Native Nations

The contributions of Native Americans to the American Revolution are highlighted throughout the Museum, both in the core galleries and in our current special exhibition, The Declaration’s Journey. Native peoples have a long and rich history in their own right and have had a major impact on the history of the United States, and exploring their varied stories can help us better understand the experiences of tribes in the Revolutionary era. Historian Kathleen DuVal’s book Native Nations: A Millenium in North America traces Native Americans from the year 1006 to the present day, highlighting not just their history and interactions with European settlers, but the cultures, beliefs, and relationships within and between different tribes.   

What kind of nation did the Revolution create, and what did this mean for Native nations? In the following excerpt, DuVal discusses how some tribes interacted with the United States in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. 

Excerpt

Some Native diplomats tried to persuade white Americans that they could in fact share the continent as independent but friendly nations. Onondaga Chief Clear Sky in 1794 patiently made the parallel for a U.S. Army officer: “Brother—We are of the same opinion with the people of the United States, you call yourselves free and independent, we as the Ancient Inhabitants of this Country and sovereigns of the soil say that we are equally as free as you, or any other Nation, or Nations under the Sun.” But white Americans did not like the idea of Native nations as sovereign neighbors who could limit U.S. ambitions. Whereas European colonial officials generally had to accept the need to build their empires through networks of Native allies and trading partners, people in the United States self-servingly imagined Native Americans as primitive nomads, supposedly wasting land that white Americans could farm. There had long been a current of European thought that misinterpreted Native Americans this way, but now it took hold in the imagination of a whole country determined to transform Native lands into the United States. White Americans told Indians they had two choices: assimilate as individuals into U.S. society or get out of the way.  

In November 1785, Virginia militia officer Benjamin Logan, who had fought against the Shawnees in three separate wars—Pontiac’s War, Dunmore’s War, and the American Revolution—led nine hundred militiamen into Shawnee country, while another militia force led by George Rogers Clark marched on Miamitown, on the Wabash River. Benjamin Logan’s forces burned seven Shawnee towns on the Mad and Miami rivers, which were largely abandoned when most of the Shawnees evacuated to help successfully defend Miamitown. Logan’s men killed everyone who hadn’t evacuated, including Nonhelema (the sister of the diplomat Cornstalk, who had been murdered in 1777) and an elderly man holding a copy of a treaty he had signed with the United States. Many of the Shawnees and Delawares who fled these 1785 attacks built new towns and farms near the Miamis in the valleys of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers, which flow into Lake Erie. Blue Jacket was one of many leaders whose towns came here, farther from U.S. encroachment and nearer to their Miami, Wendat, and Ottawa allies. Delawares and Ohio Senecas moved here too, as did some Cherokee, Mohawk, Mahican, and Abenaki families. Being clustered closer together than they had been before made it easier to organize war parties and to protect those who stayed behind when the warriors went off to fight. And they were closer to places where they could access European trade, including weapons and ammunition: Detroit, a post just on the U.S. side of the Canadian border but still held by the British, and British Amherstburg, just over the border in British Canada.  

It was in the Auglaize and Maumee valleys that the Shawnees helped to create their strongest and largest alliance ever. In November and December 1786, Shawnee, Wendat, Delaware, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Miami, Cherokee, and Haudenosaunee diplomats, including Mohawk Joseph Brant, gathered at a Wendat town near Detroit and wrote as “the United Indian Nations” to the U.S. Congress. They expressed their disapproval of not having been included in the negotiations that ended the American Revolution, and they declared the Ohio River the U.S. border. Americans had taken their hunting lands south of the Ohio, but those north of the river belonged to the confederated Indian Nations. If the United States insisted on invading, the confederated nations would be “obliged to defend those rights and privileges which have been transmitted to us by our ancestors.” U.S. representatives should no longer attempt to make treaties or buy land from their nations separately. Instead, “all treaties carried on with the United States, on our parts, should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy.” 

Some Native diplomats tried to persuade white Americans that they could in fact share the continent as independent but friendly nations. Onondaga Chief Clear Sky in 1794 patiently made the parallel for a U.S. Army officer: “Brother—We are of the same opinion with the people of the United States, you call yourselves free and independent, we as the Ancient Inhabitants of this Country and sovereigns of the soil say that we are equally as free as you, or any other Nation, or Nations under the Sun.” But white Americans did not like the idea of Native nations as sovereign neighbors who could limit U.S. ambitions. Whereas European colonial officials generally had to accept the need to build their empires through networks of Native allies and trading partners, people in the United States self-servingly imagined Native Americans as primitive nomads, supposedly wasting land that white Americans could farm. There had long been a current of European thought that misinterpreted Native Americans this way, but now it took hold in the imagination of a whole country determined to transform Native lands into the United States. White Americans told Indians they had two choices: assimilate as individuals into U.S. society or get out of the way.  

In November 1785, Virginia militia officer Benjamin Logan, who had fought against the Shawnees in three separate wars—Pontiac’s War, Dunmore’s War, and the American Revolution—led nine hundred militiamen into Shawnee country, while another militia force led by George Rogers Clark marched on Miamitown, on the Wabash River. Benjamin Logan’s forces burned seven Shawnee towns on the Mad and Miami rivers, which were largely abandoned when most of the Shawnees evacuated to help successfully defend Miamitown. Logan’s men killed everyone who hadn’t evacuated, including Nonhelema (the sister of the diplomat Cornstalk, who had been murdered in 1777) and an elderly man holding a copy of a treaty he had signed with the United States. Many of the Shawnees and Delawares who fled these 1785 attacks built new towns and farms near the Miamis in the valleys of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers, which flow into Lake Erie. Blue Jacket was one of many leaders whose towns came here, farther from U.S. encroachment and nearer to their Miami, Wendat, and Ottawa allies. Delawares and Ohio Senecas moved here too, as did some Cherokee, Mohawk, Mahican, and Abenaki families. Being clustered closer together than they had been before made it easier to organize war parties and to protect those who stayed behind when the warriors went off to fight. And they were closer to places where they could access European trade, including weapons and ammunition: Detroit, a post just on the U.S. side of the Canadian border but still held by the British, and British Amherstburg, just over the border in British Canada.  

It was in the Auglaize and Maumee valleys that the Shawnees helped to create their strongest and largest alliance ever. In November and December 1786, Shawnee, Wendat, Delaware, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Miami, Cherokee, and Haudenosaunee diplomats, including Mohawk Joseph Brant, gathered at a Wendat town near Detroit and wrote as “the United Indian Nations” to the U.S. Congress. They expressed their disapproval of not having been included in the negotiations that ended the American Revolution, and they declared the Ohio River the U.S. border. Americans had taken their hunting lands south of the Ohio, but those north of the river belonged to the confederated Indian Nations. If the United States insisted on invading, the confederated nations would be “obliged to defend those rights and privileges which have been transmitted to us by our ancestors.” U.S. representatives should no longer attempt to make treaties or buy land from their nations separately. Instead, “all treaties carried on with the United States, on our parts, should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy.” 

Confederated forces drove squatters from the north side of the Ohio. They also besieged Vincennes, a small post north of the Ohio, in what is today Indiana, that had been founded nearly a century earlier by French fur traders and traditionally had good trading relations with its Native neighbors. But a hundred of George Rogers Clark’s Virginia militiamen had lingered after the Revolution, squatting in the town and on its outskirts, claiming that their military service had won them the title to these lands. They fed themselves by plundering nearby Native towns. Confederated forces demanded that the French residents of Vincennes kick out the militiamen. 

Ohio Valley confederates also recruited in the South. In the spring of 1787, a large deputation of Shawnees, Wendats, Mohawks, and Oneidas visited the Muscogee (Creek) town of Little Tallassee, on the Coosa River (upstream from today’s Montgomery, Alabama), “to renew and strengthen the chain of general union formed with us in the years 77 and 79,” during the American Revolution, when they fought settlers together. They pointedly noted that the Muscogees had “causes of discontent similar to ours respecting American encroachments.” They promised the Muscogees they would “join their army with ours, for a general defense against all invaders of Indian rights,” and said that they “had already destroyed parties of Americans that were surveying the Western Country.” Indeed, the Muscogees did have similar causes of discontent and were fighting Georgia’s encroachments on their eastern lands. They heard much that they approved of in the delegation’s speeches, and they agreed that the Ohio Valley confederates could notify the Americans that the Muscogees had resolved to join what now would be a Grand Confederacy of Northern and Southern Nations, “to attack the Americans in every place wherever they shall pass over their own proper limits” and “never to grant them lands, nor suffer surveyors to roam about the country.”  

Muscogee leader Alexander McGillivray tried to build the southern half of the confederacy, modeled on and in coordination with the Ohio Valley Confederacy. Son of a Scottish father and a Muscogee mother, from whom he inherited a Muscogee clan and full citizenship as a Muscogee, McGillivray believed that the way for his people to resist Georgia’s aggressive post-Revolution expansion was with a unified Muscogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw southern confederacy, parallel to the Ohio Valley Confederacy to the north. The allies armed themselves with weapons from the Spanish, through diplomacy like that in St. Louis in 1784. During the Revolutionary War, Spain had won British-claimed lands along the Gulf Coast in what’s now Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi and added those claims to the colonies it already had in Louisiana, Texas, and most of the rest of the West. Like Muscogees and Shawnees, the Spanish were beginning to worry about growing U.S. power on the continent. 

A united Native confederacy from north to south along the long border of the United States was a huge crisis for President George Washington’s new administration. Although the U.S. population was growing, it was not large enough and certainly not well enough supplied to fight all Native nations east of the Mississippi River. Unable to afford a massive war they might not win, Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox backed down from post-Revolution claims that the United States had defeated all Indians by defeating the British. They formally recognized Native nations as independent and rewrote federal policy to be more like British and French policies before them. For now, at least, the United States declared that it would buy land, not just claim it as conquered. U.S. delegates traveled to the Ohio Valley to inform Indians of the new policy and negotiate a price for some land north of the Ohio.  

But Indigenous people between the Appalachians and the Mississippi had come to see the United States as the embodiment of land-hungry settlers. Diplomacy and reciprocal alliance and trade with the French, the Spanish, and even the British were possible, but the United States apparently had goals incompatible with Native interests and seemed entirely untrustworthy. Not seeing this offer as a change of policy at all, Shawnees and Miamis declined the invitation. When a U.S. emissary went to a Shawnee town to try to get them to send delegates, Shawnee Chief Blue Jacket countered that he would take no part in their efforts “to take away, by degrees, their lands.” Delegates of confederated nations who did go to the negotiations insisted to the U.S. representatives that the permanent border was the Ohio River. With a combination of threats and promises, the U.S. negotiators persuaded a few present to sign what they called the Treaty of Fort Harmar, but the agreement was clearly invalid. Miami Chief Little Turtle blamed the Haudenosaunee, claiming that they had “seduced some of our young men to attend it, together with a few” Ojibwe, Wendats, Ottawas, Delawares, and Potawatomis. It was not signed by the Ohio Valley Confederacy according to its rules, and therefore it was invalid. 

DuVal, Kathleen, Native Nations: A Millenium in North America. (New York: Random House, 2024). pp. 296-299.