1A first approach to the question of terror in the context of the American Revolution must take into account what constituted acceptable—“usual”—violence for ordinary people. That a consensus on the question existed is testified to by the prohibition, without any specification, of “cruel or unusual punishments” contained in the Eighth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1791 as part of what was immediately termed the “Bill of Rights.”

2On September 20, 1776, the Continental Congress approved a set of Articles of War1 for its army. These established an official military discipline which did not differ greatly from what had been the practice since the outbreak of hostilities in the Spring of the previous year, and, though taking into account the peculiar nature of its citizen army and the political circumstances in which it operated, generally held to British usage. How were the Articles’ criteria perceived?

3Young Minuteman Samuel Haws of Wrentham, Massachusetts, who kept a diary at the siege of Boston in 1775 and early 1776, more days than not wrote “nothing remarkable,” “nothing strange” or “no news.” However, along with standing piquet, drinking to “the Ladies” on election day, “hearing cannon,” observing a “flag of truce come out of town” he finds worth noting “Their was a man Whiped for Stealing” (June 10) and, on August 11, “Their was three men whipt for deserting they were whipt ten stripes apiece they belong to the Connecticut forces.” Indeed, by October, Haws is joking about a “Rifle man” from a Maryland company “whipt 39 stripes for Stealing and afterwards he was Drummed out of camps if the infernal regions had ben opened and cain and Judas and Sam Haws had been present their could not have ben a biger uproar.” So 39 stripes were well within the bounds of acceptability. Haws was far more disturbed by sudden death from illness.2

4At a higher social level, the order of attack issued in 1779 by Maj. Henry Lee, Jr. (“Lighthorse Harry”) for the surprise nocturnal assault on the British position on Paulus Hook, New Jersey, declared “death as the immediate fate of any soldier who may violate in the slightest degree the silence he has ordered to be observed.” Washington—careful in the Spring of 1775 during the siege of Boston to “request” discipline and to appeal to militiamen to obey orders and move from place to place only with written permission—with the Articles in place, caused no protest when he authorized the summary execution of soldiers caught in the act of desertion.3 When the Continental Congress raised the limit of punishment for insubordination and lack of discipline from 39 to 100 lashes, he requested, without success, it be fixed at 500 (the limit in the British army was 1,000). Yet, mindful of the unusual nature of his army, he was in practice found “lenient” not only by the Prussian von Steuben who undertook the task of training the Continentals, but by such figures as Charles Carroll of Maryland, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and South Carolinian Quaker Henry Laurens, who was adverse to slavery.

5In the early years of the war, Washington reduced the punishment of young soldiers from the country discovered asleep on sentry duty and even pardoned two who had abandoned their post altogether as not yet comprehending their duties. Indeed, on July 4, 1779, he pardoned all the soldiers then under sentence of death and, during the course of the war, declared four amnesties for all deserters who should return to their units within a certain date. He especially disliked the death penalty: a study of 225 death sentences found only 40 had been certainly executed.4 No mutinies deriving from these policies are recorded, though they were applied to an army often in rags and without food or pay.

6On the contrary, “riding the wooden horse,” a punishment with a long European history, introduced into the colonies by the British army at about the time of the French and Indian war and tried out by some militia authorities, was perceived immediately as unacceptable by ordinary people, whether under arms or in the streets. When in 1764 a militia private mustered on Boston Common “behaved saucily to his Captain” and was made to ride the Wooden Horse, “the mob got foul of the horse and broke it so the fellow escaped.”5

7Within civil society, where public executions were usual and pillory and stocks still existed in many town squares as instruments of official punishment, tarring and feathering (a sea-faring custom probably brought to the colonies by sailors) appeared only during the pre-revolutionary decade, but it became a characteristic practice along the coasts and in the towns of New England. Carried out by political crowds on the spur of the moment as a painful theater of humiliation with overtones of rough humor, tarring and feathering was viewed with mixed feelings by gentlemen because conducted by ordinary people, but was considered neither “cruel” nor “unusual” by those engaging in it.

8Its rise in just this moment is, Alfred Young feels, due to the failure of constituted authority to respond according to community consensus: “Popular punishment became more rife when magistrate and minister ceased to perform their traditional role.”6 In such a situation, the legitimacy of authority vacillated, or “doubled.” It became a choice instead of a given. The community—or a segment of it—did what “the law,” and its officers, used to do, or what authorities could not or would not do. The “patriotic” crowd engaging in the political theatre mirrored traditional punishment practices and was assuming what I have elsewhere called “residual sovereignty,”7 as if the failure of institutional authority had returned the community to a state of nature in which it must give itself a new consensual organisation (concept tellingly re-evoked in the Declaration of Independence).

9In echoing the patterns of execution or “branding” illicit behaviour (violation of common norms) the tarring and feathering crowds identified transgressors and denounced them in public, carried them in procession before the community audience, humiliated them with “terrifying shouting, restrained violence, and a mocking, derisive spirit.”8 As an indication of the tone, Young cites Trumbull’s 1775 mock epic poem M’Fingal, where the village squire, tarred and feathered, is carried in procession with three musicians.9 This over-all evaluation of how gentlemanly Whigs viewed the practice seems to be confirmed by the tone of such notices as the following, which appeared in the “patriotic” NewYork Journal (December 28, 1775):

New Jersey. December 6—At Quibbletown, New Jersey, Thomas Randolph, cooper, who had publicly proved himself an enemy to his country, by reviling and using his utmost endeavors to oppose the proceedings of the continental and provincial conventions, in defence of their rights and liberties; and being judged a person not of consequence enough for a severe punishment, was ordered to be stripped naked, well coated with tar and feathers, and carried in a wagon publicly around the town—which punishment was accordingly inflicted. As soon as he became duly sensible of his offences, for which he earnestly begged pardon, and promised to atone, as far as he was able, by a contrary behaviour for the future, he was released and suffered to return to his house in less than half an hour. The whole was conducted with that regularity and decorum that ought to be observed in all public punishments.10

10We can note that the culprit is not an authority, but an artisan, a part of the area of the community conducting the punishment. The episode has proper “closure:” Randolph admits his transgression, affirms “community” norms and promises to conform and make amendment; he is then released without further duress. The final phrase is a sort of stamp of approval by the “better sort,” the patriot-Whig gentlemen who thereby legitimate crowd authority as a sort of extension of their own.

11An episode of a different nature appears amid a long sequence of traditional, organised and spontaneous, manifestations involving violence, punishment, humiliation and destruction of property in Massachusetts published in the Loyalist New York journal Rivington’s Gazette dated March 9, 1775—more than a month before the first armed clash between colonial militia and British Regulars at Lexington and Concord. The episode took place in Plymouth County, on Cape Cod, at the ideological heart of Massachusetts:

Jesse Dunbar, of Halifax, in Plymouth County, bought some fat cattle of Mr. Thomas the counsellor, and drove them to Plymouth for sale; one of the oxen being skinned and hung up, the committee came to him, and finding he bought it of Mr. Thomas, they put the ox into a cart, and fixing Dunbar in his belly, carted him four miles, and there made him pay a dollar, after taking three more cattle and a horse from him. The Plymouth mob delivered him to the Kingston mob, which carted him four miles further, and forced from him another dollar, then delivered him to the Duxborough mob, who abused him by throwing the tripe in his face, and endeavouring to cover him with it to the endangering his life. They then threw dirt at him, and after other abuses carried him to said Thomas’ house, and made him pay another sum of money, and he not taking the beef, they flung it in the road and quitted him.11

12The episode starkly described shows no humor at all. It is of a new and darker nature. The theatrical progress of the cart proceeds from town to town along a planned itinerary where, at each “station,” Dunbar, encased in his ox, is passed from committee to committee, taxed and passed on, finally being covered in entrails and symbolically “buried” with handfuls of loose dirt at the locus of his transgression (counsellor Thomas’ house). Dunbar is in no sense an active subject like Randolph. He is silent all through. He refuses guilt, apology or promises; there is no closure. There is no shared community to be reaffirmed; the carcass remains in the road, meat, blood, offal, left to rot.

13The careful prose gives us a fractured polity invested with an act that is more terrifying than the armed clash with the British. This sort of terrifying episode is a thread which will reappear many times during the years that follow when Nathan Hale is denounced as a spy to British authorities in New York in 1776 by a Loyalist cousin who has just visited him and his family in Connecticut, and is hung. Or in the episode in the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna frontier in which, on July 4, 1778, after several skirmishes and clashes both in the woods and around the American forts protecting settlers in the area, Iroquois Indians, under the command of Connecticut Loyalist Col. John Butler, surround a small fort. Butler sends 196 scalps into the fort as a message and when its commandant asks for terms of surrender, replies “the hatchet”; on conquering the fort the next day, Butler orders it burned with all those who are in it. A similar fate is decreed for Fort Griswold at the Connecticut port of New London by former Continental general Benedict Arnold when, in September, 1781, he lands troops there for a raid. The commander who has, after vigorous resistance, surrendered the garrison to superior forces, is slaughtered with survivors and the fort and town put to the torch.

14In the Southern backcountry, Loyalist Col. Banastre Tarleton allowed Virginian troops who surrendered under a white flag at the Waxhaws in 1780 to be bayoneted by the dragoons of his Legion. Despite their request for quarter, 113 were killed immediately, 150 so badly wounded they were left to die and a mere 50 odd were in condition to be carried off as prisoners or to escape in the confusion. Back country militia and Continentals would shortly after attack Loyalist troops under the British officer Ferguson at King’s Mountain yelling “Banastre’s quarter,” and would proceed to mutilate the fallen Ferguson’s body and urinate on it, as well as killing many of his troops after they had surrendered under a white flag and been disarmed. Of the episode at Waxhaws, Henry Lee would comment, “This bloody day only wanted the war dance and the roasting fire to have placed it first in the records of torture and death in the West.”12

15Terror was thus employed as strategy and tactic by Loyalist forces and was not discouraged by British commanders. This acquiescence also extended to operations by the Indian forces allied to Britain operating in up-state New York and along the frontiers from Pennsylvania to the Ohio and the Mississippi; it was usually accompanied by a British liaison officer who often commanded or set the terms of engagement.13 Indeed, as he accepted command of the New York Provincial Corps from Howe in 1777, Loyalist Governor William Tryon informed the Secretary of War of His Majesty’s Government that Indian brutality was necessary, specifically using the word “terror,” though he was careful to do so by concurring “exactly” with a “Col. St. Luc”—and to quote him in “French:”

Il faut lâcher les sauvages contre les misérables Rebels, pour imposer de terreur sur les frontiers [sic]; il dit de plus (mais un peu trop pour moi) “qu’il faut brutaliser les affaires”; assurément, il est bien enragé de le mauvais traitement qu’il a reçu de les aveugles peuple.14

16Following Virginia Royal Governor Dunmore’s lead, British authorities had attempted as early as 1775 to institute a strategy of terror by offering freedom to any slaves who should flee their colonial masters and “come over” to the British forces. Interestingly, these proclamations did not produce the flow of slaves expected (not only due to the menace of punishment and the accusations of British perfidy spread by patriot newspapers and broadsides, but because many Loyalists, especially in the South, had slaves, who were regularly returned to their masters by British authorities; but, as well, due to the indifferent or poor treatment which such “refugees” did receive at British and Loyalist hands). In addition, though some few were sporadically included in operations, no real attempt was made to fit refugee blacks into fighting units or to form black units, except in the last two years of the war when a few were put on fort duty in Georgia and a small cavalry detachment organised to pursue deserters.

17Rhetoric about the “perfidy” of such proclamations was common in patriotic journals, but there seems to have been little which might be termed fear, let alone terror, on the “patriot” side. Indeed, besides the later famous figure of Crispus Attucks who fell in the “Boston Massacre” in 1770, several black militiamen fought at Bunker Hill in 1775. A French officer reported that a quarter of Washington’s forces at White Plains in 1776 were black and further noted that “three quarters of the Rhode Island Regiment” were black as well,15 though a part of this number may have been employed in works of military engineering, foraging, or as teamsters—as with those slaves who had fled to the British army.

18And, as we have just seen, at least one terrifying act was committed by American troops. Yet this is still not yet employing terror as a deliberate instrument of war.

19Here we have come to the heart of the matter: terror as policy and method in the American conduct of the revolutionary war. The key here is in the words employed by Lee in speaking of Waxhaws: “bloody,” “war dance,” “roasting fires,” “torture”—the archetype of the Indian as colonials saw him: engaging in cruel and unusual punishment and bloody violence with enjoyment and a shade of barely repressed cannibalism. Our enemy dehumanized (“savage,” “primal”), regressed (as the Enlightenment felt possible) to “Nature” (which many strands of colonial culture, for differing cultural processes, equated with insensate impulse). But we were dehumanized somehow as well, being “sons of the country.”16 The Indian was inside ourselves and at the same time at our backs. A cause of terror indeed.

20George Washington, unlike Jefferson who envisioned a fusion with them to produce a distinct, “real,” American,17 had experience in fighting against Indians and, as “an American gentleman” wrote in a letter to The New Hampshire Gazette in March, 1780, that he felt “an utter aversion to all Indians.”18 Though on his arrival in Cambridge in July, 1775, to take up the command of the disparate forces spontaneously besieging Boston, he found that the Massachusetts militia included a company of Stockbridge Indians and though he also conferred with representatives of other Indian nations, securing a few allies—and a number of “scouts” who would continue with Continental forces throughout the war (including operations like the Sullivan campaign again the Iroquois in 1779)—Washington very soon adopted a policy of “Indian” terror.

21At the heart of this policy were the various companies from the Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia backcountry in and beyond the Allegheny Mountains, which had formed rapidly on news of the siege of Boston and arrived in Cambridge in early August, shortly after Washington, who well knew what their mentality and capabilities were as compared to the New England militia already in place since April. “Our brave American boys,” as local militia would call them were, in fact, strongly characterised and not only by their “long rifles” and their marksmanship, but by their dress, bearing, and very bodies.

22Tradition had always embodied the American land symbolically in the Indian, as a cursory glance at such diverse sources as European maps, political cartoons, and Franklin’s proposals for territorial expansion indicate. Indeed, in their Treaty Council orations the Indians themselves so identified themselves (though they did so as an affirmation of their natural right to occupy the countryside and concede use of it). On the occasion of the Tea Party, Boston patriots had masked as Indians in their foray to throw the offending tea into the harbor. However intended consciously, this disguise was in its choice of mask a symbolic declaration of “natural”—“biologic”—separation from Great Britain; an affirmation of an identity which was not colonial-British, but “American.” And the refusal of participants to declare themselves even decades later when no peril, but rather fame, was attached to such a revelation, confirms the deep importance of the political theatre involved. It was so recognised immediately by the British Government and the King, who closed the port and occupied the city with troops. However, the Whigpatriot leaders involved would make the break only five years and two Continental Congresses later, and even then would be forced to it by the spontaneous siege of Boston by ordinary people and would produce an official document of independence only over a year later.

23Boston’s “Indians” were not very “savage” (one showed a bit of lace at the wrists as he grasped a keg to fling it overboard and no physical insult was offered to the crew aboard). But the backcountry embodied the identity very differently. We have an extremely clear picture of the American as Indian, as Terror felt, received and introduced in a long newspaper account of the passage of Cresap’s company at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Cresap, a 28-year-old West Virginian, who had grown up and fought as captain of militia in the backcountry, led the first of a group of rifle companies from backcountry Maryland to arrive at the siege of Boston.19

On Friday evening last [...] arrived at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on their way to the American camp, Captain Cresap’s company of riflemen, consisting of one hundred and thirty active, brave young fellows; many of whom have been in the late expedition under Lord Dunmore, against the Indians. They bear in their bodies visible marks of their prowess, and show scars and wounds which would do honor to Homer’s Iliad [...]. These men have been bred up in the woods to hardship and dangers from their infancy. They appear as if they had never felt the passion of fear. With their rifles in their hands, they assume a kind of omnipotence over their enemies [...] Two brothers in the company took a piece of board five inches broad and seven inches long, with a piece of white paper, about the size of a dollar, nailed in the centre, and while one of them supported this board perpendicularly between his knees, the other, at a distance of upwards of sixty yards, and without any kind of rest, shot eight bullets through it successively, and spare a brother’s thigh! [...] The spectators [...] were told that there were upwards of fifty persons in the same company could do the same [...]. At night a great fire was kindled around a pole in the Court House Square, where the company, with the captain at their head, all naked to the waist, and painted like savages (except the captain, who was in an Indian shirt) indulged a vast concourse of people with a perfect exhibition of a war-dance, and all the manoeuvres of Indians, holding council, going to war, circumventing their enemies by defiles, ambuscades, attacking, scalping, & c. It is said by those who are judges, that no representation could possibly come nearer the original.20

24The first Virginia company of riflemen to arrive at the siege of Boston was Captain Daniel Morgan’s. Its components were equipped not only with rifle, but tomahawk and scalping knife and all wore long hunting shirts, and Indian “leggings” and moccasins. Morgan, 39-years-old, was already known to Washington, not only because he lived in Fredrick County (which Washington had represented in Virginia’s House of Burgesses), but because Morgan had fought with acquaintances during Braddock’s campaign in the late 1750s and Washington had then met him personally. In the autumn of 1775, Morgan was given command of the three rifle companies that were part of Arnold’s expedition to Quebec, where he took over command during the assault on the city when Arnold was wounded, and was captured.21 Morgan was promoted to Colonel during his parole and, finally exchanged in January, 1777, recruited marksmen for the eleventh Virginia Continental Regiment, joining Washington’s forces in time to make a fundamental contribution to the victory at Saratoga which would convince France to support the Americans.

25By then Washington had already decided to make of American peculiarities a policy, forming a special corps of light infantry composed of some five hundred men from the western counties of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. An independent unit, under the command of Morgan, this corps was excused from all regular camp duties; it was outfitted in hunting shirts and “leggings,” and was meant to harass British forces with the Indian spectre-identity, provoking terror to avoid set battles where the uncertainties of militia units put Continental forces at a disadvantage. “Dress a company or two of true Woods Men in the right Indian style and let them make an attack accompanied with screaming and yelling as the Indians do,” Washington advised Morgan, recalling the fear which had, in the 1750s, gripped Braddock’s troops at forest warfare as well as the proclivity of all European officers to respond uncertainly to deviation from set battles: “it would have very good consequences.”22

26After the massacres in the Wyoming Valley and the Cherry Valley episode of 1778, Congress decided that the Loyalists attacking settlements with Indians and British liaison officers could not be “left to” local forces. Perhaps the most outstanding initiative growing out of this decision was the Sullivan campaign of the Fall of 1779 directed against the Iroquois in their home territories in Western New York. While local retaliations like Broadhead’s foray into the Wyoming Valley were brutal and bloody, they were not the result of any policy of terror; they were merely terrifying acts. Sullivan, instead, was under orders from Washington to devastate Indian fields and towns methodically, and proceeded north through Iroquois country, leaving scorched earth—and winter famine—in his wake.23 Openly symbolic, one thousand hunting shirts were issued to Sullivan’s troops—most of whom, like the general himself, came from New England24 and therefore did not come naturally by the identification requested of them. Besides cautioning against close-rank formations, Washington advised Sullivan to adopt a “loose and dispersed” arrangement both marching and fighting. And again, as with Morgan and the British, urged that nothing would “disconcert and terrify” the “savages” more than “the war hoop and fixed bayonets.”25 The phantom is embodied and turned upon itself.

27In any case, once in the field the resulting force proved itself as ferocious as might be desired. In one of the numerous diaries written by Continental soldiers collected by Cook in the 1880s, New Englander Lt. William Barton, reaching the Indian town of French Catherine on August 30 (on which date, more than a month into Iroquois territory, the expedition had not yet encountered a hostile Indian formation), notes that amongst the ruins of the village only an old Indian woman who “looked to be a hundred” was found sitting in the dust. Lt. Robert Parker, one of the riflemen from Western Pennsylvania, notes rather that the old woman declares the Indian women had “exhorted” the warriors to “fight us” but “they had refused to do it saying that we were invincible and it was useless to attempt it.”26 So the emulators seem indeed to have become Indians to the Indians themselves.

28At the same time, if they had succeeded in producing terror (or “awe”), Sullivan’s soldiers had also felt terror. Like the New Englanders who had fled south from Ticonderoga in 1777,27 pursued by British regulars and their Iroquois allies, the very physical absence of hostile Indians filled them with apprehension. The irregular toll of small scouting parties or single sentries found scalped, the abandoned camp-site with a still warm pot in the burnt out fire, the pervasive absence took a toll of terror no less fundamental than that inflicted on the enemy.28

29Sullivan’s troops also did some scalping and the one terrifying episode of Iroquois savagery we have is linked to this. A Lt. Boyd out with a scouting party met up with, killed and scalped a hostile Indian. Sending most of his party back to camp, Boyd went on with the remainder and two Indian scouts; the group was ambushed as they discussed who should have the scalp of another Indian they had encountered and killed. Though most escaped, Boyd and the scouts were captured. The next day Boyd’s body and that of one of the scouts were found at Chenisee Town. Both bodies had been beheaded and scalped. Not only “massacred and in putrification,” Boyd’s eyes had been gouged out, his nails torn off, his body “whipped and pierced in many different places [...]. A great part of his body was skinned, leaving the ribs bare.”29 Erkuries Beatty, also from New Jersey, is more graphic about the skinning and slashing of Boyd’s body, adding that his “privates was nearly cut of [f] and hanging down,” and “the dogs had eat part of their shoulders away.”30 Other diaries refer to atrocities “too terrible to mention.” Mary Jemison’s narrative, as reported by Seaver decades after the fact, does not mention castration, but instead affirms that a cut was made in Boyd’s belly as he hung still living on the tree or pole of his torture and his entrails were drawn out through this incision and cast across the ground.31

30The demolition of the body described recalls strongly “drawing and quartering,” a traditional punishment for High Treason which had been practised in Great Britain into the early part of the eighteenth century. Aimed at reducing the body to carcass and “offal,” the terrible punishment involved, in fact, keeping the condemned man alive as long as possible and, finally, cutting out his heart while it still beat. These disquieting echoes certainly floated somehow around the episode on Cape Cod involving Dunbar and the ox and suggest the reason for the epitaph for Boyd, which rifleman Lt. Robert Parker exceptionally wrote in his diary on September 14:

Thus died a good citizen, an agreeable friend and a gallant soldier—Inspired with every Heroe’s virtue he fell a victim to their savage barbarity in defense of the injured rights of mankind.32

31We have no clue as to why this party of Iroquois chose to carry out such a terrible execution—unique in the campaign—and on Boyd alone (the Indian was only scalped and beheaded). Yet another episode, mentioned in several diaries some two weeks earlier is suggestive. As Lt. William Barton, whose reliability and sang froid are revealed in the text, reports:

Monday, 30th [August]—At the request of Maj. Piatt, sent out a small party to look for some of the dead Indians—returned without finding them. Toward noon they found them and skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs; one pair for the Major and the other for myself.33

From destruction of the body to its appropriation

32It was, however, in the Northwest that the policy of terror developed most decisively and revealed most clearly its complex implications for the formation of a national identity. Here settlement was even more sparse than in Wyoming Valley and easily subject to Indian attack from posts north of the Ohio directed from Fort Detroit by British Lt. Governor Henry Hamilton.34 In 1776, Kentucky inhabitant George Rogers Clark, already at 24 an experienced surveyor and Indian fighter, travelled to Williamsburg to ask the Virginia government from which the territory still depended on support for the defence of the area. He received approbation but little aid, and the next year tried again, this time eschewing projects of defence and presenting Governor Patrick Henry (himself a backcountry man), instead, with a plan for an ambitious campaign to take the entire area, fort by fort, moving the Western boundary of the new United States to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Commissioned colonel in the Virginia forces, Clark was authorized to raise seven companies, ostensibly to reinforce western defences and, secretly, to conquer the Northwest.

33With less than 200 men, recruited in western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee settlements, Clark floated down the Ohio in May, 1778, where he was supposed to meet other forces, which did not, however materialize for various reasons. Seriously outnumbered by local settlers who were mostly French and officially Loyalist and by the Indian allies of the British, Clark imposed very strict discipline on his few troops, and proceeded like a war party across miles of river-bottom forest land in southern Illinois. He secured several key forts, convincing the population to join forces with him by good treatment and news of the French alliance and was even able, with the cooperation of an influential French priest, to gain the cooperation of key Fort Vincennes and garrison it with a corporal’s guard. Clark, conversant with Indian custom, also held a council where he spoke in the Indian manner, attempting to establish good relations.

34This first phase ended when, in autumn 1778, Hamilton attacked Clark (who had had to allow some of his militiamen to return home for harvest) with a force of 130 French militiamen, 70 Indians and 35 British Regulars, driving him back on Kaskaskia. Thinking Clark blocked where he could conveniently be attacked in the spring, Hamilton then returned to Fort Vincennes. Instead, in early February, 1779, Clark set out with “My boys”—by now about half local French—Illinois militia volunteers—to take Fort Vincennes. And this time, besides discipline, he “put on the Indian.”

35A third of the time in the rain, crossing four rivers, with the last ten miles to Vincennes under three feet of water and “not a mouthful of provision,” after 240 miles, Clark’s band found itself “with inexpressible joy” “safe on terra ferma within half a league of the fort, covered by a small grove of trees” and “had a full view.”35

36Marching his few troops “enough to be seen from the town before dark,” Clark set up camp so that only tents could be seen, since he had “as many of them as would be sufficient for a thousand men,” sending a letter by a “friendly” prisoner asking for surrender of the fort. Clark then refused both the aid of some inhabitants and of some hundred friendly Kickapoo and Pankeshaw Indians who also found themselves in the town. After a night of “heavy firing,” at Hamilton’s refusal to surrender, Clark resumed fire. Though, as he wrote George Mason later, “I could only consider himself and officers as murderers and intended to treat them as such,” Clark did agree finally to meet Hamilton, refused his counter-terms and, asked what further offers he would accept, responded: “(which was really the truth) that I wanted a sufficient excuse to put all the Indians and partisans to death, as the greatest part of those villains was then with him.”36

37Here the story reaches its climax. The Kickapoo, who still want to “help” Clark, sight a party of Hamilton’s Indian warriors returning to the fort and Clark sends out a party of his own men, masked as Indians, to meet them, which they take to be a sort of welcoming guard of honor from Hamilton. Writes Clark: each party “hooping [sic], hollowing and striking each others breasts as they approached in the open fields [...]. The poor devils never discovered their mistake until it was too late for many of them to escape. Six of them was made prisoners, two of them scalped, and the rest so wounded, as we afterwards learnt, but one lived.”

38Among Clark’s masquerading Illinois militia was “An old French gentleman of the name of St Croix, Lieut. Of Capt. McCrary’s volunteers from Cohos,” who had “but one son.” When the prisoners were gathered, an Indian leader was seen to be a painted white man. “The question was put whether the white man should be saved. I ordered them to put him to death, through indignation which did not extend to the savages.” For fear he would escape, the elderly Frenchman drew his sword and “stood by him in order to run him through in case he should stir.” “The wretch, on seeing the executioner’s tomahawk raise to give the fatal stroke, raised his eyes as if making his last addresses to Heaven, cried out, “O, save me!” At that, the masquerading father—who had not recognized him in his paint—“knew his son’s voice.” It is certainly a very emblem of terror: father and son so comprised in their assumed nature as not to feel the “ties of blood.” Saved only by the “voice” of individuality from destroying the future.

39“You may easily guess,” Clark comments, “of the adgetation [sic] and behaviour of these two persons comeing [sic] to the knowledge of each other at so critical a moment.” But, no father, and no son despite his youth, he reacts with detachment: “I had so little mercy for such murderers, and so valuable an opportunity for an example, knowing there would be the greatest selicitations [sic] made to save him, that I immediately absconded myself, but by the warmest selicitations [sic] from his father who had behaved so exceedingly well in our service, and some of the officers, I granted his life on certain conditions.”

40A terrifying act reluctantly suspended, within a policy of terror more explicit and finalized than that of Washington or Morgan. Clark is already another generation whose mentality, like its command of the language, is the result of a different life experience.37

41Perhaps nothing better reflects the depth of the gap in experience and worldview which the war, and the policy of Indian terror fostered by both British and Patriot leaders, produced between such young men as Parker and Clark and older leaders than the hoax with which the aged Benjamin Franklin (who had always employed “Indians” as stand-ins and counters in political discourse and polemic aimed at components of his own world) shocked the French court during these same final war years.

42At his press in Passy, Franklin printed up a “New England newspaper” with an account of a “captured” British ‘document’ describing “eight Packs of scalps, cured, dried, hooped, and painted,” each labelled with the quantity and nature of the contents, among which figured: 62 Farmers—“surprised in the Night,” 88 women—“hair long... to shew they were Mothers,” and “29 Infants’ Scalps of Various Sizes.”38 Much as he had scorned the “Paxton Boys” in 1764, Franklin meant this effort—as Pitt meant his excoriating attack on Lord Suffolk when the Indian terror policy was adopted—to denigrate the level to which “civilised” British leadership had stooped, through what he perceived as ridicule of what it actually accomplished in cowing and defeating the Americans. Franklin found the list a ridiculous result and terror bad policy. And so it had been for the British. For Franklin, the Indian, useful counter in political discourse, had no part in American identity

43But for the Americans, the policy of “putting on the Indian” over nearly a decade of war, had deeper effects than Washington ever intended or envisioned. A device in desperate redress of the lack of traditional military training of the townsmen and farmers at Washington’s disposal, as the war wore on the recourse to Indian emulation strengthened the force of those backcountry traits which had always been decried by the gentlemen who governed as “barbarous.” Militia continued to be an uncertain tool throughout the war, and Continental army discipline was never strong enough to wholly control the backcountry rifle companies absorbed into it. Finally, expansion beyond the mountains into the Northwest had strengthened the “Indian” model as a proposal of identity linked firmly to territories whose inhabitants would have no colonial phase, but be immediately “American.” The end result was full of consequence for the future history of the new republic.