The barbarities, it will be seen, were not all on one side of the war. This shocking crime against unoffending Christian Indians brought terrible consequences, for Indians who had heretofore kept out of the war now took the side of the British with savage enthusiasm and a few weeks later Col. Crawford was captured and burned at the stake at Upper Sandusky. The story of his death is blood-curdling. The Moravians were brought to Detroit leaving their crops unharvested in the fields, and a number of white captives were picked up on the way. Among these were two girls 13 and 14 years of age, who were cruelly lashed by the Indians on the Detroit common. The town turned out, of course, to witness the arrival of the raiders and their captives. One of the most prominent men of the town was James May, a man of massive build, weighing 300 pounds. The two girls broke from their captors and rushed to Mr. May, throwing themselves at his feet. When the Indians came to drag them away May knocked them right and left with his fists. Then he took the girls to the council house for shelter. The Indians complained to Alexander McKee, and McKee went to DePeyster saying that the Indians must be allowed to have their own way with their captives without interference, or they would desert the British cause. DePeyster sent for May and told him he must not interfere with the Indians. For another such offense he would put him in the fort dungeon. The Moravians were kept at Detroit several weeks and then were sent up to the Clinton River, where they founded a settlement near Mt. Clemens. During their stay of five years there they built a group of cabins and opened a road through the forest to Detroit, which afterward developed into Gratiot Avenue. The Chippewa Indians objected to the presence of the Moravians and in April, 1786, the Moravians were permitted to leave on condition that they would not meddle with affairs in Ohio. Part of them crossed Lake St. Clair and founded the Moravian town on the River Thames in Canada and others went back to old Gnadenhutten. Their little town of 24 houses on the Clinton River, which they had named New Gnadenhutten, and the lands adjoining were sold to John Askin and Major Ancrum of Detroit for $450. The Congress of the United States later gave them a grant of 4,000 acres at New Philadelphia, O., where they remained until 1807. The Revolutionary War went badly for both parties in the contention. It was more a contest of persistence and endurance than a test of military ability or fighting valor. Both the British and the Americans were near the exhaustion of their resources when the fortunate combination between the American Army and the French fleet forced the surrender of Cornwallis. This brought the British government to the hard decision between beginning the war all over again with little prospect of improving their case, or a termination of the war by treaty of peace and the surrender of all the vast territory for which they had been fighting the Indians and France for more than 100 years. It was hard for the British government even to think of surrender, particularly to a puny nation of "colonists" whom they regarded as outcasts. But the people of Great Britain had shown increasing sympathy for the Americans, so their autocratic king was forced to accept the issue of surrender much against his will. But the peace treaty did not restore good feeling. Too many hard and cruel things had been done on both sides to be soon forgotten. We had had a surfeit of atrocities in the West. The East was not free from them. The colonists were not all of one mind. The party of independence was the majority party, but there was also a strong Tory-Loyalist party composed of people who gave consent to the divine right of kings and who believed that "the king can do no wrong," being the Lord's anointed ruler and therefore infallible. Between these opposing elements in America the feeling was even more bitter than between the Americans and the English, because the English soldiers were fighting under orders from their government, while the Tories fought voluntarily against their own countrymen and heretofore good neighbors. The majority party, therefore, preyed upon the minority. Persecution intensified, buildings were burned and now and then a too outspoken Tory was tarred and feathered, ridden on a rail or lynched by a mob. As a result there was a general emigration of Tories. Those in the South fled to the Bahama and other West Indian islands. Those in the North fled to Canada. Both elements were forced to leave behind what they could not carry away in hasty flight. Many of these had been people of wealth and education, in fact, generally speaking, they were the aristocratic element. Their property was confiscated, and in the colony of New York alone these confiscations took away property valued at $15,000,000. The terms of the peace treaty, to which both parties. gave their solemn pledge, called for either restoration or compensation for the property taken from the exiled Tories. It also stipulated the payment of honest debts owed by Americans to British creditors. But the American people, impoverished by the war and embittered toward the British, neglected to carry out their part of the bargain-flatly refused to do so in some cases-so the British government retaliated by withholding the surrender of Detroit, the western territory, and several frontier forts farther east. The Tories who fled to Canada presently became known as the United Empire Loyalists, and they became important factors in the subsequent development of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and the province of Ontario. Many prominent families of Canada of the present day proudly trace their ancestry to the Empire Loyalists. Many citizens of Detroit trace back to the same origin. Practically all the histories of the world, up to a very recent time, are more or less prejudiced in their relations of fact. Some of them are propagandist in some degree. This applies in the case of United States histories in particular, for few of them give a complete or just presentation of all the facts in their true proportion, whether they are telling the story of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the war with Mexico, or the Civil War. But a generation of fair-minded men is coming to the front and many histories and biographies are destined to be rewritten that future generations may see the past in truer perspective. Refusal to surrender Detroit and the West led to a furious outburst of indignation in the new Government of the United States. It offered a barrier against a horde of greedy landgrabbers and it stood in the way of men of small means who had the true pioneering spirit and longed to build them homes in the wilderness and become founders of new states. So intense was the feeling on both sides that it was impossible for the two nations to proceed very far with the most reasonable negotiations at any one treaty conference. It took 59 years of wrangling to settle the northeastern boundary between Canada and the States. It took many years of border warfare to decide the issue in the West. Again the fierce patriotism of the Indians was enlisted in the cause on the British side. This was easily done because it was now the American settlers and land companies which were pressing into Indian territory, seeking possession of cheap lands and planting cabins here and there to become the basis of claims for a grant of land. The case was aggravated because Spain owned the territory known as the two Floridas, East and West, which ran westward to the Mississippi River. Spain claimed the southern part of Georgia and all territory west of Georgia and the Carolinas as far north as the Ohio River, while these colonies each claimed territory westward of the Mississippi. The New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut claimed corresponding strips of territory to the Mississippi River. Spain and Great Britain therefore had a common interest in holding the newly organized states from pressing their territory westward. Through Spain's influence Americans were forbidden the right to navigate the Mississippi River, although France owned Louisiana Territory, which was west of the great river. Great Britain still held undisputed possession of Canada, and this gave her a base for operations in the West, a source of supplies for carrying on a war, and free entrance over her own territory for troops and munitions shipped from abroad. Alexander McKee, British Indian agent at Detroit, was made director of the Indian warfare. He donned full Indian costume, painted his face after the fashion of Indians on the warpath, and went about among the tribes as Pontiac had done more than 20 years before. Again Detroit became an emporium where the Indians could obtain free guns, knives, blankets, food and rum. In one of the official reports showing expenditures for such purposes the relative value of the English and the New York money is disclosed, the bill being rendered at 2,729 pounds, two shillings and sixpence in New York currency or 1,535 pounds, two shillings and eightpence sterling money. Political and family pull enabled Lieut. Jehu Hay to displace DePeyster at Detroit and a long wrangle resulted. DePeyster's American birth and admixture of French blood prejudiced him in the eyes of the British government. He was an accomplished man and a social favorite. Soon after the close of the Revolution he went to Dumfries, Scotland, where he drilled soldiers for the Napoleonic wars. One of his soldiers was a celebrated volunteer, Robert Burns. It was while in this camp that Burns was stricken with his last illness, and his last poem was addressed to Col. DePeyster, who had shown him unusual kindness. That poem was written in grateful acknowledgment. It begins: "My honored Colonel: deep I feel Your interest in the poet's weal. Surrounded thus by bolus, pill DePeyster died at Dumfries in 1832. |