The Iroquois Confederacy Fractures
In the summer of 1777, the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy, whose Great Law of Peace had governed six nations for perhaps five centuries — gathered at the central council fire at Onondaga for the last time as a unified body. The question before them was which side to take in the war between Britain and the American colonies. They could not agree. The council fire was ceremonially extinguished. The oldest continuously functioning democratic confederacy in North America had fractured. This was a profound exercise of indigenous political agency under impossible conditions. The Oneida and Tuscarora nations, influenced partly by the Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland and persuaded that American victory offered better prospects for territorial protection, declared for the colonists. The Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga nations, led by the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), concluded that only a British victory could restrain American settler expansion into their lands. Brant had spent time in London, met King George III, and understood clearly that American independence meant the removal of the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763, the only legal barrier to settler encroachment on Iroquois territory. His assessment was not wrong: within a generation of American victory, the Haudenosaunee would be largely dispossessed regardless of which side they had chosen. But in 1777 his reasoning drove him to lead Loyalist and Mohawk raids across the New York and Pennsylvania frontier, provoking the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779 — a systematic American scorched-earth destruction of Iroquois villages the Haudenosaunee call the Year of the Destruction. Oneida warriors fought alongside American forces at the Battle of Oriskany in August 1777, where they faced Seneca and Mohawk warriors on the other side. Indigenous men killed their confederacy brothers in a civil war embedded within the larger colonial conflict. The confederacy never recovered its former coherence.
- Year: 1777 CE
- Category: Political
