The truth was, I was not expected to survive. When Washington lost Long Island in August & evacuated New York, my father decided he must tarry no longer: Burr had distinguisht himself in the retreat from Long Island by saving a brigade from capture (young Joel Barlow, on vacation from Yale, was in that brigade), but he had been obliged to disobey his superiors to do it, and they were not pleased. Arnold had had to withdraw from Montreal, so expensively won, and was building a flotilla on Lake Champlain to meet the superior British force there. Guy Johnson (Sir William’s nephew & successor as His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New York, whom Father had befriended at Castines Hundred) wrote that the Six Nations had so far been successfully bribed into neutrality, but were “spoiling for action.” That their likeliest leader, Johnson’s Mohawk secretary Joseph Brant, was so gone into English scholarship & English religion that nothing could rouse him from his translation into Mohawk of the Book of Common Prayer. The iron was hot, Father declared, and must be struck ere it cool’d: he bade Mother join him at Castines Hundred as soon as she was able, “with or without the child, as fate will have it,” and went on ahead to stir this Joseph Brant to action, whose motives he believed he understood.
Against all odds, Mag Mungummory & her clever company kept me this side of death, even nurst me toward robustness, but we were obliged to remain in Maryland thro the winter. In October Father wrote (in the family cipher, here decipher’d): “B[enedict] A[rnold] has lost, albeit brilliantly & against great numbers, the 1st naval engagement betwixt Crown & Continentals. I am stirring up charges against him of misconduct in Montreal, to incline him uswards.” In January: “A[aron] B[urr]‘s disgust with Washington is dangerously weaken’d by C[ornwallis]‘s defeat at Princeton, alma mater to us both and, to B, pater as well.” (Burr’s father was its 2nd president.) In March, as we were leaving for the hazardous journey north: “Cannot stir B[rant] from his books. He is much like Yrs Truly of a few years back, discovering his other self, & hates the memory of having fought in ’63 with the renegade Iroquois against Pontiac, whom too late he much admires. His sister Molly is the warrior in the family: B & I are like as twins, she declares, and she urges me to do in his name what he will not.”
That name, in Mohawk, was Thayendanegea. The deeds associated with it, and their attributions, are a house built on the sands of my mother’s love for & faith in my father, whom she saw thenceforward rarely, and always in equivocal circumstances. Hers was a harder fate than Anna Cooke’s, I think, whose Henry Burlingame never convincingly reappear’d to her. If Father’s letters are to be believed — I mean the letters in his hand, over his initials, which, never doubting them herself, Mother kept at Castines Hundred with the Journall & the Secret Historie—on my 1st birthday anniversary he assumed the role of “Joseph Brant” to head 500 Senecas & Cayugas in the St. Leger expedition against Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk, a siege not unlike the one of his boyhood. It was a siege soon lifted, not by the battle at Oriskany (which, tho costly to both sides, was indecisive), but by secret agreement between my father & the leader of the Continental relief force sent up after that battle: “Major General B[enedict] A[rnold] is still embitter’d that his new commission came so tardily, after the promotion of his juniors & inferiors & so many brave exploits of his own. Only Washington’s personal entreaties keep him in the rebel service. By giving him the victory at Stanwix (at small expense to us), I have put his dunderhead superior in such a passion of jealousy as B will find intolerable — when we shall meet again.”
Another letter has him rejoicing at “A’s” being relieved of command by that same jealous superior, General Gates. He laments the staunch, “misguided” patriotism that leads his friend to serve bravely even so, without command, at the 2nd Battle of Saratoga. He rejoices again when in June ’78 Washington puts Arnold in command of Philadelphia, “where everyone that matters, save Ben Franklin, is a Loyalist.” Burr too, he complains, “is grown a hopeless patriot since last winter at Valley Forge. The pass he guarded was the very door to the place, and for all his old contempt for Washington, he would not tender us the key. Now he fights like the Devil in New Jersey. With the British out of Philadelphia, and the French (thanks to Franklin) assembling a fleet at Newport to move against us in Canada, our position is not as certain as it was last year. ’Tis time my Mohawks bloodied their hatchets.”
They did, on my 2nd birthday. Sweeping down into Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, John Butler, “Joseph Brant,” & Molly Brant, with the Butler Rangers & the Brant Mohawks, join’d forces with a 2nd great Amazon, “Queen Esther” Montour, to capture Forty Fort. The massacre was egalitarian as their leadership: above 300 men, women, & children were tortured & kill’d by the “Devils of the Mohawk.” In August & September they burnt German Flats & other “Continental” settlements in the Mohawk Valley; in November, having captured the fort at Cherry Valley, my father & his warriors alone murder’d 30 women, children, & old people. When “her husband” return’d to her that winter at Castines Hundred, “hardly recognizable” in his Mohawk paint & dress & haircut, my mother ask’d him hopefully, Whether these atrocities were meant to avenge Lord Amherst’s smallpox campaign against the besiegers of Fort Pitt in ’63? Not particularly, he admitted: their fourfold object was to rouse the real Joseph Brant from his studious reclusion (alarm’d at my father’s excesses, Brant had indeed assumed command of the Mohawk warriors; hence Father’s return to us); to recommit the Iroquois to their traditional ferocity; to provoke enough indiscriminate reprisal to bring the more neutral of the Six Nations into the war — and to slake the personal bloodlust of Molly Brant and Esther Montour, whose appetite for mutilation, disembowelment, impalement, flaying, cannibalism, & the like was truly savage.
Our host, Baron André Castine II, observed that Madocawando’s Tarratines, while brave, had been peaceful trappers & hunters, like most Indians north of the St. Lawrence & the Lakes, who fear’d & despised the barbarous practises of the Iroquois. All he himself could say in defence of such barbarisms was that the Iroquois themselves had not perpetrated them wholesale until prest by the economics of the French & English fur trade, which had turn’d them into greedy, alcoholic middle-men. But tho savagery was savagery, the Baron maintain’d that all were not tarr’d with the same brush. Loyalists imprison’d by the Continentals in the Connecticut copper mines were being beaten & tortured about the privates in the customary ways; British regulars were stifling & abusing Continentals in the infamous jails & prison-ships of New York. Neither were yet routinely dismembering & flaying alive, or prolonging torture for the sake simply of extracting the greatest possible pain from a living body, or tying live people to trees by their own entrails, or impaling children on pointed stakes — had not so done, routinely, since the Middle Ages. Differences in degree were important; this was the 18th Century, not the 12th; the fragile flower of humanism, of civilization—
“It is your 18th Century,” my father is said to have replied. “We do not reckon time from the same events, or by the same units.”
We Princeton alumni, the Baron politely inquired, or we Yale tutors? Or perhaps we child-murderers?
“We Ahatchwhoops,” said my father, “who ever regarded the Tarratines as a tribe of old women.”
The Baron replied with a sigh that according to his grandmother, Princess Madocawanda, it was the elder women of the tribe who, like Molly Brant, were always the most ferocious when unleasht. Their conversation then ended uncomfortably, if short of an outright break in the family. And it seems not to have been without effect on my father, who soon after shaved his scalp-lock, doft his paint, beads, & buckskins, & donn’d a short wig & English dress — nor, to our knowledge, ever took a full-fledged Indian role thereafter. Unless it was he who sat for Romney’s portrait of Joseph Brant in ’86.