1782 — Year Of Blood & Terror

Conventional accounts of the American Revolution tend to tie a knot in the military aspect of the conflict in October 1781, when General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army after being besieged in Yorktown, Virginia, by a combined force of American Continentals, French regulars, and the French Navy. It would take until 1783 to establish peace and independence, but for all intents and purposes the war was over.

In the western theater of the conflict — the frontier — the war was far from over. In fact, the year 1782 saw a spasm of extreme violence that would mark the most terrible year of a brutal, savage struggle. The most recent episode in Brady Crytzer’s micro-history of a Pennsylvania frontier community, Robinson run, recounts two raids that occurred in that year.

These raids were just two among many — some of them catastrophic. The Seneca leader Guyasuta led a force that destroyed Hannas Town in western Pennsylvania; Simon Girty and other British agents led elements of Butler’s Rangers and Indians in a siege at Bryan’s Station in Kentucky, then ambushed pursuers at the Blue Licks, inflicting a devastating defeat that took 70 Kentuckians’ lives, including Israel Boone, son of Daniel Boone.

The year saw one of the worst atrocities committed in frontier history. In March 1782, Pennsylvania militia penetrated into the Ohio country and took over a village of peaceful Moravian Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten. Convinced that the villagers were providing aid and comfort to hostile tribesmen, the militiamen tomahawked and bludgeoned to death 96 men, women and children.

Weeks later, a powerful force of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware and Wyandot warriors defeated an American expeditionary force that set out to destroy the Upper Sandusky stronghold of the Indians deep in Ohio. They captured its leader, Col. William Crawford. To avenge their murdered kinsmen, the Delaware burned him at the stake with exquisite soul-searing deliberation, reducing him to a shambling hulk stumbling around the stake begging to be killed. Crawford, a friend of George Washington, had had nothing to do with the Gnadenhutten Massacre and had, in fact condemned the action.

In recent years, there has been more and more scholarship that recognizes that the American Revolution had significant roots in the backcountry — and that the western theater of war was much more than a sideshow to the “real” war in the east. The podcast series Worlds Turned Upside Down is remarkably good with this. It was the need to recoup costs of defending the frontier that pushed the British Parliament to impose direct taxation on the colonies, and Imperial restrictions on settlement (and land speculation) in the West created resentment among Pennsylvania settlers and Virginia elites. These elements contributed to the start of the war, and explain, in part, why so many — including backcountry riflemen — rallied to Boston after the events of Lexington & Concord.

The western theater was not decisive in winning the War of Independence, but it critically shaped what the outcome would look like. The new United States was put on the path of continental expansion because the Americans were able to hold a foothold of settlements west of the Appalachian chain — in the face of tremendous odds and some of the most savage warfare ever engaged in on the North American continent.

The Americans had won the war by 1782, but surviving that terrible year on the frontier meant they won the West, as the British — at least on paper — gave up the interior in the Paris peace negotiations that brought a true end to the war in 1783.

The native peoples did not see themselves as defeated, however. Indeed, they had defeated the Americans in many battles. They would have to adapt to new conditions, without an active ally in Great Britain — but their war to hold their homelands would go on…

Crytzer’s Robinson Run series will examine the makeup of the native forces that hit the western Pennsylvania community in the next installment: