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Indigenous Nations Beyond Military Alliance — Diplomacy and Division in 1778

• 11 min read
Political Events
indigenous diplomacy treaties Cherokee Delaware frontier
Indigenous Nations Beyond Military Alliance — Diplomacy and Division in 1778

Summary

While 1778 brought the Franco-American alliance and the Haudenosaunee split into military camps, Indigenous nations across North America made diplomatic choices that extended far beyond battlefield alliances. The Delaware (Lenape) negotiated the Treaty of Fort Pitt with the Continental Congress, the Cherokee formalized alliance with the British against settler expansion, and northern maritime tribes pledged loyalty to King George—each nation pursuing strategies to protect territorial sovereignty, land rights, and political autonomy. These 1778 diplomatic acts, rooted in centuries of Indigenous-European negotiation, would shape the continent’s political fate for the next century.

Key Figures and Nations

  • White Eyes (Coequacough) — Lenape (Delaware) leader who negotiated the 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt with the Continental Congress; his death under disputed circumstances within weeks of the treaty’s signing shattered American-Lenape relations and symbolized the fragility of Revolutionary diplomacy.
  • Dragging Canoe (Tsi-yu-gunsi) — Cherokee war leader who allied the Cherokee nation with Britain against settler encroachment, arguing that neutrality was impossible when colonial expansion threatened Cherokee territorial integrity.
  • Corn Tassel (Conenoy) — Cherokee diplomat and elder who navigated diplomatic relations with both British and American powers while seeking to preserve Cherokee political independence.
  • John McDonald — Scottish trader and diplomat who lived among the Cherokee and facilitated British-Cherokee alliance negotiations, leveraging kinship ties and commercial networks.

Diplomatic Events of 1778

Treaty of Fort Pitt (September 17, 1778)

In September 1778, representatives of the Lenape (Delaware) Nation signed the Treaty of Fort Pitt with the Continental Congress—among the earliest treaties between the United States and an Indigenous nation.

Terms and Promises:

The treaty made sweeping reciprocal commitments:

  • Lenape obligations: The nation would grant the Continental Army passage through Ohio Valley lands, guide American forces against British positions, provide intelligence, and allow Americans to build a fortification within Lenape territory.
  • American promises: Congress committed to constructing a protective fort; providing trade goods and provisions; and—most remarkably—to “form a state to be in the Union… in which the Delaware nation shall be the ruling people, and have a representation in Congress.”

This 14th state, governed by Indigenous people with a congressional seat, represented an extraordinary vision of Indigenous political integration into the new American republic.

Diplomatic Method:

The negotiation employed traditional Indigenous diplomatic conventions: both sides used kinship language (“Brothers”), exchanged wampum belts, and observed ceremonial protocols extending back centuries in the Great Lakes region. The Lenape understood the agreement as the beginning of an ongoing relationship requiring continuous cultivation and renewal—a tradition fundamentally different from the European written-contract model.

Rapid Collapse:

Within weeks, the treaty collapsed catastrophically:

  1. Death of White Eyes: White Eyes, the principal Lenape negotiator and war leader, died under disputed circumstances—possibly murdered by American militia—in November 1778. American sources claim he died of smallpox; Lenape oral tradition records assassination. The death shattered American-Lenape trust.

  2. Broken Promises: Congress never created the promised 14th state. Trade goods promised to sustain the relationship never arrived. American military forces occupied Lenape lands regardless of treaty provisions.

  3. Cultural Misunderstanding: Americans viewed the signed document as a final settlement; Lenape diplomacy understood it as the initiation of a binding relationship requiring ongoing reciprocal action. When Americans failed to fulfill their half of the ongoing compact, the treaty became void in Lenape eyes.

Significance:

The Treaty of Fort Pitt represented a unique moment: a moment when the Continental Congress, desperate for allies and land passage against the British, treated an Indigenous nation as an equal political actor with territorial sovereignty and claims to political representation within the new union. The treaty’s rapid failure foreshadowed two centuries of broken U.S.-Native American agreements and demonstrated how radically different Indigenous and European approaches to diplomatic obligation remained.

Cherokee Alliance with Britain (1778)

Unlike the Delaware’s cautious diplomacy with the Americans, the Cherokee Nation made a strategic alliance with Britain in 1778, motivated by territorial concerns and skepticism of colonial military power.

Strategic Calculation:

The Cherokee nation (population approximately 8,500 in the interior highlands of the Carolinas and Georgia) faced existential threat from settler expansion along its western borders. The Cherokee had negotiated with British Indian agents (most notably John McDonald and other traders who lived among them) and concluded that:

  1. Britain controlled naval superiority — The Patriots would never defeat a global empire with the world’s most powerful navy.
  2. American settlers threatened Cherokee lands — Colonial legislatures in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had consistently sought Cherokee territory through fraudulent treaties and illegal settlement.
  3. British commitment to Indian agents — The Crown had invested in relationships with tribes through official Indian agents, military supplies, and trade goods for decades.

1778 Operations:

Under British strategy to crush the rebellion in the South (intensifying in late 1778), the Cherokee participated in major military operations:

  • Capture of Savannah (December 29, 1778): Cherokee warriors fought alongside British forces under the command of Dragging Canoe and other leaders to capture Georgia’s capital, opening the British southern strategy.
  • Frontier Camps (1778): Cherokee established military camps along the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers to control frontier access and prevent settler penetration into the Mississippi valley region—a strategic position to dominate continental commerce.
  • Raids and Diplomacy: While British military strategy sometimes conflicted with Cherokee interests, the alliance gave the Cherokee leverage to shape the frontier’s military and political landscape.

Political Significance:

The Cherokee choice to ally with Britain was not military desperation but calculated geopolitics: the nation possessed the power to choose, and it chose the side it believed better protected Cherokee territorial integrity. The Cherokee were right that settler expansion would become accelerated after the war—a consequence of the Revolution’s success. But in 1778, the Cherokee could not predict the war’s outcome and made the choice that seemed strategically sound.

Other Nations: Northern Maritime Tribes (1778–1779)

In the northern colonies, other nations made different calculations. Between September 1778 and January 1779, principal leaders of the Micmac, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy nations took oaths of allegiance to King George III. These maritime nations, based on the Atlantic coasts of present-day Nova Scotia and Maine, maintained traditional alliance relationships with Britain through trade and military cooperation, viewing American independence as a threat to established order and their own autonomy.

Significance:

These northern tribes’ loyalty to Britain reflected centuries of commercial relationships with the Crown, access to British military supplies, and skepticism of the emerging American republic. Their choice to pledge allegiance to George III in 1778 represented continuity with pre-revolutionary diplomatic tradition rather than desperation.

The Paradox of Indigenous Diplomacy in 1778

The events of 1778 revealed a fundamental paradox: Indigenous nations possessed real political agency and made calculated strategic choices among competing empires. Yet American Revolutionary ideology, despite its libertarian claims, envisioned a continent unified under American sovereignty, with Indigenous nations subordinate to that order. The Treaty of Fort Pitt promised Lenape political integration and territorial sovereignty; its immediate betrayal showed that American revolutionaries, when forced to choose between Indigenous autonomy and settler expansion, chose the latter.

The Cherokee and maritime tribes’ alliance with Britain was rational geopolitics in 1778, but it foreshadowed a century of dispossession once the American republic consolidated continental dominance. By choosing based on 1778 realities, Indigenous nations could not escape 1783’s outcome: an independent American republic with territorial ambitions, westward expansion as ideology, and no meaningful commitment to Indigenous sovereignty.

Aftermath and Long-Term Consequences

The divergent diplomatic choices of 1778 shaped the next century:

  • Delaware/Lenape: After the Treaty of Fort Pitt’s collapse, the Lenape were eventually pushed west across the Ohio River and beyond, their promised 14th state never created. Multiple Lenape removals continued through the 19th century.
  • Cherokee: The Cherokee remained powerful through the 1780s–1820s but faced intensifying American settler pressure. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the subsequent Trail of Tears (1838–1839) displaced the Cherokee across the continent—a direct consequence of the westward expansion the British alliance had sought to prevent.
  • Northern Maritime Tribes: Micmac, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy communities remained on the Atlantic coast but faced declining territories and marginalization within the new United States.

The diplomatic choices of 1778—the Treaty of Fort Pitt, Cherokee alliance with Britain, northern tribes’ oaths to George III—were acts of political sovereignty. But they occurred within a larger historical structure: settler-colonial expansion and European-American imperial ambition that, by the early 19th century, made Indigenous diplomatic independence impossible.

Significance

The year 1778 represents Indigenous nations at the height of their geopolitical agency—negotiating, choosing, and shaping the Revolutionary War’s outcome through strategic alliance and negotiated agreements. Yet it also marks the beginning of a new colonial regime: one where American revolutionaries, despite rhetoric of universal liberty, pursued dispossession with the same systematic intensity as the British Crown they had rejected. The treaty promises and alliance commitments of 1778 would not survive the decade.

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Division — Context for 1778 Diplomacy

The Delaware and Cherokee diplomatic choices of 1778 unfolded within a broader crisis among the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois/Six Nations), whose formal neutrality had already fractured before 1778. The Six Nations — Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga (pro-British) and Oneida, Tuscarora (American allies) — had been diplomatically unified for centuries, but the Revolution forced them to choose sides.

The Split:

  • The Mohawk (led by Joseph Brant/Thayendanegea) allied firmly with Britain; Brant conducted devastating raids on the New York and Pennsylvania frontier throughout 1778, including the Wyoming Valley Massacre (July 3, 1778) and Cherry Valley Massacre (November 11, 1778), in which approximately 40 civilians and 16 soldiers died. These raids made 1778’s frontier warfare among the most brutal of the conflict.
  • The Oneida and Tuscarora, persuaded by missionary Samuel Kirkland and their own calculations of proximity to colonial settlements, sided with the Americans — fighting at the Battle of Oriskany (August 6, 1777) against their own Haudenosaunee kin.
  • The Confederacy’s Great Council Fire at Onondaga was extinguished for the first time in centuries, representing the political rupture of the oldest surviving democratic confederacy in North America.

This intra-Haudenosaunee division, occurring simultaneously with the Delaware treaty and the Cherokee alliance, demonstrated that Indigenous nations were not passive recipients of European imperial pressure but active political actors who divided, debated, and chose based on their own assessments of interest. See also: Haudenosaunee Strategic Alliance.

Fort Pitt and Western Frontier Strategy (1778)

The Treaty of Fort Pitt (September 17, 1778) was not merely diplomatic — it was a military necessity rooted in the Ohio Valley’s strategic importance. Fort Pitt (present-day Pittsburgh) stood at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, the gateway to the western territories and the Mississippi Valley.

The Strategic Picture:

In 1778, the Ohio Valley was contested by multiple powers:

  • British forces at Fort Detroit — The British maintained Fort Detroit as their primary western stronghold, supplying Indigenous allies (including Shawnee, Wyandot, and some Lenape bands) and orchestrating frontier raids.
  • American frontier settlements — Virginia’s claim to the Ohio Valley included settlements in Kentucky, which suffered devastating raids in 1777–1778.
  • George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign — Simultaneously with the Delaware treaty, Virginia militia under George Rogers Clark launched an expedition into the Illinois country (July 1778), capturing the British posts at Kaskaskia and Cahokia and then Fort Sackville at Vincennes. The Delaware treaty was essential to securing Ohio Valley passage for Clark’s forces. See also: George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign.

The Delaware treaty’s promise of a “14th state” was thus intertwined with American western strategy: Congress needed Lenape cooperation to pursue western territorial expansion while fighting Britain on the Atlantic coast.

Wampum Diplomacy and Indigenous Political Protocol

The Treaty of Fort Pitt employed Indigenous diplomatic conventions that Americans partially understood and partially misread — contributing directly to its failure.

Wampum Belts:

The exchange of wampum belts was the core diplomatic transaction in Northeastern Indigenous diplomacy. Wampum — cylindrical beads made from quahog and whelk shells — carried political meaning:

  • White wampum signified peace, friendship, and alliance.
  • Purple wampum (called “black” by Europeans) signified war or serious matters.
  • Belts given in treaty exchanges were not mere decorations but records — the physical embodiment of the agreement. A returned or rejected belt was a declaration of war or treaty breach.

When American commissioners at Fort Pitt exchanged wampum with White Eyes, they participated in a diplomatic tradition that bound both parties to ongoing reciprocal obligations. The Lenape understood the treaty as the beginning of a relationship, not a completed transaction. When Congress failed to build the promised fort, deliver promised trade goods, or establish the promised 14th state, the Lenape interpreted these failures as breaches of the wampum compact — the political equivalent of a rejected belt. The treaty was void in Lenape diplomatic terms before the ink was dry in American terms.

See Also

Sources