By Daniel R. Mandell
Truman State University
This is an except from a paper presented at the Mashantucket Pequot Conference last fall that explored how Indians in southern New England were involved in and affected by the American Revolution. As mock Indians tossed tea into Boston Harbor and radical British Americans pushed for more sovereignty, the real Indians in southern New England faced the upheaval as one more set of challenges in a continuing struggle to maintain their families and communities. Some with connections to the wider world fulfilled traditional or new roles in service with the Revolutionary forces. Many found new opportunities or labors at home, as the upheaval of war and revolution brought many newcomers and new pressures to Indian communities.
On April 17, 1776, as war and social upheaval rocked New England, John Adams of Braintree and Boston took a moment from the Revolutionary Congress in Philadelphia to answer his wife Abigail’s famous charge to “remember the ladies.” Before joking that the “numerous and powerful” female “tribe” had “grown discontented,” he seriously observed “our Struggle has loosened the bonds of Government everywhere.” Among other threats, he noted, “Indians slighted their guardians.” Two decades later, Mashpee’s white minister Gideon Hawley found that this Revolutionary virus had spread to a point that, as he put it, the dangerous “doctrines of liberty and equality” were spreading among “his” Indians.
What these Anglo-American intellectuals missed, however, was how the distinctive experiences of Indians in southern New England, before, during, and in the aftermath of the war, meant that these momentous developments held unique meanings for them. Thus, when the Mohegans mourned in 1789 that “[t]he times are exceedingly altered, yea the Times have turned everything topside down,” they were referring to the particular problems that they had faced in the late colonial period. At the same time, they and other Natives were closely connected to the region’s religious, social, and economic currents. Indians were inevitably touched by the political ferment of Revolutionary America, with its decline of deference, and emergence of democratic politics and culture.
We all know of Crispus Attucks, for whom there is evidence of both Native American and African-American ancestry and who was one of the Revolution’s first martyrs. Southern New England Indian participation as a group in the war and ideology of the Revolution, however, is more obscure. Like so much else about the region’s Natives, direct written evidence is scarce. The picture that can be pieced together from the occasional documents is that Indians found much in Whig ideology that resonated with their own needs and desires. But for reasons shaped by their local, tribal experiences of the previous quarter-century, members of communities in Massachusetts generally made the war for independence their own, while those from Connecticut and Rhode Island tried to remain neutral – even as some who disliked the war served as diplomats to help the patriot cause – and focused instead on their effort to create the new settlement of Brotherton, in Oneida territory. For those who remained in the region, the Revolution’s ideology of equality and freedom served – as it did for many dissident Anglo-Americans – as a source of potential relief from those who dominated them. The Indians’ experience confirms, in fact, recent historiography that sees the Revolution as a political and social process continuing into the early national period.
Indian experiences during the imperial crisis and the war were shaped by their experiences in the decades before the war. Throughout the eighteenth century, Indian communities had faced a steady decline in population from epidemics and war. In addition, individuals and families moved between Native communities, continuing and extending pre-contact traditions of kinships networks that cut across village and tribal boundaries. Some went to the growing port towns or colonial villages, particularly after 1760, where family connections, jobs, or unused land provided better opportunities. As a result, by 1775 many groups retained just a few families, while others, particularly Mashpee and Mohegan, received a growing number of newcomers, which allowed them to maintain a stable population but promised changes in the community.
Throughout the colonial period, Indians gradually adopted Anglo-American farming techniques, domesticated cattle, housing, and other aspects of material culture. By mid-century, most Native groups had been substantially reshaped by these changes. At Mashantucket and Mohegan, conflicts developed between “conservative” and “reform” settlements, as “reformers” increased their use of animal husbandry, began to build Anglo-American style farms, and created distinct communities. In 1774, a Connecticut official reported that many Mohegans “have Gone into the English way of Improvement have built Houses & Barns and by Industry have Acquired Good Stocks of Cattle & Sheep and the poor sort complain that they Take up more Land than they have Right to which Complaint is not Likely to Cease untill [sic] all are Equally Industrious or Equally Indolent.” Many Indian men and women traveled away from their villages to work for Anglo-Americans: the men primarily whaling, where they were sought after as skilled harpoonists and steersmen, the women as domestics. Indian women also found an increasing demand for their crafts. In 1764, Abigail Moheag, a sixty-four year old Natick widow, told the General Court that she had been in the business for many years of making “Brooms Baskets and horse Collars,” and had been fairly successful at supporting herself.
Indian women as well as men, girls and boys, were also frequently confronted by the prospect of servitude, either for a few years or for life. In late colonial New England, indentures served four linked purposes: as a form of social control, relief from potential public expenditure, to provide labor in a region where workers were scarce, and as a potential opportunity for the poor. Indians found little of the latter, as their masters rarely promised more than a place to live, food, and clothing. Children from poor families were usually bound for extended periods, becoming separated from family and community. More adults were forced into servitude when they were drunk, were convicted of petty crimes, or could not pay debts. Whalers were particularly vulnerable. A Rhode Island census in 1774 showed 32-39 percent of all Indians in the colony living in white households, and that was probably an undercount. Colonial legislatures tried various measures to regulate Indian indentures, but this did little to help. Crispus Attucks ran away from servitude in Framingham to become a sailor, and in 1770 was seeking a berth in Boston when he joined the crowd confronting the English soldiers.
Attucks’s death in the 1770 Boston Massacre seems the only clear connection between Indians and the simmering Revolution. But while Indians were not part of the plotting or pamphleteering that drove the revolt against imperial rule, they were deeply involved in their own efforts during the same period to end oppression and secure their rights to life, liberty, and property. Their efforts took two forms. The first, ironically, was going to London to appeal to the Crown in order to overcome authoritarian legislatures or county elites, or oppressive and malicious neighboring colonists. The second was to find a more hospitable place to secure to those liberties, fleeing revolutionary New England and creating the settlement of Brotherton, among the Oneidas.
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