Native Americans helped spark the Revolution

Boston Globe

03-04-2025

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There are few years in US history more misunderstood than those following the Seven Years' War. It was fought across the globe — from Havana to Manila — and its origins lay deep in the American interior, near what is today Pittsburgh. Fighting began in the summer of 1754 near the Ohio River, after French officials established Fort Duquesne to prevent English traders from usurping interior trade between French settlers and their Algonquian-speaking indigenous allies. This first battle ended, ironically, on July 4, 1754, when Colonel George Washington surrendered to French forces and retreated to Virginia after failing even to assault Duquesne.
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Eventually, British forces, commanded by Jeffrey Amherst, the governor general of British North America, conquered New France, more than doubling the North American territories held by the king. The British triumphs that Amherst led can still be read on the eastern side of an obelisk he designed that sits on the site of his former manor in Kent, England:
Louisbourg surrendered
And Six French Battalions
Prisoners of War, 26th July 1758
Fort du Quesne taken possession of 24th Nov. 1758
Niagara surrendered 25th July 1759
Ticonderoga taken possession of 26th July 1759
Crown Point taken possession of 4th August 1759
Quebec capitulated 18th Sept. 1759
The western side of the monument displays an homage to Amherst: 'Dedicated to that most able Statesman during whose administration Cape Breton & Canada were conquered and from whose influence the British arms derived a degree of Lustre unparallel'd in past Ages.' Nowhere else are the concluding stages of this struggle for North America so clearly commemorated.
James A. West's "Point Of View" sculpture in Pittsburgh depicts a 1770 meeting between the Seneca leader Guyasuta and George Washington.But few ever glean insight into one enduring imprint of the war: Its aftermath formed the crucible of the nation's Indian affairs — and it did so in ways that fueled colonists' grievances.
Immediately after the Treaty of Paris, in June 1763, a constellation of Native nations known as Pontiac's Confederacy formed a multitribal confederation across the Great Lakes. They sacked nearly all the Great Lakes forts the British had inherited from the French, drawing English forces deeper into the continent. This conflict, known as Pontiac's War, continued for two years and grew increasingly costly for the Crown, compelling generals like Amherst to pursue diplomacy instead of more warfare.
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In an initial step, in October 1763, a 'Royal Proclamation Line' decreed that interior Colonial settlements would be abandoned and that the lands of the Ohio River Valley were to be 'reserved for the Indians,' as many maps thereafter detailed.
Colonists considered such recognition treacherous. They vilified Indians and British officials who supported them.
Even as much of this violent history of the indigenous origins of the American Revolution has become more widely known, continued work is needed to explore these difficult and determinative years: While conflicts with Native nations across the interior of eastern North America erupted throughout the Revolution, other Native communities — particularly in New England — fought
alongside
Colonial forces, even at Lexington and Concord.
A diversity of Native warriors from across the Northeast fought and died in the Revolution because they had lived for generations within Colonial society and, like the colonists, held many grievances of their own against the Crown. Many had adopted Christianity and worked within the Colonial economy: Wampanoag and Wappinger, Pequot and Brothertown, Narragansett and Mohegan, Stockbridge and Oneida, among others. Their lives and participation remain rarely acknowledged in the national memory.
As these Native warriors joined Colonial forces, interior Native nations attempted to remain either neutral or allies of the Crown, which had spent many years recognizing their autonomy.
Samson Occom, painted circa 1950 by Nathaniel Smibert.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Participants on both sides of the Revolution, Native nations continued to suffer during the Revolution's aftermath. As the venerable Mohegan Preacher Samson Occom relayed, the Revolution 'has been the most Destructive to poor Indians of any wars that ever happened.' Among the most well-traveled and prolific writers of his generation, Occom had seen the once familiar place of Native peoples within the Colonial world transformed by the Revolution and its emerging racial hierarchies. Such changes — and racialization — became written into state constitutions, Revolutionary texts, and even the Declaration of Independence, which concludes its list of grievances with claims that the King of England 'has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our frontier, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, Is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.'
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As the Founding Fathers began a new nation, they envisioned the taking of Indian lands as a natural right of their emerging sovereignty. Indeed, a growing discourse of 'natural rights' formed the intellectual oxygen around them, especially when they looked to European philosophical traditions that championed reason and Enlightenment ideals. Within such emergent philosophies, 'savages' by definition lacked reason and remained unfit for inclusion in democracy and civilization. Ever-stronger forms of exclusion characterized the experiences of Native Americans after 1776.