Johnson, Sir William

JOHNSON, SIR WILLIAM. (c. 1715–1774). British Superintendent of Indian Affairs. William Johnson was born at Smithtown, near Dunshoughlin, in County Meath, Ireland, probably in 1715. By 1736 he was handling some business for his uncle, Sir Peter Warren, and by about 1738 he had emigrated, with twelve families of tenants, to manage Warren's Mohawk River estate in North America. In 1739 he began living with Catherine Weisenburg, a runaway German servant girl whom he may have married and who bore him three children. Perhaps even before Catherine died in 1759, he had begun a liaison with his housekeeper, the sister of Joseph Brant, a prominent Mohawk leader. who gave him eight more sons and daughters. By 1743 he had made Warren's estate an economic success and moved to his own thousand-acre property and a house he called Fort Johnson. In 1745 he became a justice of the peace, and the following year he began his career as a frontier diplomat.

Johnson's complex economic and personal ties with the Mohawks made him the ideal agent for repairing New York's relations with the Iroquois after the outbreak of formal war with France in 1744. The Confederacy, in a key position between New France and the northern British colonies, had long been enemies of the French, but over the past twenty years had come to resent British traders who cut them out of their role as middle-men in the Indian trades to the north and west. Governor George Johnson of New York, fearing that the Iroquois might join the French, gave William Johnson a colonel's commission and effectively made him New York's Indian agent. Known as Warraghiyagey ("he who does much business"), he re-established some British influence among the Six Nations, and, by espousing the Iroquois system of alliances and treaties called the Covenant Chain tried indirectly to exploit the suzerainty they claimed, but did not in fact possess, over neighboring regions. He resigned in 1750 when New York refused to repay part of his considerable diplomatic expenses.

In 1755 Johnson was reappointed Indian agent under Major General Edward Braddock and charged with leading 2,000 provincial troops and 200 Indians against Fort St Frédéric (Crown Point, New York). On the way there, he won the battle of Lake George (8 September), where he was wounded. Although he was unable to push on to Crown Point, his success looked dramatic against the background of Braddock's defeat on the Ohio River, and he was rewarded with a baronetcy. In 1756, when the Crown needed to appoint two officials to coordinate Indian policy in the north and south respectively, Johnson became Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Department. In that role, although he could not bring all the Iroquois over to the British side, he raised substantial Native American forces and took a leading part in defending the northern colonial frontier.

In 1759, when Brigadier General John Prideaux (who led one of Britain's four divisions in North America) was killed in action near Fort Niagara, Johnson took command of the expedition that captured Fort Niagara on 25 July. When New France fell, Johnson was aware of the need to cultivate and reassure the Ohio and Great Lakes Indians so recently under French influence. He opposed General Jeffery Amherst's ill-informed and myopic policy of cutting back supplies of gifts and trade goods and ignoring traditional diplomatic protocol. Even after Pontiac's War (1763–1766) erupted, Johnson was able to preserve the neutrality of nearly all the Iroquois, and later, as the British gained the upper hand, he helped to restore peace. His 1766 treaty with Pontiac was of key importance.

In succeeding years Johnson advocated firm, defined boundaries, as sketched out in the proclamation of 1763, which was intended to keep white settlers from further encroachments on Indian land. Johnson also favored tight control over Indian trade to prevent fraud and exploitation. Although his activities were mixed with self-serving land deals, he was meticulous in settling disputes through traditional diplomatic forms and spared no expense in the distribution of gifts. In 1768 he negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix which shifted the boundary for settler expansion to the west, and so opened up most of modern West Virginia and Kentucky, and provided a fixed boundary that safeguarded the Native lands to the north and west. This policy would not have been possible except as an imperial scheme, for the individual colonies would hardly have countenanced a bar to further westward expansion. Yet those same colonies, already aroused by what seemed like unjust imperial taxation, were not about to accept imperial regulation of any of their inland frontiers. A land scramble between settlers from Virginia and Pennsylvania followed immediately upon the signing of the treaty, and boundary violations were frequent. Moreover, the treaty rested on the Iroquois' claim to land they did not occupy, so the boundary was unacceptable to the Cherokees and Shawnees who lived there. In 1772 a Virginia-Shawnee conflict over Ohio lands erupted and seemed likely to spread to New York. This became known as Lord Dunmore's War, named for the governor of Virginia, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore. Though seriously ill, Johnson urgently summoned a council to Johnson Hall, the baronial hall he had built in 1762, where he tried to address Iroquois grievances. On 11 July, after four days of negotiations, he suddenly collapsed and died.

SEE ALSO Pontiac's War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flexner, J. T. Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson. Revised edition. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Hamilton, Milton W. Sir William Jhonson: Colonial American 1715–1774. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikar Press 1976.

Kelsay, L. T. Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

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

                                 revised by John Oliphant