Daniel Whitney and Daniel M. Whitney

[caption id="attachment_7594" align="aligncenter" width="423"] Daniel Whitney (1795-1862). Image credit: FC Pierce (Descendants of John Whitney (genealogy)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]Genealogists and historians of all stripes have found out the hard way that two people with the same name (or roughly the same name) can cause problems in their research. When you come upon a name in a document there is rarely any indication that the name belongs to more than one possible person. You might be reading about two different people and not realize it. So it has been with Daniel Whitney and his nephew Daniel M. Whitney. (And by the way, Daniel also had a son named Daniel, but the son is of no importance to us here.)

Both Daniel Whitney and Daniel M. Whitney were important actors in the lives of the Stockbridge Mohicans. The Daniel that was born in 1795 was, by anybody's standards, an ambitious, enterprising captain of industry. It probably would be no exaggeration to say that Daniel Whitney brought capitalism to present-day Wisconsin. What we now call Wisconsin and northeast Minnesota were part of the Michigan Territory in 1820, which was when Daniel Whitney started supplying Green Bay residents and small-time traders with the things they needed. Prior to that time, the so-called "factory system" was in place. In other words, there were "factors" at forts who represented the United States and supplied Indians and "frontiersmen" with goods at a regulated price. You might call it benign patriarchy; it was the federal government's way of protecting the Indians and frontiersmen from being cheated by unscrupulous traders.

Whitney (the uncle) started off his career by embarking on trade expeditions, including one trip from what is now Minneapolis to Detroit in which he hauled goods on a toboggan. The successful trade expeditions led to the establishment of general stores, one of them being at Statesburg, the first settlement of the Stockbridge Mohicans in present-day Wisconsin (the Stockbridges began settling at Statesburg in 1822, twenty-six years before Wisconsin became a state).

Daniel M. Whitney was born in New York State in 1815. He came west to Green Bay in 1833, and was employed by his uncle for many years, in a number of capacities, but most notably, Daniel M. ran the general store at Statesburg and moved with the Stockbridge Mohicans to their settlement on the eastern shores of Lake Winnebago (aka Stockbridge, Wisconsin).

When an 1843 act of Congress made the Stockbridges citizens, the land that had once belonged to the whole tribe was allotted into private parcels. And the Indians began selling their land. Daniel Whitney (the uncle) was the biggest buyer of Stockbridge land between February 1844 and February 1846. According to historian Alice E. Smith, he acquired "nearly 2,500 acres, mostly in 60-acre tracts"(Wisconsin Magazine of History, March, 1941, page 294).

The interaction between the Whitneys and the Stockbridges, I suspect, is a complicated one. Within a politically correct mindset, it would be difficult to think of Daniel Whitney (the uncle) as a positive factor in the lives of the Stockbridge Indians. However, he is said to have employed a lot of them in his business ventures. Meanwhile, Daniel M. Whitney, the storekeeper, was said to be a great friend to the Indians - at least in his obituary where people always say good things about you.

Clearly the topic of the Whitneys and the Stockbridge Indians has great potential for more historical research.

A Map of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears"

[caption id="attachment_999" align="aligncenter" width="604"] This map outlines the migrations of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. Click on the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

 

Above is my best visual representation of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears," and the only reason that I put that in quotation marks is because the phrase has long been associated with removals of the southeastern Native nations. If you've read my book, Proud and Determined, you already know that the people now known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians endured many, many years of hard times. And their migrations were an essential part of those hard times.

Many of the migrations don't have an exact date, instead, they happened over a range of years. Below is a summary of the Trail of Tears of the Stockbridge Mohicans:

 

The tribe started leaving Massachusetts in 1785 and that move was two-thirds complete by 1787. They made a treaty with the Menominees and Ho-Chunk (sometimes known as the Winnebago Indians) in 1821 and another one in 1822 (which will be the subject of an upcoming blogpost). One band, led by John Metoxen, left New Stockbridge, New York in 1818, but, by the time they reached their destination, Indiana's White River, they were told that the land had been sold by the Delaware, Miami and other tribes.

Although the Metoxen band did their best to establish farms on the White River for about four years, they could not stay and in 1822 they headed up to Detroit. There they met up with about twenty of their tribesmen who had taken a steamship, the Walk-in-the-Water, from Buffalo. This larger band landed in Green Bay and made their way up the Fox River, settling Statesburg, which is now the south part of Kaukauna, Wisconsin. The long migration had really only started in 1822. Several bands made their own separate moves from New Stockbridge, New York to Statesburg between 1822 and 1829.

The treaties that were made in 1821 and 1822 were not well-thought-out and, understandably, the Menominee Indians put up a protest against them. For quite a few years the United States tried to get the Menominees and the New York Indians to make some kind of agreement or compromise regarding the two sloppily created treaties. The end result was that the Stockbridges had to move again. Their next home was on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, not particularly far south of Statesburg.

The move from Statesburg to their next settlement, known as Stockbridge, Wisconsin was made in 1834 and 1835. A number of sources will confirm this, the one that I have to share with you now is from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, or ABCFM, the ABCFM received very detailed reports from Rev. Cutting Marsh, several times a year (we get the ABCFM's report here via Roger Nichols' biography of Rev. Cutting Marsh).



 

It goes without saying that each time Indians were told that they would have to move it was a disincentive for clearing land for farming. Unfortunately, in this brief summary, there is little space to go into any detail other than the "wheres" and "whens" of each move.

Something I intentionally left out of the map was the 1839 departure of less than one hundred Indians from Stockbridge, Wisconsin to what is now Kansas. This "Emmigrant Party," was made up of members of the Hendrick family, the Konkapot family and the Brotherton Delawares, a group of Natives who sold their reservation in New Jersey and moved to New Stockbridge, New York in 1802 (or, possibly 1803).

Two townships were purchased from the Menominees and those two twonships became the Stockbridge Mohicans' reservation per an 1856 treaty. The Citizen Party began moving to the Shawano County Reservation within months of having thedetails worked out. On the other hand, many of the Indian Party Stockbridges protested the tereaty of 1856, some of them not moving until 1860. In fact, given that the soil of the new reservation was poor for farming, many Indians would be "absentees" from the rez for many years.

Arguably, the tribe still had more moving to do. But, for the sake of simplicity, I'll just say that the current reservation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians exists on the same two townships in Shawano County that the Citizen Party started moving to in 1856.

My thanks to Bart Putzer from Bart Putzer Design, for creating the graphics for the map in this post.

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April 17, 2014 - Note: I want to acknowledge here that the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has their own map - which I have seen but didn't use as a source. (They also used the title "....Trail of Tears.") If their map shows the same places, routes and dates (and I really don't know if it does or not), it only means that my research agrees with theirs.

Why Weren't the Perpetrators of the Gnadenhutten Massacre Brought to Justice?

If you've been following this series of posts, you already know that the Gnadenhutten Massacre was a horrible and shameful example of frontier violence during the American Revolution (which also makes it part of the Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes). The massacre itself was described in the post just prior to this one.

Those of you who have read my book, Proud and Determined, know that The Stockbridge Mohicans were briefly suspected of arson, kidnapping and murder by their white neighbors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Those suspicions were short-lived, because of the larger picture: a state of war between the British and the French with the Stockbridge Indians ready to fight for the British. (Those acts of arson, kidnapping, and murder, committed by French-allied Indians, were what brought the French and Indian War to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.)

The Moravian Indians in the Ohio River Valley, however, were in a much different situation. They were associating themselves with German-speaking missionaries. The Moravian missionaries - aside perhaps, from the fact that they were white - really had no standing in American society (and no standing in British society either). The Moravian committment to peace and justice meant on the one hand that the mission communities themselves weren't going to exploit their Native converts. But on the other hand, the Moravian Indians were - in a lot of ways - a lot more vulnerable to outside forces compared with Indians like the Stockbridges who had managed to align themselves with the white American powers-that-be.

The Moravian committment to peace is something that their white farmer neighbors simply didn't understand. In their view - according to Leonard Sadosky (201) - it was impossible for Indians to be neutral in war.

And you probably remember from my last post that that was part of the context in which the Gnadenhutten Massacre occurred.

You'll also remember from earlier posts that Sadosky divides frontier society into three groups: The largest group was made up of common white farmers and the Pennsylvania militia that were guilty of killing ninety-six Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten came from this largest group.

But the smallest group in number, the gentry, or upper class whites, held positions of power and they were the ones who should have brought the perpetrators to justice. Why didn't that happen?

Sadosky's chapter ("Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre") in the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, has been very difficult for me to "get my head around" and I think I know why. His topic is an event of great cruelty and racism - but he manages to go beyond the cruelty and racism of the Gnadenhutten Massacre to see more.

According to Sadosky (page 202), "Indian trade, alliance, and coexistence...formed the centerpiece of the Continental commanders' [frontier] strategy" at Fort Pitt. And this rubbed the common white farmers the wrong way. Going back as far as 1779, Sadosky analyses Colonel Daniel Brodhead's roughly two years as commander of Fort Pitt, which ended with the common farmers pressuring General George Washington to relinquish his position.  By the end of 1781, Brigadier General William Irvine was the new commandant at Fort Pitt. When Irvine left to consult with Congress, "the rumble of mutiny and rebellion was heard from inside the walls of Fort Pitt"(197). The enlisted men (the common white farmers) were rebelling against the upper class white officer corps.

When General Irvine returned, he struggled to get everybody onto the same page. His approach to - or avoidance of - the Gnadenhutten Massacre is explained by Sadosky:

Irvine was determined to not become a victim of political pratfalls that had handicapped, and in some cases almost killed, his predecessors. Fortunately for the historian, on several occassions Irvine revealed his inner thoughts... Just weeks after he returned...and learned of the violence...he observed that "The general and common opinion of the people of this country is that all Continental officers are too fond of Indians"(204).

General Irvine wanted to keep his job - and save his skin. That serves as enough of an explanation as to why he kept quiet about the massacre.

In Sadosky's last paragraph he writes that an

adversarial and hierarchichal social structure combined with a potent public policy debate [produced] a combustible situation. Commandants Daniel Brodhead and William Irvine were patrician, autocratic outsiders in a world that valued independence, liberty, and patriarchal authority. Given the anti-aristocratic nature of the American Revolution, the commandants found themselves in a position that offered enormous potential to offend the local populace. The militiamen of Washington County wanted a change in how the Continental commanders made use of the enormous public powers granted them. Violence against the Continental army's Native wards, and threats against its officers were a brutal, but effective way to achieve these ends. Daniel Brodhead's inability to heed the signs of popular discontent resulted in his removal from office and set into motion a series of events culminating in massacre and rebellion.

I've been struggling with Sadosky's nineteen-page chapter for a few weeks now and I'm glad to be done with it. For almost the entire time, I was not able to get past the brutality and racism of the massacre itself to understand what Sadosky was able to add to it with his broader analysis. But that is what sets his work apart from the others.

The final post in this series will be about at least one long-term effect of the shameful day in Gnadenhutten.

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The Gnadenhutten Massacre: Introduction

This monument in Gnadenhutten, Ohio honors the 96 massacre victims.

 

I don't know if I can put enough weight on how sad, how shameful, or how unjust the Gnadenhutten Massacre was. But maybe just a description of the uncontested facts will be enough to make you upset - no matter if you are an Indian or non-Indian, Christian or something else. I'm going to quote the description of the Gnadenhutten Massacre from Proud and Determined:

The Stockbridges were keenly aware that a whole village of Christian Indians had already been claimed by frontier violence. The Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten in what is now Ohio had fallen prey to a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Colonel David Williamson in March of 1782. The peaceful Indians...were faithful to the end; even after being told they would die the next day, they spent their last night praying and singing hymns. A total of 96 innocent Indians, including men, women and 39 children were murdered by blows to the head with a [cooper's] mallet and scalped by the militia. No attempt was made to bring them to justice.

 

*  *  *

 
I used the following sources at the time:

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 390.

Olmstead, Earl P. Blackcoats Among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991, 330-335.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 75-78.

 

But since I wrote Proud and Determined, I've become aware of another more current source. Leonard Sadosky wrote a book chapter called "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre."  For the sake of clarity, I'll repeat myself here: ninety-six innocent Indians were massacred. Nobody, including Sadosky, questions that. And maybe that is all that matters to you.

I haven't read all of Sadosky's chapter yet, but early on he gives us a clear tipoff of what it is about:

The massacre has figured prominently in several recent histories of the Revolutionary frontier and Indian-white relations, but it has yet to be put in its appropriate context. Thomas Slaughter describes the massacre as a product of "frustration" on the part of the western Pennsylvanians, and it was but one of many events that prefigured the Whiskey Rebellion that was to follow. For Richard White, the massacre was prime evidence of an omnipresent, almost pathological feeling of "Indian-hatred" that permeated the society of the American frontier. Although the descriptions of the Gnadenhutten Massacre offered by these and other historians are generally accurate, their explanations of the massacre are unsatisfactory.

 

I haven't read much beyond that point myself. But I'm inclined to suspect that it will be fodder for at least one more post, if not several.

By the way, Sadosky's chapter starts on page 187 of the following book:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great
Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

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