Brant, Mary (Molly) (1736-1796)

Mary (Molly) Brant (1736-1796)

Sources

Mohawk political leader

Influence . Elder sister of the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), Mary, called Molly, was the common-law wife of the most powerful British official west of the Allegheny Mountains. She was also the most influential Mohawk leader during the French and Indian War and the Revolution. Molly Brant looked after the interests of her people and spared them the devastation visited upon other Iroquois tribes.

Marriage . Molly’s station in life improved markedly when she was seventeen: her mother, Margaret, married the sachem Brant, a military leader and trader. At the age of twenty-one Brant was already a mature woman by Iroquois standards. She had become an important political figure around the council fire at Canajoharie. She was adept as a healer, apparently having some command of herbal medicines. Brant took another step up in the world in 1759, when she entered the household of the British superintendent of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson. Johnson’s wife had recently died, and Brant came to him first as housekeeper and then as mistress. The Mohawks of Canajoharie legitimized the alliance in frontier terms by presenting Sir William with a tract of land and addressing him as “Affectionate Brother and Friend.” As Johnson’s wife, Brant cemented an alliance between the Mohawks and the representatives of the British Crown that would last for decades. Straddling two cultural worlds, her power in the Iroquois tradition was rooted in the matrilineal tradition of that society, in which women’s descent determined kinship ties and clan boundaries. Women were political leaders of the community while men were war chiefs. Her influence and that of other Mohawk leaders kept the tribe out of Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763, in which their Iroquois brethren the Senecas were engulfed. Sir Johnson, though angered at Seneca massacres of whites, made peace with that tribe.

Mistress of Johnson Hall . At Johnson Hall, a few miles from Schenectedy, Brant reigned over tributary whites and Mohawks, dispensing favors of clothing, blankets, and alcohol to Indians and controlling precious land grants to whites. She outlived her influential parents and accumulated more power in her own right than even her father. She controlled a great deal of trade, more in fact than did Johnson himself, and her influence extended up and down the Mohawk Valley, reaching even into Albany. Brant and Sir Johnson encouraged the trade in furs and European consumer goods that brought traders and land speculators to the Mohawk Valley, which they usurped from its original inhabitants. Brant facilitated this transition but alleviated the plight of her people whenever possible. She also remained defiantly Mohawk, refusing to learn English or adopt European customs or dress.

The Revolution . With Johnson’s death in 1774, Brant remained a wealthy and influential Mohawk leader. She orchestrated the tribe’s Loyalist strategy, and, utilizing her spies, she gave important information to the British, resulting in the ambush of Gen. Nicholas Herkimer’s forces at Oriskany in 1777. Brant retreated with her family and tribe to Fort Niagara and later went to Montreal, retaining control over trade and Indian politics. After the war the British settled her with a pension and a home in Kingston, Ontario, where she remained active in Iroquois politics, supporting her people in disputes with both British and Americans.

Sources

Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);

James T. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet: Sir William Johnson of New York (New York: Harper, 1959);

Isabel T. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984).