During the American Revolution, both the new American government and the British sought to ally with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a centuries-old powerful confederacy of six allied nations located in present day New York: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, Senecas, Onondagas, and after 1713, a group of Tuscaroras driven from their homeland in what is currently Virginia and North Carolina by war and colonial oppression. Under the Great Law of Peace, the confederacy’s oral constitution, each nation retains its own governance, practices, and language, while uniting for common defense and the preservation of peace. Haudenosaunee, meaning, “people of the long house,” refers not only to the tribes’ traditional houses—which the confederacy symbolically evokes—but also to the kinship, harmony, and peacemaking that structures Haudenosaunee communities. The American Revolution, however, fractured the confederacy. Unable to agree on a unified strategy, most Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas allied with the British; many Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with the American rebels. During the war, some of the Continental Army’s fiercest violence, notably the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, was directed at Haudenosaunee communities to punish British-allied tribes and deter them from challenging the westward expansion of the United States after the war—efforts which the Six Nations continued to resist long after the Revolution. This kit allows you to explore the Haudenosaunee’s diplomatic approaches to navigating the violence and disruption of the American Revolution and their postwar efforts to protect their lands from the encroachment of the new United States. –Prof. Lauren Duval
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Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
Choosing Sides
“Peacemaker Story [The Great Law of Peace].” In Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators., 2–3. [Washington, D.C.]: National Museum of the American Indian Education Office, 2009. (Pages 2-3 of document / 4-5 of PDF.)
“Speech to the Six Nations, December 7, 1776,” Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 6, 1010–1011, Library of Congress. (Companion Canvas page.)
“Speech to the Six Nations, December 3, 1777,” Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 9, 994–998, Library of Congress. (Companion Canvas page.)
“Board of War Report, June 11, 1778.” Journals of the Continental Congress, 587-591.
The Sullivan Expedition (1779)
The Journal of Lieut. John L. Hardenbergh of the Second New York Continental Regiment from May 1 to October 3, 1779, in General Sullivan’s Campaign against the Western Indians.Auburn, N.Y.: [Knapp & Peck, printers], 1879. (Contains multiple diaries, see especially chapter entitled, “Expedition Against the Cayugas.”)
An Uneasy Peace
“Treaty With the Six Nations : 1789.” The Avalon Project. Yale Law School.
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Kane, Maeve. “‘She Did Not Open Her Mouth Further’: Haudenosaunee Women as Military and Political Targets during and after the American Revolution.” In Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, edited by Barbara Oberg, 83-102. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. (Companion Canvas page.)
Martin, James Kirby. “Forgotten Heroes of the Revolution: Han Yerry and Tyona Doxtader of the Oneida Indian Nation.” In Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, edited by Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael, 199–215. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. (Companion Canvas page.)