Hard War & Britain Victorious — A Counterfactual Musing…

There is a powerful sense of inevitability about frontier history, a sense that there was simply no stopping the juggernaut of American civilization sweeping across the continent from sea to shining sea. The very concept of Manifest Destiny reflects this sense of inevitability, lending it a Providential aspect that has thrilled or repelled people ever since the term was coined.

But that term was coined in the 19th Century, after the train got rolling. Things were much more contingent in the 18th Century, when the first American hunters, traders and settlers began punching through the Appalachian barrier. Through many decades of obsession with frontier history, I have pondered a scenario in which the native peoples of the Ohio Country and Tennessee, backed by British arms, were able to close the door to American penetration of the continental interior — and even turned the tide in the American Revolution.

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Even as the unrest in New England exploded into open armed conflict in April 1775, a party of settlers was clearing land and erecting a fort in the verdant land of Kain-tuc-kee. They would name the settlement Boonesborough in honor of their leader, the now-legendary frontiersman, Daniel Boone.

Another settlement, Harrodsburg, had been founded a few miles away, and Benjamin Logan would also found a settlement known as Logan’s Station in 1775.

These tiny settlements were achingly vulnerable, hundreds of miles from any support, undermanned and undersupplied. Had the native peoples hit them hard in their infancy, they would in all likelihood been wiped out. Had the British opted for Hard War at the inception of the rebellion, and armed and supplied the Shawnee, the Cherokee, the Mingo and urged them to rub out the settlements, there is no way the Americans could have withstood the onslaught.

I am defining Hard War here as destruction and dislocation of a civilian population and its means of living. Direct attacks on hearth and home and the destruction of crops and livestock are a consistent feature of Frontier Partisan warfare, what John Grenier calls “The First Way of War.”

In a Hard War scenario, in 1775 and ’76 the native peoples would wipe out or force the abandonment of the settlements in Kain-tuc-kee and along the Upper Ohio River, then sweep east in a red tide of blood, as they had done after Braddock’s Defeat in 1755, as they had done when Pontiac and Guyasuta led their rising in 1763. The Iroquois would rise, and drive Rebel settlers out of the Mohawk Valley. The frontier would be rolled back, and the riflemen and other backcountry militia who had responded to the call to arms under George Washington would be forced to return to defend their homes. A similar policy would be enacted in the seaboard colonies, destroying crops, mills and any civilian production that provided the means for the Rebels to sustain themselves.

The Continental Army would dissolve even as it was formed, and the rebellion would be snuffed out like a guttering candle.

Great Britain would forcibly reassert its restriction on western settlement and the lands of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee would remain in the hands of the native peoples, under the suzerainty of the British Empire. Population pressure would eventually demand expansion into the Trans-Appalachian lands again, but under conditions such that a hybrid culture would develop and the native nations would not fully lose their sovereignty.

It’s not a far-fetched scenario. The British and Indian forces generally outfought the Americans in the frontier theaters of the American Revolution, so if they had acted in concert at an earlier stage, it is likely that they would have overwhelmed frontier defenses.

And that’s the rub. They did not act early enough. It took two or three years for the British and the Indians to begin to offer concerted resistance to American expansion, and that was just enough time for the tenacious settlers to dig in and hold on. It was a close-run thing, but the Americans were able to stay in the fight and ultimately triumph on both sides of the mountains.

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Why couldn’t the British and the Indians launch Hard War in 1775-’76?

A number of factors combined to impede an early adoption of a Hard War strategy. The Shawnee were deeply divided over how to respond to the new settlements springing up in their treasured Kain-tuc-kee hunting lands. They had faced destruction just a year before in Lord Dunmore’s War, despite having fought well in a bloody pitched battle at Point Pleasant. They had been compelled to cede the lands south of the Ohio River. While some militants wanted to attack the settlements — and conducted some harassing raids — other elements wished to abide by the treaty they had agreed to, which had brought a semblance of peace. Some were so determined to avoid a destructive conflict that they were willing to remove themselves themselves west of the Mississippi.

The Americans made a concerted early effort to keep the native peoples neutral in the conflict, offering presents and promises of friendship, which worked for a time. The native peoples didn’t have much trust for the British; they had been fighting them just a decade before, after all.

The British government, too, was urging neutrality early on. The Crown was reluctant to resort to Hard War, hoping that their errant colonists would come to their senses, and there would be a reconciliation.  The surest way to blow up any such reconciliation would be to loose Indian war upon the frontiers, with people from New England down to the Carolinas long traumatized by the savage nature of such warfare. It took a couple of years and the recognition that the conflict would not be quickly extinguished to harden British resolve to forcibly crush the rebellion.

A fragile half-peace held along the frontiers through 1775 and most of 1776. In the south, Cherokee militants launched a war along the Carolina frontier, and paid a price for it as American militia penetrated their strongholds and burned their towns. But Dragging Canoe was not done fighting, and would carry on a bitter struggle against the Americans for another 16 years.

As Washington turned from a long retreat to snatch a crucial victory from the British in New Jersey in December, a hardcore Mingo militant named Plukkemehnotee was leading a raid in force into Kain-tuc-kee. Pluggy, as he was known to whites, fell in battle. His attack was a harbinger. The next year, 1777 would be known as the Year of the Bloody Sevens, as all hell broke loose from New York, through Pennsylvania and down the Ohio into Kentucky.

In Journal of the American Revolution, Joshua Shephard describes the turn to Hard War, as Lt. Governor at Detroit, Henry Hamilton, was ordered to encourage Indian raiders to attack American settlers:

In June of 1777, Hamilton received orders from Lord George Germain to actively court the assistance of the region’s Indians in harassing the American backcountry, or, as Germain loftily put it, to employ every means “that Providence has put into His Majesty’s Hands, for crushing the Rebellion.”

Hamilton became known as The Hair-Buyer for allegedly paying bounties for scalps. This was not quite accurate; he didn’t pay a direct bounty — but he did accept scalps as evidence of raiders’ success and provided them with supplies. The distinction was lost on those whose loved ones fell under the flail of Hamilton’s raids.

Hamilton had his qualms about unleashing indiscriminate war upon civilians, and encouraged the taking of prisoners to mitigate wholesale slaughter.

Shephard:

The governor regularly supplied southbound raiding parties with supplies and ammunition, but made token gestures to soften the blow.  Hamilton endeavored to attach to each war party one or more Loyalists, generally Indian Department rangers and interpreters, with orders “to attend to the behavior of the Indians, protect defenceless persons and prevent any insult or barbarity being exercised on the Prisoners.” Native war parties operating under Hamilton’s aegis proved immensely successful, wreaking havoc on the frontier in a wide arc from Pennsylvania to Kentucky.  In the first year of British-authorized raids, Hamilton reported that the tribes brought 109 prisoners into Detroit, and the governor consistently offered ransoms for such captives.

The Shawnee chief Cornstalk tried to hold his people back even as the pace of raiding picked up through 1777. When it became apparent that he could not, he visited the Americans at Fort Randolph at Point Pleasant (now West Virginia) to warn them that things were going to get ugly. Agitated American militiamen shot him and his son to pieces. There would be no reconciling the Shawnee.

It was Hard War now. The frontier conflict was exceedingly bloody and terrible. Many fled the war zone to relative safety in the eastern settlements — but those who stayed were themselves hardened. They would weather the constant raiding — and give some back, eventually launching raids and expeditions of their own into the Ohio Country to assail the Indian towns, and into the Illinois Country to take down western centers of British supply. In New York, General John Sullivan brought Hard War to the Seneca, destroying their crops and homeland villages.

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Hard War came too late to eliminate the American settlements. And the survival those settlements and the military successes of George Rogers Clark in the Illinois Country gave the Americans enough presence in the interior to force the British to cede the Ohio Country to the new United States. The Indians who had allied themselves with the Crown were completely ignored in the Treaty of Paris. At that point, inevitability truly did kick in. While there would continue to be native resistance, sometimes with remarkable temporary success, was no stopping the continental march of the new power that had bought a foothold across the Appalachians with blood in a savage frontier war.