Did the Declaration of Independence Matter on the Frontier?
The revolution was fought on the frontier, too – far from the straight lines of tidy soldiers in the eastern theatre of the war.
This article is companion to a YouTube video of the same name:
The declaration itself makes mention of the frontier only once. As you will recall, it is in the fifth and final grievance addressed by the colonists: Jefferson writes that King George “has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.”
Based on this text alone, it could be said that the founding fathers largely thought of the frontier as an ominous threat to some distant people. I think in large part this is the case: the grievance is listed last, so despite the aggressive wording, it really doesn’t come off as all that urgent in comparison to some of the others. The founding fathers were representatives, ultimately tasked with making known the needs and desires of their people – and the majority of their people were not living along the frontier, in direct danger of hostile tribes. We know now, looking back, that those who did live along the frontier experienced the raw effects of this document – and all politics, really. It was experienced by young men in uniform taking musket balls on the battlefields of the eastern United States, sure, but it was experienced perhaps even more brutally by the men, women, and children – entire families – who would experience the exact language set forth in the declaration, that being an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.
It has been said that most frontiersmen were indifferent to the knowledge that a revolutionary war had been declared. This might be true, but they certainly were not indifferent to the effect it had on the British and their Native allies – that’s the real focus of interest along the frontier. The relationships between the British, American Indians, and colonial frontier settlers are complicated and deep-seated.
The close of the French and Indian War brought the removal of France and her Native American allies, who had hemmed in the British along the frontier, preventing westward expansion. It was thought to be a great victory by the commoners, who KNEW they had secured a future on that distant territory of unlimited resources and freedom. But not long after, the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade British colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains. The colonists who fought over that wilderness weren’t about to be told they couldn’t go into it to settle the land that they had lost brothers, fathers, cousins, and uncles over. It was a gross injustice. But the Proclamation of 1763 was also a stroke of genius on behalf of the British parliament – it was meant to prevent tensions between colonists and the tribes beyond the Appalachians while the colonies stabilized after the conflict, and it may have been met to that effect had colonists obeyed the rule.
Protest over this policy was so strong, though, that in 1768 Britain pursued the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Treaty of Hard Labour, which opened up land south of the Ohio River for settlement. What the British did not realize during this period of deregulation was that the tribes who supposedly sold these lands to them during these treaties actually had no right to sell them at all. The Iroquois had fought viciously with neighboring tribes long before any European presence on the North American continent. Now, with the presence of the colonists, the Iroquoian leadership reasoned that rather than fighting these enemy tribes directly, it was less costly to approach the British “Indian Agents” stationed along the frontier, claiming to be the mightiest confederacy around – the rulers of the Ohio Valley tribes – who were, in reality, their ENEMIES – and offer to sell their land to the British. The british believed the Iroquois owned that land and had sold it to them legally, and happily moved to settle it, but in reality, tribes like the Shawnee had never been consulted. Other tribes would be displaced by this Iroqoian policy: the Mingos, Delawares, and Wyandots, among others, would lose significant portions of land to white settlers carrying deeds granted by a government that had no legitimate ownership of the land they settled on whatsoever.
The Shawnee started fighting back immediately, and the British became wise to the tricks of the Iroquois. Historically, to the best of my understanding, the British Indian Agents who were on the front lines of frontier politics were well aware of the fact that the Iroquois did not have legitimate claim, or even influence, over the land that they were peddling, but allowed that misconception to pass up to higher leadership. Rather than acknowledging this fact, however, once fighting began, the British used the documents of sale as a convenient excuse to continue settling the land. The Shawnee fought a truly valiant and honorable fight in 1774 that became known as Lord Dunmore’s War, but the cards were stacked horribly against them. The Iroquois leveraged their power to prevent other tribes from joining in, thus singling out the Shawnee, who took on the full might of the still-British Virginia militia and suffered great losses. After Virginia's victory in the war, the Shawnees were compelled to accept the Ohio River boundary as the southern and southeastern boundary of their lands.
As more white colonists began to flood into the lands provisioned to them by the Fort Stanwix Treaty – the land south of the Ohio River which the Shawnee had already been pushed off of – tensions spiked among all of the frontier tribes, including the ones the Iroquois had previously managed to keep from joining the Shawnee in their fight against white encroachment. By 1775, on the eve of the Revolution, the frontier was on a hair trigger. Young Shawnee warriors like Blue Jacket agitated loudly to take up the tomahawk and strike back into the lands that were rightfully theirs, while older leaders tried desperately to restrain them against open confrontation with the whites, which would surely mean death.
There was a tense frontier neutrality that set in early in the war, during 1776. Neither side, British or American, wanted to devote resources to a full-scale campaign in the West. Wise chiefs were dismayed as their young warriors began to strike out across the Ohio into white settlements despite orders not to. In 1777, one wise old leader, Chief Cornstalk, determined that he would uphold his honor by formally riding to the “white fort,” Fort Randolph, located at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to formally tell the commanding officer there that he could no longer control his braves and that any agreement they had made at Fort Stanwix was essentially off, since senior leadership could no longer restrain their younger warriors. That commander responded by taking Cornstalk prisoner. He didn’t fully comprehend the honorable thing that Cornstalk was doing in giving him a proper warning. Later that day, some hot-headed frontiersmen came in – men who had lost friends and brothers to Cornstalk and his braves not long before, during Dunmore’s War – and those men murdered Cornstalk and the two ranking men he had brought with him in cold blood. Now the Shawnee couldn’t be held back.
White men knew tensions had been rising, and they feared that treatment laid forth by the founding fathers in the declaration. They knew that along the border territories, they would be subjugated to “an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.” By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 colonists remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station. The Shawnee, teeming with young warriors ready to cut loose across the frontier, were, as predicted, backed by the British. The British were, at the same time, looking for some diversion to cover the Saratoga campaign from Canada. A hot frontier full of “merciless Indian savages,” as Jefferson wrote in the declaration, would be the perfect diversion.
The tribes (primarily the Shawnee defending their Ohio homeland) didn’t realize that they were merely a diversion. They would never get the full weight of the British empire that had been repeatedly promised to them by British Indian Agents. Ultimately it was in Britain’s better interests to keep the Shawnee weak as well – it’s no good to have a sovereign body of warriors in the middle of your empire. The Americans didn’t know that the violence picking up along the frontier was a diversion, either, and even if the Shawnee hadn’t have had British support, they would still have been a terrifying foe. The American frontier settlements prepared for a fight. The Virginians situated their frontier defense from three forts along the Ohio River: Fort Pitt, Fort Henry, and Fort Randolph, where Cornstalk had been killed. Problems at Fort Pitt would descend into what became known as the Squaw Campaign: a mess of fighting that resulted only in civilian casualties. Three men would defect from the American lines as a result of this failure: Simon Girty, an interpreter who had guided the "Squaw Campaign", Matthew Elliot, an influential trader, and Alexander McKee, future agent for the British Indian Department. All three would be tremendous assets to the British and their Native allies. Two battles would be fought at Fort Henry, and Fort Randolph would endure a brief stalemate siege before being abandoned halfway through the war.
The Kentucky settlers desperately clung to their three settlements there, too: Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logans Station. Boonesborough would endure legendary attacks. During one, Simon Kenton famously saved Boone’s life, in part by barreling over two native attackers by throwing Boone’s wounded body right into them. Harrodsburg housed many famous frontiersmen and would go on to be incorporated as a town that stands there today, but it didn’t see much direct action during the revolution. Logans Station was the site of a 13-day siege in the spring of 1777, during which, at one point, Benjamin Logan, founder, ran out into a hailstorm of arrows to rescue a wounded settler using a feather mattress as a shield to absorb the incoming projectiles.
Each of these frontier posts would continue to engage enemies. Make no mistake about it, men fought and died in the coming years of the war. In the end, though, the war in the Northwest ended in a stalemate. In the war's final years, each side could destroy enemy settlements but could not afford the manpower to stay and hold captured territory. For the Shawnee, the war was a loss. The Americans had successfully defended Kentucky and increased settlement there so that primary hunting ground was now lost. Similarly, although the tribes had been pushed back from the Ohio River and were now settled primarily in the Lake Erie basin, the Americans could not occupy the abandoned lands for fear of violent counter-raids.
News of a pending peace treaty arrived late in 1782. In the final treaty, the Ohio Country was signed away by Great Britain to the United States, even though not a single American soldier was north of the Ohio River when the treaty was signed. Great Britain had not consulted the tribes in the peace process, and they were nowhere mentioned in the treaty's terms. For the Shawnee and their allies, the struggle would soon continue as the Northwest Indian War, though this time without the explicit support of the British.
In short- the declaration brought tremendous ramifications for those living along the frontier. While many frontiersmen might have shrugged their shoulders at the onset of the conflict and wondered how it would affect them, every man, woman, and child along the frontier would be hard-pressed to say they had not witnessed some form of frontier brutality during the war: a direct cause of the declaration that was debated and signed by the continental congress as far East as Independence Hall. The frontier was the living, breathing result of politics. Every man lived the political decision when he shouldered his shot pouch for the day, every woman lived it when they made do without flour or pins, and every child lived it when they fell asleep with terrifying images of American Indian warriors dancing in their heads. This period of time wasn’t all violent all the time, but regular people, frequently civilians, did have to confront the conflict.
