Brant, Joseph

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Brant, Joseph

BRANT, JOSEPH. (1743–1807). Mohawk leader. Brant was born as Thayendanegea at Cuyhoga to undistinguished Mohawk parents early in 1743. His father died when he was young, and his widowed mother took him back to her native Canajoharie in the Mohawk Valley, where he was baptized into the Church of England. After Catawbas killed her second husband, his mother married the hereditary chief, Brant Canagaraduncka (whose own father had visited London in 1710), from whom Joseph took his surname. His elder sister Molly became Sir William Johnson's mistress and Joseph consequently became Johnson's protégé.

During the Seven Years' War, young Brant fought against the French and their native allies, beginning at the tender age of thirteen at Lake George. In 1761, with the American war virtually over, Johnson sent Joseph and two other Mohawks to Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, where he learned to speak, read, and write fluent English and studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and agriculture. He was supposed to complete his education and become a missionary but, for reasons that are still obscure, he returned to Canajoharie after only two years. In 1765 he married Neggen Aoghyatonghsera (Margaret) from a prominent Oneida family, a connection that significantly enhanced Joseph's own status.

RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS

Despite his exposure at Lebanon to Wheelock's nonconformist influences, Brant clung to a devout Anglicanism blended with traditional Iroquois beliefs. He appears to have been a missionary's interpreter in 1763, and later he helped to translate several religious works, including parts of the Book of Common Prayer, into Mohawk. In 1768 Joseph and Molly gave land for the building of the Indian Castle mission church at the Mohawk Upper Castle. In 1773, two years after Margaret's death, Brant followed Mohawk custom by marrying her half sister. This was too much for the local Anglican priest, so the ceremony was performed by a German minister. The incident seems to have had no effect on Joseph's attachment to the Church of England, which appears to have been of political as well as religious importance. As the revolutionary crisis deepened and the New England Calvinist missionary, Samuel Kirkland, seduced the Oneidas and Tuscaroras to the American cause by offering an alternative belief system, so Anglicanism became all the more inseparable from the Mohawk alliance with the British.

SECURING BRITISH SUPPPORT

Like some other Native leaders, Brant judged that unswerving loyalty to the crown might bring the Mohawks protection against unscrupulous land jobbers and intrusive settlers. He therefore joined the Mohawks who fought on the British side in Pontiac's War and worked as a guide and translator for the northern Indian department. In 1774, when Guy Johnson succeeded Sir William Johnson as Indian superintendent, Brant became his secretary. Joseph was not, however, above using violence when appeals to officialdom failed, as when he led twenty warriors against the notorious speculator, George Klock.

As the revolutionary conflict developed, most of the land speculators came to support the American cause, thus deepening Brant's conviction that the Six Nations must cleave to the British. In 1775 he went north with a Loyalist and Mohawk force to oppose the American advance on Montreal and was the Mohawk spokesman at a conference with Guy Carleton. Here Brant's principal concerns were partly met by Carleton's assurances that the Mohawks' lands would be safe and that Britain would compensate them for any losses during the war. He was even given a captain's commission. But experience had made Brant cautious, and late in 1775 he traveled to London to get Carleton's promises confirmed and to ask for redress for earlier illegal encroachments. In London, like earlier Native visitors, he was received at court, feted and entertained by members of the educated public (including James Boswell), painted (by George Romney), and made a kind of popular public spectacle. More importantly, he was given the guarantees he sought in return for Mohawk loyalty during the rebellion. Thus armed, Brant sailed for home in June 1776, used his musket in an encounter with an American privateer, and landed on Staten Island. He joined in military operations in New Jersey before returning home through American lines.

THE NEW YORK FRONTIER

Subsequently Brant, in conjunction with the Butlers at Fort Niagara, led many Loyalist-Indian raids upon the New York frontier. These operations had three objectives: to rescue the families of fled Iroquois and Loyalists; to defend the Iroquois country; and to prevent the rebel forces drawing supplies from the frontier farms of New York. No doubt Brant also saw the opportunity for personal distinction, but despite black propaganda to the contrary, he was not interested in slaughter and scalping for their own sake. He led the Indian contingent with St. Leger's expedition at the siege of Fort Stanwix and took part in John Butler's ambush of Herkimer's relief column at Oriskany on 6 August 1777. During the next year, while Butler was raiding the Wyoming Valley, Brant gathered a force of Indians and Loyalists at Unadilla on the Susquehanna. From there he hit Andrustown on 18 July and German Flats on 13 September. Finally, after rebel forces destroyed Unadilla (6-8 October), he joined forces with Walter Butler to inflict a serious reverse upon the rebels at Cherry Valley on 11 November 1778. These actions attracted the admiration of the distant Lord George Germain, who sent Brant the king's commission as colonel.

Brant's raids provoked Sullivan's invasion of the Iroquois country in 1779. While this expedition was being prepared, Brant raided Minisink, a settlement on the Delaware, on the night of 19-20 July, perhaps to secure supplies for Butler or to draw off some of Sullivan's men. Two days later he cut off and destroyed a pursuing rebel force before retiring to help Butler resist Sullivan. On 12 August he inflicted some casualties in a minor skirmish with the rebels. At Newtown (29 August 1779), where an ambush similar to that at Oriskany failed and the rebel artillery panicked the Indians, Brant held enough of his warriors together to offer a desperate resistance against odds of five to one. He launched a counterattack that almost destroyed a New Hampshire regiment before the Loyalists and Indians were forced to retreat. Sullivan's army then marched through the Iroquois country, burning towns and forcing most of the people to flee to Fort Niagara. Here they had to live in refugee camps, dependent upon British handouts.

But the Iroquois were not knocked out of the war: on the contrary, they struck back harder than ever. Brant himself raided Harpersfield and Minisink (2-4 April 1780) and destroyed the Canajoharie settlements (1-2 August). About 25 August he destroyed a one-hundred-strong rebel force on the Ohio before moving north again to join Sir John Johnson's raid on the Schoharie Valley. In early 1781 he repeatedly raided the upper Mohawk Valley until rebel resistance stiffened and British will to fight on withered away. By now the strain had caused a marked deterioration in Brant's character, and he had begun to take to drinking and brawling. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 seemed to him a cynical betrayal of the Iroquois. Nevertheless, he led a movement to resettle the Iroquois on the Grand River in British territory on the northern side of Lake Erie. By 1785 about one-third of the New York Iroquois were there and Brant had risen from being a predominantly Mohawk leader to being a leading figure in the Six Nations.

POST-REVOLUTIONARY EFFORTS

Brant now tried to construct a pan-Indian alliance while also attempting to obtain for the Iroquois full title to their Canadian lands and the compensation promised to the Mohawks in 1775 and 1776. He also hoped for promises of British military support for the nations of the northwest and Great Lakes against the United States. However, this support, without which Brant and other leaders felt unable to act, was not forthcoming when the Americans attacked the northwestern nations in the years from 1787 to 1794. Consequently, the idea of a pan-Indian alliance collapsed and with it the aim of reuniting the Six Nations. Within the Canadian Iroquois, his political opponents may have tried to have him assassinated by his son Isaac, who died after a brawl with his father in 1795. Joseph himself, much weakened by drink and malaria, died in his bed at Burlington on Lake Ontario on 24 November 1807.

OF THE "MIDDLE GROUND"

Joseph Brant was an outstanding product of the "middle ground," a term Richard White originally applied to the Great Lakes region but which some writers have used even when its relevance is limited. However, there is no doubt of its validity in connection with the Mohawks, and with Brant in particular. He lived in a world where he could be simultaneously hunter, trader, civil servant, and assistant missionary and in which both sides borrowed from the other in order to establish a mutually acceptable meeting place. His extraordinary intelligence and energy thrived in such an environment. If Brant was only temporarily successful in sustaining this middle ground, it was because the odds were stacked against him from the beginning.