Key figures: Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), John Butler, Walter Butler, Cornplanter, Sayenqueraghta, Zebulon Butler (Patriot commander at Wyoming), George Washington
Summary
The Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) Confederacy — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora — had preserved a centuries-old political union under the Great Law of Peace, but the Revolutionary War broke that unity apart. In January 1777, following an epidemic that killed ninety people in the Onondaga capital, including three of the Confederacy’s principal chiefs, the Onondaga formally extinguished the council fire that had symbolized Six Nations unity since the League’s founding, an acknowledgment that the Confederacy could no longer act as one body on the question of the war. By 1778 the split had hardened into open alliances: the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and most Seneca sided with the Crown, believing British rule offered better protection for their lands, while the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. Oneida scouts served the Continental Army around Fort Stanwix, and on March 4, 1778, Congress authorized George Washington to recruit up to four hundred allied Native warriors — chiefly Oneida — for Continental service, a diplomatic counterpart to the Treaty of Alliance with the Delaware Nation signed that September.
Over the winter of 1777–1778, Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant and Loyalist Colonel John Butler planned a coordinated campaign of frontier raids for the following campaign season, drawing on Butler’s Rangers and warriors principally from the Seneca and Cayuga. On July 3, 1778, this combined force of roughly 110 Rangers and 464 Native warriors overwhelmed Patriot militia at the Battle of Wyoming in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, inflicting some 302 killed against negligible losses of their own, and burned the surrounding settlements.
On November 11, 1778, a second and more controversial strike fell on Cherry Valley, New York. A mixed force of British regulars, roughly 150 Butler’s Rangers under Walter Butler, and some 321 Haudenosaunee warriors — mostly Seneca under Cornplanter, alongside Mohawk and Cayuga contingents — attacked the settlement, killing 14 defenders and 30 civilians and taking dozens captive. Command friction between Walter Butler and Brant undermined the operation; historian Barbara Graymont characterized Butler’s leadership as “criminally incompetent,” and Brant, though not present at Wyoming, worked to limit killing at Cherry Valley even as the raid’s brutality became notorious on the frontier.
The Pre-War Confederacy and the Sources of the Split
The Six Nations had navigated European imperial competition for over a century through collective diplomacy, trading access and military alliance with the British, French, and Dutch for manufactured goods, weapons, and guarantees of territorial limits. The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which Britain signed with Confederacy representatives, had attempted to draw a permanent boundary between colonial settlement and Native lands along the upper Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys — a line almost immediately violated by advancing Patriot settlers. This background helps explain both sides’ wartime choices. The Crown, at least nominally, had formally recognized the boundary and had a structural interest in restraining frontier expansion by settlers who were now enemies. The Americans, from the Haudenosaunee perspective, represented precisely the class of frontier people who had ignored the 1768 treaty.
The split, however, was not purely strategic: family ties, long-standing village alliances, missionary influence (the Oneida had been heavily evangelized by the Reverend Samuel Kirkland, who counseled neutrality that gradually became American alignment), and differing calculations of which side might actually win all played roles. Seneca leaders Cornplanter and Sayenqueraghta favored British alliance partly because they feared American land hunger more than British governance; Oneida sachems calculated that the Americans’ stated commitment to fixed boundaries — articulated in the Articles of Confederation, ratified by many states in 1778 — offered at least theoretical protection.
Battle of Wyoming: Tactics and Aftermath
The July 3, 1778 engagement at Wyoming was tactically decisive and psychologically devastating on the frontier. Patriot Colonel Zebulon Butler commanded approximately 300–400 militia out of Forty Fort against Butler’s Rangers and Seneca, Cayuga, and Mohawk warriors under John Butler and Sayenqueraghta. The militia advanced from the fort and were drawn into an ambush: after initial skirmishing the British-allied force executed a double envelopment, and the Patriot line collapsed in minutes. Contemporary accounts, later supplemented by military historians, count 300–360 Patriot dead; the Rangers and warriors suffered fewer than five killed. The settlements of the Wyoming Valley — home to approximately 5,000 settlers — were abandoned and burned in the days following.
The news reached Philadelphia and the Continental Congress within two weeks, provoking immediate calls for retaliation. The context mattered: Washington’s army was simultaneously completing its transformation at Valley Forge (the encampment ended June 19, 1778) and fighting at Monmouth on June 28, leaving little capacity for a frontier counterstrike in 1778 itself. The raids thus succeeded tactically: they diverted congressional and popular attention, stretched Washington’s manpower requests, and forced the construction of additional frontier posts at a time when the main army was pressed.
Cherry Valley and the Controversy Over Command
The November 11, 1778 attack on Cherry Valley, Otsego County, New York differed from Wyoming in character and command. Walter Butler — unlike his father John, a capable regular — showed poor tactical judgment: he had promised garrison commander Colonel Ichabod Alden safe conduct if the fort’s defenders remained inside, but frontier conditions and the independent action of Seneca warriors made his assurances unenforceable. Fourteen soldiers were killed defending the garrison, and some 30 civilians — including women and children — were killed outside the fortified area, a toll that drew censure even from British officers. Approximately 71 settlers were taken captive, of whom many were later released.
Brant’s reported efforts to protect individual families during the raid were corroborated in post-war accounts by surviving settlers; his own later testimony emphasized that he had opposed attacking noncombatants. This internal division between Butler’s Rangers (acting on strategic orders to terrorize the frontier) and some Haudenosaunee leaders (who had different codes governing captives and civilians) would continue to complicate British-allied operations through the war’s end.
Significance
The 1778 raids converted the New York and Pennsylvania frontier into an active theater of the Revolutionary War and hardened American resolve to eliminate the threat at its source: the following year, Washington authorized the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, a scorched-earth campaign that destroyed more than forty Haudenosaunee villages and their stored harvests across the Finger Lakes region, permanently breaking British-allied Iroquois military power in New York. The expedition burned an estimated 500,000 bushels of corn and 160,000 bushels of other crops, producing refugee columns of Haudenosaunee who spent the winter of 1779–1780 near Niagara in near-starvation conditions. The Confederacy’s 1778 split — the collapse of a centuries-old political union into rival, war-driven factions — proved irreversible; postwar treaties never restored the Six Nations to unified standing, and the war left, in the words of the National Park Service, “their confederacy and culture shattered.”
The year thus marks the point at which the Revolutionary War’s global expansion under the Franco-American Alliance was matched, on the western frontier, by the fracturing of North America’s most powerful Indigenous confederation. Edmund Burke’s simultaneous objections in Parliament to the use of Native allies on the frontier show that the moral controversy over this strategy was recognized even within Britain’s own political system.
See Also
- Treaty of Alliance with the Delaware Nation — the September 1778 treaty extending the pattern of American alliance-building with Native nations
- George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign (1778) — the parallel western offensive that opened the same summer the frontier raids began
- Battle of Monmouth (June 1778) — the main-theater engagement that consumed Washington’s attention while the frontier burned
- Britain Declares War on France — the widening conflict whose frontier dimension the Haudenosaunee split intensified
- Valley Forge Encampment Ends — the Continental Army’s main-theater transformation occurring the same season as the frontier war
- George Washington — the commander who both authorized Native alliance recruitment and ordered the 1779 retaliatory expedition
- Articles of Confederation Ratification (1778) — the federal framework under which Congress authorized Native alliance policy in 1778
- Edmund Burke’s Parliamentary Opposition — the British critic who publicly objected to the strategy of using Native allies to raid frontier settlements
Sources
- Cherry Valley massacre — Wikipedia
- Battle of Wyoming — Wikipedia
- The Six Nations Confederacy During the American Revolution — U.S. National Park Service
- Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse University Press, 1972.
- Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. Knopf, 2006.