by 34 feet; the walls, from foundation to garret, are two feet thick. There is not to-day a flaw in them, nor has there ever been a crack. The roof, now of slate and previously of shingles, was at first of lead, which was used for bullets during the Revolutionary War. Part of the house seems to have been sufficiently finished for occupancy by the summer of 1742, for here, on the 5th of November, his son John was born. Around the house he planted a circle of locust-trees, two or three of which still remain. His grist-mill stood on Chucktununda Creek, which flowed through his grounds; and near it was the miller’s house. This branch of his business—flour manufacture—was so soon developed that cooperage was stimulated, and shipments of Johnson’s Mohawk Valley flour were made to the West Indies and to Nova Scotia. Grand as his stone dwelling was, a very patroon’s mansion,—and it is probable that one of Johnson’s purposes in rearing what was then so splendid a mansion was to impress favourably the Indians,—he became none the less, but even more, their familiar and friend. He joined in their sports, attended their councils, entertained the chiefs at his board, feasted the warriors and people in his fields, and on occasions put on Indian costume. In summer this would mean plenty of dress and liberal painting, but in winter, abundance of buckskin, a war-bonnet of vast proportions, and a duffel blanket. Yet all this was done as a private individual and a merchant, having an eye to the main chance. He as yet occupied no official position. His domestic life in these early days at the Mohawk Valley must have been very happy; and here were born, evidently in quick succession and probably before the year 1745, by which time the stone house was finished, his two daughters, Mary and Nancy. About sixty yards north of the mansion was a hill on which a guard-house stood, with a lookout ever on the watch. On account of this hill the place was often spoken of as “Mount” Johnson. In time of danger a garrison of twenty or thirty men occupied this point of wide view.

Despite his many cares, Johnson enjoyed reading and the study of science. He ordered books and periodical literature regularly from London. His scientific taste was especially strong in astronomy. To the glorious canopy of stars, which on winter nights make the mountain-walled valley a roofed palace of celestial wonders, Johnson’s eyes were directed whenever fair weather made their splendours visible. In autumn the brilliant tints of the sumach, dogwood, swamp-maple, sassafras, red and white oak, and the various trees of the order of Sapindaceæ filled the hills and lowlands with a glory never seen in Europe. His botanical tastes could be enjoyably cultivated, for in orchids, ferns, flowering plants, and wonders of the vegetable world, few parts of North America are richer than the Mohawk Valley.

The military nerves of the continent of North America lie in the water-ways bounding, traversing, or issuing from the State of New York. Its heart is the region between the Hudson and the Niagara. In these days of steam-traction, when transit is made at right angles to the rivers, and thus directly across the great natural channels of transportation, New York may be less the Empire State than in the days of canoes and bateaux. Yet even now its strategic importance is at once apparent. In the old days of conflict, first between the forces of Latin and Teutonic civilization, and later between British king-craft and American democracy, it was the ground chosen for struggle and decision.

Before the European set foot on the American continent, the leading body of native savages had discovered the main features of this great natural fortress and place of eminent domain. Inventors of the birch-bark canoe, the red man saw that from this centre all waters of the inland ocean made by the great lakes, the warm gulf, and the salt sea, could be easily reached. With short land-portages, during which the canoe, which served as shelter and roof at night and house and vehicle by day, could be carried on the shoulders, the Indian could paddle his way to Dakota, to Newfoundland, or to Hudson’s Bay on the north, or the Chesapeake and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. In his moccasins he could travel as far. From New York State the pedestrian can go into twenty States and into two thirds of the territory of the United States without leaving the courses of valleys. No other State can so communicate between the east and the west without overcoming one or more mountain ridges. The T-shaped Hudson-Mohawk groove in the earth’s crust unites the valleys east of Massachusetts. With such geographical advantages, added to native abilities, the Iroquois were able to make themselves the virtual masters of the continent of North America.

Here, accordingly, was built the Long House; that is, was organized the federation of the Five Nations. Like the Pharaohs, Sultans, Mikados, and European princes of the world which we call old, because of its long written history, these forest sovereigns named their government after their house. The common edifice of the Iroquois was a bark structure fifty or more feet long, and from twelve to twenty feet wide, with doors at either end. In each dwelling lived several families.

So also, in the Great Long House, stretching from the Hudson to the Niagara, dwelt at first five families. The Mohawks occupied the room at the eastern end of the house, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley, the schenectady , or “place just outside the door,” being on the “mountain-dividing” or Hudson River. More exactly, the place of “Ye treaties of Schenectady” was at the mouth of Norman’s Kill, a little south of Albany. Here was the place of many ancestral graves, where multitudes of the dead lay, and where Hiawatha, their great civilizer, dwelt.

Of all the tribes the Mohawks were, or at least in England and the colonies were believed to be, the fiercest warriors. It was after them that the roughs in London in the early part of the eighteenth century were named, and the term was long used as a synonym with ferocious men. The tea-destroyers in Boston Harbor in 1774 also took this name. Next westward were the Oneidas, inhabiting the region from Little Falls to Oneida Lake. The Onondagas at the centre of the Long House, in the region between the Susquehanna and the eastern end of Lake Ontario, had the fireplace or centre of the confederacy. The Cayugas lived between the lake named after them and the Genesee Valley. The Senecas occupied the country between Rochester and Niagara. The evidence left by the chips on the floors of their workshops, show that their most ancient habitations were on the river-flats and at the edges of streams. Later, as game became scarcer, they occupied the hills and ledges farther back. On these points of vantage their still later elaborate fortifications of wood were built. As the rocks of New York make the Old Testament of geology, so the river-strands and the quarries are the most ancient chronicles of unwritten history, in times of war and peace.

How long the tribes of the Long House lived together under the forms of a federated republic, experts are unable to tell. It is believed that they were originally one large Dakota tribe, which became separated by overgrowth and dissensions, and later united, not as a unity, but as a confederation. The work of Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who in 1727 published his “History of the Five Nations,” has been too much relied upon by American and English writers. It was one of the very first works in English on local history published in the province of New York. Utterly ignoring the excellent writing of the Dutch scholars, Domine Megapolensis, De Vries, and the lawyer, Van der Donck, who wrote as men familiar with their subject at first hand; ignoring also the personal work of Arendt Van Curler,—Colden compiled most of his historic matter from French authors.

According to the tradition of the Algonkin Indians of Canada, which Colden gives at length, the Iroquois were at first mainly occupied in agriculture, and the Algonkins in hunting. The various wars had developed in the Iroquois the spirit of war and great powers of resistance, so that they held their own against their enemies. Another of the many bloody campaigns was to open on the shores of the lake named after Champlain, when Europeans appeared on the scene, and trustworthy history begins. Champlain, it seems, did not desire to join in the Indian feuds, but was compelled to do so in order to retain the friendship of the Hurons. This first use of fire-arms in Indian warfare meant nothing less than revolution in politics, in methods of war, in the influence of chiefs, and in other elements of Indian civilization. What gunpowder began, alcohol completed.

This much seems certain, that at the opening of the seventeenth century the whole continent was a dark and bloody ground, in which war was the rule and peace the exception; in which man hunted man as the beasts and fishes destroy and devour one another. The Iroquois, speaking substantially one language, were as an island in a great Algonkin ocean. Unlike mere fishermen and hunters they were agriculturists, and many hundred square miles were planted with their maize, squashes, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, and other vegetables, edible or useful. They were able to store up corn for long campaigns and to brave a season of famine. The streams furnished them with fish, and they hunted the deer, elk, bison, and smaller animals for flesh or furs; but their noblest game was man. To kill, to scalp, to save alive for torture, to burn his villages and houses, to wreak vengeance on his enemies, was rapture to the savage.

Before they knew gunpowder, the Iroquois, equipped with flint weapons and clothed in bark armour, often fought in the open field and with comparative personal exposure. Their battles were by masses of men who were led by chiefs, and their tactics and strategy resembled those of white men before the introduction of fire-arms. One famous field in the open ground near Schenectady was long pointed out in Indian tradition as the place where the great battle between the Iroquois and the Algonkins had been fought before the coming of the whites. For the defence of their villages they built palisades with galleries for the defenders to stand on, and with appliances at hand to put out fires, or to repel assaults and drive off besiegers. Theirs was the age of stone and wood; but their civilization was based on agriculture, which made them superior to that of their neighbours, whom they had compelled to be tributary vassals.

The apparition of the white man and the flash of Champlain’s arquebus, vomiting fire and dealing death by invisible balls, changed all Indian warfare and civilization. Gunpowder wrought as profound a revolution in the forests of America as in Europe. Bark or hide shields and armour were discarded; bows and arrows were soon left to children; the line and order of battle changed; fighting in masses ceased; the personal influence of the chiefs decreased, and each warrior became his own general. Individual valour and physical strength and bravery in battle counted for much less, and the dwarf was now equal to the giant.

An equally great revolution in industry took place when the stone age was suddenly brought to a close and the age of metals ushered in. The iron pot and kettle, the steel knife, hoe, hatchet, and the various appliances of daily life made more effective and durable, almost at once destroyed the manufacture of stone and bone utensils. The old men lost their occupation, and the young men ceased to be pupils. This loss of skill and power was tremendous and far-reaching in its consequences; and its very suddenness transformed independent savages into dependents upon the white man. In time of famine or loss of trade, or interruption of their relations with the traders caused by political complications, the sufferings of the Indians were pitiable.

Champlain’s shot dictated the reconstruction of Indian warfare; but the Iroquois took to heart so promptly the lesson, that the Algonkins north of the St. Lawrence were able to profit little by their temporary victory. Full of hate to the French for interfering to their disadvantage, the Mohawks at once made friends with the Dutch.

Both Hudson and Champlain had visited Mount Desert Island, and thence separating had penetrated the continent by the great water-ways, both reaching the heart of New York within a few miles of each other. While the French founded Quebec, and settled at Montreal, the Dutch made a trading settlement on the Hudson at Norman’s Kill, Tawasentha. This “place of many graves” and immemorial tradition was the seat of their great civilizer and teacher, Hiawatha, who had introduced one phase of progress. It was now destined to be the gateway to a new era of change and development. As in Japan, at the other side of the globe, at nearly the same time white men, gunpowder, and Christianity had come all together.

It was not out of disinterested benevolence that the confederate savages sought the friendship of the Hollanders. They came to buy powder and ball, to arm themselves with equal weapons of vengeance, and to protect themselves against the French.

But if Champlain was a mighty figure in the imagination of the red man of the Mohawk Valley, there was coming a greater than he. This new man was to impress more deeply the imagination of all the Iroquois, and his name was to live in their language as long as their speech was heard on the earth. Champlain was a bringer of war; “Corlaer” was an apostle of peace.

Arendt Van Curler is a perfectly clear figure in the Indian tradition, and in the history and documentary archives of the Empire State. Having no descendants to embalm his name in art or literature, he has not had his monument. Yet he deserves to have his name enrolled high among the makers of America. The ignorance, errors—and there is a long list of them—of writers on American and local history concerning Arendt Van Curler, have been gross and inexcusable. It were surely worth while to know the original of that “Corlaer” after whom the Indians named, first the governors of New York, and later the governors of English Canada, and finally Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. To the Iroquois mind, Corlaer was the representative of Teutonic civilization. Other governors of colonies and prominent figures among the pale-faces, they called by names coined by themselves, just as they named their own warriors from trivial incidents or temporary associations. Even the King of Great Britain was only their unnamed “Father;” but as our ablest American historian, Francis Parkman, has said: “His [Van Curler’s] importance in the eyes of the Iroquois, and their attachment to him are shown by the fact that they always used his name (in the form of Corlaer) as the official designation of the governor of New York, just as they called the governors of Canada, Onontio, and those of Pennsylvania, Onas. I know of no other instance in which Iroquois used the name of an individual to designate the holder of an office. Onontio means ‘a great mountain;’ Onas means ‘a quill or pen;’ Kinshon, the governor of Massachusetts, ‘a fish.’ ” ^[4]

Rev. I. A. Cuoq, in his “Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise,” also remarks that the title Kora, the present form of [Van] Curler, given even yet to the kings and queens of England and to the English governors of Canada, is a purely Iroquois creation; while that of Onontio, used of the French king and governors, was given for the first time to Montmagny, the successor of Champlain. Quite differently from their method in the case of Van Curler, they translated, with the aid of the French missionaries, Montmagny’s name, rendering it freely by Onontio, which means, strictly speaking, “the beautiful mountain,” rather than “the great mountain.” The term Onontio was used until the end of the French dominion in America, whereas Kora [or Corlaer] is still in vogue; Queen Victoria being to the Canadian Indians Kora-Kowa, or the great Van Curler.

As first-cousin of Kilian Van Rensselaer, Arendt Van Curler, a native of the country near Amsterdam, but probably of Huguenot descent, reached America in 1630, and became superintendent and justice of the colony at Rensselaerwyck. From the very first he dealt with the Indians in all honour, truth, and justice. He was a man of sterling integrity, a Dutch patriot, and a Christian of the Reformed faith, but also a man of continental ideas, a lover of all good men, and a Catholic in the true sense of the term. He rescued from death and torture the Christian prisoners in Mohawk villages; and his first visit into, or “discovery” of the Valley as far as Fonda in September, 1642, was to ransom Father Jogues. His description of “the most beautiful land on the Mohawk River that eye ever saw,” and the journal of his journey, probably sent with his letter of June 16, 1643, to the Patroon, form the first written description of the Valley. He mastered the vernacular of the savages, visited them at their council-fires, heard their complaints, dealt honestly with them, and compelled others to do the same. The first covenant of friendship, made in 1617, between the Dutch and the Iroquois, and its various later renewals, he developed into a policy of lasting peace and amity. The scattered links of friendship between the Dutch and the confederacy of Indians he forged into an irrefragable chain, which, until the English-speaking white men went to war in 1775, was never broken. In 1663 he saved the army of Courcelles from starvation and probably destruction. Winning alike the respect of the French in Canada, and of their enemies, the Mohawks, he was invited to visit the governor, Tracy, in Quebec. On his journey thither in 1667, he was drowned in Lake Champlain near Rock Regis, the boundary-mark between the Iroquois and Algonkin Indians. This lake, like the Mohawk River, and the town of Schenectady which he founded, the Indians and Canadians called Corlaer.

Rarely, if ever, was a council held in Albany or at Johnson’s house or at the Onondaga fireplace, that Corlaer’s name was not mentioned, and their “covenant chain” with him referred to under the varied figures of rhetoric.

Van Curler’s policy was continued and expanded by Peter Schuyler, a son of Van Curler’s warm personal friend, Philip Schuyler. As the Iroquois in speaking never closed the lips, but used the orotund with abundance of gutturals, they were unable to pronounce properly names in which labial consonants occurred. They could not say Peter; so they called their friend “Quider.” The policy of Johnson was simply a continuation and expansion of that of these two Hollanders, Van Curler and Schuyler. There was no name of any white man that Johnson heard oftener in the mouths of the Indians than that of Corlaer; and yet, in the index of seventy thousand references to the Johnson manuscripts in Albany there is no reference to this founder of the Dutch policy of peace with the Indians.

In their political and social procedures, in public discourse, and in the etiquette of councils, no denizens of European courts were more truly bond-slaves to etiquette and custom than these forest senators. In certain outward phases of life—especially noticed by the man of hats, boots, and clean underclothing—the Indian seems to be a child of freedom, untutored and unsophisticated. In reality he is a slave compared to the enlightened and civilized man. He is by heredity, training, and environment fettered almost beyond hope. His mind can move out of predestined grooves only after long education, when a new God, new conceptions, induced power of abstract reasoning, and an entirely new mental outlook are given him. First of all, the savage needs a right idea of the Maker of the universe and of the laws by which the creation is governed; and then only does his mental freedom begin. So far from being free from prescribed form, he is less at liberty than a Chinese or Hindu. His adherence to ceremonial runs into bigotry. The calumet must be smoked. The opening speech must be on approved models. The wampum belts are as indispensable in a treaty as are seals and signatures in a Berlin conference or a Paris treaty. To challenge tradition, to step out of routine, to think for himself, and to act according to conviction, is more dangerous and costly to him than to one who has lived under the codes of civilization.

To gain his almost invincible influence over these red republicans of the woods, Johnson, like his previous exemplars, had to let patience have her perfect work. He had to stoop to them in order to lift them up. He even learned to outdo them in ostentation of etiquette, in rigid adherence to form, in close attention to long speeches without interruption, in convincing eloquence, in prolixity when it was necessary to subdue the red man’s brain and flesh by the power of the tongue, and in shine and glitter of outward display. Like a shrewd strategist, this typical Irishman knew when to exercise his native gift of garrulity in talking against time, and when also to condense into fiery sentences the message of the hour.

One chief reason, however, why the Iroquois preferred to talk with him more than with the average colonial grandee, was because they were not when before him at the mercy of interpreters. Despite the fact that time was of little value to the savage, it was rather trying to an Indian orator, after dilating for an hour or two in all the gorgeous eloquence of figurative language, to the manifest acceptance of his own kinsmen at least, to have an interpreter render the substance of his oration in a few sentences. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, the Indian was perforce obliged to draw the images of thought entirely from the environment of his life on land and water. Hence his speech superabounded with metaphors. He thoroughly enjoyed the discourse of one of his pale-faced brothers whose flowery language, while insufferably prolix to his fellow-whites, ran on in exuberant verbosity. In such a case, as Johnson soon learned to know, the sons of the forest felt complimented and flattered. Rarely was a speaker interrupted. Extreme rigidity of decorum was the rule at their councils. On great and solemn occasions the women were called as witnesses and listeners to hold in their memory words spoken or promises given.

There were other resources of human intercourse besides words. The wampum strings that reminded one of rosaries, or the belts made of hundreds and thousands of black and white shells, served as telegrams, letters missive, credentials, contracts, treaties, currency, and most of the purposes in diplomacy and business. The principal chief of a tribe had the custody of these archives of State. A definite value was placed upon these drilled, polished, and strung disks or oval cylinders of shell. The Dutch soon learned to make a better fabric than the Indian original, and they taught the art to the other colonists. Weeden, in his “Economic History of New England,” has shown how great an aid to commerce this, the ancient money of nearly all nations, proved in the early days when coined money was so scarce. The belts used as newsletters, as tokens of peace or war, as records of the past, or as confirmations of treaties, were often generous in width and length, beautifully made, and fringed with coloured strings. Schenectady was a famous place of wampum or seewant manufacture; and Hille Van Olinda, an interpreter, received in 1692 two pounds eight shillings for two great belts. Two others of like proportions cost three pounds twelve shillings. A large quantity of this sort of currency was always carried by the French to win over the Indians to their side. The same commercial and diplomatic tactics were also followed by the English, and especially by Johnson.

The Iroquois had also a rude system of heraldry. A traveller over the great trails or highways, or along the shores of the great water-ways most often traversed, would have seen many tokens of aboriginal art. The annals of the Jesuit missionaries and of travellers show that besides the hideously painted or carved manitou or idols found at certain well-known places, the trees and rocks were decorated with the totem signs. The wolf, the bear, the tortoise, were the living creatures most frequently seen in effigy on tent, robes, or arms. Or they were set as their seal and sign-manual on the title-deeds of lands bartered away, which the white man required as proofs of sale and absolute alienation, though often the red man intended only joint occupancy. In the Iroquois Confederacy there were eight totem-clans, which formed an eight-fold bond of union in the great commonwealth. Less important symbols were the deer, serpent, beaver, stone pipe, etc. In their drawings on trees or rocks there were certain canons of art well understood and easily read. A canoe meant a journey by water; human figures without heads, so many scalps; the same holding a chain, as being in alliance and friendship; an axe, an emblem of war, etc. A rude fraternity, with secrets, signs, and ceremonies,—the freemasonry of the forest,—was also known and was powerful in its influence. In family life, inheritance was on the female side; and on many subjects the advice of the women was sought and taken, and as witness-auditors they were a necessity at solemn councils, as well as made the repository of tradition.

Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off.

The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.

Great changes took place within the Iroquois Confederacy after the advent of the white man. His fire-arms, liquor, fences, and ideas at once began to modify Indian politics, hunting, social life, and religion. The unity of interests was broken, and division and secession set in, as steady currents, to weaken the forest republic. Large numbers of the Iroquois emigrated westward to live and hunt in Ohio and beyond, and joined the Ottawa confederacy. Others left in bands or groups, and made their homes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Southwest, to get away, if possible, from the white man’s fences and fire-water. Others followed their religious teachers into Canada, and made settlements there. These losses were only in a measure made good by the addition to the Long House of a whole tribe from the South, the Tuscaroras, whose ancestral seats had been in the Carolinas.

North Carolina was one of the majority of the original thirteen States first settled by a variety of colonists,—French, German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. At first red and white men lived at peace; but soon the inevitable “question” came, and the Indians imagined that they could show themselves superior to the pale-faces. Making what white historians call a “conspiracy,” but striking what they believed to be a blow for home and freedom, they rose, and in one night massacred in or near Roanoke alone one hundred and thirty-seven of the white settlers. Their murderous act at once drew out the vengeance of Governor Craven of South Carolina, who sent Col. John Barnwell, an Irishman, who marched with a regiment of six hundred whites and several hundred Indian allies. Without provision trains, but subsisting as Indians do in a wilderness unbroken by villages, farms, or clearings, Barnwell struck the Tuscaroras in battle, and reduced their numbers by the loss of three hundred warriors. Pursuing them to their fortified castle, he laid siege and compelled surrender. By successive blows, this “Tuscarora John,” by death or capture, destroyed one thousand fighting men, and compelled the remainder of the tribe to leave the graves of their fathers, and emigrate northward. Only a remnant reached New York. The Tuscaroras joined the Iroquois Confederacy in 1713, and the federated forest republic then took upon itself the style and title of the Six Nations.

Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed.

How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.

While the white man’s gunpowder and bullets, war, diseases, fire-water, and trade wrought profound changes for better or worse, usually the latter, the Indians were not stolid or unreceptive to his religion. Both the Roman and the Reformed teachers won many disciples in the Long House. Almost as soon as the learned Domine Megapolensis arrived at Fort Orange, he began to learn the language of the Mohawks. He was soon able to preach to them and to teach their children. This was three years before John Eliot began his work in Massachusetts. The pastors at Schenectady did the same, translating portions of the Bible and of the liturgy of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The missionary efforts of the Dutch Christians soon bore definite and practical results. The Reformed Church records show large numbers of Indians baptized or married or buried according to Christian rites. There are also frequent instances of adult communicant membership in the Mohawk, Hudson, Raritan, and Hackensack Valleys. Hundreds of Indian children were trained in the same catechetical instruction, and in the same classes with those of the whites. As a general rule, the Hollanders and other peoples from the Continent lived in kindness and peace with their red brethren. The occasional outbreaks of the savages in massacre, fire, and blood were not by those of New York, but from Canada. The Indians were set on like dogs by the French, who stimulated the thirst for blood by political and religious hatreds; and the English repaid in kind. Rarely was the peace broken between the people of New Netherlands and New York except by causes operative in, and coming from Europe.

The first Roman Catholic who entered the bounds of the State of New York was Isaac Jogues, who was captured by the Mohawks while ascending the St. Lawrence River. One of the sweetest spirits and noblest characters that ever glorified the flesh he dwelt in, Isaac Jogues was brought captive into the Mohawk Valley to be reserved for fiendish torture. Ransomed by Arendt Van Curler, and assisted to France by Domine Megapolensis, these three men of the Holy Catholic Church became ever after true friends. The surface discords of church names were lost in the deeper harmonies of their one faith and love to a common Saviour. Bressani was later assisted in like manner. Returning willingly, by way of Quebec, after his fingers, once chewed to shapeless lumps between the teeth of the Mohawks, had been kissed by nobles and ladies in the court at Versailles, Jogues reached, four years later (1647), the scene of his martyrdom and nameless burial. His severed head, mounted upon one of the palisades of the Indian castle, was set with its face to Canada, whence he came, in insult and defiance.

Nevertheless, the French Jesuit missionaries, with unquailing courage and fervent faith, persevered; and Poncet, Le Moyne, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron passed to and fro through Albany to continue the work in what they had already named as the Mission of the Martyrs. In 1667 St. Mary’s Chapel was established at the Indian village which stood on the site of Spraker’s Basin. In 1669 St. Peter’s Chapel was built of logs on the sand-flats at Caughnawaga near Fonda, by Boniface. Here in 1676 the Iroquois maiden Tegawita—the White Lily of the Mohawks, the now canonized saint—was baptized by James de Lamberville. From 1642 to 1684 was the golden age of early missions of the Roman form of the Christian faith in New York. Then it was abruptly brought to a close, not because of Indian animosity or Protestant opposition, but by the Roman Catholic Governor Dongan in the interests of British trade.

Perhaps this interruption was not wholly dictated by greed, but was strongly influenced by political interests. This fact must be noted. When Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie Indian woman adopted into the Oneida tribe, was led to serious thought by Bruyas, to whom she taught the language in 1668, and with her Christian husband was persecuted by the pagans, the couple left for Montreal. Here she was baptized and confirmed by Bishop Laval. Instructed by Raffeix, who was somewhat of a statesman, Catharine invited several of her family in New York to Canada, and early in 1670 they founded the Indian village of La Prairie, where members of the Iroquois Confederacy might come to settle. According to the code of laws established in this Christian community, every one must renounce belief in dreams, polygamy, and drunkenness. This settlement was destined to be a powerful influence, not only in the Christianization of the Indians, but upon the politics of New York. In 1674, the wife of Kryn, “the great Mohawk,” who had conquered the Mohegans, became a Christian, and her husband abandoned her. Happening in his wanderings to visit the Christian village of La Prairie, Kryn was impressed with the peace and order reigning in it, and after a time became a Christian.

Returning to his home on the Mohawk, Kryn told what he had seen, and persuaded forty of his fellows from Caughnawaga (now Fonda, New York) to follow him. They reached La Prairie on Easter Sunday, 1676. From this time forth Kryn was an active missionary, on one occasion talking over a whole party of sixty Mohawks sent by Dongan on a raid against the French, and converting four of them to Christianity. He also persuaded the Oneidas and Onondagas to keep peace with the French, and in this was aided by the remarkable influence of Garakonthie, the Christian protector of “the black coats.” It was Kryn who led, and it was these “praying Indians” from Canada who with the French were sent by Frontenac to destroy Schenectady in 1690; and it was he who just before the attack harangued them to the highest pitch of fury. His especial pretext for revenge was the murder of sixty Canadian Indians by the Iroquois about six months previously.

For many years La Prairie was the gathering-place of seceders from the confederacy who had adopted the religion of their French teachers. In 1763 the village had three hundred fighting men; during the Revolution the number increased, and at present the Indian reservation at Caughnawaga, about twenty miles from Montreal, contains about thirteen hundred Roman Catholic Indians. These facts explain why the Mohawks and others of the confederacy had so many relatives fighting for the French, and why the political situation in New York, until the fall of French dominion, was so complex. As a rule, the Iroquois preferred the more sensuous religion of the French, while eager also for the strouds, duffels, guns, and blankets of the Dutch. Under Gallic and British influences, their hearts were as often divided as their heads were distracted. They were like tourists from Dover to Calais, when in the choppy seas which seethe between the coasts of England, France, and Holland.

In 1684 Jean de Lamberville, the last Jesuit settler in New York among the Iroquois, departed for Canada amid the lamentations of the Onondagas who escorted him. In a few generations all traces of the work of the French missionaries had vanished from the Mohawk Valley. In our days, when under the farmer’s plough or labourer’s pickaxe, the earth casts out her dead, the copper rings with the sign of the cross tell the touching story of the Indian maiden’s faith. Under the eloquent pen of John Gilmary Shea the thrilling story of labour and martyrdom glows. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville shows that even modern piety can find fresh stimulus in recalling the events which have made the Mohawk Valley classic ground to devout pilgrims as well as to the scholar and patriot.

For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction.

For the possession of the North American continent two nations, France and England, representing the two civilizations, Roman and Teutonic, which dominate respectively Southern and Northern Europe, contended. France, in America, embodied the Roman or more ancient type of civilization, in which government and order were represented by the priest and the soldier, while the people had little or nothing to do with the government, except to obey. External authority was everything; inward condition, little or nothing. The French system was not that of real colonization, but of military possession; and the desired form of social and political order was that based on monarchy and feudalism. In the despotism of a Church subordinate to a ruler in Italy, and of a State represented by a monarch, the individual was lost, and the people’s function was simply to submit and pay taxes. They were taught to look upon their privileges and enjoyments as the gifts of the sovereign and of the Church. Authority emanated from the government, which represented God, and represented Him infallibly.

The English colonists, whose leaders had been largely trained in the Dutch Republic, represented the best elements of Teutonic civilization, those of English blood being more English than the Englishmen left behind, and more Teutonic than the Germans. Most of the principles and institutions wrought out in the experience of the colonists, especially those now seen to be most peculiarly American, were not of British, but of continental origin. New England was settled mostly by immigrants who had left England before 1640; and nearly all their leaders had come by way of Holland, receiving their political and military education in the United States of Holland, and under its red, white, and blue flag.

The strong hereditary instincts of Germanic freedom were best represented in the seventeenth century by the Hollanders, who in the little republic had long lived under democratic institutions. Nearly all the leading men who settled New England had come to America after a longer or shorter stay in Holland, where they imbibed the republican ideas which they transported as good seed to America. The Pilgrims, who were the first settlers of Massachusetts; many of the Puritans who came later to Boston and Salem; the leaders of the Connecticut Colony,—Hooker, Davenport, and many of their company,—had all been in Holland. The military commanders—Miles Standish, John Smith, Samuel Argall, Lyon Gardiner, Governor Dudley, and others—had been trained in the Dutch armies. Thus it came to pass that while the makers of New England were English in blood and language, their peculiar institutions were not of England, but directly borrowed from the one republic of Northern Europe.

The Middle States were all settled under the Netherlands influences. Even in New York, where through the patroon system semi-feudal institutions very much like those of aristocratic England had begun, the innate love of liberty in the people ultimately broke through these as a seed through its shell. The full growth was the typical American State of New York, whose constitution possessed more of the features of the National Constitution of 1787 than any other of the original thirteen States. Feudalism and its ideas were thus for the most part left behind or soon outgrown. The Church, even when united with the State, as was the case in some of the colonies, was of democratic form. The system of landholding and registry, the town-meeting, and the written and secret ballot,—all Germanic ideas,—with many customs and practical political ideas brought from Holland, made the people free, developed the individual man, and gave the colonies a reserve of strength and endurance impossible in Canada.

In their plan of strategy, the French idea was to limit the English domain within and east of the Alleghany Mountains by a chain of forts stretching from Quebec along the Great Lakes, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. This was a scheme of magnificent distances, involving enormous energy and expense, especially while the English held the seacoast and bases of supplies. It was evident that for any hope of success in their mighty territorial scheme the aborigines must be secured as allies. In this work the priest could do more than the soldier. Hence the zeal and energy of the spiritual orders were invoked, and put under tribute to the grand design of Gallicizing America.

On the other hand, to overcome the plans of the French, there must be that which could neutralize the wiles of the Jesuit as well as the ability of the soldier. In every war between France and England, Americans must bear a part; and until the ultimate question should have been decided, the Indian held, on this continent, the balance of power. Neutrality to red or white man was impossible. The spring, the dominating idea of diplomacy and war in Europe was this doctrine of the balance of power; but in America it was less a speculative notion than a practical reality. The American Indian would be the decisive element until one or other of the two nations and civilizations became paramount.

A fresh disturbance of this doctrinal stability in European politics occurring near the middle of the eighteenth century, at once caused the scales to oscillate in America, gave the French the first advantage, and compelled William Johnson to follow up Van Curler’s work, and to be the most active agent and influence among the Mohawks which had been felt since the death of “Brother Corlaer.” This series of episodes is called in Europe “The War of the Austrian Succession.” It was begun by Frederick the Great of Prussia, against Maria Theresa of Austria. In America it is known in history as the “Old French War.”

The “Old” French War (not that of 1753) was declared by Louis XV., March 15, 1744. The news was known all along the Canada borders by the end of April. The tidings travelled more slowly in the English language; and it was the middle of May, after the French had attacked the English garrison at Canso and compelled it to surrender, before the startling facts aroused the colonies. Already the Indian hatchets had been sharpened, and the plan of raid and slaughter well made, when the governor of New York, relying on the Indians as the great breakwater against the waves of Canadian invasion, called a council of the chiefs of the confederated Six Nations at Albany, which met June 18, 1744.

The settlers soon found that, in this as in previous wars, the French and Canadian Indians were the more aggressive party, while the military authorities of New York relied on a defensive policy. The governor, George Clinton,—not the ancestor of the Clintons in the United States, but the sixth son of the Earl of Lincoln,—had arrived in September, 1743. He was an old sea-dog, an ex-admiral, who knew as much about civil government as one of his powder-monkeys on shipboard. It seemed to be the policy of the British Government to send over decayed functionaries and politicians who were favourites at court, but in every way unfitted for the great problems of state in the complex community whose borders were on Canada, where French power was intrenched. Too many of these nominees of the Crown considered it to be their first duty to build up their private fortune. Nevertheless, it was Clinton—who had probably been influenced by his fellow-sailor, Captain Warren—who summoned William Johnson, the trader, into public life.

Despite the superiority of the British fleet, the French moved more quickly, and were first in America with reinforcements. The open water-way from Canada into the heart of New York was the military nerve of the continent. It made the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys the objective point of the French invaders. The war, though not yet declared, was to last five years, and, as we shall see, developed all the inherent energies of Johnson, the young Irishman, who had already shown powers of leadership. The military policy of the French was to keep the English frontier in a state of ceaseless alarm, by small parties of stealthy savages striking their blows unexpectedly all along the line from Oswego to Hoosic. The story of the numberless petty raids is well told in Drake’s “Particular History;” but in some cases the details are now extant only in written accounts found in the Johnson papers, in church records, in family Bibles, and on tombstones in Mohawk Valley and in New England.

Johnson soon found himself where the Robinson Crusoe of poetry wished to be,—“in the midst of alarms;” but his temper rose into the heights of unshakable calm as the dangers increased. Invited, with his wife and three infant children, to come and live in Albany till the war was over, he declined, and remained at Mount Johnson, losing no opportunity to win, to keep, and to increase his influence over the Iroquois. His abilities and power were, as we have seen, brought to the notice of the new governor, indirectly through his uncle, but immediately through the introduction of Chief Justice De Lancey, a brother of his uncle’s wife. In the month of April, 1745, William Johnson received a commission as one of the justices of the peace in the county of Albany, which then extended from Coeymans to Herkimer.

At this point the strictly private life of Johnson ended, and his political career began. The situation of Mount Johnson was within easy reach of all important places in the province which were likely to be the seat of war. An easy day’s ride on horseback would bring him to Albany, whence, by either land or water, the country was opened northward to Crown Point, or southward to New York. Thence, over a cross route by way of Saratoga Springs, a strong man well mounted could, by hard riding, reach Mount Johnson from the foot of Lake George in a day and part of a night. Westward also, by river or land route, there was easy access to all the tribes of the Long House and to all the Mohawk Valley settlements.

Johnson’s uncle, Captain Warren, had by the capture of a privateer distinguished himself at sea, and receiving promotion to the grade of Commodore, was ordered to command the naval forces for the reduction of Louisburg. By his energy and ability strict blockade was maintained while the American citizen soldiery under Pepperell tightened the coils of investment. When the “Vigilante,” a French frigate laden with reinforcements in men and provisions, had been decoyed and captured, the fortress was surrendered. Warren became an admiral; and Pepperell, a merchant like Johnson, was made a baronet,—the former one day, the latter one month, after receipt of the news in England.

Chronology was in this case a key to English jealousy of the colonists, whose growing strength and republicanism monarchical Britain feared. The joy of the Americans was excessive. It culminated in Boston, where “Louisburg Square” still preserves the name. The gladness on this side of the Atlantic equalled the astonishment, flavoured with jealousy, which fell upon Europe. One would have thought that it would salt wholesomely the inborn contempt which the regular officers of the king’s troops felt toward provincial fighters, but it did not; and Braddock, Loudon, Abercrombie, and their foolish imitators were yet numerously to come. Indeed, this success of provincial Americans induced a jealousy that was to rankle for a generation or more in British breasts, to the serious disadvantage of both Great Britain and the colonies, as we shall soon see.

Meanwhile, Indian affairs were in a critical condition, and the signs of danger on the frontier were ominous. For reasons not here to be analyzed, there were bad feelings between the Iroquois and the Albany people. Rumours of the purpose of the English to destroy the Indians were diligently kept in circulation by both lay and clerical Frenchmen. Those who wore canonicals and those who wore regimentals were equally industrious in fomenting dissatisfaction. The uneasiness of the Mohawks was so great that they sent several chiefs to confer with their brethren, the Caughnawaga Indians, in Canada. It was generally believed that the French would attack Oswego. There is also evidence that attempts were made to kidnap Johnson, against whom, as a relative of Admiral Warren, as one of the captors of Louisburg, and as the man who especially influenced the Iroquois in favour of the English, the French had an especial grudge. It was known that from the fort at Crown Point scalping parties issued at intervals; but mere rumours turned into genuine history when Longmeadow, Massachusetts, was attacked and burned by French Indians. On Nov. 17, 1745, the poorly fortified Dutch village of Saratoga on the Hudson was attacked by an overwhelming force of over six hundred French and Indians. After easy victory the place was given over to the torch, and the sickening story of the massacre of Schenectady was repeated.

In French civilization the priest and the soldier always go together. They are the two necessary figures, whether in Corea, Africa, Cochin China, or Canada. The soldier, Marin, was in this case led by the priest, Picquet. Besides the massacre, in which thirty persons were killed and scalped, sixty were made prisoners; and the whole fertile farming country, blooming with the flower and fruit of industry, was desolated for many miles. Many of the captives were negroes, and a majority of the whole number died of disease in the prisons of Quebec. One of the best accounts of this massacre—meagre in details—is contained in a letter to Mr. Johnson from Mr. Sanders, of Albany. It was nine days after this event that Johnson received the urgent letter inviting him to move for safety to Albany.

A line of fire and blood, ashes and blackness, was now being drawn from Springfield to Niagara. All men were under arms, and each was called to watch every third night. No house was safe, except palisaded or built of logs for defence. The forts were repaired and garrisoned. The bullet moulds were kept hot, and extra flints, ramrods, and ammunition laid out all ready, while weary sentinels strained ear and eye through each long, dark night.

Out from the gateway of Crown Point, like centrifugal whirlwinds of fire, swept bands of savages, who swooped down on the settlements. Almost under the shadow of the palisades of Albany, Schenectady, and the villages along the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, men were shot and their scalps taken to decorate Canadian wigwams. The little “God’s Acre” in every settlement on the Mohawk began to fatten with victims who had died out of their beds. Perhaps none of these ancient sleeping-places has been reverently emptied in order to consign their memorials of once active life to more enduring public honour in the modern cemeteries, but the number of perforated skulls surprises the beholder. In these mute witnesses to the disquiet of the past, he reads the story of ancestral danger and suffering. The devout frontiersman made his way to church on the Lord’s Day with his loaded gun on his shoulder, its flint well picked and its pan well primed. He took his seat at the end of the pew, only after sentinels had been posted and arms made ready for instant use. Slight wonder was it that the effects of all-night vigils, and the unusual posture of repose in a pew, rather than the length of the Domine’s sermon, induced sleep even in meeting.

Most of the churches were loop-holed for defence, and even in the few old houses occasionally found with projecting second floor, we see an interesting survival of the old days, when from both church and dwelling a line of gun-barrels might at any hour decorate the eaves with gargoyles spouting fire and death. Away from the villages, the farmers, building a block-house on some commanding hill, and if possible over a well or spring, kept a sentinel on the roof while they laboured in the fields. Horn in hand, the watcher surveyed the wide stretches of valley, or scrutinized the edges of the clearing, to give warning of the approach of skulking red or white murderers. Yet human nerves would weary, and after constant strain for months with no near sign of danger, vigilance would often relax at the very moment when the enemy opened fire and raised his yell. Men would laugh to-day at warnings, while, perhaps, the boys in play would set up mock sentinels at the gateways, who on the morrow would be scalped or be bound and on their way to Canada.

The twofold plan of campaign decided on in England was the old one first formulated by Leisler in 1690, looking to the invasion and subjugation of Canada, attempted again in 1711, when a German regiment in New York was raised for the purpose, and which was frustrated by the disaster to the British fleet. The land and naval forces of New and Old England were now to make rendezvous at Louisburg, and move up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, while the provincial militia of the middle and lower colonies, combined with the Iroquois if possible, should capture the French fort, St. Frederick, at Crown Point, and the city of Montreal.

The disastrous inaction of King George and the London lords, arising probably from jealousy of the provincials, and the rumours of a great French fleet under D’Anville to be sent against New England, caused the abandonment of the expedition to Quebec. This, however, was not known by submarine electric cable; and meantime New York politics, at which we must now glance, had become interesting.

Two friends, the Chief-Justice De Lancey and Governor Clinton, quarrelled over their cups at a convivial gathering, and this took place just after the latter had renewed the former’s commission for life. Happening, too, on the eve of the great council of the Six Nations, which Clinton had summoned at Albany, just when that town was pestiferous with small-pox and bilious fever, the outlook for successful negotiations was not very promising. Messrs. Rutherford, Livingston, and Dr. Cadwallader Colden were the only members of his council who came with Clinton, while of the expected Indians only three had arrived. These, for the two scalps with the blood hardly dried on the hair, were rewarded with strouds and laced coats, and sent to drum up recruits, while the governor waited a month for the tardy, suspicious, and sullen savages to appear before him.

Matters looked dark indeed. Yet when Mohawk runners, despatched by Johnson on a scouting expedition to Crown Point, arrived, bringing news of French preparations for a descent upon Schenectady and the Valley, and possibly upon Albany, the governor was unable to see the imminent danger. He still waited; he still believed wholly in the defensive policy, and seemed satisfied, because for the fort on the Hudson at Saratoga, now Easton, a sum equal to about eight hundred dollars had been voted by the Assembly. This sum enabled the colonial engineers to build a palisade one hundred and fifty feet long, with six redoubts for barracks, all of timber, and to mount on platforms twelve cannon of six, twelve, and eighteen pound calibre. In this way the summer was wasted in waiting; for the Indians came not, and Clinton’s ambition to be a powerful diplomatist with the Indians was for the present baffled.

Believing this was a matter between French and English alone, strongly inclining to neutrality, and diligently persuaded thereto by the French Jesuits, the Iroquois sulked at home. Not only did they flatly refuse to meet the governor, but some of the chiefs went openly over to the French.

Meanwhile the white settlers were, according to Johnson’s report, abandoning their farms along the Mohawk, and concentrating in the block-houses or palisaded towns. Besides having sent Indian scouts to the Champlain country, Johnson wrote urgent letters to Clinton stating the case, and asking him to open his eyes to the facts. To protect Johnson’s stores of eleven thousand bushels of grain, while standing his ground, the governor sent a lieutenant and thirty men. Another militia company was despatched to the upper Mohawk Castle. Having done these things, Clinton, who had as early as the 4th of August officially notified Governor Shirley of Massachusetts that he would proceed against Crown Point with the warriors of the Five Nations, was at his wits’ end. He had alienated Colonel Schuyler and the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, mostly faithful and trusted men well known in the provinces. In the quarrel of the governor with De Lancey, these ranged themselves on the side of the chief justice.

It is too clumsy an attempt at explanation of the difficulty between the king’s agent, Clinton, and the Board of Indian Commissioners, to ascribe the causes chiefly or entirely to the “rascality” of the commissioners, who “abused their office for private peculation,” or to the ambition of De Lancey. It is not necessary in one who appreciates the great abilities of Johnson to describe him as a white lily of honesty and purity. English authors, the Tory historians of the Revolution, and the prejudiced writers of American history, who reflect their own narrowness and sectional views, take delight in maligning the character of the men of colonial New York simply because they were Dutch. As matter of unsentimental fact, there is much to be said on both sides. The people of New York were not anxious to send the Indians on the war-path, nor to furnish white soldiers to guard their squaws and pappooses while they were away from their villages. They were not at all persuaded of the superior honesty either of the governor or his advisers and appointees. The greater facts are also clear, that the New York Assembly was vigilantly jealous of the people’s liberties, and was determined at all hazards to limit the royal prerogative as far as possible. Since his quarrel with De Lancey, the governor had shown excessive zeal in maintaining the rights of the king. On the other hand, most of the steps necessary to make New York an independent state had, as the British Attorney-General Bradley declared, already been taken by his Assembly, which of twenty-seven members had fourteen of Dutch descent. These men were determined to teach the king’s agent that he must bow to the will of the people, who were more important than king and court, and make no advance in monarchical ideas. They saw that the governor was under the close personal influence of Cadwallader Colden, a radical Tory, who they suspected prepared most of Clinton’s State papers; and they set themselves in array against this intermeddler on royalty’s behalf. Again the petty jealousy which burned steadily in all the colonies made these Dutchmen enjoy paying back the New Englanders in their own coin some of the slights and insults of the past. The former had long looked down in contempt on the settlers of New Amsterdam, and their sons now repaid them in kind, and were on the whole rather glad to snub Shirley and to annoy Clinton for so deferring to the wishes of the latter. Clinton seemed lacking in tact, and was unable to conciliate the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, who one and all, led by Schuyler, resigned.

In a word, Clinton had begun his administration by trying to bully and drive the Dutchmen. Now, those who know the men of this branch of the Teutonic race have always found by experience that when their hearts are won they are easily led. All attempts to drive them, however, usually result as Alva’s and Philip’s plans resulted in the Netherlands, where three hundred thousand Spaniards were buried; or as in South Africa, where Dutch boers hold their own against British aggression. It took Clinton some years to learn the lesson, but it was the same experience of failure and retreat.

At his wits’ end, Governor Clinton turned to the man for the hour. William Johnson was offered the appointment of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and at once accepted. Thus, at thirty-one years, opened in full promise the splendid career of the Irish adventurer.

While no man in the province or continent comprehended more clearly the gravity of the situation, no one better understood all the elements in the case, the ground of faith in the immediate improvement of affairs, and the ultimate supremacy of the British cause. Johnson was a man of continental ideas. Without losing an instant of time he at once set himself to the task of getting hold of the chief men of the Six Nations. He first sent wampum belts to the Pennsylvanian Indians and the Esopus tribe, asking their co-operation with the Albany Council. He put on Indian dress, and for weeks gave himself up to their pastimes. Sparing not paint, grease, ochre, feathers, games, or councils, he arrayed himself as one of their own braves. He encouraged them to get up war-dances, in order to excite their martial spirit. He was speedily successful in turning the tide of opinion in one whole canton of the Confederacy in favour of attending the Albany Convention.

It was probably about this time that Johnson was formally adopted into the Mohawk tribe, made a chief, and received that name which was ever afterward his Indian title. This habit of the Iroquois, of especially and significantly naming prominent personages, is still in vogue. When some Dakota Indians visited Boston in 1889, after seeing Charlestown and Bunker Hill Monument, they called on Governor Brackett, and named him the “Great Rock in the Clouds.”

The title which the Mohawks gave their new white chief and leader in 1746, was, according to the anarchic and unscientific spelling of the time, War-ragh-i-yah-gey. The term may be translated “Chief Director of Affairs.” It may with economy of vocables be spelled Wa-ra-i-ya-gé.

Other matters contributed to this success, and utilized the work of others. Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvanian German interpreter, had been recently among the tribes as far as Ohio, influencing them in favour of the English. A happy accident—the coming of a delegation of Chickasaws from the West and South to invade Canada, and to invite the Senecas to take part and pilot them—awoke this most western division of the Iroquois Confederacy to the importance of the accession. The simultaneous offers of alliance and aid by other scattered tribes led to a complete change of views. In a word, the Senecas resolved to sit at the Albany caucus. With the tribes at each end, the west and the east of the Long House, thus in substantial accord, Johnson directed the Mohawks to send out runners to the whole confederation. Thus the work of winning over the other few tribes, at least so far as attendance at Albany was concerned, proved to be comparatively easy.

Even the feuds and quarrels which at the time divided the Long House seemed to work for Johnson’s fame and the English cause. For some reason in Iroquois politics, occult to a white man, the house was divided against itself: the Senecas, Onondagas, and Mohawks composed one great faction; the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras formed the other and weaker. The latter tribe from the Carolinas, which had joined the Confederacy a generation before, in 1712, were far from being won over so as to take up arms for the English. When the fighting braves and counselling old men came to pow-wow with the large faction, the first thing done by them was to give the Mohawks, especially, a vigorous scolding for having acted so presumptuously and independently without taking council of the whole Confederacy. After lively debate and rejoinder, it was agreed by all to go to Albany, but with the river between the factions on their journey. So, along the banks of the Mohawk the delegates of the Confederacy marched as far as Schenectady, when quitting the river, the trail across country and to Norman’s Kill was followed. All but three of the Mohawk chiefs had been won to the English side. Of these, two of the Bear-totem clan lived at the upper castle at Canajoharie, and the third of the Tortoise-totem clan at the lower castle on the hill near Schoharie Creek. These dignitaries were finally persuaded by Rev. Mr. Barclay, then living among the Mohawks, and the famous Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who knew the Indians well, and later became the historian of the Six Nations.

It was a decisive moment in the history of America when on the 8th of August, 1746, the two rival divisions marched down old Patroon Street, the Clinton Avenue of to-day, and into State Street to Fort Frederick. Leading the Mohawk band in all the paraphernalia of Indian dress and decoration, with abundant ochre and plumes, was the pale-faced man, Johnson, who could whoop, yell, leap, dance, run, wrestle, play racket, and eat dog-hash—drawing the line at the cannibal feast,—with the best champions in any of the six tribes. The double column moved past Fort Frederick, where now stands the Episcopal Church, the Indians firing their guns and the fort its ordnance. Then the gates of the sallyport swung open, and in the largest room of the fort the red men squatted and were served with food.

When the conference opened, August 19, Dr. Cadwallader took the place of Governor Clinton, who was down with fever. The two delegates from Massachusetts, Mr. Nelles and Colonel Wendell, were also present, but none from Connecticut appeared. Colden’s speech was a bubble of rhetoric, fairly dazzling with the prismatics of a lively imagination. It rehearsed facts, fancies, and prophecies appropriate to the situation. The colossal but purely mythical preparations supposed to be made in Great Britain, in the reality of which the sailor-governor himself heartily believed, were duly set forth. Then the wrongs suffered by the Indians at the hands of the “perfidious” French were detailed, until the braves were stirred in eye and nostril, and the chiefs grunted out, “Yo-hay! yo-hay!” (“Do you hear! do you believe!”), and general applause in Indian fashion followed as the interpreter finished each sentence. The war spirit was further roused by flatteries which fell like oil on the flames, kindling the fiercest enthusiasm. After the usual promises of gifts and equipment, with assurance of reward and booty in the future, the orator wound up by narrating the murder of some white men, their brothers, even since their arrival in Albany, and calling upon his hearers for immediate and permanent revenge.

Taking it all in all, this speech of Clinton and Colden’s is a fair sample of the lies, false promises, and irresponsible assertions on which the red man has been fed, from the first coming of the whites, to the battle with the Sioux, near Pine Ridge Agency, in January, 1891. The proper peroration of the speech, according to Indian etiquette, was the casting down of a wampum war-belt with verbal assurances and in symbolic intent that the British would live and die with their brethren the Iroquois. When this was done, a war-whoop was raised that must have been heard in every cabin and iron-monogrammed brick-house in the colony and manor.

On that very day, as was soon afterward learned, the French were at Fort Massachusetts, ^[5] which had been built by Col. Ephraim Williams. It stood in the meadows east of Williamstown, under the shadow of old Greylock, beyond the present town of North Adams. After two days’ siege the brave garrison surrendered and were led away to Canada. The French lost forty-seven men. The fort was afterward, in 1747, rebuilt, and was the scene of more than one attack by the enemy.

The council-fire was then raked up, so that the braves might have time to sleep, smoke, and deliberate for reply. When the council re-opened on the 24th, the governor was present, and the first orator at the rekindled fire was an Onondaga chief. After the usual efflorescence of forest rhetoric, he promised in the name of the Seven Nations—a small army of eight hundred braves from Detroit and the Lake country, the Missesagues, having temporarily joined the confederates for the common purpose—to dig up the hatchet against the French and their allies. They further agreed to roast alive any French priest who came among them. The next day was devoted to distributing the presents sent from the king and the governors of Virginia and Massachusetts; the new tribe, Missesagues, receiving one fourth. On the 26th the kettle was hung over the fire, and a great war-dance held, in which, after unusual smearings of paint, the weird, wild, and guttural, but pathetic songs were sung. After a few private interviews with the chiefs, and further tickling of their palms with presents and their stomachs with fire-water, the council-fire was put out by separation and scattering. Part of the Valley Indians remained in Albany, in token of their loyalty to the English, while most of them returned to their castles to organize war-parties. Unfortunately an epidemic of the small-pox broke out at this time all along the Valley, carrying off hundreds of the Indians, among whom were the two delegates from the Missesagues.

Other councils were held with lesser bodies of Indians; and Johnson, despite the raging of the small-pox among the Valley Indians, endeavoured to keep the savages on the war-path toward Canada; but little was accomplished during the summer. While the coming French fleet was destroyed by storm, Johnson increased his fortune by being appointed government contractor for Oswego, and his fame by being commissioned by Clinton as Colonel of militia. The only campaign in 1747 was one of paper and ink, Shirley and Clinton being the chief combatants. There were also raids and fights on the New England borders, but little took place that needs to be chronicled here. Clinton and De Lancey kept up their quarrels; the former warning Johnson of his illustrious relative, venting his wrath on the Dutch legislators, and taking high-handed vengeance on Judge Daniel Horsmanden. This champion of the Assembly and people, and one of the ablest jurists in the province, was most obnoxious, politically, to the king’s representatives. He was also personally offensive as being the co-worker with Chief-Justice De Lancey.

On the 12th of September Horsmanden was suspended from service as a member of the council. The fact was published in the journal; but no reason was given for this, except that the governor announced that he would explain his action to the king. Horsmanden was also removed from his other positions,—as commissioner to meet the representatives of the other colonies, and as judge and recorder of the city. This act of the governor’s still further irritated the “stubborn Dutchmen,” whose hostility now turned into a war to the knife. Even though savages were ravaging the suburbs of New York, it is doubtful whether they would have been turned from their determination to fight absolutism, in the person of Clinton. When the governor announced the return of Johnson from his fruitless search after the enemy at Crown Point, the temper of the Assembly was not improved. They were tired of having the praises of Johnson sounded in their ears. They still refused, in the face of Johnson’s contract, while still in force, to furnish extra guards for the fulfilment of his stipulation in provisioning Oswego. They also adhered to their determination not to yield to the governor’s demands, so long as he thwarted their purposes. In affirming their former resolutions, they, nevertheless, offered to indemnify Johnson if through accident he became a loser by fulfilling his contract.

Meanwhile, the governor held counsel with the New England commissioners, and despite the remonstrances of the members, bluffed off his little Parliament until October 5. The frontier was still exposed. It was hard to get volunteers for Oswego, largely owing to the abominable drunkenness of the officers there, and the lack of good discipline. Two companies from Colonel Schuyler’s regiment were therefore drafted for the purpose. It being practically impossible to maintain the weak force at Saratoga, this post, which had been named Fort Clinton, was burned by order, and the ordnance and stores removed to Albany. In this unpleasant state of affairs Colonel Johnson was summoned to New York, and on October 9 was examined by the committee of the Executive Council. He exposed the grave state of affairs, in that the Indians had been kept from hunting for a whole year, and were now destitute. Unless something were speedily done, he felt he must abandon Mount Johnson and his interests in the Mohawk Valley. He even imagined that his leaving would be the general signal for an exodus of all the white people from the Mohawk basin. He recommended the erection of forts both in the Seneca and the Oneida districts. He believed that these measures, with plenty of presents, and the ferreting out of the miscellaneous rumsellers who debauched the Indians, would make safe the northern frontier and save the colony.

Clinton’s message to the Assembly, October 6, was presented with high praises of Johnson, a vindication of himself, and an exhortation to act promptly and liberally, as the Iroquois sachems were waiting with Johnson in the city to see what would be done in their behalf. The conquest of Crown Point was still in view; and men, money, and supplies were asked for. It was intimated that the Crown (the mother country) had already done its full part, and that the colonies should now do theirs.

Still the Assemblymen, who thought the Indians ought to have been allowed to go on their hunting, ought to have been kept friendly, but not stirred up to fight the French or be sent to Canada, and ought to have stayed in New York to guard their own old men and squaws instead of having white men drafted to do it, distrusted the servant of the king and the tool of Colden, and doubted the fitness of the governor’s appointees to office. They questioned the wisdom of the governor’s general policy; and they intimated, with only too good reason, that the money so freely distributed for the Indians was not properly and publicly accounted for. They voted promptly all that was necessary for the expedition against Canada. They fully realized the necessity of holding firm the loyalty of the Six Nations; and to keep it, they offered at once to vote the sum of eight hundred pounds, provided the persons chosen to distribute the people’s money were such as they approved of. In regard to the forts on the distant frontier, so near Canada, they considered that the other colonies should share the expense of permanently guarding the king’s dominions.

In answer to these defiant resolutions, which practically impeached the governor, Clinton sent a curt and insulting note of less than one hundred words. The Dutchman’s ire now blazed fiercely. After the significant ceremony of locking the door and laying the key on the table, they proceeded to issue a manifesto, marshalling in review the whole proceedings since June 6, 1746. They censured him for removing the former commissioners of Indian affairs, and for practically making Dr. Colden the real administrator of affairs in the cabinet, and Colonel Johnson in the field. They sneered at the pretensions and vanity of the governor in his constant boasting of what he claimed to have done. They charged him with treating the people of the colony with contempt, and with insulting them by vile epithets. They complained of the many brief and inconvenient adjournments to which he had needlessly subjected them. Especially were they enraged in their feelings at the deference paid, at their expense, to the commissioners from Massachusetts and Connecticut. They claimed that they ought to have been kept in session, in order that they might have been advised with, and their opinions consulted from time to time as to the matters under consideration.

In this last point, especially, the Dutch blood was roused; for although in monarchical England the power of making treaties is vested in the sovereign, yet in the Dutch Republic, then a living reality before their eyes, the States-General, like the United States Senate, shared with the Stadtholder or President the right of treaty-making, and had the power of veto upon all compacts. Even in Great Britain, the exercise of the treaty-making power by the king was subject to parliamentary censure, and ministers negotiating a disadvantageous treaty were liable to impeachment. This right had been several times exercised in the sixteenth and even in the fifteenth century.

The address wound up by this declaration: “No treatment your Excellency can use toward us, no inconveniences how great soever that we may suffer in our own persons, shall ever prevail upon us to abandon, or deter us from steadily preserving the interest of our country.”

A committee waited upon the governor on the 9th of October, to present the address; but the angry executive would not hear it, nor receive a copy, and three days later replied with all the artillery of rhetoric and abuse which he and his secretary were able to load into the document. It was as full of vituperation as a carronade of later day was of langrage shot. As to their complaint that the money intended for Indian presents was not honestly distributed, he charged the House with telling “as bold a falsehood as ever came from a body of men.” He was in no way accountable to the Assembly for the manner in which he distributed the money of the Crown. He charged them with violating both the civil and military prerogatives of the king. “Nor will I,” he said, “give up the least branch of it [the military prerogative] on any consideration, however desirous you may be to have it, or to bear the whole command.” He also asserted, with some attempt at humour, that their farce of locking the door and placing the key upon the table—a symbolic act charging breach of privilege upon the executive—was a high insult to King George’s authority, and in so far, an act of disloyalty. He charged that they were assuming the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and renouncing their subjection to the Crown and Parliament. He had his Majesty’s express command not to suffer them to bring some matters into the House, nor to debate upon them; and he intimated that he had a right to stop proceedings when they seemed to him improper or disorderly. After a tirade upon their insolence and unbecoming conduct, his peroration was a warning not to infringe upon the royal prerogative.

Safety-valves having thus been opened through the ink-bottles, the war of words ceased, and both governor and legislators proceeded to diligence in business. In expectation that Massachusetts and Connecticut would bear their quota of expense, the governor was requested, October 15, to carry out his plan of sending gunsmiths and other mechanics to live among and assist the tribes of the Confederacy westward of the Mohawks. Four days after, however, news came from England ordering the disbanding of all the levies for the expedition to Canada. This was disheartening alike to the governors and the people of the colonies; but some compromise measures were amicably agreed upon between Clinton and the Assembly.

Peace, in New York City at least, seemed almost at hand, when Clinton again attempted folly in trying to muzzle the press. The Assembly had ordered Parker, the public printer, to publish the address and remonstrance of the Assembly, in which they asserted the rights of the people. The governor commanded him to desist. Parker stood by the people and their Assembly, as against the king and his foolish governor. After Cosby’s ignominious failure to restrain the liberty of the press by imprisoning Zenger, this act of Clinton’s seemed like that of a madman or a man who had no memory. The Assembly ordered Parker to print their manifests, and to furnish each member with two copies, “that their constituents might know it was their firm resolution to preserve the liberty of the press.”

In a word, all this wrangle between colonial governor and Assembly was really the cause of popular liberty against monarchy, of ordered freedom under law against despotism. It was part of the chequered story of liberty, in which the people of New York were in no whit behind those of any of the colonies, but rather led them. Clinton, by his blunders, and Colden, by his toryism, helped grandly forward the American revolution, while the names of Parker and Zenger belong with those of the promoters of order and freedom. When on the 25th day of November, 1747,—significant date, for on that day, only thirty-six years later, King George’s troops and mercenaries evacuated that very city of New York, in which Clinton had illustrated the folly of monarchy,—after addressing, or rather berating, the people’s representatives, he concluded his address with the significant words:—

“Your continued grasping for power, with an evident tendency to the weakening of the dependency of the province on Great Britain, accompanied by such notorious and public disrespect to the character of your governor, and contempt of the king’s authority intrusted with him, cannot longer be hid from your superiors, but must come under their observation, and is of most dangerous example to your neighbours.”

It was, indeed, true that New York was setting what was in the eyes of the Tories a most dangerous example to her neighbours. Most of the people of this colony were descendants of those who had come from the Dutch Republic, where the taxation without consent had been resisted for centuries, and where resistance to monarchy and feudal ideas had been exalted into a principle. It was this determined spirit, reinforced by the lovers of liberty, whether of Huguenot, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh blood, or men from the mother country who believed that the rights of Englishmen were still theirs, that made New York lead all the thirteen original colonies in outgrowing the colonial spirit. New Yorkers first took the steps which must logically and actually lead to separation from the transatlantic country, whose language was indeed spoken in America, but by colonists who had continued the institutions not of monarchical England, but of republican Holland.

To reorganize the demoralized militia of the northern counties, Governor Clinton in November offered the command of the entire frontier to Johnson, who after due consideration accepted. Besides having the confidence of the people, among whom he was personally popular, Johnson, being backed by the Executive Council, was able to do the work expected of him, and bring about much needed reform, especially in improving the quality of the officers and the general discipline. The able-bodied men of the Mohawk Valley, mostly Dutch and German, with a few English, Irish, and Scots, were organized into nine companies of militia. Each village or settlement had its company of one hundred men, the most westward being at German Flats. Schenectady had two companies, and at Albany there were several; while all the farmers living in the open country, between forts or palisaded villages, were likewise enrolled.

Johnson’s wealth as farmer, fur-trader, army-contractor, and salaried officer was now steadily increasing. Even the victualling of Oswego ceased to be a losing enterprise, since the Assembly, in February, 1748, voted two hundred pounds to reimburse him for the extraordinary charges to which he had been put. The same Assembly, however, voted one hundred and fifty pounds to Mr. Horsmanden, whom Clinton had arbitrarily deposed from the Council, and also appointed an agent to reside in London to represent them and act with them and for the people against the governor. In this the Dutch legislators were following a precedent which their fathers had established, in having agents to represent them to the States-General in Holland, and which they continued under English rule, when they sent Peter Stuyvesant to the Court of King Charles II. in 1667.

The expedition to Canada being wholly given up, it was necessary to conciliate the Indians with presents. In April, Johnson set out to Onondaga, the central council-fire of the Iroquois Confederacy, to meet the delegates of all the tribes, in order to ascertain their temper and invite them to a great council at Albany. His other purposes in going were to circumvent the schemes of Joncaire the French Jesuit, and talk the Indians into giving their permission to have forts erected in their country. As usual, he was not too squeamish in the use of means to accomplish his purpose. He wrote from Albany, April 9, 1748, to Captain Catherwood: “I shall leave no stone unturned to accomplish what I go at, either by fair or foul means; for if they are obstinate—I mean the Onondagas—I shall certainly talk very harsh with them, and try what that will do.”

Leaving Mount Johnson with a guard of fifty men, with Captain Thomas Butler and Lieutenant Laurie as officers, he set off, in bateaux heavily laden with presents and provisions, up the Mohawk. To move these loaded boats against the current, by punting, pushing, pulling, sailing, or floating their way along, was slow work, but was safely accomplished. Some of the Indians had come with pleasant remembrances of the courtesy of Mount Johnson. They felt deeply that sort of gratitude which has been defined as a “lively sense of favours to come.” Having arrived some days before, and waited with attenuated rations, they were ravenous when Johnson and his stores arrived on April 24. After a salute of fire-arms and the unfurling of a British flag, three bark houses were assigned to the company, while Johnson was escorted to a large new lodge in which the mats were fresh and clean. That night a feast was given to the Indians out of the stores brought, all business being deferred until next day.

With all formality of pipes and tobacco, splendour of Indian and civilized costume, the council opened next morning. It was a contest of tongues, and one garrulous Irishman was here to enter the lists and to pit himself, with seemingly interminable prolixity of speech and the fixed ammunition of Indian rhetoric, against a host of tireless tongues. With plenty of talk to fill their ears and abundance of good things to tickle their stomachs, Johnson succeeded in strengthening the covenant of Corlaer; and the issue of the council was, on the whole, all that, even to Johnson, could be expected. In reporting results, Johnson suggested to the governor that proper regulation of the sale of rum among the Indians was the first thing to be considered.

Clinton, while happy in knowing that the Iroquois would come to the Albany council, was brooding over the tendency everywhere manifest in the colonies to assert their independence. Johnson’s full report of the tongue-victory at the Onondaga council was laid before the Assembly, June 21. The governor added, that to hold the Indians loyal to the English it would be necessary to prosecute the expedition against Crown Point, and at once make arrangements for exchange of prisoners. In this latter suggestion, and with that recommending a severe enactment against rumsellers, the Assembly at once concurred. A few days after came news of the treaty of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle.

Johnson, by unremitting exertion, had succeeded in securing the largest attendance of Indians that had ever assembled in Albany. They came from all the tribes of the Confederacy and from the lake region westward, besides remnants of New England and Hudson River Indians. Many of these Indians had never seen a civilized town, and greatly enjoyed the regular meals and other comforts of civilization, while interested in studying houses with chimneys, carpets, glass windows, and other things unknown to forest life. Great preparations had been made to receive them and to keep them in the best of humour. What with the clerks, quartermasters, interpreters, and others of the official class, the militia and the citizens, the farming folk who had flocked into the city to see the sights, in addition to villagers from the region around, Albany had never before beheld so large a population, nor shown such picturesque activity in her streets. In the oldest city in any of the colonies north of the municipality on Manhattan Island, these few days in the month of July were long remembered.

The eighteenth day of July had come; and all the Indians expected, hundreds in number, had already arrived, and were beginning to think “Brother Corlaer” was as dilatory as his war operations had all along been. Governor Shirley and the Massachusetts commissioners, however, had come; and all lay down at night expecting the great palaver would be but a day or two off. But before Clinton was to arrive, they were to learn how near the enemy was even at that moment.

In the evening exciting news was brought them from Schenectady. A battle had been fought between a party of Canadian Indians and the militia and villagers just beyond Schenectady, in which twenty whites had been killed and a number taken prisoners. The drums at once beat to quarters, and Captain Chew with one hundred militiamen and two hundred of the Indians, told off from those in convention, marched at once in pursuit. The Indians from Albany expected to head off the raiders, and hence went along the usual trails to Canada; but this time the Canada savages had retreated along the Sacandaga road and creek, “by a different road from what they used to go,” as Onnasdego, an Onondaga sachem, said to Clinton in his oration a few days afterward. Johnson remained in Albany attending to his horde of guests; while Captain Chew and his band made vain pursuit. On the 22d, the day of the opening of the council, he received a letter from Albert Van Slyck, dated “Schonaictaiday, July 21st, 1749,” giving a brief detail of the bloody affray. Van Slyck was an honest Dutch farmer, whose defective powers in English composition were in contrast with his courage; and his Dutch-English account is difficult to make certain sense of, especially in its blotted, time-stained, and torn condition in the Johnson manuscripts at Albany; but, except some entries in the family Bibles of people in or near the town, this is the only known contemporaneous writing by one who was in the fight. It is not mentioned even in Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” nor in the colonial or more recent histories, except Drake’s, though sometimes referred to inaccurately.

Further, it was difficult, until 1752, for an intelligent Hollander or American of Holland descent, whose ancestors since 1581 had adopted the calendar of Christendom to keep the run of English chronology, which was eleven days behind the rest of the world. For over a century and a half, England was very much in the condition of Russia of the present day, as compared with the rest of Europe. The English used “the old style,” or the calendar of Julius Cæsar, while the continental nations made use of the modern or Gregorian calendar. It may be that this explains why Van Slyck dated his letter one year ahead, 1749, instead of 1748.

Van Slyck’s letter describes an event which for a generation formed a leading topic at the evening firesides of the people of Schenectady, and of many in Connecticut. The tremendous loss in men, chiefly heads of families, that fell upon this frontier town is almost unknown to history; yet the fight at Beechdale was one of the most stubbornly contested little battles of the Old French War. Instead of being “an autumnal foray” upon a party of woodmen, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight by the Schenectady men against savages who were consummate ambuscaders, and well versed in all the arts of woodcraft and the tricks most likely to confound raw militiamen.

The battle-field lies on the Toll Farm, three miles west of Schenectady, and is visible from the car-windows to the right of a train on the New York Central Railroad going westward. A company of Schenectady men were at Maalwyck, a place not far from the town, on the north side of the river. Messrs. Dirk Van Voast and Daniel Toll, with Toll’s negro slave, Ryckert, left their comrades to find their horses which had strayed off. A few minutes after they had left, firing was heard in the direction in which they had gone, by the Van Slyck brothers, Adrian and Albert, one of whom was afterward in the fight and wrote the meagre account which is now among the Johnson papers. They at once sent a messenger, their negro slave, to Schenectady to give the alarm, which was doubtless sounded out from the belfry of the strong fortress-church by the Widow Margarita Veeder, the klok-luider or bell-ringer at that time. The summons came first before noon. The negro delivered his message, bidding the men go out to Abraham De Graaf’s house at Beukendal, where Van Slyck would meet them.

At this time there was a company of New England militia in the town under the command of Captain Stoddard, who was then absent, his place being filled by Lieut. John Darling. The militiamen were from Connecticut, and were raw levies unused to Indian warfare. They started off accompanied by five or six young men and Daniel Van Slyck, another brother of the writer. The party numbered about seventy men in all. Another company of armed men, whose number is not stated, left for the scene of conflict a few minutes later, to see if they could find or see Daniel Toll.

Toll and Van Voast, after leaving the Van Slycks at Maalwyck, had reached a place two miles away, near the house of De Graaf, and called in Dutch, Poopendaal, or later, Beukendal or Beech Dale. Within or beyond the dale, was a well-known place on hard clayey soil, full of deer-licks at which the deer used to come to lick the salt. At this kleykuil , or clay-pit, the two men imagined they heard, about ten o’clock, the sound of horses’ hoofs stamping on the hard ground, but with a regularity that seemed very suspicious. Approaching warily nearer, they discovered that the noise came from a party of Indians playing quoits. Almost as soon as the two white men came in sight, they were fired on by the savages, who had seen their coming. Toll was instantly killed, and Van Voast was wounded and made prisoner. The black man, Ryckert, fled toward Schenectady.

The wily savages now prepared to ambuscade the party which they knew would soon appear from Schenectady. For this purpose they laid a sensational trap in a field, somewhat off from the path and in a defile near the creek, which was surrounded with forest and bush. Taking the dead body of Mr. Toll, they set it up against a fence and tied a live crow in front of the corpse. This curious sight of a wild crow flying up and down before an apparently living man they knew would at once excite the attention, especially of the impulsive and unwary young men who, as they supposed, would be the first on the field. The sequel proves they were not disappointed.

Lieutenant Darling and his Connecticut men marched out, cautiously searching for the enemy, but seeing no trace of any. At Mr. Simon Groot’s unoccupied house they found Adrian Van Slyck, who with a few men had arrived and learned from the negro boy Ryckert, that his master, Mr. Toll, had been shot. Though nearly paralyzed with fear, he offered to point out the place where he fell. The negro was furnished with a horse, and acted as pilot to the advance party of about forty men. Soon after they had gone, Ackes Van Slyck arrived and remained with his men near the house.

Pretty soon the strange phenomenon of a crow playing near a man arrested their attention, and they at once marched into the trap to see the curious sight. Very soon they discovered that the man was a corpse, and the crow was tied to it with a string. At this moment when nearly all were in the defile along the creek, and off their guard, the crash of the enemy’s guns enlightened them as to the situation. They found themselves in a ravine or hollow curved like a horseshoe, and nearly surrounded on both sides by woods, from which puffs of white smoke and flashes of fire were issuing from unseen enemies. Eight or ten of the whites were at once stretched dead on the clay ground, and then the yelling savages leaped out of cover with knife and hatchet.

The militiamen soon broke and ran, but the Schenectady men bravely stood their ground. It took a moment to deliver their fire, and then with musket clubbed or thrown aside, the fighting became, for a few minutes, a series of desperate encounters between white and red man, in which it happened more than once that both buried their knives in each other. After the battle the bodies of Glen, De Graaf, and other noted Indian fighters were found alongside their dead enemies with whom they had wrested in deadly struggle. In this hand-to-hand fight twelve of the party of whites were killed, and five made prisoners; Lieutenant Darling’s company losing seven men, who were shot dead, and six missing.

Adrian Van Slyck and a company of New York militiamen now reached the scene, where the little band of whites were found behind trees and stumps holding the enemy at bay; Lieutenant Darling having been killed at the first fire, Ackes Van Slyck was directing the fight. No sooner had the New York reinforcements got into the line of Indian fire, than they all fled in the most cowardly manner. Adrian Van Slyck and the two or three Schenectady men who stood by him in this part of the field were shot down.

The rest of the original party of whites now retreated out through the western entrance of the vale, and joined by Albert Van Slyck and a few men from the village, reached the house of Abraham De Graaf near by. This substantial edifice—still standing, but used as a dried-apple bleacher when the writer visited it—was not then occupied, but was new and strong, and stood on commanding ground. The fact of its being empty shows the condition of affairs; the people who lived in isolated farm-houses being at this time gathered almost wholly in palisaded villages or other fortified places.

Hastily entering, they barred the door, and reaching the second story, tore off all the boards near the floor and eaves, and prepared for a stubborn defence. With their keen marksmanship they kept the enemy at bay, completely baffling the savages, who peppered the house in vain. While this siege was going on, the two Indian lads left in charge of Dirk Van Voast, eager to see the fight, tied their prisoner to a tree, and climbing up the slope of the ravine, became absorbed in the firing. Van Voast succeeded in reaching his knife, cut the thongs binding him, and ran off to Schenectady, meeting another squad of armed men from the village hastening to the scene. These were led by Jacob Glen, and Albert Van Slyck, the writer describing the event.

Van Slyck had hoped to gather enough men to get out and surround the Indians so as to capture the whole band; but Garret Van Antwerp, fearing lest the town would be left without a garrison in case of attack, would suffer no more to leave the palisades. However, this last reinforcement reached the battle-ground in time to drive off the savages, who were fighting the previously sent party from behind trees, and to save the bodies of Adrian Van Slyck and the dead men near him from being scalped and stripped. Seeing this last party approaching, the savages drew off, retreating up the Sacandaga road. All the whites, including the last comers, the scattered out-door fighters behind trees, and the little garrison in the house, now united. They proceeded at once to count up their loss, and to gather up the dead men and load them on wagons for burial in Schenectady.

What the loss of the Indians was in this battle, as in most others, the white men were never able to find out. Except at the scene of the first firing and ambuscade, Indian corpses were not visible. The first purpose of the redskins, as soon as the opening fury of battle slackened, was to conceal their loss. To run out from cover, even in the face of the fire, and draw away the corpses of their friends, was their usual habit, and to this they were thoroughly trained. Exposure in such work was more cheerfully borne than in regular combat, though usually the dead body was reached by cautious approach, and with as much concealment as possible in the undergrowth. A noose at the end of a rope was skilfully thrown over the head of the corpse, and the end of the rope carried back into cover. As skilfully as a band of medical students or resurrectionists can put a hook under the chin of a corpse and hoist it up from under the coffin-lid half sawed off, the savages in ambush would draw the body of their fallen comrade out of sight, to be quickly concealed or buried. Indian fighters often told stories of dead men apparently turning into snakes and gliding out of sight. Owing to this habit of the Indians, it was very difficult to arrive at the exact execution done by the white man’s fire. As most of the Schenectady men were trained Indian fighters, the loss of the savages was probably great.

This was a sad day for Schenectady. One third of the white force engaged were dead or wounded. Twenty corpses—twelve of them Schenectady fathers, sons, or brothers, and eight Connecticut men—were laid on the floor of a barn, near the church, which is still standing. The sorrowing wives, mothers, and sisters came to identify the scalped and maimed dear ones. Thirteen or fourteen men were missing, while the number of wounded was never accurately known. In the Green Street burying-ground, east of the “Old Queen’s Fort,” the long funeral procession followed the corpses, while Domine Van Santvoord committed dust to dust.

Many are the touching traditions of sorrow connected with this “Beukendal massacre.” So it, indeed, appeared to the people of Schenectady, because of so many of their prominent men thus suddenly slain. To them it was in some sense a repetition of the awful night of Feb. 8, 1690. Yet, instead of its being a massacre, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight in Indian fashion, and a typical border-battle. In the superb and storied edifice of “The First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Schenectady, in the county of Albany,”—so called in the old charter given by King George II., and so rich in the graphic symbols of “the church in the Netherlands under the Cross,” as well as of local history,—a tablet epitomizing the history of the church in its five edifices was set in its niche after the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the church, celebrated June 21, 1880. It is “in pitiful remembrance of the martyrs who perished in the massacres of February 9th, 1690, and July 18th, 1748.” From the rear church window one may still look, in 1891, on the barn on the floor of which the bodies were brought and laid for identification on the day when the sturdy Dutch-American Albert Van Slyck signed his letter to “Coll. William Johnson at Albany,” “your Sorrowfull and Revengfull friend on those Barbarous Enemys, and am at all Times on your Command.”

Clinton, accompanied by his satellite, Dr. Colden, and some other members of his council, arrived in Albany, July 20. The next day, after those necessary ceremonies to which the Indians are as great bond-slaves as their civilized brethren, the council fairly opened. A great palaver ensued, and talk flowed unceasingly for hour after hour, until many ears needed rest even more than the few busy tongues. The governor wound up his long address by referring to the battle of Beukendal, so recent and so near by.

After three days of smoke and thought, a wordy warrior from Onondaga replied for the Confederacy in prolix detail. The day was closed with a dance by the young braves, and the king’s health was drunk in five barrels of beer.

On the following day the River Indians spoke, expressing gratitude for favours past, and asserting that if they had been present when news of the Schenectady battle reached Albany, they would have cheerfully joined in pursuit, even to the gate of Crown Point.

By this time it was no longer possible to suppress the news of peace in Europe, and the poor savages who had been goaded into digging up the hatchet and neglecting their hunting, and who were thirsting for revenge, were now left in the lurch, and told to go quietly home. Nevertheless, most of the colonists were satisfied with the result of the council, and Johnson’s popularity increased. The Iroquois were pleased when they found that both Shirley and Clinton were about to send back all the French prisoners to Canada, and to ask for the return of both the white, red, and black captives, who had been carried away from their homes south of the St. Lawrence.

Lieutenant Stoddard and Captain Anthony Van Schaick went to Canada, and into the Indian country; but their success was not gratifying. Only twenty-four prisoners accompanied Lieutenant Stoddard when he left Canada, June 28, 1750. The white boys and girls who had nearly or wholly forgotten their old home and kin, and had been adopted into the tribes, declined, or were forced to decline, going back. Occasionally white women had abjured their religion, and in other cases the red squaws threatened sure death to the adopted captives should they try to return, even at the French governor’s orders. With the Indians, however, exchange was more easy, though the savages were unable to understand the delays of diplomacy between Clinton and Gallissonière; and to pacify them, Johnson was often at his wits’ end. However, by his personal influence, by visits of condolence, by social participation in their games and feasts, by persistent patience, public eloquence, private persuasion, and the frequent use of money and other material gifts, he won fresh laurels of success. In spite of the diplomacy of La Gallissonière, the ceaselessly active Jesuit priests, French cunning and strategy on the one hand, and English and Dutch weakness and villany on the other, he held the whole Iroquois Confederacy loyal to the British Crown. The greatness of Johnson is nobly shown in thus foiling the French and all their resources.

This year, amid manifold commercial, military, and domestic cares, he entertained the famous Swedish botanist, naturalist, and traveller, Peter Kalm, with whose name the evergreen plant Kalmia is associated. He had come at the suggestion of Linnæus to investigate the botany and natural history of North America. He arrived at Fort Johnson with a letter from Dr. Colden, who was as fond of physical science as he was of his Toryism. After dispensing courtly hospitality, Johnson furnished him with a guide to Oswego and Niagara, and a letter to the commandant at the former place. Kalm’s “Voyage to North America” was translated and published in London in 1777, and the map accompanying it is of great interest. After him was named that family of evergreens in which is found the American laurel, Kalmia latifolia , which has been proposed as the national flower of the United States.

The Old French War , or the War of the Austrian Succession, was foolishly begun in Germany, and foolishly ended in Europe, Asia, and America. The peace which came without honour settled nothing as regarded the questions at issue in America. In reality this treaty guaranteed another American war. Louisburg was again handed over to the French in exchange for Madras. All prisoners in the three continents were to be released without ransom, and a return of all conquered territory and property was agreed to. The balance of power now rested level on its fulcrum, ready for some fly’s weight to tilt it and cause the scale-pans to bounce.

In what part of the world first? With unspeakable disgust the raw troops and scarred veterans, and the people generally of the colonies, received the news. Not a few thought it was time to think of not only fighting their own battles, but of making their own treaties. The continental or American spirit, already a spark, was fanned almost to a flame.

Meanwhile, in home politics, New York was steadily advancing in the pathway that was to merge into the highway of national independence. To a New England writer, accustomed to the unbridled laudation of his own State and ancestry as those who led the Teutonic-American colonies in the struggle for liberty, the doings in the New York Assembly may seem “teapot-tempest politics.” To those less prejudiced, it is a noble chapter in the story of freedom, when they see an ultra-Tory British governor fast relegated to a position of impotence, though backed by the able Tory, Cadwallader Colden, while the people’s will is manifested in persistent limitation of the royal prerogative.

This was the state of affairs in May, 1750, when, on the death of Philip Livingston, Col. William Johnson was appointed to a seat in the governor’s Executive Council. The Livingstones were sturdy men of Scottish descent, descended from a Presbyterian minister who had been banished for non-conformity. Like so many of the founders of America, the Pilgrim Fathers and most of the chief settlers of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, he reinforced his democratic ideas by some years’ residence in the Dutch Republic, living gladly under the red, white, and blue flag of the United States of Holland. The Livingstones in America married into families of Dutch descent, and thereby were still further imbued with Republican ideas. Robert and Philip had been secretaries of Indian affairs, and had thus gained great favour and influence over the Iroquois. Of their descendants, one was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and others were officers in the Revolutionary army, while others are even yet adorning the annals of freedom, progress, and order.

Clinton was, no doubt, very glad to have, in place of a Livingstone, one who was so loyally devoted to the Crown, and so good a personal friend as Johnson near him, Johnson, however, was not sworn in and seated until 1751.

The state of affairs was growing worse and worse, and Clinton the foolish had attempted to stay the tide of democracy by having no Assembly called for two years. When, however, it met on Sept. 4, 1750, Johnson’s bills for six hundred and eighty-six pounds, for provisions sent to Oswego, were cheerfully paid; but the vote was so made that the governor’s claims were, as he thought, invaded. However, for good reasons, and fearing the loss of trade, he submitted. Could Johnson’s invaluable services have been acknowledged without also making recognition of Clinton’s pretensions, the Assembly would have been more liberal. The remarks and strictures of the biographer and eulogist of Johnson about the Dutch traders of Albany, and “the love of gain so characteristic of that nation” ( sic ) seem strange when the same love of gain was, and is, equally characteristic of Englishman, Yankee, Scotsman, Huguenot, and Quaker. No one will justify the members of the New York Colonial Assembly in all their acts, especially those which were clearly contemptible; but we cannot see that Johnson, Clinton, or the English loved either lucre or liquor any less than the Albany Dutchmen. Indeed, it was the well-founded suspicion that Clinton was using his office largely to recoup his broken fortunes that made the representatives resist him at every point. Johnson, however, finding that the Assembly and the governor could never be reconciled, and that his first bill of two thousand pounds would be likely, under existing circumstances, to remain unpaid, resigned his office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To his Iroquois friends he announced this step by sending wampum belts to all the chief fortified towns of the Confederacy.

Neither war nor peace had settled the question of the boundary lines between the French and English possessions in America. The French claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys by right of prior discovery by La Salle and others. The English based their ownership on occupation by the Iroquois or their vassals, and because the Five Nations were allies of Great Britain. Both parties now began anew to occupy the land. The race was westward through the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. The starting-points were from tidewater Virginia and from Montreal. Not on parallel lines, but toward the apex of a triangle, and straight toward collision, the movement began. The Ohio Company was formed with a grant of six hundred thousand acres by the English Government, chiefly to speculators in Virginia. George Washington was one of the first to be smitten with the fever of speculation, and to the end of his days he made investments in the Western lands as eagerly as many do now in Western farm mortgages.

La Gallissonière instructed Celoron de Bienville, one of the four famous brothers of a remarkable family, to occupy definitely the Ohio Valley in the name of Louis XIV., King of France. Like a sower going forth to sow, Bienville went in a canoe with a sack full of leaden plates, depositing one in the soil at the mouth of every important tributary, so as to publish to the world that from the source of the Ohio to its mouth, the country watered by it belonged to France. Up to 1891 several of these plates have been dug up,—coming thus to resurrection like faint memories of vanished dreams.

While thus the lines of empire were once more drawn between Celt and Teuton, the same masters again held the key to the situation,—the Iroquois. To win these over to French alliance or vassalage, all the arts of peace were now to be employed by the ablest intellects employing the strongest forces of religion, education, diplomacy, cunning, and material gifts. France with her compact military and religious system in America was a unity. Soldier, priest, and semi-feudal tenant were parts of one machine moved by one head. With the unity of a phalanx and the constrictive power of a dragon, she expected to crush to atoms, or at least coop up between mountains and sea, the English colonies. The heterogeneous collection of people from north continental and insular Europe, of many languages and forms of religion, dwelling between the Merrimac and the Everglades, were held together only by the one tie of allegiance to the British Crown.

Francis Picquet, priest, soldier, and statesman, saw the necessity of securing the loyalty of the Six Nations; and receiving the French Governor’s assent, established himself at La Presentation, on the St. Lawrence River, between Oswego and Montreal, a fort and a chapel. Ostensibly his mission was the conversion of the Iroquois. No more strategic point could have been selected. Whether for peace, war, trade, voyaging, or education and general influence, the site was supremely appropriate. When Johnson heard of the man called, according to which side of the border his name was spoken, “Apostle of the Iroquois” or “Jesuit of the West,” he was alarmed, especially when he learned that this lively hornet, Joncaire, was busy in fomenting trouble among the tribes in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. Before long, this Jean Cœur had succeeded in reviving between the Iroquois and western tribes and the Catawbas an old feud. Very soon Clinton received word from Gov. James Glenn, of South Carolina, that the Senecas were on the war-path and murdering the Catawbas. In this action the Senecas were repeating one of the numerous southern raids to which their grandfathers had been addicted, and one of which Col. John Washington, ancestor of George, assisted to repel. At Johnson’s suggestion, Clinton now invited all the tribes composing the Confederacy or in alliance with the Iroquois to meet at the ancient place of treaties,—the ground on which now stands the new Capitol at Albany,—while Clinton himself called upon the governors of all the colonies to form a plan of union for uniting the tribes and resisting French aggression. On the 28th of June, 1751, the tribes met in Albany, again to renew the covenant first confirmed by Arendt Van Curler. There were present delegates from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, and Indians from the Great Lakes, besides six Catawba chiefs and representatives of the Six Nations.

The first point made by the Iroquois was that Colonel Johnson should be reappointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs. They begged leave to try to influence him by sending a string of wampum to him at Mount Johnson. They despatched a swift footman to his house. A man is a finer animal than a horse, and, in the long run, swifter and more enduring. They chose two human soles rather than four horse’s hoofs for their messenger. Johnson met the wampum-bearer at Schenectady; but when at Albany, despite the eloquence of Clinton and the Indians, he firmly declined serving again while his salary depended upon the Assembly. He now took the oath of office and his seat in the governor’s Council. He retained this dignity while he lived.

The great council formally opened on the 6th of July, 1751. Besides the usual eloquence there was much singing, with ceremonial dances and enjoyment of that aboriginal custom and product,—the pipe and tobacco. The sucking and actual whiffing of the calumet, the metaphorical burying of the hatchet and planting of the tree of peace, signified that war was over between the Southern and Northern Indians. The confederates living above the not yet made Mason’s and Dixon’s line clasped hands across the bloody chasm with the Southerners, and peace again reigned from Pilgrim Land to the Salzburger Germans in Ogelthorpe’s country. The “late unpleasantness” was past. After the usual drinking of fire-water and distribution of presents, the council adjourned, and the Indians went home.

While the Pennsylvania traders were establishing posts on the Ohio, under British authority, the French were also busy. Early in September, from a French deserter, Johnson learned the startling news that a great fleet of canoes manned by twelve hundred Frenchmen and two hundred Adirondack Indians, had passed Oswego, bound for the Ohio. News also arrived by a Cayuga chief that at Cadaracqui a large French man-of-war was being built for the reduction of Oswego. This fort was then in command of Lieutenant Lindsay, founder of the Scottish settlement at Cherry Valley.

Johnson was in New York attending to his duties as a member of the Council, when the harassing news was received. In addition to the anxiety this caused him, he was selected by Clinton to do what proved to be a disagreeable task to himself, and in the eyes of the people’s representative a repulsive one. Indeed it seemed to them to be doing the governor’s dirty work. When the House sent to the Council an act for paying several demands upon the colony, it pleased Clinton and the Council to demand vouchers, and Johnson was sent to the Assembly to request them. The offended and angry representatives of the people declared that the demand was extraordinary and unprecedented, and declined to consider the request until the first of May. The Council, angry in turn, sent Johnson back with a bill of their own originating,—in clear violation of right precedent and propriety, “applying the sum of five hundred pounds for the management of Indian affairs and for repairing the garrison at Oswego.”

As might be expected, this bill was not allowed even a second reading, but a motion was at once passed “that it was the great essential and undoubted right of the representatives of the people of this colony to begin all bills from raising and disbursing of money,” and that the bill of the Council should be rejected. In an address to the governor it was intimated that the one thousand pounds recently voted for entertaining the Indians at the council at Albany had been used for other purposes than the public good. After four days of foolish resistance, the governor, knowing he was unable to make headway when so clearly in the wrong, passed all the bills. Then, gratifying a personal spite at the expense of the public, he dissolved the Assembly.

All this was what those who think the story of American liberty was fought out chiefly in New England would call the “teapot-tempest politics of the New York Assembly.” Yet here was the great principle upon which republican government is founded, and for which Holland revolted against Spain, and the American colonies against England; “our great example,” as Franklin declared, being the Dutch republic.

The Dutch had, centuries before, beyond the dikes of Holland, developed and fought for the doctrine of “no taxation without consent;” and Clinton, Colden, and their coadjutors were clearly in the wrong. Further, the representatives were right in hinting that Clinton and his flatterers were too anxious to improve their own fortunes, and to make the people pay for their needless junketings enjoyed in the name of public service. Those who read the local history of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys know how burdensome to the people was the silly and costly pageantry of royal governors on their travels.

Johnson, probably with his eyes needfully opened, on reaching his home after the dissolution of the Assembly, found the outlook for the ultimate occupation of the mid-continent by the English rather gloomy. The French held the frontier of New York on its three strategic lines,—Crown Point, La Presentation, and Niagara. They were now planning to plant a mission, which should mean a fort and a church, at Onondaga Lake, near which had perhaps been—if we so interpret the inscription on the Pompey stone—a Spanish settlement once destroyed by the Senecas. Even if the stone, inscribed with the symbols and chronology of Christendom, were that of a captive, it is a mournful but interesting relic.

When Johnson heard the news, the Jesuits had already succeeded in winning the consent of the chiefs even at this ancient hearth of the Iroquois Confederacy. Such a move must be checkmated at once. Despite the raw and inclement weather of late autumn, and his desire for rest and reading, Johnson determined on a journey with its attendant exposure. He set out at once for Onondaga. Summoning the chief men, he asked them, as a proof of their many professions of friendship, to give and deed to him the land and water around Onondaga Lake, to the extent of two miles in every direction from the shores, for which he promised a handsome present. Unable to resist their friend, the sachems signed the deed made out by Johnson, who handed over money amounting to three hundred and fifty pounds, and left for home. Writing to Governor Clinton, he offered the land to the Government of New York at the price he had paid. Thus were the designs of the French again foiled.

With the country at peace, and himself released from the responsibility of Indian affairs, Johnson began to indulge himself more and more in literary pursuits, the development of the Mohawk Valley, the moral and intellectual improvement of the Indians, and the social advantage of the white settlers. He had already a pretty large collection of books from London in his mansion, but he sent an order, August 20, 1752, to a London stationer for the “Gentlemen’s Magazine,” the “Monthly Review,” the latest pamphlets, and “the newspapers regularly, and stitched up.” He persuaded many of the Mohawks to send their children to the school at Stockbridge, Mass., founded by John Sergeant in 1741, and served after his death by America’s greatest intellect, Jonathan Edwards. His uncle, the admiral, had already given seven hundred pounds to the support of this school. Johnson’s correspondence was with the Hon. Joseph Dwight, once Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, who had married Mr. Sergeant’s widow, and was deeply interested in Indian education.

In 1753 Rev. Gideon Hawley, who had taught the children of the Mohawks, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras at Stockbridge, was sent from Boston to establish a mission school on the Susquehanna River, west of Albany. Visiting Mount Johnson, the young missionary was received by the host in person at the gate. He spent a night enjoying the hospitality, and left with Johnson’s hearty godspeed. Hawley was able to pursue his work quietly until the breaking out of the war in 1756. After serving as chaplain to Col. Richard Gridley’s regiment, he spent from 1757 to 1807, nearly a half-century of his long and useful life, among the Indians at Mashpee, Mass.

Johnson was also in warm sympathy with the efforts of Dr. Eleazar Wheelock, who since 1743, when he began with Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian, had been steadily instructing Indian youths at Lebanon, Conn. “Moor’s Indian Charity School,” as then called, was set upon a good financial basis when in 1776 Occum and Rev. Nathaniel Whitten crossed the ocean, and in England obtained an endowment of ten thousand pounds; William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, being president of the Board of Trustees. At this school, among the twenty or more Indian boys, Joseph Brant, sent by Johnson, was educated under Dr. Wheelock. Later the Wheelock school was transferred to Hanover, N. H., and named after Lord Dartmouth. On the college seal only, the Indian lads are still seen coming up to this school instead of attending Hampton in Virginia, or Carlisle in Pennsylvania. However, ancient history and tradition, after long abeyance, were revived when, in 1887, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, was graduated from Dartmouth’s classic halls.

Various other attempts were made by Johnson, especially during the last decade of his life, to interest the British authorities in Church and State in the spiritual improvement of the Indians. The evidences of his good intentions and generous purposes are seen in his correspondence. Interesting as they are, however, they bore little fruit, owing to the outbreak of the Revolution which divided both the red and the white tribes. The baronet built a church for the Canajoharie Indians, and supported religious teachers for a while at his own expense. In 1767, being a man above his sect, he would have had the Indian school, which grew into Dartmouth College, removed, and established in the Mohawk Valley. Sectarian influence and ecclesiastical jealousies at Albany prevented his plan from being carried out. The Valley was thus without a college, until Union, founded and endowed almost entirely by the Dutchmen of Schenectady, was established in 1786, free from sectarian control, as its name implies. Under Eliphalet Nott’s presidency of sixty-two years, its fame became national, and within its walls have been educated some of the most useful members of the aboriginal race called, by accident, Indians.

Admiral Warren died in Dublin, July 29, 1752, of fever; and Johnson received the news shortly before setting out to attend the Executive Council in New York, which met in October.

Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics” for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all carried out.

Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753 the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas, hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his own home.

Again the stone house by the Mohawk became the seat of an Indian council, and was enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke. Johnson, compelling them to drink the cup mingled with upbraiding and kindness, while bountifully filling their stomachs from his larder, sent them away in good humour, and most of them burning with loyalty. Besides thus manifesting his singular power over the Mohawk savages, he met the representatives of the United Confederacy at Onondaga, September 9. The result of the ceremonies, the eloquence, the smoke, and the eating was that the confederates, though sorely puzzled to know what to do between the French and the English, promised loyalty to the brethren of Corlaer. They would, however, say nothing satisfactory concerning the Catawbas, some of whose scalps, and living members reserved for torture, even then adorned their villages.

Governor Clinton had grown weary of the constant battle which he was, probably with the stolid ignorance of many men of his time and class, fighting against the increasing power of popular liberty. He saw it was vain to resist the spirit which the Dutch, Scots, and French Huguenots had brought into New York with them, or inherited from their sires, and he longed for a rest and a sinecure post in England. He liked neither the New York people nor the climate. When therefore his successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, arrived on Sunday, October 7, Clinton hailed the day as one of the happiest of his life. He shortly after sailed for home, to spend the remainder of his years in a post for which he was better fitted,—the governorship of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1761, fourteen years before the breaking out of the war which his own actions had strongly tended to precipitate. His son, Sir Henry, led the British regulars and mercenaries who were bluffed in North Carolina, driven off at Fort Moultrie, and finally won victory at Long Island. He failed to relieve Burgoyne, fought the drawn battle at Monmouth, captured Charleston, dickered with Arnold, left Cornwallis in the lurch, and returning baffled to England, shed much ink in defending himself against his critics. Another family of Clintons shed high lustre on the American name and the Empire State. One added another river parallel to the Mohawk, flowing past Johnson’s old home, and joining the waters of the Great Lakes to those of the Hudson and the Atlantic, making the city of New York the metropolis of the continent.

Sir Danvers Osborne’s career in America was a short tragedy in three acts. It lasted five days. He came to be ground as powder between the upper millstone of royal prerogative and the nether disk of popular rights. He came from an aristocratic and monarchical country, whose government believed that it was the source of power to the people, to colonists whose fathers had been educated mostly under a republic, where it was taught that the people were, under God, the originators of power. Charged with instructions much more stringent than those given to his predecessor, he was confronted in the town-hall by the city corporation, whose spokesman’s opening sentence was that “they would not brook any infringement of their liberties, civil or religious.” On meeting his Council for the first time, he was informed that any attempt to enforce the strict orders given him and to insist upon an indefinite support, would be permanently resisted. That night the unfortunate servant of the king took his own life. He committed suicide by hanging himself on his own garden wall.

De Lancey, the chief-justice, was now called to the difficult post of governor, and to the personally delicate task of serving King George and his former associates, whom he had so diligently prodded against Clinton, Colden, and Johnson. This was especially difficult, when the Assembly found, in the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, how diligently the late governor and his advisers had slandered and misrepresented them to the British Government. The good results of a change in the executive were, however, at once visible, and the Assembly promptly voted money for the defence of the frontier, for the governor’s salary, for his arrears of pay as chief-justice, for Indian presents, for his voyage to Albany, and indeed, for everything reasonable. They added a complaint against Clinton, and a defence of their conduct to the Crown and Lords of Trade, which De Lancey sent to London.

The clouds of war which had gathered in the Ohio Valley now broke, and M. Contrecœur occupied Fort Du Quesne. George Washington began his career on the soil of the State of Pennsylvania, in which his longest marches, deepest humiliations, fiercest battles, and most lasting civil triumphs were won; and on the 4th of July, 1754, honourably surrendered Fort Necessity. The French drum-beat was now heard from Quebec to Louisiana. The English were banished behind the Alleghanies, and their flag from the Ohio Valley.

It was now vitally necessary that the colonies should form a closer union for defence against French aggression and the inroads of hostile savages. The Iroquois tribes had been able to unite themselves in a stable form of federalism. Why could not the thirteen colonies become confederate, and act with unity of purpose? Besides so great an example on the soil before them, there was the New England Confederation of 1643, which had been made chiefly by men trained in a federal republic. Both the Plymouth men and many of the leaders of New England had lived in the United States of Holland, and under the red, white, and blue flag. There they had seen in actual operation what strength is derived from union. Concordia res parvæ crescunt (“By concord little things become grand”), was the motto of the Union of Utrecht, familiar to all; but in New York the republican motto Een-dracht maakt Macht (“Union makes strength”) needed no translation, for its language was the daily speech of a majority of the people.

It seemed now, at least, eminently proper that the Congress of Colonies should be in the state settled first by people from a republic, and at Albany, the ancient place of treaties, and at the spot in English America where red and white delegates from the north, east, west, and south can even now assemble without climbing or tunnelling the Appalachian chain of mountains.

By direction of the Lords of Trade, the governments of all the colonies were invited to meet at Albany, so that a solemn treaty could be at one time made with all the Indian tribes, by all the colonies, in the name of the king.

For treaty-making with the Iroquois, the most powerful of all the Indian tribes, there was only one place,—Albany. Dinwiddie, of Virginia, vainly wanted it at Winchester, Va., while Shirley, of Massachusetts, jealous of New York, and a genuine politician, wished to keep himself before the voters, and to come after the elections were over. His party was more than his province or the country. As the Indians had already, according to orders from England, been notified, the New York Assembly declined to postpone time or place.

In Albany the streets were cleaned and repaired by order of the City Council, and the delegates were given a public dinner at the municipal expense. The Congress met in the City Hall on the 19th of June, 1754, twenty-five delegates from nine colonies being present; and whether in personal or in representative dignity formed the most august assembly which up to this time had ever been held in the Western World. The colonies were named in the minutes according to their situation from north to south. All were represented, except New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The business proper began when Johnson read a paper, which was the official report of the Board of Commissioners on Indian Affairs, in which the political situation was exposed. In it propositions were made to build forts in the Onondaga and Seneca countries, with a missionary in each place; to forbid the sale of rum, and to expel and keep the Frenchmen out of the Indian castles. The speech, prepared as the voice of the Congress, was delivered June 28 to the Indians who were present, and who had to be urged by the governor to attend. After various conferences and much speech-making on either side, including an address by Abraham, a scorching philippic by King Hendrick,—both Mohawk sachems and brothers,—and the distribution of gifts, the Indians went home apparently satisfied. To the edification of delegates from some of the colonies, where Indians were deemed incapable of understanding truth and honour, they found that Governor De Lancey and Colonel Johnson treated them as honest men who understood the nature of covenants. Whereas the laws of Joshua and Moses had been elsewhere applied only too freely to Indian politics by the elect of Jehovah, the New York authorities really believed that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule had a place in Indian politics.

Other questions of vital interest to the colonies were discussed. On the fifth day of the session of the Congress, while waiting for the Indians to assemble, a motion was made and carried unanimously that “a union of all the colonies” was absolutely necessary for their security and defence. A committee of six was appointed to prepare plans of union, and from the ninth day until the end of the session this important matter was under debate. On the 9th of July the Congress voted “That there be a union of his Majesty’s several governments on the continent, so that their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.” On the 10th of July the plan was adopted, and ordered to be sent to London for the royal consideration.

How far this Albany plan of union, which looked to a Great Council of forty-eight members meeting at Philadelphia under a President-general, resembled or foreshadowed the National Constitution of 1787, we need not here discuss. Certain it is, that though the exact plan proposed was rejected, both by the colonies and by Great Britain, the spirit of the movement lived on. Between the year 1754 and that of 1776 was only the space of the life of a young man. Between the “Congress”—the word in this sense was a new coinage, dating from the meeting of colonial delegates in Albany, after the burning of Schenectady in 1690—in the State House at Albany and the one in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, the time was even less. Certain it is that the assembly of representatives of the colonies at Albany in 1690 was the first occasion of the popular use of the word “Congress” as now used, and usually written with a capital, while that in 1748 made it a word of general acceptance in the English language. Before that time and meeting it had other significations not so august; but while these have fallen away, the other and chief signification in English remains. Further, from this time forth the “Continental”—that is, the American as distinct from the British, the independent as discriminated from the transatlantic—idea grew. In common speech, the continental man was he who was more and more interested in what all the colonies did in union, and less in what the king’s ministers were pleased to dictate. More and more after the Albany Congress Wycliffe’s idea prevailed,—that even King George’s “dominion was founded in grace” and not on prerogative. More and more the legend on the coins, “Georgius Rex Dei Gratia,” faded into the nature of a fairy tale, while the idea grew that the governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. To those wedded to the idea that religion can live only when buttressed by politics, that a church owes its life to the state, this increase of democratic doctrines was horrible heresy, portending frightful immorality and floods of vice. A State without a King, a Church without politically appointed rulers and the support of public taxation, a coin without the divine name stamped on it, were, in the eyes of the servants of monarchy, as so many expressions of atheism. Not so thought the one member of the Albany Congress who lived to sign the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution of 1787,—Benjamin Franklin, who incarnated the state founded politically by Penn; nor the Quaker, Stephen Hopkins, of Rhode Island, who lived to put his sign-manual to Jefferson’s immortal document, July 4, 1776.

By the movements in Western Pennsylvania, the war had already broken out, though the diplomatists on the transatlantic side had not yet said so. By the first week in May, the raids on the northern border began by the destruction of Hoosic, within ten miles of Fort Massachusetts. The half-naked or starving refugees reaching Albany furnished a vivid object-lesson of reality. Under Johnson’s vigilance and activity, the people in the forts, block-houses, and palisaded villages were kept on guard night and day. In this work he was ably seconded by Governor De Lancey. Politics make strange bed-fellows; and the late critic and opponent, now that he occupied the seat of the person whom he had, largely out of party spirit, opposed, became a warm friend of his friend Johnson, the untiring frontiersman.

When in New York, Feb. 28, 1755, Johnson learned of the official declaration of war, and the sailing from Cork, Ireland, of General Braddock with one thousand regulars, bound for Alexandria, Va.; and to this place Johnson with Governor De Lancey made a journey. At the council held by the five royal governors, expeditions against Nova Scotia, Crown Point, Niagara, and Fort Du Quesne were planned. Johnson was again made Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and appointed as major-general to command the forces for the reduction of Crown Point.

The story of the success of one of these expeditions and the failure of two of them under Braddock and Shirley, is known to all. We may now glance at that under Johnson. After a great council held in June, attended by eleven hundred of all ages and sexes, to the devastation of Johnson’s larder, King Hendrick and many hundred fighting men promised to be ready for war. After various delays, the motley army gathered from the colonies left Albany August 8, 1755, and on the 28th Johnson reached the Lake of the Holy Sacrament. A true courtier, he changed the name given by Isaac Jogues, which had superseded the Indian term, Andiatarocte; and in honour of his sovereign George, and “to ascertain his undoubted right there,” called the beautiful water by the name it still bears. The modern fanciful name “Horicon” seems to be nothing more than a printer’s mistake, glorified by a romancer.

Parkman’s magic pen has drawn the picture of the movements of Dieskau, the German, and his French and Indian forces opposed to the provincial army, and has brilliantly described the camp and forces at Lake George, when, on the morning of Sept. 8, 1755, the Canadians, Indians, and French, numbering fifteen hundred, being, unknown to the English, only an hour’s march distant, one thousand men sallied out from the camp to capture Dieskau and his forces. The spirit of Braddock seemed to be still in the air; and the men—New England and New York militia—sallied out jauntily, expecting easy victory, but in reality to what proved “the bloody morning scout.” They were led by Col. Ephraim Williams—whose will, creating what is now Williams College, had been made a few days before at Albany—and by Lieutenant-Colonel Whiting. In three divisions the little army marched out and soon disappeared from view in the forest, just before nine o’clock a. m. The two columns, French and English, were thus approaching each other in a narrow road, like trains on a single track in a tunnel.

Not knowing what the issue might be, Johnson made preparation for all risks. He at once ordered trees felled and laid lengthwise. With these and the wagons, bateaux, and camp equipage, he constructed a rough line of defence, which faced all along the one side of the camp which an assaulting party might be reasonably expected to attack,—that is, on that side of the rough quadrangle which was parallel to the lake. At that portion fronting the road, he planted three of his heaviest pieces of cannon, one thirty-two and two eighteen-pounders. Another was posted a little way round to the left, while five howitzers of smaller calibre, with the mortars, one of thirteen-inch, and four of smaller calibre, were stationed to throw shell in the morasses and woods on the flanks. The superb artillerist, Major William Eyre, with a company of British sailors, served the guns.

The situation then was as follows: Colonel Williams’s party was marching southward along the stump-embossed road cut by Johnson’s axemen a few days before. After advancing two miles he halted for the other divisions to come up, and then moved in a solid body. With what seems incredible carelessness, neglecting to send out scouts, they moved on, Braddock-like, unsuspicious of danger, imagining that the French were miles away.

On the contrary, Dieskau’s scouts had watched their departure from the camp, and quickly reported the news to the German baron. He at once ordered his regulars to halt, and sent the Canadians and Indians into the forest, three hundred paces ahead, with orders to lie flat on the ground behind trees, rocks, and bushes, and make no noise or sign until the regulars had fired, when all were to rise and surround the English.

Here, then, was a horseshoe ambuscade in a swampy spot. It was another case of “the fatal defile.” The regulars were, to the party approaching them, invisible, for they lay behind a swell of ground. All was as silent as the grave when the head of Colonel Williams’s line entered the trap. Had it not been for the treachery of the Indians, or the warning signal of the French Iroquois to their kindred, given by the discharge of a gun,—though it may be possible that this unexpected shot was an accident,—the English would have been nearly annihilated. But before the party had passed the calks of the horseshoe at the ends of the ambuscade, the war-whoop and the countless puffs of smoke and whistling bullets told the whole story. The silent wilderness at once became hell.

Colonel Williams at once took in the situation, and mounting a rock to direct his men, ordered them to spread out on the hill to the right. He was soon shot through the head. Hendrick had fallen at the first fire. The Americans were rallied by Nathan Whiting, and retreated stubbornly, contesting the ground rod by rod, and firing from behind trees and rocks at the Canadians and Indians, who followed the same tactics. Where they met reinforcements sent out by Johnson, their firing was more steady and destructive.

It was near Bloody Pond that Lieutenant Cole and the three hundred men sent out from camp by Johnson met them, and ably covered their retreat, so that the wounded were brought in, and the main body reached the camp in good order about ten o’clock. Le Gardeur, the officer to whom Washington had surrendered a few months before, commanded the Canadian Indians in this battle, and was slain. The savages, seeing the English out of the way for the present, at once fell back to scalp and plunder the slain Americans. Dieskau ordered them off, refusing to let them stop and thus lose time. Though obeying, they were angry and insubordinate, and later in the day sneaked out of the fight, to return like dogs to their vomit of war. Dieskau ordered the bugles to sound the assembly, and re-formed his forces, hoping by a rush on Johnson’s camp to capture it at once. Unfortunately for him, he had to reckon with Indians and bush-rangers instead of with trained soldiers.

Once inside the camp, the Massachusetts men were ranged on the right, the Connecticut men on the left, with the New York and New Hampshire men between. Five hundred troops were posted on the flanks in reserve. Lying down flat on their stomachs behind the hastily thrown up barricade, they lay awaiting the enemy, whom they expected at a double-quick pace.

Everything now depended on the steadiness of the militia. The officers threatened death to all who flinched from the foe. All eyes were bent on the woods in front, and especially down the road whence they expected to see the regulars rush on them with levelled bayonets. Could raw provincials, commanded by a fur-trader and a lawyer, face the veterans of Europe?

Three long, cold iron noses poked out at them were too much for Dieskau’s Indians. The black-mouthed cannon, intercepting with their round circles a charming view of the blue lake ahead, took away the courage of the bush-rangers, and both reds and whites scattered and took to the woods. To the exasperation of Dieskau, all his life used to regular military formations, his great host melted away from his sight in the undergrowth and behind trees; where, now creeping forward, now squatting or lying, they began a dropping fire in the front and on the flanks of the Americans. In traditional European style, the French regulars, in white uniforms and with glittering bayonets, marched up and delivered their volleys from double ranks.

Platoon-firing was then the orthodox method of war. The long, thin lines of battle which now obtain in the field, and which the Americans taught to Europe, were not then known to men accustomed to the cleared land and level fields of the Low Countries, and of Europe generally. Soon moving forward into the clearing, and deploying to double width, the regulars fired by platoons of three lines,—the first file of men kneeling down, and the rear, or third file, delivering their volleys over the shoulders of those of the second line in front. Aiming too high and being too far off for the effective range of flint-lock smooth-bores, the result of their general miss was to arouse the spirits of the Americans, even to gayety. After the first hour their nerves became more steady, and they aimed with deadly effect, while the irritated and excited veterans fired too high to do much execution. When the cannon served by the sailors under Major Eyre began to tear their ranks with round shot and canister, the great gaps made among the white coats cheered the provincials still more. Gallantly dressing up, they endeavoured for many minutes to present an orderly front; but, finally, Dieskau had to break from the road, and moving to the right in the face of a murderous fire, began the attack on the three regiments of Colonels Williams, Ruggles, and Whitcomb. Here for another hour they stood their ground manfully, in the face of a fire whose rapidity and accuracy were the astonishment of Dieskau, who bravely led his troops until struck down.

The commanders on either side in this battle were wounded, and had to retire in favour of others. Johnson, shortly after the first volley of the French regulars, was struck by a ball in the thigh which made a painful flesh wound. The ball broke no bones, but was never extracted, and the lacerated nerves troubled him more or less all his life thereafter. He retired to his tent, and Gen. Phineas Lyman took command, cheering his men, and exposing himself with reckless bravery both behind and outside the barricade. In fact, this battle of Lake George was Lyman’s battle, and was largely Lyman’s victory.

Dieskau had bravely led his men during several hours, but while giving an order to his Indians to move farther to the left, he approached so near the intrenchments that he received, from an American standing behind a tree, his first wound. Ordering the Chevalier de Montreuil to take command, and to order retreat if necessary, then to do his best, and to send men to remove him, Dieskau crawled near a tree and sat with his back against it. One Canadian sent to remove him was picked off by an American, and fell across the baron’s wounded knee. The other went off for assistance; but soon after his disappearance the retreat was sounded. A renegade Frenchman, on the American side, then approached within twelve paces of the German baron, and deliberately shot him, the bullet traversing his hips. Dieskau had received, in all, five wounds.

Blodget, a sutler in Johnson’s army, stood like a war-correspondent on the hill near by, watching the fighting. He was thus enabled to make a sketch of the battle, which he published as a cheap print, “with a full though short history,” some weeks afterward, in Boston. Even the wagoners, in the intervals between carrying to Surgeon Williams the wounded who lay on the ground behind the log-house, took their part in fighting; each probably doing as much execution as the average farmer’s boy. For, despite the hot fire so long maintained, the number of killed and wounded on the enemy’s side, except among the French regulars whose white uniform made them easy targets, was not very great. It was not easy to hit men ensconced behind trees or stumps, or occasionally rising in the smoke above the underbrush, while the enemy could, during most of the time, see only here and there a head. The Mohawks in the camp were mostly useless, except to keep up yelling while their white brothers fought beyond the breastworks; and they enjoyed seeing how the pale faces fought. Nevertheless, about forty of their number lost their lives during the day in ambuscade and battle.

While this attack of the regulars on the right was progressing, the French Canadians and the Abenaki Indians boldly attempted to flank the left of the camp, many of them even going away round toward the lake, and clustering in a morass where the musketry fire could not well reach them. Fortunately, however, Johnson had posted a field-piece advantageously on the extreme left of his front, which now harassed the squatting Indians, while on those in the marsh the mortars and howitzers were trained. Although the howitzers split and became useless, the mortars did well; and some shells skilfully dropped drove the lurking enemy away, and completely relieved this flank of danger.

Brave as were the Americans behind the rude barricade, they did not excel the French regulars, who fought until they were nearly annihilated. It was well into the afternoon when they were deserted by hundreds of French forest-rangers and Canadian Indians, who, seeing no hope of winning the day, skulked away to the scene of the morning’s ambuscade,—the one set to plunder, and the other to scalp the slain. About four o’clock so many of the white-coated regulars were prone on the ground and so few in action, all their officers being disabled, while the fire of the others had slackened, that the Americans began to get out of their breastworks, and to fight in the woods. This made the French give way so visibly that the whole of Lyman’s force rushed out on the enemy with their hatchets and clubbed muskets, pushing them out of ambush into full retreat. This onset took place between four and five o’clock p. m. , and resulted in completely driving the enemy off the field.

The fighting was not yet over, for the third battle on this eventful day was yet to take place. Hearing the distant firing, Colonel Blanchard, of Fort Lyman, sent out a party of two hundred and fifty men under command of the brave Captain McGinnis, who, with his Schenectady men, led the van. Warily approaching the place of the morning’s ambuscade, with scouts ahead, they succeeded in getting between the piled-up baggage of the French army and a vidette of five or six men who were keeping a lookout on a hill. Moving farther up the road, they found a party of three hundred French and Indians, consisting of those who had plundered the slain, and of other remnants of the beaten army, who were eating cold rations out of their packs. They sat along Rocky Brook and the marshy pond. McGinnis and his men approached stealthily until within firing distance, and then, after a volley, charged like tigers upon their prey.

In the fight which ensued the Americans contested against heavy odds; but although their brave captain was mortally wounded, he directed their movements till the firing ceased, and the third battle of this eventful day resulted in victory. Not till the next evening did the scattered band of Dieskau’s army meet, exhausted and famished, at the place where they had left their canoes.

The next day the marshy pool, in places reddened with the blood of the slain, thrown into it to save burial, was given the name—which it ever afterward kept—of “Bloody Pond.” When the writer saw it, in 1877, the sunbeams danced merrily on its dimpled face, as the snow-white and golden pond-lilies were swayed by the morning’s breeze, rippling the water’s surface, while yet held at anchor beneath. In this threefold battle the Americans lost most heavily in the “bloody morning scout” at the ambuscade,—their total being two hundred and twenty killed, and ninety wounded. The well-plied tomahawks, after the surprise in the woods, and the poisoned bullets of the French Canadians accounted for the disproportionate number of the dead over the wounded. Among the officers were Colonel Williams, Major Ashley, Captains Keys, Porter, Ingersoll, and twelve others. Captain McGinnis died in the camp two days afterward. Of the Indians, beside Hendrick, thirty-eight were slain. On the French side the loss must have been fully four hundred, or probably one third of those actually engaged.

In this battle farmers and traders prevailed over European troops, trained woodcraftsmen, and fierce savages. The honours of the command belong equally to three men. The credit of the defences, and the excellent disposition of marksmen, artillery, and reserves, belongs to Johnson, who, unfortunately, was wounded in the hips in the first part of the battle, and had to leave the field for shelter. The command then devolved upon Gen. Phineas Lyman, who deserves equal honour with Johnson. The Connecticut general, cool and alert, displayed the greatest courage, and was largely influential in securing the final result. To McGinnis belongs the credit of winning a victory,—the second of the day, in what may be called the third battle of this eventful 8th of September. Nevertheless, such are the peculiarities of the military mind, that Johnson never mentioned Lyman’s name in his official despatch. For this reason, and because they unjustly suspected cowardice in Johnson during the battle, and because they saw comparatively little of him before and after it, withal being sectional and clannish in their opinions, Johnson was extremely unpopular with the New England soldiers. Their judgments have mightily influenced the accounts of the threefold battle of Lake George as found in the writings of New England annalists and historians.

Johnson was at once rewarded by being made a baronet, with the gift of five thousand pounds, while Lyman received the ordinary stipend of his rank,—another ingredient in Johnson’s unpopularity in the Eastern colonies.

Three days after, the Iroquois allies waited on Johnson and informed him that, according to custom, after losing comrades in battle, they must return home to cheer their people, and protect their castles against the Abenaki Indians, from whom they feared an attack. It was in vain that Johnson tried to show them that the campaign had hardly begun, and to persuade them to alter their purpose. They insisted on going away, promising, however, to come again soon with fresh zeal.

Dissensions and jealousies between the troops of the various colonies now broke out. Both the generals commanding, and the new governor, Hardy, thought that a strong fort should be built to command the water-way to Canada, by way of Lake George. Though as important for the defence of New England as of New York, the Eastern officers and men could not see the need of a fort here, and the work dragged. When finished, it was called by the courtier, Johnson, Fort William Henry, after the king’s grandson, and had a notable history. Meanwhile, owing to remissness of contractors, the petty jealousies of the officers and militia of five or more colonies, and the overcautiousness of Johnson, nothing aggressive was done. Late in November, the fort being finished, the unpopular duty of garrisoning it devolved upon a medley of six hundred men from the various colonies. The army was disbanded, and the levies marched home. Johnson resigned his commission, and returned to Mount Johnson about the middle of December. About ten days later he was in New York, enjoying, as well as his wound would allow, the parade and illumination of the city in his honour; while Dieskau languished in the Schuyler mansion in Albany, waiting for some of his many wounds to heal; and Lyman received modest honours at home. The patent of Johnson’s baronetcy was dated Nov. 27, 1755. He invested the four thousand nine hundred and forty-five pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence which came into his hands, in three per cent bank annuities.

His coat-of-arms consisted of a heart-shaped shield held and flanked on either side by an Indian equipped with feathers, medal, quiver, and bow. On the shield are three fleurs-de-lis; and on the convex band across the shield, two shells, and between them a smaller heart, on which lies an open hand supine. Above the shield a hand grasps a dart. The motto is Deo Regique Debeo . The full inscription of the blazon in the language of heraldry is given in the standard books which treat of the British peerage.

The versatile Johnson, turning from military to civil duties, remained in New York during the whole of the month of January, 1756. The men then in control of the British government, with their usual obtuseness, sent another sailor to do the work of a statesman. Sir Charles Hardy, after appointing October 2 as a day of public thanksgiving for the victory at Lake George, celebrated it himself by starting on a visit to Albany. He proposed to effect such a resumption of active military operations as would secure the main object of the great expedition,—the capture of Crown Point. His presence, however, was fruitless, and he returned to New York, November 26. Then, on the 2d of December, he met his little Parliament, and told them all about the victory of General Johnson or Baron Dieskau. The stolid Dutchmen and others were unable, as the Indian orators would say, “to see it in that light.” They could not do other than anticipate the verdict of the critical scholarship of this generation, for they looked upon the whole affair as “a failure disguised under an incidental success.” Further, instead of hearing that the English flag waved over Crown Point, and that English cannon guarded the narrows of Lake Champlain, they were asked to pay for Fort William Henry and Fort George, both of which were but an ordinary day’s horseback-ride from Albany. At the same time Sir Charles demanded in King George’s name a permanent revenue, with which to pay governors, judges, and the general expenses of the government.

To the first proposition, to pay their share of expense for forts in which all the colonies were interested, the Assembly at once responded favourably. To the second they gave a flat refusal, declaring that the idea of a permanent revenue was in direct opposition to the public sentiment of the colony.

On the same day on which the Assembly met, Governor Shirley arrived in New York. Being, by the death of Braddock, the king’s chief military representative in America, he summoned a congress of colonial governors to meet in New York December 12. With his usual extraordinary mental activity, he was full of schemes, one of which was a midwinter campaign against Ticonderoga. The congress approved of it; but the hard-headed members of the Assembly, the people generally, and Johnson, did not. With all admiration for the fussy politician, who planned superbly on paper, but somehow failed in the field, they had a sincere respect, which was, however, tempered by excellent common-sense.

As for Shirley and Johnson, they seemed always unable to work harmoniously together, the latter resenting what he believed to be the needless interference of the other. Shirley found Johnson more than a match for him in the rather acrid correspondence conducted in New York during January. Living but a few rods apart, the liveried coloured servants of these colonial dignitaries kept their soles warm in carrying despatches. In jealousy of each other, the two gentlemen were as incompatible as Siamese twins, their only common ligament being loyalty to the Crown. Johnson was determined to get and hold his commission from the Crown, and not be subject to colonial governors or assemblies. He laid the whole matter before the Lords of Trade, and aided by his friends at Court, secured a flattering verdict in his favour. In July, 1756, there came to him from his Majesty’s Secretary, Fox, a commission as Colonel, Agent, and sole Superintendent of all the affairs of the Six Nations, and other Northern Indians, with an annual salary of six hundred pounds. By orders from the same august source, the Northern colonies were prohibited from transacting business with the Indians, so that the whole matter was settled in Johnson’s hands.

Being now well intrenched in his office and authority, Johnson, with his usual versatility and vigour, turned from the duties of the desk and council-room to the activities of the field. The frontiers of New Hampshire had been harassed during the winter by prowling bands of savages, but the French now attempted a more ambitious raid. Warned by Indian runners, who had made the first part of their journey on snow-shoes from Fort Bull at the Oneida “carry,” he at once sent ammunition to the garrison of thirty men. On skates from Montreal to Fort Presentation, and thence on snow-shoes to the Oneida portage, the party of nearly three hundred Frenchmen, after ten days of gliding and stepping, appeared before the wooden fort, March 27. Their demand for surrender was met by a volley, which in return was answered by a charge, a crushing in of the gate, and a massacre of all but five of the garrison. Among the military stores destroyed were two tons of powder. About the same time the ship-carpenters at Oswego became the prey of raiding Indians from Niagara, who returned with three prisoners and twelve scalps. Forays were made by Canadian savages, even into Ulster and Orange Counties, within a day’s horse-ride of New York.

The winter was unusually mild, which caused the utter abandonment of Shirley’s expedition to Crown Point; while the numerous petty successes of the French and Indians turned the faces of the vacillating members of the Iroquois cantons toward Canada as the winning side.

Yet strange as it may seem, the New York Assembly was slow in voting supplies. The ultra-loyalists who supported Hardy, who was backed by the king and his council, now vented their maledictions upon the “foreigners” who made the cosmopolitan population of the province, and their representatives in the Assembly. All this seems strange to the average historiographer, especially to the copyist of loyalist or other writers who rely on such men as Colden, Smith, Jones, Washington Irving, and the like, for their ideas of Colonial New York and her people. There was good reason for the stubbornness of the legislators. The fact is, that the people of the province of New York were mostly descendants of the sturdy Republicans who had fought under William the Silent. They believed that the encroachments of monarchy—that is, one-man power—were more dangerous than the raids of hostile Indians. The Dutch, Germans, Scots, Irish, Huguenots, were almost a unit in their democratic ideas. This province, unlike others of the original thirteen, was not settled by people of aristocratic England, in which a republic, once begun, had gone to pieces inside of twelve years, but by men long trained in self-government and in a republic. Even their forms of church life were as nurseries for the training of men in democratic principles. To the loyalist historian, Jones, a Presbyterian seems to be a synonym for rebel, of whatever name or strain of blood. Congregationalists, fed on the rhetoric and oratory of Forefathers’ Day, find it hard to believe that the democratic idea in Church and State flourished anywhere outside of New England. The New York men were determined at all hazards—even the hazards of savage desolation—to resist any further trenching upon their rights by King George, or his subservient Parliament, or his bullying governor.

England had sent over, after Clinton, another illiterate sailor to enforce a fresh demand,—even the passage of a law for settling a permanent revenue on a solid foundation; said law to be indefinite and without limitation of time. The descendants of the Hollanders who had long ago, even against mighty Spain, settled the principle of no taxation without consent, and had maintained it in a war of eighty years, were resolved to fight again the same battle on American soil. They now set themselves resolutely to resist the demands of the Crown, and this whether Indians were in Orange County or at Niagara. Despite the protests of such incorrigible Tories as Smith, Colden, and others in the Executive Council, the people’s representatives persevered.

It is needless to say that the Assembly gained their point, and that the greatest and most lasting victory of the people in the long story of American liberty was won. A few months after, at the autumn session, the joyful news reached New York that the Crown had virtually repealed the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, which had made the colonists of New York set themselves in united array of resistance to “their most gracious sovereign.”

The war had thus far been carried on without profession or declaration. The diplomatists of London and Versailles had been as polite and full of smooth words as if profound peace reigned. The English were following their old trade of piracy, and had captured hundreds of French vessels, and imprisoned thousands of French sailors. The French, on the other hand, were doing with England as they did with China in 1885, when they bombarded cities, treacherously got behind forts in the Pearl River, and killed thousands of Chinese, while all the time professing to be at peace. At length the British went through the formality of declaring war, May 17. On the French side, the necessary parchment, red tape, and seals were prepared, and the official ink flowed two years after blood had flowed like water.

Now at last, in Pitt, England had a premier who knew something about the geography of America; and “geography,” as Von Moltke teaches, “is half of war.” William Pitt thought the time had come for intelligent and active operations looking to the conquest of North America by the English. His first selection of men, however, was not particularly wise or evident of genius. Listening to the word of Johnson, and others in New York, he removed Shirley from the chief command, and sent out, successively, Colonel Webb, General Abercrombie, and Lord Loudon,—all of them, as it proved, failures.

The three men appointed were alike in their supercilious contempt for American militia and officers, and were all destined, through their ignorant pride, to disgust Americans with English ways, and steadily to determine them toward independence. Abercrombie, on his arrival, at once began to cast firebrands of discontent among the colonial troops by nullifying the intelligent and well-laid plans of Shirley, and promulgating the exasperating order that all regular officers were to be over those in the colonial service of the same rank. General Winslow fortunately succeeded in dissuading the Britisher from his madness, before desertions and threatened resignations became too numerous; but with the compromise that the imported soldiers should garrison the forts while the Americans went to the front. In other words, the provincials were to see and do the severest service. Abercrombie further showed his obstinacy and ignorance of affairs by billeting ten thousand soldiers on the citizens of Albany, instead of at once advancing to Oswego. He thus unwittingly helped to create that sentiment against the outraging of American homes by the forced presence of soldiers which, later, found expression for all time in the amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Abercrombie wasted the whole summer at Schenectady, which now became the headquarters of the armies. It was determined to build forts at all the portages between this town and Oswego, as well as at South Bay, to protect Fort Edward. While the boat-yards along the Mohawk River were in full activity, and stores were being collected, he employed his men part of the time in teaching the people of Albany and Schenectady how to build earthworks in European style, in digging ditches, and in putting up heavier stockades around the two towns.

One of the good things done by Parliament at this time was the formation of the Royal American Regiment of four battalions, each a thousand strong. Of the fifty officers commissioned, nearly one third were Germans and Swiss. Most of the rank and file were Palatine and Swiss-Germans in America, who enlisted for three years. None of the officers could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and the Earl of Loudon was appointed first colonel-in-chief. Loudon was succeeded in 1757 by Abercrombie, and in 1758 by Lord Amherst. Until the Revolutionary War, this cosmopolitan regiment did noble service under Stanwix, Bouquet, Forbes, Prideaux, Wolfe, and Johnson. From 1757 to 1760 we find one or more battalions of the regiment in active service in the various parts of New York. The famous Rev. Michael Schlatter, the organizer of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, was the regimental chaplain. On the 15th of June, 1756, the forty German officers who were to raise the recruits arrived, one of the ablest being Colonel Bouquet. This Swiss officer, with the Germans, at Bushy Run in Pennsylvania largely retrieved the disasters caused by Braddock’s defeat, and restored the frontiers of Pennsylvania to comparative safety and comfort.

While Abercrombie, who was one of those military men whose reliance is less upon the sword than the spade, was digging ditches in Albany, Johnson was arranging for a great Indian council at his house on the Mohawk. He had in view the double purpose of winning the Delawares and other Pennsylvania tribes from war against the English colonists, and of inducing all the Northern Indians to join in the expedition against the French posts on Lake Ontario. Braddock’s defeat had been the signal for the Delawares, under the direct influence of the French, to break the peace of more than seventy years, and to scatter fire and blood in Pennsylvania, from the Monongahela to the Delaware. The solemn treaty of Penn—which Voltaire, with more wit than truth, declared was “never sworn to and never broken”—was now a thing of the past. The wampum was unravelled, and the men with hats and the men with scalp-locks were in deadly conflict. While the Friends remained at their Philadelphia firesides, the German and Scotch settlers on the frontier bore the brunt of savage fury. When public action was taken, it was in the double and contradictory form of peace-belts of wampum sent by the Friends, and a declaration of war by Governor Morris. In this mixed state of things it was hard for Johnson to know what to do. Through his influence the Iroquois, uncles and masters, had summoned by wampum belts their nephews and vassals to the great conference which was opened at his house in February, 1756. To prepare for this, Johnson had made a journey to the council-fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga, arriving June 15. There he succeeded in neutralizing in part the work done by the French, and obtained an important concession. The Iroquois voted to allow a road to be opened through the very heart of their empire to Oswego, and a fort to be built at Oswego Falls.

These severe exertions cost Johnson a fit of sickness; but on the 7th of July he met the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawanese at his house. After the usual consumption, on both sides, of wampum, verbosity, and rum, all the Indians were won over to the English cause. The covenant chain of peace was renewed, the war-belts were accepted by the sachems, and medals hung around their necks by Johnson himself. The Delawares had “their petticoats taken off,”—or, in other words, they were no longer squaws in the eyes of the Iroquois, but allies, friends, and men. Without detracting from Johnson’s reputation, it is probable that the possession by many of the Delawares of the rifles made by the Pennsylvania Swiss and Germans, which gave them such an advantage over Dutch and English smooth-bores, had much to do with winning the respect of the Iroquois.

Through Johnson’s influence two councils were held in Pennsylvania, at Easton, when the Delawares under their great chief, Teedyuscung, met delegations of the Iroquois and Governor Denny. Teedyuscung had for his secretary “the Man of Truth,” Charles Thompson, master of the Friends’ Free School in Philadelphia. The proceedings lasted nine days; Denny by his tact being able “to put his hand in Teedyuscung’s bosom and draw out the secret” of his uneasiness. The council was adjourned to Lancaster in the spring of 1757, when, however, the Delaware chief failed to appear. Nevertheless peace was obtained on the Pennsylvania borders, the credit for which was claimed by the Senecas.

To turn now to the field of war, we find that Governor Shirley had organized a corps of armed boatmen, and had sent them under Colonel Bradstreet to Oswego. Bradstreet was successful in thus provisioning the forts with a six months’ store for five thousand men. After his brilliant exploit he was attacked on his way back, three leagues from the fort, by De Villiers with eleven hundred men. Despite the sudden fury of the attack, Bradstreet beat off the enemy with loss, only a heavy rain preventing his gaining a greater victory. Reaching Albany, he urged General Abercrombie to march at once to the forts. A large expedition under Montcalm was already on its way to remove these, the chief obstacles to their plans of empire. Johnson in person seconded Bradstreet’s appeal, urging that if Oswego fell, the Iroquois would be sure to join the French. Abercrombie stupidly refused to move until Lord Loudon’s arrival, and the golden opportunity was lost.

This slow-minded personage, Lord Loudon, the Scotsman, reached Albany on the 29th of July; but correct ideas as to the situation percolated into his brain with difficulty. Indeed, as with Sydney Smith’s proverbial joke about the Scotchman’s skull, it seemed necessary to perform a surgical operation in order to show him how needful it was to march at once to Oswego, notwithstanding that Montcalm with his host was daily approaching.

While Loudon was fooling away his time in jealousy of the provincial militia, and sending a force in the wrong direction at Crown Point, Montcalm with three thousand troops and plenty of cannon, part of which had been captured from Braddock, settled himself before Oswego. Of the three forts garrisoned by Shirley’s and Pepperell’s regiments of New England men, only one was able to stand a protracted siege. All assembled in this fort, Ontario, and fought gallantly until Colonel Mercer was cut in half by a cannon-shot. Then a panic ensued. The one hundred women in the fort begged that the place should be surrendered, and the white flag was shortly afterward hoisted. The forts were burned, and the place left a desolation, in which the priest, Picquet, set up a lofty cross, and beside it the arms of France. The French were now masters of Lake Ontario, and of the passages by land and water to the Ohio, and free to attack the Lake George forts. They found themselves enriched to the extent of sixteen hundred prisoners, one hundred and twenty cannon, six ships of war, three hundred boats, three chests of money, besides a great quantity of provisions and the stores of war. The destruction instead of the occupation of the forts was a master stroke of policy in favor of conciliating the Six Nations.

In this affair Montcalm showed the nobility of his nature in protecting, at the hazard of his life, the prisoners from massacre. When the Indians, filled with rum, had turned into devils, and were sinking their hatchets in the brains of the unarmed, Montcalm, as the eyewitness John Viele of Schenectady on his return testified before Johnson, ordered out his troops and fired on the brutes. Six of the drunken savages were shot dead. The murdering ceased at once, and there was no massacre.

Loudon the lazy had finally awaked to the situation, and sent General Webb with twelve hundred men to reinforce Oswego. At the Oneida portage Webb heard of the surrender, and hoping to delay the French who were advancing, as he supposed, on Albany, he had some trees chopped down to delay their boats. He then hastily retreated to the fort at German Flats. Johnson, at Albany, heard the news August 20, and under Loudon’s orders, with two battalions of the Valley militia and a corps of three hundred Indians, hastened to reinforce Webb. Remaining in camp fifteen days, until hearing of the removal of the French, he dismissed the militia and returned home.

So passed another year of failure. John Campbell, Scotsman, otherwise called Earl of Loudon, had been sent out as the representative of Lord Halifax and of the Lords of Trade. Having decided to unite all the colonies under military rule, and force them to support a standing army, they selected this man, who was strong in the idea of colonial subordination, but was vacillating, incapable, vain, wasteful, and lazy. His first winter campaign consisted chiefly in scolding Shirley, and making the Massachusetts governor the scapegoat for his own shortcomings; in disgusting the people of New York by billeting his officers upon them; and in both New York and Boston diligently hastening the separation of the colonies from Great Britain by making a fool of himself generally.

With the regulars in winter quarters, the militia dismissed to their homes, the whole frontier, except in the Lake George region, open and exposed, five of the Six Nations practically alienated from the English and already making terms with the French, the outlook was dark.

However, the Mohawks were faithful; and Johnson took heart, believing he could yet win and hold the Iroquois. Sending his captains, the two Butlers, and Jellis Fonda to the various castles, and to the fireplace of the Confederacy at Onondaga, he appointed a great council to meet, June 10, 1757. Meanwhile he sent the Mohawks out upon the war-path, and had the satisfaction of hearing of the repulse of the French and the safe defence of the Fort William Henry which he had built two years before at Lake George. Major William Eyre, the ordnance officer who had served the guns so efficiently at the battle of Lake George against Dieskau’s regulars, was in command of the fort, with four hundred men. The commander of the American rangers, with Eyre, was John Stark. The long and dreary winter was nearly over, and Saint Patrick’s Day was at hand. The French knew as well that the Irish soldiers would be drunk on the 18th of March, as Washington knew that the Hessians would be unfit for clear-headed fighting the day after Christmas. Fortunately, through the thoughtfulness of the future hero of Bennington, his own rangers were kept sober by enforced total abstinence, and the Irish had the rum and drunkenness all to themselves. The French force of fifteen hundred regulars, wood-rangers, and savages came down the lakes on the ice, dragging, each man, his sledge containing provisions, arms, and various equipments, among which were three hundred scaling-ladders. They began a furious attack at sunrise on the 18th, expecting easy victory; but Eyre used his artillery with such deadly effect that despite four separate attacks within twenty-four hours, the expedition ended in total failure. Seized with a panic, the besiegers fled, leaving their sledges and much valuable property behind, besides their dead.

Johnson first heard of this event in a letter from Colonel Gage,—him who married an American wife, and afterward occupied Boston with the redcoats, only to be compelled to leave it at the request of Washington, his old comrade-in-arms on Braddock’s Field. It is a curious coincidence that Colonel Gage has unwittingly furnished Yankee Boston with a public holiday in honour of Ireland’s patron, Saint Patrick,—which the Irish majority in the Boston City Council first inaugurated in 1890, under the disguise of “Evacuation Day.” The date which the Frenchmen chose for their approach to Fort William Henry was the date also on which Gage, in 1775, sailed away to the land whence the Canadians had come in 1757.

Johnson’s tremendous energies now shone forth. He at once summoned the Mohawk Valley militia, and sent his trusty interpreter, Arent Stevens, to rouse the Mohawks. The meeting-place was at his house. The news came on Sunday the 24th; and on Monday, at daylight, the column of twelve hundred militia and the Indians were on the march which in less than four days brought them to Fort William Henry.

Finding the enemy gone, Johnson allowed his men two days’ rest, and was about to start homeward, when hearing that the French meditated a blow on the frontier village of German Flats, he kept in the saddle all night, reaching home at four a. m. Fortunately the news was not confirmed; but he nevertheless ordered the militia to Burnet’s Field, and made his headquarters there. This energetic action had a good effect upon the Iroquois who had been invited to the grand council at Fort Johnson, as his house was now called, and on the 10th of June the proceedings were duly opened. The result of the ten days’ conference was that the neutrality of the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas was secured; while the three other tribes—the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Mohawks—were heartily enlisted to fight for the English against the French.

Summer passed away in Johnson’s despatching Indian parties to Canada; in Governor Hardy’s returning to the more congenial quarter-deck, exchanging civil for naval life; in Loudon’s making a grand failure at Louisburg, as usual blaming the colonial officers and troops for his own blunders; and in the shameful loss of Fort William Henry through the cowardice of General Webb.

Johnson had warned Webb of the coming of Montcalm with nearly eight thousand men, including a body of Indians said to be gathered from forty-one tribes. On the 1st of August, while holding a council with the Cherokees at his house, he received news from General Webb that Montcalm was moving down upon Colonel Monro, who with two thousand men occupied the fort and adjoining camp. Johnson at once adjourned the council, and summoning the militia and Mohawks, quickly reached Fort Edward, and begged to be sent to reinforce Monro. The double-minded Webb at first consented, and then ordered him back. Within sound of the cannon, Webb held back his whole force, and sent Monro a note advising him to surrender. Only when his ammunition was nearly exhausted, his heavy cannon burst, three hundred of his men killed or wounded, many others helpless with small-pox, and the outlook hopeless, did Monro surrender. As usual, the Indians, many of them from tribes utterly unused to any control, got at the rum-barrels, and were converted into devils, whom Montcalm in vain endeavoured to control, until after they had butchered scores of Monro’s unarmed people, including women and children. The fort and barracks were burned, and on great heaps of the fuel thus obtained the bodies of the slain were given cremation.

Webb, almost scared out of his wits, would have moved southward to West Point, but that Lord Howe, who had arrived with reinforcements, calmed him. Almost as a matter of course, the blame was laid by the British officers and regulars on the provincial troops. This military bigotry, and the inveterate prejudice of the regulars against volunteers had a tremendous effect in making the native-born militia suspect that they could some day do without the supercilious and conceited king’s servants. They saw that most of the hard fighting had been done by militiamen at the front, who, notwithstanding the immense resources of Great Britain, were not properly supported at the right time. They were tired of being led to the slaughter by fussy, incompetent, and often cowardly commanders. They noted, also, that the regulars were mostly kept in garrison, while the militia were sent to the front, where, usually in battle with the Indians, the Americans stood their ground, fighting behind trees, while the handsomely uniformed regulars were flying to the rear. Further yet, the regulars stationed in the forts in the Mohawk Valley were so arrogant and conceited as to look—as the average Englishman is so apt to do—upon the Dutchmen and Germans as a sort of inferior cattle. The consequence was that they were practically useless as defenders.

Johnson was so heartily disgusted with the state of affairs that it is probable that his sickness in October and November was a direct result of exposure in camp, and distraction of mind. He knew that the French would now at the first opportunity strike the western frontier. He therefore wrote to Abercrombie in September, to reinforce the Valley forts and send scouts and rangers to German Flats. All such warnings, however, were like “an east wind in an ass’s ears.” Abercrombie and his men drilled, drank, swore, gambled, dug ditches, and caricatured the Dutch people in church, and otherwise amused themselves in Albany. At German Flats the long strain of duty in watch and ward resulted in the inevitable reaction; and when the danger was greatest and nearest, the nerves relaxed, the midnight lantern went out, and the sentinel and people alike slept. The friendly Oneidas informed the Germans, fifteen days in advance, of the enemy’s movements. A week later, a chief came in person to warn them; but the people took it as a joke, laughed in his face, and sent no word to Johnson. Tired of hearing the cry of “wolf,” they neglected to provide for their sheep. Despite the fort, the block-houses, and the militia company of one hundred men, the blow fell. Fortunately the minister and some of his people heeded the friendly warning of the Oneidas, and the day before the attack, crossed the river to a place of safety. Those left were infatuated until the last moment.

It was on the morning of Nov. 13, 1757, that the Canadian, Belletre, and his three hundred white and red savages surrounded the doomed village, raised the yell, and began the attack. The people were dazed. After some fitful musketry-firing, the Indians succeeded in setting the houses on fire, and in tomahawking and scalping the people as they rushed out of the flames. One of the block-houses was surrendered by the head man of the village, who asked for quarter. Numbers of the people were killed as they ran out to the fording-place of the river to escape to the opposite side, or were shot while in the water. The settlement was totally destroyed. Of the three hundred people, a sixth were killed and one half taken prisoners; the remainder escaped, or had already fled to Fort Herkimer. The abundant live-stock was destroyed or driven off, and the place left in ashes. All this was done almost under the eyes of the commander of Fort Herkimer, but a short distance off, across the Mohawk River. Having a small garrison, he, though fully warned by Oneida Indians of the coming blow, was unable to send assistance, and perhaps anticipated an attack on his own post.

The people of Stone Arabia and Cherry Valley were excited, and prepared to leave these places when the escaped refugees brought the news. Lord Howe, with his reinforcements, though too late for action, prevented the depopulation of the settlements.

The sage Lord Loudon heard of this latest disaster while in Albany, and his conduct was characteristic. Eager to find a victim on whom to vent his rage and to bear his own and his officers’ shortcomings, he blamed the Iroquois, and even proposed to make war against them. It was, probably, only by the active persuasion of Johnson that he was turned from his madness.

Imagination vainly seeks to picture the results had Loudon, the grand master of Great Britain’s resources, even begun his folly, and broken the peace league which Van Curler had made, Schuyler extended, and Johnson perfected. Had he practically betrayed his country by turning the whole Indian power of the continent over to the French, the history of this country would have been vastly different from that we know. Had Johnson done nothing else than prevent this, he would deserve a high place among the Makers of America.

It is hard for Americans to realize that the French and Indian War was more costly to Great Britain than was the War of the American Revolution. As matter of fact, the British Government sent a larger total of soldiers and sailors, and spent more blood and treasure in defending the colonies and in wresting North America from the French, than in endeavouring to coerce the revolted colonies. Though in the various attempts at the reduction of Canada, no large armies like those of Burgoyne or Cornwallis were lost by surrender, yet the number of men slaughtered in siege and battle was greater, and the expeditions being in the wilderness were much more costly. To throw a bomb into the Niagara fort was like dropping a globe of silver; to fire canister, like scattering a Danæan shower of guineas; while every effective bullet required an outlay of pounds, as well as of shillings and pence.

Before the decision of the long controversy between Latin and Teutonic civilization in America, at the fall of Quebec, another terrible disaster, caused largely by British arrogance and contempt of American experience, remains to be recorded. This time it was to be linked not with the name of Braddock or Loudon, but with that of Abercrombie.

Under the quickening touch of the master-hand of Pitt, who knew the topography of America, and had appointed the “young madman” Wolfe to supersede Loudon, Louisburg, Ticonderoga, and Fort Du Quesne were chosen as points of attack. Of the three expeditions planned, Abercrombie was chosen to lead that which was to move to Canada by the great water-way of Eastern New York.

We need not here repeat the oft-told story of the capture of Louisburg by Amherst and Wolfe; or that of the fall of Fort Du Quesne, which Washington named Pittsburg. Tremendous enthusiasm was kindled in the colonies at the news of these successes. In England, when the stands of French colours, after being carried through the streets of London and laid at the feet of King George, were hung up in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the whole nation took fresh courage, and believed final victory near. The name of the dashing and spirited Wolfe was on every tongue; though the other heroes were not forgotten. In New England the names of the successful British leaders were made monumental in geography. Such places as Wolfboro, Amherst, Boscawen, and many others on the map, almost as numerous as the grains shaken from a pepper-box, testify to popular gratitude and enthusiasm.

A different story is that of Abercrombie’s expedition. For the reduction of the French fortress on Lake Corlaer, or Champlain, the largest army ever gathered on the continent was encamped on the shores of Lake George. Of the sixteen thousand men about three fifths were brilliantly uniformed British regulars. For the first time the pavonine dress of the bare-legged Highlanders was seen on large bodies of men on this side of the Atlantic. Among the American militia officers were Stark, Putnam, Bradstreet, and Rogers. The following of Sir William Johnson was three hundred Indians. In over one thousand boats, with banners and music, the host moved down the lake, making a superb pageant. In the first skirmish in the woods between Lake George and Ticonderoga, the gallant Lord Howe was killed. With Howe, fell the real head and leading mind of the expedition for the capture of Fort Carillon, or Ticonderoga. Without waiting for his artillery, which, being loaded on rafts, came more slowly, Abercrombie, on the morning of July 8, ordered an attack on the French abattis which had been made by Montcalm, two hundred yards in front of the fort itself.

This movement was against the advice of John Stark, who saw in the Frenchman’s line of defence a solid breastwork of logs. He knew, also, that the trees, cut down and laid with their branches outward over the space of three hundred feet in front of the breastwork, would throw the attacking platoons and columns out of order. With Braddock-like contempt for a provincial captain’s advice, Abercrombie, forgetting how the rude brushwood defence at Lake George had enabled the militia to repulse Dieskau’s regulars, ignored the hints given by Stark. Taking care to remain safely at the saw-mills, some distance in the rear, Abercrombie sent forward his men in four columns.

It was but a few minutes before all formations were hopelessly lost in the jungle of brushwood. When Highlanders, rangers, British, and Yankees were well entangled, sheets of fire issued from a line of heads behind the log breastwork, while the French artillery also played bloody havoc. Abercrombie, hearing of the initial disaster, left the saw-mills and made off with himself to the boat-landing; thence, issuing his orders for attacks on the left, the right, and the centre. For five hours, without flinching, the victims of military incompetence furnished food for French powder, and then broke into disorderly retreat. The whole army followed their commander, and, when at the boats, would have sunk them in their mad rush, but for the coolness and firmness of Colonel Bradstreet. It is said that the French found, stuck in the mud, five hundred pairs of shoes.

The Highlanders—old retainers of the Stuarts, but organized by Pitt to fight for the Guelphs—lost in this battle one half of their number. The total loss of the English was nearly two thousand men. Montcalm, the skilful soldier, covered himself with glory. The Indians under Johnson, being on the top of a hill, took no part in the fight, though active as spectators.

Abercrombie retreated to the site of Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George. The wildest rumours of the advancing victorious French army now prevailed at Albany and in the Valley; but Johnson did much to allay fear and restore confidence by sending out the militia, doubling the guards, and garrisoning the forts and block-houses. Largely through his earnest appeals, in person, to Abercrombie, General Stanwix was sent with a large force to build a spacious fort at the one place where direct boat navigation between Schenectady and Oswego is interrupted. This portage of four miles—reduced to one mile by ditching and clearing out the streams—was between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, and made a point of highest strategic importance. The fort—which was built and named Fort Stanwix—had afterward a notable military history.

From this point Colonel Bradstreet, having obtained by a bare majority in a council of war permission to attack Fort Frontenac, which for three years he had longed to do, set out with twenty-seven hundred militia, eleven hundred of whom were from New York. Johnson, who had sent Capt. Thomas Butler with forty-two Indians, received from him, under date of August 28, 1758, the joyful news of Bradstreet’s complete victory, which, all considered, compensated for the disaster of Abercrombie. It cleared Lake Ontario of all French shipping, and was in relative influence and importance fully equal to Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, over half a century later. None rejoiced more than the sons and grandsons of the victims of the Schenectady massacre of 1690, which had been instigated by Frontenac, after whom the fort had been named.

During this year Johnson was unusually active with the Indians, in holding their loyalty to the British side or in maintaining their neutrality. Many gatherings were held at his own house. In the great council held at Easton, Penn., in October, 1758, five hundred Indians were present, including delegates from all the Six Nations, the Shawanese, Miamis, and Moheganders. The principal figure was Teedyuscung, who insisted on his people being treated with the same dignities accorded to the Iroquois. Indeed, if the explanation of the Delawares be accepted, they had, in times long before, and at the earnest request of the Indians both north and south of them, voluntarily and by solemn treaty assumed a subordinate position as warriors and refrained from war, in order to preserve peace, trade, and the general good of the whole community of red men. They claimed, however, that it was Iroquois overreaching in diplomacy and even downright treachery, that made them seem to “accept the petticoat” and become “squaws.” It is certain that Teedyuscung made it the aim of his life to secure for his people the respect of the Iroquois and their equality with the proudest of the red men. The Easton council lasted nineteen days, and was productive of harmony both between the Indians and the whites, and among the varied tribes themselves. The one who contributed most to this gratifying success was not Johnson, but the honest German and Moravian, Christian Post, who from his home in the Wyoming Valley had made a journey and mission of peace, alone, among the tribes in the Ohio Valley.

When Sir Jeffrey Amherst reached America as commander-in-chief of the British forces, he came at once, with his four regiments at Albany, to reinforce Abercrombie. He found at Lake George, by the end of May, twelve thousand New York and New England militia. Johnson at once urged upon him the importance of capturing Niagara, the port between the two great lakes. Amherst agreed to the proposal, and warmly seconded it. In place of the stockade which the French from the time of La Salle had maintained, there was now a formidable fort. To Sir William Prideaux was assigned the work of reducing this Western stronghold; and Johnson, in order to assist him, called a council at Canajoharie to enlist the Mohawks, Senecas, and other Indians in the expedition. After the usual eloquence and expenditure of war-belts of wampum, Johnson led into the field seven hundred warriors, whose painted faces showed they were on the war-path. The Swegatchie braves also swelled this following, so that on arriving at Niagara he wrote to William Pitt, Oct. 24, 1760, that his Indian force numbered nine hundred and forty-three men.

By the 7th of July Prideaux with thirty-two hundred men, including Johnson’s Indians, began siege operations. On the twelfth day he was killed in the trenches by the bursting of a shell from a coehorn mortar. This left the command to Johnson, who renewed operations with greater vigour, and by the 22d breached the wall sufficiently for assault.

While active in the trenches with hot shot, bombs, and canister, Johnson did not forget to keep out his scouts and rangers. From them he learned that the French officer D’Aubrey was advancing to the relief of the garrison with twelve hundred men whom he had gathered from all the four French posts on the lakes. Leaving a force to continue the bombardment, Johnson marched out with infantry and grenadiers, having the Indians on his flanks, and attacked the advancing French with vigour. In this battle the Indians fought like genuine soldiers, and threw the French into disorder. Seeing this, the charge of the regulars and militia was made with such force and fury that in less than an hour the fight was over, and a splendid victory for the English was the result.

Returning to camp and trench, Johnson sent Major Harvey to Captain Pouchot, the French commander, to tell of the defeat of D’Aubrey, and to advise capitulation, especially while it was possible to restrain the Indians. Pouchot yielded; and the surrender of the whole force of over six hundred took place the next morning. Johnson wisely had ready an escort for the French prisoners, and not one of them lost his scalp or was rudely treated by the Iroquois. While the women and children were sent to Montreal, the men were marched by way of Oswego to New York, to fill English prisons. The manner in which Johnson restrained the savages was in marked contrast to the butcheries allowed, or only with great difficulty prevented, by the French under similar circumstances.

Johnson’s victory at Niagara broke the chain of French forts along the great valleys and water-ways from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the delta of the Mississippi. One after another the French deserted the other forts, except Detroit; and General Stanwix at once occupied them or their ruins. Leaving Colonel Farquar at Niagara with a garrison of seven hundred men, Johnson came to Oswego, there meeting General Gage, who had been appointed to succeed Prideaux. Gage, perhaps irritated that the provincial fur-trader or “Heaven-born general” had, instead of himself, won the most brilliant of victories, refused to allow Johnson to advance and destroy the French forts at La Galette and Oswegatchie, or Ogdensburg. Finding that Gage, despite his advice and that of Amherst, meant to do nothing of importance until the next year, Johnson, after meeting the chief men of the Ottawa and Mississagey Indian tribes, returned home. He was now the most popular man in the province; while his name in England was joined with that of his fellow-tradesman, Clive, as a “Heaven-born general.”

At his home Johnson learned that the French had at last abandoned Ticonderoga and Crown Point, but by concentrating at the northern end of Lake Champlain and fortifying their position, blocked the British advance to Montreal. Amherst was therefore obliged to rest for the winter; having first rebuilt the great fortresses, constructed Fort George near the site of old Fort William Henry, and cut a road from the New York lakes into the heart of New England. Critics of the over-cautious Amherst say he should have pushed on and helped Wolfe to conquer Quebec earlier. However, after so many mistakes and disasters arising from rashness, such a man as Amherst was, perhaps, necessary. Wolfe, however, succeeded, and on the Plains of Abraham won America for Teutonic civilization, finding the path of glory a short one to the grave.

Montreal still remained to the French; and when, the winter over, it was resolved to attack this last stronghold from three points, Amherst with the main army assembled at Schenectady was to proceed by way of Oswego down the “ocean river” of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, General Murray was to ascend the river from Quebec, while Colonel Haviland was to advance by way of Lake Champlain. The colonial militia came in slowly; but by the 12th of June Amherst left Schenectady with twelve thousand men; while Johnson, arriving at Oswego July 25, led the first detachment of six hundred Iroquois fighting men. His influence was however so great that before embarking on Lake Ontario he had, from the tribes formerly neutral, won over seven hundred more warriors. He also sent runners with wampum belts to nine tribes of Indians living near Montreal. These, on his arrival at Fort Levi, at once declared their neutrality. It was thus from the danger of eight hundred hostile warriors, familiar with every square rod of land and water, that Amherst’s army was saved. Passing through the dangerous Lachine Rapids with the loss of but forty-six men out of his ten thousand, he reached Montreal. So perfectly was the plan of campaign carried out, that Amherst and Murray appeared on opposite sides of the city on the same day. Haldiman soon appeared from the south, and thus the three English columns became practically one army within twenty-four hours. The city surrendered on the 8th of September, 1760, and the French power in America fell.

So fully were the Indians kept in hand by Johnson, that no atrocities were committed by them, nor the enemy’s people or country in any way harmed by their presence. In this campaign, in which the talents of Johnson shone with conspicuous brilliancy, his military career culminated.

The only French post of importance now remaining was Detroit. To carry out the terms of the capitulation, and to plant the red flag with the double cross in the remote Western posts, Captain Rogers, the celebrated ranger, was sent westward on the 12th of September. At Presque Isle, about a month later, Johnson’s deputy, Croghan, and interpreter, Montour, with a force of Iroquois to serve as scouts, joined him. Passing safely through the country under the influence of Pontiac, having an interview with the great sachem on the site of Cleveland, they reached Detroit, November 29. There, in the presence of hundreds of Indians, heretofore the allies of France, the garrison marched out and laid down their arms; the great chief, Pontiac, being one of the witnesses of the memorable sight.

With the change of dominion in North America came a change in the ruler of Great Britain. King George II. died October, 1760; but this made no alteration in the relations of Sir William Johnson to the Crown. On the contrary, his sphere of influence was enlarged by his having charge of Indian affairs in Canada, and indeed in all the regions north of the St. Lawrence, in what is now called British America. In October, 1760, a new commission as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, valid during the king’s pleasure, was issued and duly received. At the request of General Amherst, Johnson now made a journey to Detroit to regulate matters, and settle various questions which had arisen in consequence of a change of masters.

Now that the contest so long, equally or unequally, waged by the two forces was over, and but one people were masters of the situation, there was no more balance of power. The Indian had lost his place at the fulcrum. As a political factor, he was suddenly reduced to an ally only, with the strong probability of soon becoming first a vassal and then a cipher. No son of the forest saw this more clearly than Pontiac, who, in the long line of red men who have vainly fought against destiny, from King Philip to Tecumseh and from Black Hawk to Sitting Bull, stands pre-eminent in genius and power as well as in the tragedy of failure.

Johnson made the western journey accompanied by Capt. John Butler, his secretary and prospective son-in-law Lieut. Guy Johnson, and a body-guard of Oneida Indians. A long line of boats carried the provisions and the Indian goods intended for gifts. Johnson’s object was to learn everything possible about the country recently held under French dominion, and about the Indians living in it. At Fort Stanwix, where the portage required several days to be spent in unloading and reloading on account of land transit, Colonel Eyre reached him with a letter from General Amherst communicating startling news. Apparently under the instigation of the Senecas, behind whom was Pontiac, all the tribes from Nova Scotia to the Illinois were being plied by wampum belts and messages, and a plot to murder the English garrisons was being hatched. Owing to the warnings given to the garrisons by Captain Campbell, the plot was, for the time at least, postponed. Johnson accordingly called a council at Onondaga, and directly charged the Senecas with dissimulation. He gave them to understand that only by their appearance in friendly council at Detroit would his suspicions be allayed and their own safety secured.

A change in Johnson’s domestic arrangements made about this time probably still further increased the prestige which he had so long enjoyed among the red men. His wife Catharine died in 1759, and for a while he illustrated in his own life the injury to morals which war, especially when successful, usually causes. He lived with various mistresses, as tradition avers, but after a year or two of such life dismissed them for a permanent housekeeper,—Mary Brant, the sister of Joseph Brant. According to the local traditions of the Valley, Johnson first met the pretty squaw, when about sixteen years old, at a militia muster. In jest, she asked an officer to let her ride behind him. He assented, returning fun for fun. To his surprise she leaped like a wild-cat upon the space behind the saddle, holding on tightly, with hair flying and garments flapping, while the excited horse dashed over the parade-ground. The crowd enjoyed the sight; but the most interested spectator was Johnson, who, admiring her spirit, resolved to make her his paramour.

From this time forth Mollie Brant, the handsome squaw, was Johnson’s companion. Her Indian name was Deyonwadonti, which means “many opposed to one.” She was a granddaughter of one of the Mohawk chiefs who had visited London a generation or two before, when “Quider,” or Peter Schuyler, had shown the King of Great Britain some of his American allies. Mary Brant was undoubtedly a woman of ability, and with her Johnson lived happily. She presided over Fort Johnson, and later at Johnson Hall. She became the mother of a large brood of Johnson’s “natural” children; and as “the brown Lady Johnson,” white guests and visitors always treated her with respect. With this new link to bind the Iroquois to him, the colonel’s influence was deepened far and wide throughout the Indian Confederacy. To strengthen his ascendancy over the minds of the Indians, Johnson seemed to hesitate at nothing.

The dangerous journey to Detroit was duly made, and after being waited on by friendly deputies of the Ottawa Confederacy, the great council was held on the 19th of September. Here, before the representatives of many Indian nations from the four points of the compass, he made a great speech, smoked the pipe of peace in the name of their Great Father the King, and distributed the presents. The ceremonies wound up with a grand dinner and ball to the people of Detroit. The return was safely made, and home was reached October 30.

During the winter of 1761, spent by Johnson in New York in pursuance of his civil duties, Dr. Cadwallader Colden, the incorrigible Tory, who was now lieutenant-governor, distinguished himself in further encroaching upon the liberties of the people, by trying to make the judiciary dependent on the Crown. Instead of the judges being appointed to hold office during good behaviour, Colden wanted them to serve at the pleasure of the king. In other words, he would, by making the king’s will the term of office, reduce the bench of judges to be the instrument of the royal prerogative. A lively discussion in the press was carried on by William Livingston, John Scott, and William Smith, as champions of the people, who contended vigourously for the principle so long regnant in the Dutch, and now prominent in the American republic,—the supremacy of the judiciary. Remembering too well how servile were the English judges who held office at the pleasure of the Plantagenets, the Stuarts, and even of Cromwell, the people of New York fought stoutly for their rights and the republican principle. When Colden desired an increase of salary for the Boston lawyer who acted as chief-justice, the Assembly flatly refused to grant it. The salary of the obnoxious Chief Justice Benjamin Pratt was finally paid out of the royal quit-rents of the province. Colden wrote to the Board of Trade prophesying the dire results of the doctrine—embodied in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States only twenty-six years later—that all authority is derived from the people. This is the doctrine on which republics are founded.

Largely due to Johnson’s influence was the passing by the Assembly of an act for the better survey and allotment of lands in the province. At the English conquest of 1664 the excellent Dutch customs of land survey, measurement, registry, and allotment had been changed for the tedious forms of English common law. In consequence, there was much confusion in regard to claims and boundaries. Large tracts of land had been granted by the British Government, under letters patent, in which the exact quantity of land given away was not stated, nor the correct boundaries named. Further, the popular methods of measurement in vogue—such as by counting off the steps made by a grown man, or by using horse-reins or bridles in lieu of a surveyor’s chain—were not calculated to insure accuracy. Not only were constant trespassings made, both with honest and dishonest intent, upon the king’s domain,—that is, the lands of the Indians,—but there were frequent troubles about the division of the great patents. The lawyers held that when the boundaries were uncertain, the title was void. The only way to settle the many disputes was to have all the patents and tracts accurately surveyed by the king’s surveyor-general, and done in so scientific a manner that his lines should be final; while the names of the patentees, the size of the patent, and the year when patented, should be matter of public knowledge. The good fruits of this piece of legislation were the removal of much of the irritation felt by the Indians, and the prevention of further encroachments on the royal lands.

In a word, close approximation was made to the methods followed in the Republic of Holland for centuries, and established in the New Netherlands by the first settlers from the Fatherland. After the Revolution, under the Surveyor-General of the United States, Simeon De Witt, a Hollander by descent, and familiar with the Dutch methods, this system, enlarged and improved, became that of the whole nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is this system, lying at the basis of the land laws of the United States, which so won the encomium of Daniel Webster in his great address at Plymouth, when he said that our laws relating to land had made the American Republic.

Some time afterward, the Mohawks, who had forgotten the covenants of the past, thereby showing the worthlessness of mere tradition or unsupported assertions freshly fabricated, claimed that “the great flat,” or large tract of fertile land near Schenectady, had not been purchased of them, but had been lent to the Dutch settlers simply as pasture-land. On their making complaint to Johnson, the documents were called for, and duly produced by the magistrates of Schenectady. The deed of sale to Van Curler and his fellow-settlers, made in Fort Orange, July 27, 1661 (“Actum in de fort ^ss Orangie den 27 ^e July A. 1661”), was first produced. On it were the signatures or marks of the sachems Cantuquo, Aiadne, and Sonareetsie, with the totem-signs of the Bear, Tortoise, and Wolf. Other papers of later date were shown, which set more definite boundaries to the patent of eighty thousand acres. Johnson declared the Schenectady men in the right. The Indians, with perfect confidence in Johnson as arbitrator, went to their bark houses satisfied.

From this time forth until the end of his life, a large part of Johnson’s time was occupied in the settlement of land disputes between whites and Indians. Ceasing to be any longer a political factor in the future development of the continent, the Indian’s course was steadily downward. Having exhausted the benefit of his service, the British and colonial governments were both only too ready to ignore the red man’s real or supposed rights. Steadily the frontiers of civilization were pushed forward upon the broad and ancient hunting-grounds of the West. In the old and thickly settled domain of the Iroquois, it was now scarcely possible for an Indian to chase deer without running into a fence or coming unexpectedly upon a clearing where the white man stood, gun in hand, to warn off intruders. The saw-mills of the pale-face spoiled the primeval forests, choked the trout-streams with sawdust, and killed the fish, even as his traps and ploughed land drove off the game. Henceforth, though Johnson’s business with the Indians was greater than ever before, it was largely matter of laborious detail and settled routine. Important as was his work to the perfecting of the results attained by the annulling of French pretensions, it would be monotonous to tell the whole story. His toil was necessary to the uniformity desirable in all the king’s dominions, yet it lacked the picturesque element dominant in his early life, and need not here be set forth. We may take notice only of the most important of his labours as examiner of claims, as advocate for the right, and as judge and decider.

After inviting the sachems of the Six Nations to assemble at his house to hear his report of the Detroit Council, he examined into the famous Kayaderosseras or Queensborough patent of several hundred thousand acres granted in 1708. This patent was one of several which the Mohawks claimed were fraudulently obtained. Johnson heard both sides fully, and decided that the Indian claim was the correct one, and that the white man was in the wrong. The result was that the alleged owner gave full release. In the matter of the lands on the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, but claimed by Connecticut, the Iroquois were so excited that they sent a delegation of five chiefs to Hartford. These were led by Guy Johnson, and bore a letter from Sir William. The Connecticut people held tenaciously to their claim, and were about to settle, to the number of three hundred families, in the Wyoming Valley. In the speech of the Onondaga orator at Hartford, after rehearsing the story of the covenant with Corlaer, and denouncing men like Lydius and Kloch, who fraudulently obtained the Indians’ land, he declared the Six Nations would resist, even unto blood, the loss of their Susquehanna lands. Governor Fitch heartily agreed with the Iroquois, and so actively seconded the royal order that the proposed settlement was, at least, postponed.

Johnson predicted in a letter to Amherst, March 30, 1763, “the dangerous consequences which must inevitably attend the settlement of these people in the Wyoming Valley.” The Susquehanna Company persevered, however, and at the council held at Fort Stanwix succeeded in getting from some of the chiefs—after Johnson had been warily approached with bribes to take the vice-presidency of the company—a title-deed to the lands. Into this beautiful valley, twenty-one miles long, and now one of the richest and most lovely in all Pennsylvania, forty families from Connecticut settled in 1769. The unsleeping vengeance of the Senecas did not find its opportunity until 1778. Then, led by Butler and his Tories, the awful massacre was perpetrated which has furnished the poet Campbell with his mournful theme.

During the great conspiracy and war of Pontiac, Johnson was ceaselessly active in measures tending to holding the loyalty of the Indians. The Senecas, always the most wayward, because most easily influenced by the French, and more susceptible to Indian arguments, at first espoused the cause of Pontiac. The baronet had no sooner heard of this than he called a council of all the Six Nations at German Flats, and secured a tremendous advantage to the cause of civilization, by winning them over to neutrality. He sent Captain Claus with the same end in view to Caughnawaga, or the Sault St. Louis. At this place, formerly called La Prairie, whence had so often issued in the old days, from 1690 and onward, scalping-parties on the English and Dutch settlements, Claus met the Caughnawaga, St. Francis, and other tribes of Indians, thus cutting off another possible contingent for Pontiac. So successful was Claus, that these Canadian tribes not only sent deputies to dissuade the Western braves, but also warned them that in case of hostilities they would fight for the king with their English brethren.

Not knowing what roving bands of Western savages might make sudden raids, Johnson ordered out the Valley militia, despatched Indian scouts to Crown Point, built a stockade of palisades around Johnson Hall, and armed his own tenants and the people of Johnstown. The two stone towers or block-houses flanking the Hall were mounted with cannon,—the weapons most objectionable to savages, one of them being a piece captured at Louisburg, and presented by Admiral Warren. Seeing that the Mohawk Valley was thus so guarded, the Western braves, though harrying the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, kept out of New York. Indeed it seems not too much to assert that the influence of Johnson over the Indians east of Detroit was the chief cause of the failure of Pontiac’s great plot. Angry with this one man because of his power to thwart their designs, the followers of Pontiac intended to penetrate to Johnstown and take his life. Hearing of their purpose, the Mohawks, coming in a great delegation to their Great Brother, offered to serve as his body-guard.

Pontiac’s attempt to recover this continent to barbarism failed, but the scattered war continued for years. Half of the warriors of the Seneca castles were out on the war-path with the Delawares and Shawanese; and against these Johnson sent out many a war-party from Johnson Hall, selecting his men from among the most loyal of the Iroquois. These three tribes were already in possession of a large number of rifles which Swiss hunters of the chamois and German skilled artisans made at Lancaster and other places in Pennsylvania. Being thus more effectively armed and able to move with less ammunition, they were also less dependent on the white man,—a condition of things which Johnson viewed with alarm. We find him writing to the Lords of Trade, requesting that traffic in such deadly weapons should be prohibited. Colonel Bouquet, the gallant Swiss officer, avenged Braddock’s defeat by his brilliant victory at Bushy Run; and the Moravian Indians in Pennsylvania were ruthlessly slaughtered by wild beasts in white skins who wore the clothes of civilization. All this was part of “Pontiac’s War.”

“War is hell,” as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman insisted in our own days; and the barbarities in Johnson’s times seemed to have made devils of both white and red men. We find Johnson again making himself a trader in scalps by offering out of his own private pocket fifty dollars apiece for the heads of the Delaware chieftains. In a word, he continued a policy becoming obsolete in other colonies. He thus encouraged the retention by the British Government, long after the Revolution had broken out, of a custom worthy of Joshua and his Hebrews in Canaan, or of the pagan Anglo-Saxons in Celtic Britain, but not of Christian England or of modern America. Was he encouraged to do this by his squaw wife, Mollie Brant?

Teedyuscung was no more; but his son, Captain Bull, was an active warrior. The famous Delaware chief had perished in the flames of a house in which he was lying in a drunken stupor. An incendiary and hostile savage had been bribed by enemies to do the vile deed. Captain Bull, while on his way to surprise a white settlement, was himself surprised, July 26, 1764, by the interpreter, Montour, now become a captain, who led a band of two hundred Oneidas and Tuscaroras. The Delawares were all captured and taken by way of Fort Stanwix to Johnson Hall. Those who were not adopted into the Confederacy found their way into the jails of New York. Joseph Brant, leading another party of Iroquois into the country of the head-waters of the Susquehanna, surprised other Delaware braves, killed their chief, and burned seven villages.

The result of these successes was to cow and terrify the Senecas, who came to Johnson Hall and made peace. General Gage vigourously pressed operations against the hostile tribes, and sent Bradstreet westward. As a reinforcement, Johnson persuaded over five hundred of the Confederate Iroquois to join Bradstreet. He then went himself to Niagara, arriving July 8, 1764, to hold a grand council with all the Indians favourable to the English cause, from Dakota to Hudson Bay, and from Maine to Kentucky. Besides a treaty of peace with the Hurons, the earth-hunger of the pale-faces was temporarily satisfied by a cession of land along the lakes, accompanied with the promise of protection to navigation. The Senecas also ceded, not for private use, but to the Crown, a strip of land eight miles wide between Lakes Erie and Ontario, bisected by the Niagara River. They made a promise of the islands in the river to Johnson himself, who immediately transferred them to the British Government. A considerable number of white prisoners were delivered up. In this policy of possibly mistaken kindness, in which the change of life to those who had forgotten their old home and friends and had become habituated to Indian life, was like a resurrection, there were many incidents like those upon which Cooper has founded his romance of “The Wept of the Wish-ton-wish.” Johnson’s advertisement to friends of the captives is one of the pathetic curiosities in the American journalism of the eighteenth century.

After interviews between Johnson’s agent, Croghan, and Pontiac, arrangements were made for the amicable dwelling together of the two races. Johnson had proposed to the Lords of Trade in London that the territory west of the Ohio River should be forever reserved to the Six Nations as a hunting-ground. Another great council was held at his house April 27, at which over nine hundred Indians, including one hundred and twenty Senecas, the Delaware chiefs Squash-Cutter and Long-Coat, were present. The various conferences lasted nearly a month, resulting in a fresh treaty of peace with the Western Indians. They covenanted to allow the boundary to be made, protect traders, allow the passage of troops, deliver up murderers to the nearest garrison, and endeavour to win over the Illinois tribes. Later, Croghan, the agent of Johnson, visited Detroit, on the way collecting the white captives delivered up, and meeting the penitent Pontiac, who of his own accord made overtures of peace and accompanied Croghan. On the 17th of August, at Detroit, he met the Ottawas, Pottawatamies, and Chippewas, and in one of several conferences presented Johnson’s road-belt to “open the path of the English from the rising to the setting sun.” Ten days later, on the 27th, with Pontiac and the tribes of the great Ottawa Confederacy, the war-hatchet was buried, the tree of peace planted, and the calumet of peace smoked. Pontiac even gave a promise to visit Johnson at Oswego to ratify the peace thus made. The road being cleared for the passage of the troops, Captain Sterling, with one hundred Highlanders from Fort Pitt, received possession, October 10, of Fort Chartres, and the French flag was hauled down.

True to his promise, Pontiac met Johnson at Oswego July 23. Amid every possible accessory of impressive display and ceremony, the sacramental wampum, the sacred promises of peace and tokens of friendship were exchanged. Then Pontiac and his braves moved out in their canoes over Lake Ontario to the west and to obscurity. Henceforth the way of Teutonic civilization was cleared, and the march to the Pacific began. As we write in 1891, the centre of population is near Chicago.

In October, 1768, the great council called for the purpose of making a scientific frontier met at Fort Stanwix. This great concourse, not only of Indians, but of the governors and other distinguished men of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, makes one of the historical pictures in the story of America well worth the artist’s interpretation on canvas. Johnson, being at this time heartily interested in the welfare of St. George’s Episcopal Church, built next to the British barracks in Schenectady, in which he was a frequent worshipper, profited by the presence and happy mood of so many prominent men. He took up a collection, and secured sixty-one pounds and ten shillings for the little stone church on whose spire in Ferry Street still veers the gilded cock of St. Nicholas, the symbol of vigilance and of the resurrection.

Of the Six Nations and other tribes, thirty-two hundred individuals were present to witness the bartering away of their birthright for such pottage as the pale-faces had to tempt these Esaus of the wilderness. For ten thousand pounds, unlimited rum, and after due exchange of eloquence and wampum, they sold to the king the ground now occupied by Kentucky, Western Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania. Fort Stanwix was dismantled. The Indians moved out of Eastern New York, and the next year Daniel Boone led that great emigration of white men from the Southern Atlantic coast which resulted in the winning of the West. Boone’s was a movement for the annihilation of savagery, the extinction of Latin, and the supremacy of Teutonic civilization in North America, parallel to that rolling westward from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.

This was the last of the most important meetings and negotiations of Johnson with the men who claimed by hereditary right to occupy the continent. Though afterward full of toilsome detail, and busy in conference, in hearing complaints, and securing the performance of stipulations, Johnson’s constructive career as Superintendent of Indian Affairs virtually closed at Fort Stanwix.

The last ten years of Johnson’s life were among the busiest of his career. War matters occupied but a portion of his time. His greater works were those of peace, his chief idea being the development in civilization of the region watered by the Mohawk and its tributaries. The story of his life now concerns itself with the location of settlers; the education of the Indians; the building of schools, churches, and colleges; the improvement of land and live-stock; the promotion of agriculture, and of the arts and comforts of life. In a word, none more than he carried out the command to replenish the earth and possess it.

Fortune seemed to have no frowns for this one of the chief Makers of America. Popular with his neighbours, and appreciated on the other side of the ocean, his rewards were many. Besides the gift of five thousand pounds accompanying the title of baronet, the king, in June, 1769, made over to him the famous “royal grant” of sixty-six thousand acres on the north side of the river between the East and West Canada creeks, the present town of Little Falls being in the southern centre. This large piece of territory had been given him by the Mohawks in 1760, as a token of their gratitude and appreciation, Johnson making return for the gift in a sum amounting to over twelve thousand dollars. As no private person could, under the proclamation of 1763, obtain in any way so large a tract of land, the possession was made sure by being given under the royal seal and approbation as a token of his services.

It was, however, as early as 1763 that Johnson chose the site on which to found the village of Johnstown, and to erect Johnson Hall,—as a letter dated May 8, 1763, to Mr. Samuel Fuller, of Schenectady, the architect and builder, shows. Like his former house on the Mohawk, this edifice, so famed in romance and history, still stands, though outwardly somewhat altered in appearance by the addition of modern roofs, bay-windows, portico, and verandas. Only one of the two square towers or houses which flanked the main edifice still remains.

The writer visited the Hall in July, 1890, being pleasantly received by the present owner and occupant, Mrs. John E. Wells, and allowed to see the spacious rooms which, upstairs and down, flanked the superb, wide hall-ways which extend from front to rear doors. The missing block-house was burned by accident in May, 1866. Between the cellar of the mansion and those of the block-houses an underground passage formerly existed, in which my informant often played, until within a few years ago. A circle of Lombardy poplars planted round the Hall, once formed a striking feature of the landscape,—for these prim sentinels made a strange cordon to the Indians and those accustomed only to the American forest trees. Only four survivors on the east front of the house remain,—the small arc of a grand circle. Of an old walnut-tree planted by Johnson himself, and lovingly preserved as an historical relic, only the vine-covered and flower-adorned trunk was left, in which a squirrel was nimbly enjoying itself. The Hall faces the east, the ground sloping to the left. The mansion has been in the possession and occupancy of the Wells family for over a century.

Passing to the village, a half-mile to the east, I visited the church built by Johnson. Its walls are of the famous graywacke stone which underlies the Mohawk Valley, and which is so widely utilized in edifices. A fire in 1836 that emptied the building of nearly everything, and left only the walls, was the occasion for rebuilding. When this was done, in 1838, the site was so changed that the grave of Johnson under the altar was left outside the new building, and the exact site of it lost to memory. For several years it may be said that the very spot where lay the dust of this Maker of America was forgotten. In 1862 the rector, Rev. Charles H. Kellogg, took measurements, sunk a shaft, and discovered the brick vault. Only a few fragments of the mahogany coffin remained,—the leaden coffin enclosing it having been cut up during the Revolutionary War for making bullets. The skull and a few bones left, together filled but a quarter of a bushel. It is not stated whether the bullet which remained in the wound in Johnson’s body when he died was found; but the dated gold ring was, and is carefully kept. The relics of once animated earth were enclosed in a hollowed granite block, and re-deposited with solemn ceremonies by Bishop Horatio Potter, a few feet east of the church, in a space of the churchyard which has no other tombs in it. The unmarked mound, eight feet square and six inches high, barely discoverable by a passerby, had no other decoration than the thin grass which manages to live between the shade of two buildings. The action of St. Patrick’s Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons which Johnson founded—his son being the last Provincial Grand Master of the upper district of the Province of New York—is still awaited. Either the Masons, or others who honour Johnson’s memory, should set up a worthy memorial of the great man who has stamped his name so ineffaceably on the history of America.

In the neat village itself are many things to remind one of its founder. The chief hotel is named after the baronet. A number of autograph letters and relics are in possession of private persons. Documents in the handwriting of Johnson are in the Masonic Lodge which he founded in the parlour of Johnson Hall in 1772. The gold ring found in 1836 with his dust, and inscribed with the date of an important event, and possibly with the age of his bride, is here. Nor far away, the cradle of black walnut in which Mollie Brant rocked her children is preserved as a relic. In an old innkeeper’s book the first entry is that of the great man’s name, who ordered the first glass of grog. Besides the evidences of ordinary human life and infirmity, one cannot go very far in the Mohawk Valley, or in those of the lowlands which hold the tributaries to the river flowing through it, or in the collateral ones on higher levels, but the fruits of a rich and busy life abound.

Johnson, though belonging to the Church of England, was willing to help men who were of the Churches of Holland or of Germany. He assisted all Christians to have houses of worship,—at Fort Hunter, Canajoharie, Burnet’s Field, especially; but in other towns and villages tokens of his presence are to be seen. He helped financially the Lutheran and Reformed Germans, and the Dutch congregations, and provided the Indians with missionaries and churches. With Domine Samuel Kirkland, who laboured among the Iroquois for over forty years, and was the founder of the town of Kirkland and of Hamilton College, Johnson was on friendly and sympathetic terms. He greatly honoured the young man’s character, and appreciated his labours; and the two frequently corresponded. During one winter while secluded in Cherry Valley, Kirkland was saved from starvation by the Indians, who gathered ginseng, for which they bought provisions in Albany. The root having been just discovered on this continent by a French Jesuit in Vermont, early in the century, already formed one of the staples of American commerce with China.

While it is absurd to say that Johnson first “discovered” the fertility of the Mohawk Valley, it is unquestionably true that he greatly stimulated advance in agriculture. Under his encouragement many of the Mohawk Indians became happy and prosperous farmers. When the officers and men under the leadership of Sullivan, the New Hampshire general of Irish descent, invaded the country of the Six Nations in 1778, they were amazed at the evidences of Indian thrift, and at the wide areas of richly cultivated land.

These being the piping times of peace, Johnson built a handsome summer-house at Broadalbin, in Fulton County, where he entertained lavishly. Having a healthy interest equal to that of the Englishman in out-door sports, he also erected on the south bank of the Sacandaga Creek a lodge, which has given the place the name it still holds,—the Fish House. The building, which was of wood painted white, with the doors and mouldings painted green, was comfortably furnished. It was frequently occupied in summer, often with gay company from New York or Albany. An orchard, vegetable-garden, well of spring water, sheds for horses and cattle, with poultry and stock, enabled the lord of Johnson Hall, with the assistance of his favourite negro slaves from the Manor, to dispense lavish hospitality to his friends from Albany, Schenectady, the Valley settlements, or even from Manhattan Island. Coming himself on such occasions, in his later years, in a coach and six, it was no infrequent sight to see the like equipages numerous in the grounds of the Fish House. For days together, gayety and bustle filled the grounds, while pleasure-parties of both sexes in the boats tempted to their hooks the finny spoil. Excellent gunning was also provided in autumn for the gentlemen in the sunken lands and low-lying coves along the Sacandaga, wild ducks and geese being the chief game. Oftener, however, instead of visiting Europeans or fashionable society nearer home, the baronet would be accompanied by his cultured Irish friend and family physician, Dr. Patrick Daly, and by his favourite musician, Billy. Nor is it likely that tradition wrongs him in frequently furnishing him with other room-mates, since chastity was not the shining virtue of Sir William Johnson.

Simms, the gossipy annalist of Schoharie, who seemed incapable of writing history or holding himself to a narrative without meandering off into theology, politics, or preaching, has much to say about Sir William Johnson. Though gathering a valuable harvest, his sheaves need to be well threshed out before using. He has set down in sober print much tittle-tattle which New England historians, as usual when writing about New York, have only too freely copied.

We see that the household at the Hall and in the quarters was almost as cosmopolitan as New York itself. Simms tells us that Johnson’s bouw-master, or head farmer, was an Irishman named Flood. He looked after the ten or fifteen negro slaves who lived with their families in cabins on the other side of the Cayudutta Creek, opposite the Hall. They dressed much like Indians, but wore coats. His private secretary, after Wraxall, Croghan, and others, was a Mr. Lafferty,—a good lawyer withal, who attended also to Johnson’s legal business. The family physician, named Daly, was a companionable and cultivated gentleman. Billy, a dwarf about thirty years of age, was a master of the violin, and the presiding genius of the numerous balls given in the Hall when “persons of quality” were guests, or at the village when the tenantry or other citizens had their merry-makings. The gardener kept the grounds “as neat as a pin,” and from May to November smiling with flowers. The butler, Frank, was an active young German; and the chief body-guard was Pontiac, a sprightly, well-disposed lad of part Indian blood. He was named after the great conspirator, and was often with Johnson when away from home. Two of the waiters,—probably brothers,—named Bartholomew, were short, thick-set white men. Across the road from the Hall were the blacksmith and the tailor, who did little work outside of the “royal” or “patroon’s” household. The numerous progeny and employees of Johnson furnished them with almost constant occupation. One of the most important characters was the schoolmaster, Wall, an Irishman with a rich brogue. His specialty was the teaching of manners and rudiments of English to the children of the tenantry and Johnson’s half-breed bastards. It may be well imagined that the training given by Wall was rather to fit his pupils for proper subordination than to be self-reliant patriots. In front of the schoolhouse stood the whipping-post and the stocks, for which truant boys, drunken louts, wife-beaters, and other transgressors, actual and potential, were supposed to have due respect.

Holidays and out-door merry-makings were frequent. The many-sided lord of the manor seemed most in his natural element when providing or participating in the athletic sports, Irish games and frolics with which he amused Indians and whites, old and young. Himself ever jovial and fond of fun, he entered into the performances with an enthusiasm that was magnetic. The greasy pole with a coin or other prize on the top was set up for the nude Indian children to attempt to climb. The pig with its tail likewise anointed was set free to be caught by him or her who could. Tradition tells how, in one case, an old Indian squaw beat every one in the race, and finally, having caught up a handful of sand, had literally the grit to hold on and win the race. Sack, hurdle, and three-legged races were also favourite amusements.

Besides all this out-door activity and healthy occupation, there was plenty of amusement indoors. The numerous guests who came from all quarters and at all times made Johnson Hall more like a grand hotel than the private house of a gentleman. From April, after the ice in the Mohawk had burst, as it often did, with a sound like cannon, and floated out to the Hudson and to the sea, and the spring floods were over, until the autumnal splendours of crimson and gold filled the Valley, the house rarely lacked guests. Indian chiefs and warriors came at all times; but in summer the paint and feathers of forest fashions were replaced by those from beyond sea. The rouge, powder, patches, wigs, perukes, silken gowns and stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and ruffled cuffs and shirt-fronts from London, or patterned after Piccadilly prints, filled the Hall with brilliant colour. With musical instruments, a well-filled library, and the last new novel on the drawing-room table, the guests could easily amuse themselves on a rainy day; while in fair weather saunterings over the grounds of their host, or drives or rides in the beautiful country around, made the daylight hours fly pleasantly. Then, in full dress for the evening dinner, the night soon passed in feasting, drinking, and exchanging news, with chat, gossip, and smoke; and more than one of the hours of morning arrived before the concourse broke up.

Such a course of life was kept up for years, until the hospitality of Johnson Hall became a proverb, and its revelry, we must add, passed into a byword. Despite his constant out-door life and otherwise good habits, it is more than probable that such luxurious living long persisted in explains why the baronet never saw his sixtieth year.

In practical farming and in horticulture Johnson took great delight, and in his intervals of leisure did much, both by personal example and by neighbourly conference with the farmers, to improve crops and live-stock. He was a regular correspondent of the Society for the Promotion of Arts in England, and of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Agriculture was one of the themes most often discussed in his letters. He sent frequently to London for choice varieties of seeds, and delighted to see how they fared in our climate and soil. Of horses and other fine stock he was very fond, and to him is due the credit of the introduction of sheep and blooded stallions. He also credits himself with first raising hay, and thus stimulating the development of improved breeds of cattle. While thus on his table lay the last reviews and best periodical literature of London; while in his library the European scholars, professors from Harvard and Yale, and English ladies from London drawing-rooms, would all find books to their taste, the pursuit of science indoors and out was carried on with ardour by the lord of the manor himself.

In attendance upon the county fair at Fonda during the summer of 1890, the writer was struck with the variety and excellence of the live-stock, as well as with the richness of the agricultural products of Montgomery County. This county, with Saratoga and others adjoining, has had marked influence upon the development of the region westward. Not a few of the fine specimens of horses and cattle are descendants of the denizens of the Johnson farm of pre-Revolutionary days. Certainly Johnson was one of the benefactors of the race, who made many blades of grass grow where none grew before. Not the least of his good offices was in prevailing upon the British Government to relax the illiberal laws which prevented the agricultural development of the Mohawk Valley. Much of England’s troubles with her colonies arose from her determination to keep the American part of her domain as a close market for exclusively British products, and thus to compel the Americans to buy only those goods which were manufactured in England or came from British ports. In thus attempting to nip in the bud all flowering of the native genius of the people, she succeeded in hampering, but not wholly repressing, American manufactures. Johnson, as we have seen, was able to get removed the restriction against raising wool. Peter Hasenclever, a Palatine German, who owned land next to Johnson’s royal patent, started an iron foundry, and though himself failing after long and earnest efforts, unable to surmount the numberless difficulties, gave a great stimulus to the development of the iron industry in Northern and Eastern New York. Philip Schuyler set up a flourishing flax-mill.

Johnson lived to see the fearful results of the determination of the lucre-loving British lords to force their products upon Americans at all hazards. He regretted these violations not only of human rights in general, but of Englishmen’s rights in particular; though not so outspoken as he might have been. The Americans, while willing to be customers to the greatest nation of shopkeepers, were resolved not to be considered as buyers, and victims of monopoly only. Johnson fortunately died before the covetousness, avarice, and arbitrary thick-headedness of Great Britain, which had forced the slave-trade, hampered commerce, and paralyzed foreign commerce and home manufactures, compelled the colonists to rebuke her pretensions by an appeal to arms.

While the brown Lady Johnson, Mollie Brant, presided over the mansion, and her dusky brood attended the manor school, the daughters of Johnson and of Catharine Wisenberg were trained under the care of a governess who made them familiar with the social graces of London and the polite accomplishments and standard literature of England. Mary Brant, though not only an Indian, but a Mohawk Indian in spirit, was to her dying day, in the old English and Hebrew sense of the word, a virtuous woman. She had the virile qualities of worth, excellence, and abilities, and not only managed her household to the satisfaction of her lord, but kept herself well informed and interested in the two worlds in which lived the people of the Long House and those of Christendom. More than one English lady visiting at the Hall was surprised to find this Iroquois woman so cultivated, refined, and alert, not only with womanly intuition, but equipped with information as to the life and thoughts in which they and their husbands moved.

Johnson was happy in the careers of his children born in wedlock, so far as he lived to witness them. His first-born child, John, was the especial pride of his father, though he never won the regard of his neighbours. He had the misfortune to be the son of a great man, and to be constantly compared with his father. He was educated under Domine Vrooman and other clergymen of the Dutch Reformed and Anglican Churches. He often accompanied his father on his journeys, notably the adventurous one to Detroit in 1761. Later he was placed in command of three hundred Iroquois; but these unfortunately deserted their commander, who had not the power, like his father, to sweeten the rigours of discipline by magnetic personality and system. He had considerable experience in the field with the militia, but never won much personal popularity. Visiting England to complete his education, he was presented at court, and knighted at St. James’s, Nov. 22, 1765. He later became a member of the Assembly, being pitted against Colonel Schuyler, who rightly or wrongly—more probably the latter—imagined the father to be prodding the son or using him for a cat’s-paw.

On the 29th of June, 1773, Sir John was married to Miss Mary Watts, of New York City, the wedding being at the bride’s house. The bridal tour was a trip up the Hudson River when Nature was dressed in her glorious summer robes. A stay at Albany marked by brilliant social attentions, and the ride up the loveliest of valleys, completed the journey. Johnson Hall was then embosomed in a wealth of foliage and flowers, and bright with the pageantry which manor life could on special occasions display. Sir John, on the death of his father, succeeded to an estate which, with the exception of that of the founder of Pennsylvania, was probably the largest ever held by a private individual in America. At the request of the Indians to Johnson, and of the latter to the king, Col. Guy Johnson was made Superintendent of Indian Affairs, assisted by Colonel Claus; but Sir John succeeded to the office of major-general of the militia. To tell the story of his Tory career in the Revolution is no part of our plan. “The Life and Misfortunes and Military Career of Brig.-Gen. Sir John Johnson, Baronet,” has been ably written by Gen. J. Watts De Peyster. In this book a list of Sir William Johnson’s descendants are given.

Johnson usually called Anne, his first daughter, Nancy, and often wrote to her while away from home. A son of one of the Palatine Germans, Daniel Claus, a noted Indian fighter, captain of militia, and a man of considerable culture in German, English, and the Iroquois languages, and withal a favourite of Sir William, fell in love with Miss Nancy, and married her in July, 1762. The nuptials were celebrated at Johnson Hall with great rejoicing. Claus assisted his father-in-law and Joseph Brant in translating and preparing the Book of Common Prayer in the Mohawk language. In thus following up and completing the work of Domine Barnhardus Freeman, of Schenectady, a manual of devotion was prepared for the Mohawks which was in use until near the second half of the present century. As colonel of militia, Claus saw long and varied service in New York, Canada, and the West.

Mary Johnson, the baronet’s second daughter, married in March, 1763, her cousin Guy, a nephew of Sir William and his private secretary. Guy Johnson was later an active member of the Assembly from Tryon County, and was always a helpful assistant of his uncle. Their daughter Mary became wife of Sir Colin Campbell, and mother of Gen. Sir Guy Campbell. Guy Johnson’s career in devastating the valleys of New York during the Revolution is too well known to need repetition here.

The absorption of Johnson’s mind in his multifarious labours and in the interests of the community in which he lived, scarcely gave him time to study carefully the great political movements leading to the Revolution. The time had now come when the continued folly of the king and Parliament acting as irritant and stimulant upon people in whom a love of freedom was inborn, was to result in independence. The long training in the border wars had educated a generation of soldiers who did not fear to meet either the mercenaries or the regulars of Great Britain, while also well able to profit by the mistakes of the king’s agents, and to organize government for themselves. On the civil side, the people of New England, led and trained by Congregational clergymen rather than by lawyers, were educated into the idea of resistance to the king and Parliament on grounds of abstract right. In the Middle and Southern States regularly educated publicists and lawyers trained in England were much more numerous. The continued invasion by the king of their rights as Englishmen was their theme; and resistance was made, and final victory expected, not by revolution, but through the right application of the law and tradition which had been so often violated. In many of the colonies a well-grounded fear lest a politically organized church should be forced upon them, as well as hatred of England’s avaricious policy of holding the colonies as a close market, had also their influence in bringing about separation.

Johnson, too busily occupied to follow every step of the movements, yet sympathized with the people, even while sincerely loyal to the Crown. As member of the Council in New York City, he witnessed not only the frequent turbulent expressions of the populace, but also saw from the firm temper of the Assembly signs of the coming danger. While John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, and Samuel Adams, of Massachusetts, were discussing the political situation and the principles at stake, the people of New York showed by their acts their constant determination to resist all invasion of their rights by either the king or his agent. The governor, Sir Henry Moore, who dissolved the Assembly in 1769, found out quickly that the members were re-elected by overwhelming majorities. His sudden death called to the office of acting governor, for the third time, Dr. Cadwallader Colden.

In the following March the political sky, already full of the portents of a coming storm, gathered a deeper blackness when the fact became known that the House of Commons in London had refused to receive the representative of the New York Assembly. In spite of prophetic warnings and wise cautions in Parliament, the determination to make merchandise of the colonies stupefied and debauched the conscience of the average lord and commoner of commercial England, as the opium question in China stupefies and debauches it yet. The government was as much determined on a war with the American colonies, and for much the same purpose, as so many of Great Britain’s later wars have been waged,—for the sake of maintaining trade. Of the twenty-five or thirty wars, even during Victoria’s reign, the majority have been for the purpose of forcing trade and making money. In a word, the war of King George and his Parliament in 1775 against the colonies was a shopkeeper’s war for a market. “British interests” then, as now, meant trade and profits. Johnson felt the injustice of the British Government’s acts when he wrote in 1769: “Whatever reason or justice there may be in the late steps, there is a probability of their being carried farther than a good man can wish.” Nevertheless, Sir William was wisely non-committal on the burning question.

The Sons of Liberty in New York became active and turbulent, and made the lives of ultra-loyalists, like Colden, a burden. The royal troops had been by his orders summoned to New York City, after he had been driven to take refuge in the fort on the outbreak of violence when the stamps arrived from England. These soldiers were now the targets of scorn, especially after the Assembly had refused indemnity to Colden, who kept on recommending them to supplicate the paternal tenderness of their gracious sovereign George. After concurring in the spirited resolutions of the Legislatures of Virginia and South Carolina, the Assembly had also defeated a cunning scheme to win from them a vote of money to support the king’s military forces.

The hatred between the soldiers and the Sons of Liberty burst into flame at the battle of Golden Hill, Jan. 18, 1770, in New York City, when the first blood of the American Revolution was spilled. The Sons of Liberty had erected an emblem of their freedom and hereditary rights. The liberty-pole, and their meetings with speeches under it, were survivals of the old custom of their Teutonic ancestors, who met in the folk moot under the chosen oak-trees in the forests of Germany before Christendom began. The liberty-pole with its spars was obnoxious to the redcoats, who with saw and gunpowder tried to destroy it. The citizens resisted, but the unarmed and unorganized mob broke before the charge of armed men with bayonets. Having finally succeeded in sawing the pole into kindling-wood, the military piled the fragments before the doors of the tavern where the Sons of Liberty met.

The citizens were now thoroughly roused, and on the 18th a riot broke out, in which clubs and cutlasses were used, and in which the soldiers were worsted; though several citizens were wounded, and one of them, a sailor, died. When at Golden Hill, or John Street, between Cliff Street and Burling Slip, the riot was stopped by the arrival of British officers, who ordered their men back to camp. Conspicuous in the affrays of next day were the sailors, who in revenge for the death of their comrade clubbed the soldiers and drove them out of the streets into their barracks. On the 5th of February a new liberty-pole was erected on ground purchased for the purpose, and it remained until 1776.

The Sons of Liberty succeeded in carrying out the non-importation act so vigourously that the market became empty of goods used as presents to the Indians. Johnson was in danger of becoming seriously embarrassed. The Cherokees, who in January, 1770, intended to go to war with the tribes in the West and Southwest, wanted the Six Nations to join them. These at once resolved first to ask the advice of Johnson, who appointed a council at German Flats, hoping to win the Cherokees away from their purpose. Johnson was obliged to write to the chairman of the Sons of Liberty to get permission to receive or purchase a package invoiced to him which they held in bond, promising to use the goods only for the Indians. The request was cheerfully granted, and the goods delivered.

In company with Dr. Shuckburgh, who composed or introduced the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” Johnson met the Indians, half famished as they were on account of the failure of crops through caterpillars. The result of the council was that the Cherokees gave up their proposed war, and the treaty of Fort Stanwix was ratified in detail.

Perhaps it was from this incident that the New Yorkers prepared to dress themselves as Mohawk Indians, and tumble the tea into the waters of the East River, when it should come. On the 9th of July, hearing that all taxes, except upon tea, had been removed, the Committee of One Hundred agreed to receive all imports except tea. Johnson’s storehouses were now well stocked with imported Indian goods. Indian trade, which had come almost to a standstill, was resumed, much to the joy of all the Six Nations. The red men could not comprehend the white man’s politics, or realize that the love of money was the root of the evil of war also. They could not understand that titles of nobility, commissions in the army, stars, garters, decorations, and things most noble were peddled by government and purchased by money.

So rebellious a spirit as that manifested in New York must be rebuked, and so the king and his counsellors chose as the proper man to curb it, the infamous William Tryon. This Irishman had been an army officer, but through his wife’s influence obtained the post of lieutenant-governor of North Carolina in 1764; becoming governor in 1765. He was the fit tool of the kind of a king and parliament that ruled England at this time. Living while at Newbern, N. C., in amazing luxury, at the cost of the oppressively taxed colonists, he delighted in scorning their remonstrances and in crushing out their liberties. Goaded to desperation, the Sons of Liberty, after five years of vain petition for redress, met to the number of nearly two thousand on the banks of the Alamance River. Tryon marched out from his “palace” with an army of one thousand regular British troops, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, to suppress them. On the 15th of May, 1771, the Regulators, or Sons of Liberty, sent Tryon a message offering to lay down their arms if he would redress their grievances. Tryon advanced with the idea of scattering the patriots before the reinforcements coming from all parts of the province should encourage the Regulators. When within a hundred yards of the patriot ranks, his officers read the riot act. It was met by shouts of defiance. Tryon then ordered his men to fire. They hesitated. Rising in his stirrups, Tryon in a rage cried out, “Fire—on them, or on me,” at the same time discharging his pistol and felling a victim. In the two hours’ musketry battle which ensued, the ammunition of the poorly armed patriots being soon exhausted, the decisive victory of Tryon was obtained when the artillery was ordered up, and the unequal contest decided by rounds of grape and canister. Twenty of the Sons of Liberty were left dead on the field, the wounded being carried off. Of Tryon’s men, sixty were killed or wounded.

Although practically unknown to popular American history, this was the first battle of the American Revolution. For a few weeks Tryon held high revel of execution and devastation in North Carolina, and was then, in the height of his glory, transferred to New York; the Earl of Dunmore, who from Oct. 18, 1770, had served for a few months on Manhattan Island, being ordered to Virginia.

Tryon, who reached New York July 8, 1772, soon became known among the New York Sons of Liberty as “Bloody Billy.” Before the Assembly he made a conciliatory speech attributing his butchery in North Carolina to the special favour of a kind Providence. With consummate address and flattery, and the adroit distribution of ministerial patronage, he managed to hoodwink the Assembly. Backed by the order of the British Government that his salary should be paid out of the revenue, and becoming thus independent of the colony, he was well fitted to be the king’s tool. To the amazement of the patriots like Schuyler, and of other colonies, the Legislature of New York seemed to have reversed its former record, and to have become hopelessly subservient.

Local affairs were meanwhile well attended to. Early in January, 1772, Sir William Johnson, who had long believed with Philip Schuyler that a division of Albany County should be made, forwarded a petition from the people in all parts of the county. After considerable discussion a bill was passed by which the old county of Albany was divided into three counties,—Albany, Tryon, and Charlotte. All the civil officers, except one who had been nominated by Johnson, were appointed, and the county-seat of Tryon County was fixed by the Government at Johnstown. At Johnson’s suggestion, Tryon County was divided into the townships of Mohawk, Stone Arabia, Canajoharie, Kingsland, and German Flats.

Johnstown now became the centre of bustle and activity. New roads were laid out, and a jail and county court-house built; while new settlers came in by scores to select lots and build houses. In the midst of his pressing local occupations, Johnson, who had been elected a trustee,—his name standing first on the list of Queen’s, now Rutgers College, chartered Nov. 10, 1766,—received an invitation to visit New Brunswick, N. J. He was obliged to decline to attend. The college went into operation in 1771; but its sessions were soon interrupted, both professors and students entering the patriot army when the war broke out.

Remaining at home, he entertained at the Hall, in July, Governor Tryon and his wife. Tryon, as avaricious as he was murderous, had come into the Valley under pretence of holding a council with the Indians to redress their grievances against Klock and others. In reality his purpose was speculation in land; and the use of his office, like that of so many royal governors of New York, was to swell his private purse, while taking advantage of his high position. Although the Indians rehearsed their troubles, and Tryon listened, they obtained from the governor, who was too busy with his money-making schemes, no satisfaction. After reviewing the militia at Johnstown, Burnet’s Field, and German Flats, fourteen hundred men in all, and purchasing a large tract of land north of the Mohawk, Tryon returned to New York. His name was not suffered to remain on the map of New York; for Tryon County before many years became one of the first of the nineteen counties in the United States named after General Montgomery. Shortly afterward Tryon appointed Johnson major-general of the Northern Department.

At a council with the chief sachems of the Confederacy of the Six Nations held at his house, at the order of Lord Dartmouth, Johnson obtained from them their assent to the purchase of twenty-three thousand acres north of the Ohio, by the Ohio Company. After telling the chiefs that as a mark of the king’s friendship to them Fort Pitt was to be demolished, the sachems agreed to the settlement of what grew to be the State of Ohio.

Just at the time when Sir William Johnson was in the midst of the most varied activities, and was the most popular and influential man in the whole province of New York, his physical strength failed. For several years the inroads upon his constitution had warned him to seek the rest from labours and from social indulgence which seemed impossible to him. For the last ten years before his death he had suffered at intervals from dysentery, which often kept him an invalid in bed for weeks. During these periods of weakness the unextracted bullet received at Lake George in 1755 irritated his nerves, and made his wound very painful. Even when recovered from the attacks of the disease which threatened to be chronic, active exercise was frequently impossible for a long time afterward. This suffering, though so grievous to himself, was providentially turned to the advantage of millions. It was the occasion of the revelation to the world of the health-giving waters of Saratoga Springs. With a touching solicitude for his personal good, the Mohawks had called his attention to the remedial value of the High Rock Spring, to which they always turned aside in their wanderings or hunts eastward. On the 22d of August, 1767, Sir William left the Hall, and was borne to these springs by his devoted Mohawks. He travelled in a boat to Schenectady, and on their shoulders in a litter to Saratoga. A halt over night was made at Ballston Lake in the cabin of an Irishman named Michael McDonald. Reaching the springs by way of the Indian trail next day, his faithful bearers built a bark hut, and tenderly cared for him during the five days he was able to spend there,—for pressing letters soon called him home. The Adirondack air charged with ozone, and the cleansing and healing waters greatly benefited him. After his return, when this fact was known, others followed his example. Known for ages to the aborigines, its line of fame went out through all the earth; and gradually the evolution of the most famous watering-place in America followed. It is noteworthy that a camp of the red men is still found at Saratoga Springs.

Stone, in his biography of Johnson, calls attention to the coincidence that while Johnson was recovering at Saratoga, Dieskau was dying at Suresnes near Paris. Both had been leaders of the opposing forces, and both had been wounded at Lake George twelve years before. Arriving on the 4th of September, he was in time to hail his knighted son, John, just home from Europe. Had the vital nerve of an electric cable thrilled under the ocean, Johnson would have heard, four days later, of the decease of his illustrious antagonist.

Other trips for the sake of health were made to the sea-shore at New London, Conn.; but owing to the fact of his being so often overworked, he was frequently prostrated in summer by his old enemy. When Cresap’s war broke out in 1774, he was almost discouraged. Chief Logan’s relatives—the Delaware chief Bald Eagle, and the Shawanese sachem Silver Heels—had been murdered by white men, who were too eager to improve red men off the face of the earth. The treaty of Fort Stanwix had not only been trampled under foot by the whites, but the murderers of Silver Heels had, perhaps unwittingly, but certainly in accordance with Indian interpretation, committed a symbolical act which was not private, but national and declarative. It meant war. After the white murderer had shot Bald Eagle, who was alone on the river, he scalped the chief, and propping his body upright in his canoe, sent him adrift down the stream. No note of a congress or decree of a royal court could be to the red man more distinctly a declaration of war than was the bloody freight which this boat bore to the Indians.

To the Six Nations the murder of Logan, their kinsman, was a direct insult and irritating challenge; yet instead of rushing to massacre, they came to their friend Johnson to ask his counsel. For weeks before the congress which he called to meet at his house, July 7, 1774, he was in constant correspondence with his agents in the Ohio and Illinois country. As fast as the chiefs arrived, he persuaded them privately to refrain from war, and to trust in him to obtain justice. Six hundred Indians, many of them from great distances, were impatiently waiting at Johnson Hall while the war raged on the borders of Virginia. Though Johnson was sick with dysentery, he took no thought of self. From a sick-bed he rose to attend the council. After preliminaries, the meeting on the 9th of July, 1774, was addressed by an eloquent Seneca chieftain. Fortunately, God’s day of rest intervened; but on Monday—the last of Johnson’s days on earth—his answer was given. For two hours, on a hot day and in the glare of a July sun, with all his old-time fire of eloquence, this friend of the red man spoke in grave discourse. His diction was fiery, rhetorical, impassioned at times; but he spoke judicially on the problem in hand, pleading that they should not rush into war, but await the course of law. Six hundred dark faces, unrippled with emotion, were fixed intently with burning but immovable eyes, and with the gravity of statues, on the speaker during the long discourse. Then after the peroration, pipes and tobacco were passed around, and the conference broke up, that the auditors might prepare, through their orator, a reply.

Johnson never heard the Indians’ rejoinder. A few minutes after the conclusion he was taken with relapse. Supported to his library, he soon became unconscious, and before sunset was dead.

It was euthanasia. Past all call to decide between Indian tribe and tribe, between white murderers and red, between serving conscience and king, between following the colonies for freedom under law or supporting arbitrary despotism under the fiction of power by the grace of God, Johnson rested from his labours. He was one of the Makers of America, building grander than he knew. His place in history is sure. Had he lived a decade later!—but here we enter the region of conjecture, the ground forbidden to history.

MAKERS OF AMERICA.

The following is a list of the subjects and authors so far arranged for in this series. The volumes will be published at the uniform price of $1.00, and will appear in rapid succession :—

Christopher Columbus (1436–1506), and the Discovery of the New World. By Charles Kendall Adams , President of Cornell University.

John Winthrop (1588–1649), First Governor of the Massachusetts Colony. By Rev. Joseph H. Twichell .

Robert Morris (1734–1806), Superintendent of Finance under the Continental Congress. By Prof. William G. Sumner , of Yale University.

James Edward Oglethorpe (1689–1785), and the Founding of the Georgia Colony. By Henry Bruce , Esq.

John Hughes, D.D. (1797–1864), First Archbishop of New York: a Representative American Catholic. By Henry A. Brann , D.D.

Robert Fulton (1765–1815): His Life and its Results. By Prof. R. H. Thurston , of Cornell University.

Francis Higginson (1587–1630), Puritan, Author of “New England’s Plantation,” etc. By Thomas W. Higginson .

Peter Stuyvesant (1602–1682), and the Dutch Settlement of New York. By Bayard Tuckerman , Esq., author of a “Life of General Lafayette,” editor of the “Diary of Philip Hone,” etc., etc.

Thomas Hooker (1586–1647), Theologian, Founder of the Hartford Colony. By George L. Walker , D.D.

Charles Sumner (1811–1874), Statesman. By Anna L. Dawes .

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Third President of the United States. By James Schouler , Esq., author of “A History of the United States under the Constitution.”

William White (1748–1836), Chaplain of the Continental Congress, Bishop of Pennsylvania, President of the Convention to organize the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. By Rev. Julius H. Ward , with an Introduction by Right Rev. Henry C. Potter, D.D., Bishop of New York.

Jean Baptiste Lemoine , sieur de Bienville (1680–1768), French Governor of Louisiana, Founder of New Orleans. By Grace King , author of “Monsieur Motte.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804), Statesman, Financier, Secretary of the Treasury. By Prof. William G. Sumner , of Yale University.

Father Juniper Serra (1713–1784), and the Franciscan Missions in California. By John Gilmary Shea , LL.D.

Cotton Mather (1663–1728), Theologian, Author, Believer in Witchcraft and the Supernatural. By Prof. Barrett Wendell , of Harvard University.

Robert Cavelier , sieur de La Salle (1643–1687), Explorer of the Northwest and the Mississippi. By Edward G. Mason , Esq., President of the Historical Society of Chicago, author of “Illinois” in the Commonwealth Series.

Thomas Nelson (1738–1789), Governor of Virginia, General in the Revolutionary Army. Embracing a Picture of Virginian Colonial Life. By Thomas Nelson Page , author of “Mars Chan,” and other popular stories.

George and Cecilius Calvert, Barons Baltimore of Baltimore (1605–1676), and the Founding of the Maryland Colony. By William Hand Browne , editor of “The Archives of Maryland.”

Sir William Johnson (1715–1774), and The Six Nations. By William Elliot Griffis , D.D., author of “The Mikado’s Empire,” etc., etc.

Sam. Houston (1793–1862), and the Annexation of Texas. By Henry Bruce , Esq.

Joseph Henry, LL.D. (1797–1878), Savant and Natural Philosopher. By Frederic H. Betts , Esq.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Prof. Herman Grimm , author of “The Life of Michael Angelo,” “The Life and Times of Goethe,” etc.

DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY,

753 and 755 Broadway, New York.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations , by William Elliot Grifis.]