Key figures: George Washington, the Council of Massachusetts Bay, Mi’kmaq and St. John’s (Maliseet) delegates
Summary
The Treaty of Watertown was a treaty of alliance and friendship concluded on July 19, 1776, at the Edmund Fowle House in Watertown, Massachusetts Bay — the temporary seat of the Massachusetts government while Boston recovered from British occupation. It was signed between the Council of the State of Massachusetts Bay, acting “in behalf of said State and the other United States of America,” and delegates of the Mi’kmaq and St. John’s (Maliseet) nations, whose homelands lay in present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and eastern Maine. Signed just fifteen days after the Declaration of Independence, it is often described as the first treaty entered into by the United States following independence.
Facing a war against the world’s foremost naval power, the fledgling United States was anxious to secure its exposed northeastern frontier and deny Britain the use of the Wabanaki peoples as allies. George Washington, commanding the Continental Army, encouraged Massachusetts to cultivate the friendship of the northern nations. Tribal captains — seven representing Mi’kmaq bands and three the St. John’s (Maliseet) — travelled to Watertown, arriving on July 10, 1776, and negotiated over the following days.
Terms of the Alliance
The treaty established a mutual military alliance. Its signatories agreed to “consider the enemies of the other as enemies to themselves,” to defend one another, and — on the Indigenous side — to withhold all assistance and commerce from British forces for the duration of the war. In its central military provision, the Indigenous parties undertook to “furnish and supply six hundred strong men, or as many as may be” to serve alongside the Continental Army; these men were to proceed to Boston and join Washington’s forces near New York, receiving pay and provisions equivalent to American soldiers, with wages commencing upon their arrival at Washington’s camp. The document also set out mechanisms for resolving robberies or injuries between the parties by “peaceable application” rather than “private revenge.”
Three of the six Mi’kmaq delegates who signed the treaty volunteered to enlist immediately. Tribal forces subsequently formed part of an “American Battalion” that took part in the Battle of Fort Cumberland (November 22 – December 28, 1776), an unsuccessful Patriot attempt to seize a British fort in Nova Scotia, and helped guard the Maine frontier against British incursion.
A Complicated Legacy
The alliance proved difficult to sustain. Distance, competing British diplomacy, and the practical hardships of the war strained the relationship, and Nova Scotia’s Mi’kmaq were subject to intense British pressure. On June 7, 1779, Mi’kmaq representatives delivered a copy of the treaty to the Nova Scotia superintendent of Indian affairs, Michael Francklin, and reaffirmed their allegiance to the British Crown — a reflection of the divided and shifting loyalties that Indigenous nations navigated throughout the Revolution, as seen also in the choices of figures such as Joseph Brant and in the Cherokee War of 1776.
The treaty was never formally abrogated, and it has retained symbolic and legal force into the modern era. The Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq peoples have continued to invoke it, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the anniversary of its signing has been commemorated in Watertown and recognized by the Maine Legislature.
Significance
The Treaty of Watertown marked the entry of the United States into treaty-making as an independent nation, and it did so within weeks of declaring that independence — before the Model Treaty framework produced any concluded agreement and nearly two years before the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France, which is sometimes counted as the first treaty of the national government because Watertown was concluded by a single state on the union’s behalf. Beyond questions of precedence, the treaty illustrates how central Indigenous nations were to the strategic calculations of both sides in 1776: the Revolution’s northeastern flank depended on Wabanaki cooperation, and the pact belongs to the wider story of Native diplomacy during the war, alongside the northern campaigns such as the American invasion of Canada. Its endurance as a living document in Wabanaki political memory underscores the lasting weight of the commitments the young United States made in its first year.
Sources
- Treaty of Watertown — Wikipedia
- Treaty of Watertown — Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission (MITSC) Library
- Treaty of Alliance and Friendship between the St. John River Indians and Mi’kmaq Tribes of Nova Scotia — DigitalMaine
- Treaty of Watertown — Historical Society of Watertown, Massachusetts