Native Americans in the American Revolution: The History We Didn’t Learn

Adel:
Dr. Silverman, it’s a pleasure to have you in our program. It’s a special series. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation with me about the American Revolution.

So I want to start with sort of defining and perhaps even confining the scope of our conversation, because as I was preparing for this interview with you, I realized that you and I could have multiple podcasts about Native peoples. So here it is. For purposes of discussing the American Revolution, does it make sense to, one, call Native Americans Native peoples, and two, to confine our conversation to Native peoples east of the Mississippi?

Dr. Silverman:
Yes, on both counts. Scholars refer to Native Americans in various ways, Native American, Indigenous peoples, American Indians, and the like. And there’s no rule as to what term to use.

In Indian country, which is to say among Native peoples themselves, there’s also no singularity on this matter. Generally speaking, my sense is that older Native folks prefer the term Indian when referring to them in the aggregate. It’s a misnomer, to be sure, but they’ve appropriated it over the course of their lives and turned that label into a source of pride.

A lot of younger folks, particularly college-educated folks, have drifted away from that term. They see it as an anachronism and is racially loaded and have adopted it mostly in the 1970s and 80s. Native Americans, more recently Indigenous peoples, has come into favor.

Let me note, though, there are Native-run institutions that use the term Indian. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. is an example. The National Congress of American Indians, which is the main lobbying organization for tribes around the country, uses the term.

And Indian country is a legal term in the United States. It’s a designated area by the government.

Adel:
We’ll stick to Native peoples.

Let’s talk about some of the Native peoples east of the Mississippi in the 1770s and the years leading up to and during the American Revolution. Were there Native peoples that we could call nations or did they have humongous settlements like size of cities?

Dr. Silverman:
The question of what to call Native groupings is an ongoing matter of debate in scholarly circles.

Let me preface this by saying that a lot of the debate has to do with how those terms will resonate politically today. Today, in 2025, Native American groups are organized into nations, which is to say they have formal governments. Most of them would be recognizable to your average listener because they tend to be modeled on the structure of the United States.

You have a single executive, a bicameral legislature, a judiciary, so on and so forth. They’re formally organized, they have written laws, and their operations are practically identical to those of any municipality, state, or the federal government, for that matter, in the United States. When we’re talking about the 1770s, very few Native peoples had adopted those structures.

Their polities, as such, tended to be quite decentralized, which is to say some groups had chiefs who normally inherited their position genealogically. Most groups did not. And so, effectively, what you have is a very loose organization in which representatives from clans, which is to say genealogical groups, family groups, would meet together in council and try to reach consensus on political matters.

None of these groups operated by majority rule. None of them had formal judiciaries. None of them had police forces.

And those features, combined with the fact that most of these groups are, in effect, an extended cousinage, have led anthropologists and some historians across time to refer to them as tribes rather than as nations. I prefer the term tribe. A lot of my colleagues do not because they think it’s dismissive of the legitimacy of those polities, but I think it’s a more accurate description for these loose organizations of people.

Now, these polities, these tribes, if you will, let’s say we’re talking about the Cherokees, the Mohawks, the Chickasaws, what have you, with very rare exception, they number under 30,000 people and sometimes well under 30,000 people. In terms of the localities in which they lived, there’s enormous variety, even across Native America, east of the Mississippi. For the most part, people lived in villages.

Those villages are, again, mostly kin groups living together.

Adel:
Were these villages, did they have permanent structures or were they nomadic-based villages that migrated from place to place?

Dr. Silverman:
Normally, you have a village which is in the same place season after season.

For the most part, women, children, and the elderly would be living in this site year-round. The men would use different resource areas seasonally. They might go off in the fall for a months-long hunt that takes them away from the village for a sizable portion of time.

Then they might move to fishing runs in the spring. Sometimes the village would move to a fishing run in the spring. Then you return to the village during the planting season during the summer.

In other communities, there is no village. Individual family hamlets live strung out along a riverway or throughout the tribal territory. There’s an enormous amount of variety in this respect.

It also matters whether the people are at peace or at war. During wartime, the people would consolidate and sometimes create palisaded villages, so walled villages to protect themselves against enemy incursions. In peacetime, those clustered settlements tended to disperse.

There’s an enormous amount of variety.

Adel:
Did any of these tribes form any sort of alliances, confederations?

Dr. Silverman:
Yes, to be sure.

Most of the major groups that will be familiar to your listeners say the Six Nations Iroquois or Haudenosaunee as they call themselves, the Creeks or Muscogees, the Cherokees, the Catawbas, the Choctaws. These are groups that combined many different tribes into a single confederacy. One of the processes that created these groups over the course of the 17th century is that so many groups were decimated by a combination of epidemic disease, intertribal warfare, and warfare with colonists that groups that had previously been independent could no longer sustain themselves independently, and thus they banded together with other groups to form those polities that I named previously.

Adel:
Part of what you just said about disease and how it decimated or even obliterated some groups, that goes back to a conversation you and I had several years ago about the 400th anniversary of Thanksgiving, how disease had essentially cleared out much of certain native peoples in Massachusetts. Okay, I see.

Here’s another big question. To what extent did native peoples interact with the American colonies?

Dr. Silverman:
Oh, they thoroughly interacted with them.

One of the truisms that I share with my students is that if you go into the official colonial records for any colony, colony of Massachusetts Bay, official records of Virginia or South Carolina, I say, go to the index and then look at which heading is the longest. Almost invariably, the longest heading is India. That speaks to your point.

There’s a lot of reasons for this. Let’s just start with the basic principle. Throughout the history of colonial America, native people are most of the people.

There’s no competition here. They are overwhelmingly the majority of the people. They’re militarily powerful and thus are a matter of concern for colonists.

They’re economically powerful. Early colonial economies, and in some cases, the economies of colonies throughout their entire existence, have everything to do with native people. The fur trade, whether we’re talking about the trade in beaver pelts in the north or deerskins in the south, there is a thriving trade in Native American slaves between indigenous people in the colonies, particularly in the south, but not just limited to the south.

Adel:
I’m sorry.
Did you say Native American slaves? You’re not talking about African slaves. You’re talking about native?

Dr. Silverman:
No, I’m talking about Native American slaves.

Adel:
I see.

Dr. Silverman:
During the 17th century and the early 18th century, you were almost as likely in any context in which colonists held slaves to encounter native people in bondage as Africans. Now, that’s going to change over the course of the 18th century as the transatlantic African slave trade picks up. As I frame it for the 17th century, colonists are equal opportunity and slavers.

They will acquire slaves anywhere they can get them. Because of intertribal enmities and a longstanding native tradition of capturing one’s enemies and holding them in bondage for greater or lesser periods of time, there was a market available, just as there was in West Africa for colonists. It’s a very similar dynamic.

There’s a robust market for Native American land. You have regular conferences between colonists and native polities for colonists to purchase native land and negotiate the terms. Whenever there’s a war between the imperial powers of Britain, France, and Spain, and let’s be clear, there’s almost constant war between those powers from the 16th century until the 1810s, native people are always involved in those conflicts as allies or enemies of one group or another.

Like the Seve-Years War that happened a decade or so before the Revolutionary War, right? That’s absolutely right, and the Seven Years War, or the French and Indian War, as it’s more commonly known. The English called it the French and Indian War.

The French might have called it the English and Indian War, right? Because the English have their own native allies. Native.

In so many different ways, native people and colonists, there’s no frontier dividing them. They live cheek by jowl. They’re integrated into one another’s lives.

Colonists sometimes dress like native people and use goods that native people had traded to them. Native people sometimes dress like colonists and have a material culture that is full of goods full of goods from Europe. Really?

Dr. Silverman:
Look, what are the crops that colonists grow? Corn, tobacco, among others. Well, those are native crops.

The image of Daniel Boone in buckskin. Well, the buckskin comes from native people, right? There’s no cultural or geographic dividing line between these people.

They’re part of one another’s lives.

Adel:
Now that you tell me there’s no frontier, really, between them and their lives are so intertwined. Their economies and, let’s say, going back to colonies such as the Massachusetts colony, they have a longer list than, let’s say, other nations and people’s trades.

What are the major grievances at this time that native peoples have against the American colonists?

Dr. Silverman:
The list is very long, but the major grievance is land encroachment. No question about it.

Let’s set the stage. For most of the 17th and the 18th century, when we’re talking about the British American colonies, their expansion is really no greater than about 100 miles inland from the coast. In the case of New England, northward up the Hudson, Connecticut rivers and some of the rivers in Maine, they’re really still limited to the coastal plain.

Adel:
So they’re not venturing far. They’re just really sticking to where they originally were, more or less.

Dr. Silverman:
It’s not a matter of a lack of curiosity.

It’s because native people won’t let them. That’s the issue, right? Native people are sufficiently powerful to keep them hemmed in on the east side of the Appalachian mountains, and really on the east side of the foothills leading to the Appalachian mountains.

But we have a significant change in the mid 18th century. That significant change is that Britain has defeated France in the Seven Years’ War. Now, New France or French Canada was never a populist place.

The total population of New France on the eve of its defeat is about 70,000 people. That’s one fifth the size of Virginia. But the French had a presence throughout the vast interior of the continent in the form of fur traders, military posts, and Jesuit missionaries.

And they armed native people to the teeth to serve as proxies in the imperial wars against the British and enlisted native assistance in that mission. And now that the French were gone, native people had been robbed of a really important ally who helped to counterbalance the growing strength of the English colonies. So the English colonies, when the French are defeated in the Seven Years’ War in the early 1760s, their population is about one and a half million people.

By contrast- You’re talking about east of the Mississippi? East of the Mississippi is just the British colonies. The population is about one and a half million people.

The total Native American population east of the Mississippi is 250,000. They need native people. And those native people are not united.

They’re divided into dozens of different groups. They desperately need an imperial rival to the British to help supply them, in particular, with guns, powder, and shot. They don’t manufacture those weapons themselves.

And they need them in order to wage war, not only against the British, but foremost against the but against one another and for their hunting and so on and so forth. So the French are now gone. Between 1760 and 1775, upwards of 3% of the total population of Ireland and Scotland migrate to the British colonies.

Those numbers include a population that is larger than the total native population east of the Mississippi River. Let me repeat my point. More migrants enter the British colonies in 15 years, between 1760 and 1775, than the total native population east of the Mississippi.

And those people are streaming into the trans-Appalachian hinterland and provoking enormous conflicts with native people. So I’m talking about they’re moving into the lands of the Six Nations Iroquois or Haudenosaunee in what’s now upstate New York, the Shawnees and Delawares who are in eastern Ohio, the Cherokees who are in the Smoky Mountain region, the southern Appalachian region, and then the Muskogees or Creeks who are on the Georgia- Alabama border. This is a crisis of grand proportions for native people.

And they can clearly see that if this trend continues, they’re going to be entirely displaced by these folks. That’s the number one grievance.

Adel:
They don’t have the ally.

They don’t have the arms or ammunition. And they don’t have the numbers.
Dr. Silverman:
That’s correct.

Adel:
Yeah.
Hmm.
Okay. So that’s their major grievance. And I think you’re about to tell me that it may even get worse.

Dr. Silverman:
So- That is correct.

Adel:
So war is brewing in the colonies and also outside colonies, sort of in eastern, what is today continental United States and sort of eastern and southern Canada. What do native peoples discuss?

Do they think they should stay neutral? Is this a big decision? Did they fall into it?

Or are they literally sitting and talking about this?

Dr. Silverman:
Oh, they at length. Not only do they talk about it amongst themselves, but they’re very clear about their positions with both the American colonists and British officials who are courting them as allies.

So after the battle of Lexington and Concord, let’s keep in mind here, there’s over a year interval between the battle of Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence.

Adel:
So Lexington and Concord are in April, 1775 and the Declaration of Independence as we all know is in July, 1776.

Dr. Silverman:
That is correct.

So there is a state of rebellion, but the question of what that rebellion will mean is still being determined during that interval. Nobody’s sure at this point, whether it’s going to be an independence movement.

Adel:
And the native peoples are tuned into this.

Dr. Silverman:
Native people are thoroughly tuned into it because you have parties from both sides, both from the British imperial side and from the rebel American side who are reaching out to native people and courting them to join one side or the other. And almost universally, what native people say is, we want nothing to do with this. They call it a war between brothers.

And they say, there’s no winning for us in all of this. All we’re going to do is lose lives and land, no matter what side we choose.

Adel:
I’m surprised you said universally.

I wasn’t expecting that. It is universal. No question about it.

Dr. Silverman:
And especially it’s the old guys. It’s the old guys in native communities who have lived through these wars before. And the young guys are always chomping at the bit.

They want to prove themselves as warriors. They usually don’t have families that they have to defend. They haven’t seen how disastrous war is.

And when the old guys, they’ve already consolidated their reputations as warriors and they don’t have anything to earn. And they have wisdom on their side. What they say is, this is not going to go the way you think it’s going to go.

You might have visions of glory, illusions of grandeur. What this is going to produce is death and destruction for us, as it always has. Let’s stay out of it.

The problem is they can’t stay out of it. I made the point earlier, they are thoroughly integrated with this world. Staying neutral is not a possibility.

They know that the colonists are going to continue to encroach on their lands, even if they remain neutral on this. And they know that if they don’t side with the British, the British are going to cut off their supply of trade goods, which they desperately need. Let me be clear about this dynamic here.

Native people by the eve of the revolution, native people living east of the Mississippi, have a material culture that depends on trade with Europeans. They get much of their clothing from Europeans, all their metal tools. They don’t produce metal tools.

So the kettles they cook in, the knives they cut with, the needles they sew with, the fishing hooks they fish with, guns powder and shot. Most native people have not used a bow and arrow for hunting ever by this time. The gun is part of their daily life, essential to their male roles as hunters and warriors.

They need these goods, and they desperately want them to. They can do without the clothes and the tools. They could fall back on their traditions there, but they need the weaponry.

They need it. The colonists don’t produce that weaponry. They don’t produce anything.

They grow crops, but they don’t have any manufacturing to speak of. All of those goods come from Britain. What’s more, if you’re native people and you’re trying to size up who’s going to be the winner here, you want to side with the winner.

Who would bet on the colonies? Britain is the most powerful empire in the world. They just defeated France.

That saying that the sun never sets on the British empire, that begins in the 1760s. Britain really does have a global empire by that point. So it has might on its side.

It has manufacturing on its side. What’s more, the king himself promises native people that if they side with Britain against the colonies, Britain will defend their lands. Wow.

Adel:
That’s a closer.

Dr. Silverman:
That’s a closer. As a result of that and the recognition that the American colonies are not going to stop encroaching on native lands no matter what they say.

Native people know that. Any native group that is not already surrounded by the colonial population sides with Britain. Now those who live surrounded by colonists who are overwhelmingly on the side eventually of independence, they don’t have a choice.

I’m talking about small groups like the Wampanoags in Massachusetts, the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, Pequots and Mohegans in Connecticut, Catawbas in South Carolina. If they side with Britain, they’re sitting ducks. They’re dead on arrival.

Their neighbors will slaughter them. They can’t afford to make that choice. So they tend to side with the colonies, not because they necessarily support the colony’s cause, but because they have no other choice.

The only leverage they have with these people is to show that they’re good allies of them. Those are the dynamics at play.

Adel:
Do native peoples unite into one force or are they in patches confronting the colonists on behest of the British?

Dr. Silverman:
No, it’s community by community by community. One of the many things that the British complain about endlessly about their native allies is their lack of commitment to the cause. They say, well, they will accept payment in goods to go out and launch raiding parties, but they won’t put any of their men at risk.

If they’re not sure of an overwhelming victory, they won’t fight. That’s it. Or if things aren’t going their way, they abandon the campaign.

Or if the payment they expect is not promptly delivered, they quit. Or if one of their guys gets killed, they say, oh, that’s it. We’re through.

They’re very fickle allies in this because they don’t have a stake in the colonies’ independence or Britain’s supremacy in this. This is not their concern. Their concern is their own material and physical well-being and protecting their lands in the future.

Adel:
A few minutes ago, I said, that’s a deal closer where British said, we’ll protect your land. That is not impetuous enough for them to be all riled up and be passionate about this war. That in and of itself.

Dr. Silverman:
Correct. Not in and of itself. When colonists invade their lands, they get quite passionate about that subject.

But fighting for the British cause is not enough for them. We also have to note, Native people do not organize militarily the way that Europeans and white Americans do. They don’t have armies in which common soldiers are supposed to follow the orders of military officers without question.

That’s not how it works. When they go out as bands of warriors, you’re effectively talking about a group of brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews, fathers and sons. These are kin groups and friends who are going out.

No one’s really in charge. Whoever has the most military experience effectively makes suggestions that other people are deferential toward. But if you violate their counsel, there’s no consequence of doing so other than you might get yelled at when you get home.

There’s no punishment. In the British military, a soldier who violates orders is going to be whipped at the post very often with hundreds of lashes. Even in the New England colonies, they use the biblical limit of lashes and set it at 35.

But that would be unheard of in Native communities. No one’s going to treat them.

Adel:
They don’t have the military discipline or hierarchy to create-

Dr. Silverman:
They’re not going to line up in a battlefield as they’re getting picked apart by another similarly massed force 100 yards away.

They call that insanity. They simply will not do it.

Adel:
That’s interesting and also very funny.

When you say insanity, it does look insanity when you watch these movies or reenactments, but that has to do with the technology of the time. You said community by community, their commitment may differ or their commitment at the time may differ. Does this also cause rifts and perhaps even civil war amongst the Native peoples?

Dr. Silverman:
No question about it. I’ll give you two prime examples. One is the Six Nations Iroquois or Haudenosaunee.

This is a confederacy of Iroquoian speaking peoples across upstate New York, east to west, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras. The vast majority of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee people side with the British for the reasons we’ve already explored. The Oneidas side with the Americans.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. For one, the Oneidas were feeling an enormous amount of landed pressure from colonists and they understood that if they sided with the British, they were going to get overrun very quickly by the Americans and they don’t want that. What’s more, in an attempt to try to figure out how to stay on their lands as that invasion had been unfolding during the 1760s, they had begun to host missionaries from New England, a sizable number of whom, let me be clear, were Native American themselves, predominantly from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes.

The Oneidas are adopting Christianity as an attempt to figure out how to participate in this encroaching colonial world while retaining their political independence and their landed independence. Those ties contribute to them siding with the United States during this war. In other words, they’re on the opposite side of this war from most of the rest of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Adel:
Does that break up the Confederacy then?

Dr. Silverman:
It does break up the Confederacy. Indeed, what the Confederacy does, because there’s such stiff disagreement within the ranks.

Let me be clear, a smattering of Onondagas and Tuscaroras also side with the US. The Haudenosaunee’s side with the British? Most of the rest side with the British.

The Haudenosaunee’s Central Council fire in Onondaga, the site of modern day Syracuse, New York, had been burning as a symbol of the Confederacy of these people since before colonization. We don’t know the exact date that the league was founded, but for hundreds of years, they extinguished the council fire during the American Revolution and say, everyone can go their own way during this war and we’ll reunite after the war. That’s not what happens.

What happens is most of the Haudenosaunee’s who side with the British end up in Canada with white loyalists. Those who sided with the United States and a few who didn’t stay in New York, and they create their own rival council fire. The Iroquois have never reunited.

The Haudenosaunee have never reunited as a single Confederacy ever again because of the revolution.

Adel:
And there’s also a story, and we don’t need to get into it, I just thought of it, of an Iroquois sister and brother that become very famous and they have-

Dr. Silverman:
Molly Brant and Joseph Brant is probably what you’re thinking about. Exactly, exactly.

Adel:
And sometimes when you Google the story of Iroquois, actually, the brother, his poster child, his portrait comes up. And they sided with the British, but they didn’t have a happy ending.

Dr. Silverman:
No, Joseph Brant even goes to London during that interval between Lexington and Concord in the Declaration.

He meets with the King to negotiate the Mohawks participation in this war. And George III promises that he’ll protect Mohawk lands in exchange for this alliance. And that’s where the portraits are painted.

He also, by the way, Joseph Brant becomes a Freemason. He shares that in common with George Washington. He had been formally educated at a Connecticut boarding school.

He’s fluent in English, has beautiful penmanship. He’s a member of the Anglican church. He knows what he’s doing.

His sister had been the common law wife of Sir William Johnson, who’s Britain’s Northern Superintendent for Indian Affairs. So again, their lives are thoroughly integrated. Another example of Native people degenerating in the Civil War is the Cherokees in the South.

Okay. The Cherokees initially side with the British and then suffer multiple scorched earth invasions from the Americans. And it devastates their country.

Dozens of towns burn to the ground. People suffer starvation. Their population dwindles by estimates by 50%.

Wow. So they’re suffering enormously. And so eventually the old guys say, enough, enough.

We will cede land to the Americans in exchange for peace. But the young guys, they want to keep up the fight. And they’re led by a war leader named Dragon Canoe.

And he forms a breakaway band of Cherokees that he calls the Chickamaugas, the real, which means the real people. And the Chickamaugas is called the Peace Cherokees Virginians. And the Chickamaugas keep up the fight.

The problem is that the Americans will not distinguish between war Cherokees and Peace Cherokees. And so when the Chickamaugas attack the Americans, the Americans retaliate by attacking the Peace Cherokees, right? So now there’s a rift between the Cherokees over this matter.

These kinds of divisions characterize Native American communities throughout the East in response to the American Revolution.

Adel:
So is it fair to say that a majority of Native peoples side with the British?

Dr. Silverman:
The overwhelming majority of Native peoples side with the British.

Adel:
Does that make a difference for the British?

Dr. Silverman:
Oh, without question. Most of your viewers will be familiar from grade school days with the stories of George Washington’s difficulty manning the Continental Army.

Particularly in 1776 before the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton. It’s famous for the line, these are the times that tried men’s souls, right?

Adel:
I think that comes from Thomas Paine.

Dr. Silverman:
It does.
Yeah, but it’s in reference just to the low state of the Continental Army after the first year of fighting. Now, there’s lots of reasons that the Continental Army is suffering such a manpower shortage. You know, some of it has to do with low pay, some of it has to do with low performance.

But there’s another reason too. And one of the main reasons is that any white colonist living in the Trans-Appalachian region doesn’t know when an Indian raid is coming and doesn’t want to abandon his homestead and his family to go serve in the Continental Army. Now, Native people aren’t numerous, but their guerrilla raids terrorize the entire western reach of the United States and effectively paralyze the place.

So those attacks are enormously effective in disrupting recruitment for the Continental Army. They also destroy numerous settlements in the western reaches of the young United States.

Adel:
Oh, wow.

So in some respects, well, the Continental Army, especially in the early years, is sort of hamstrung by the Native peoples because, you know, would-be recruits are constantly vigilant.

Dr. Silverman:
Right.

Adel:
So who on the Continental Army? Well, let me ask it this way. At some point, from what I understand, the colonists, the American colonists throughout the American Revolution actually begin fighting with Native peoples, not just defending.

I’m not referring to the recruits at state home. This is organized fighting. So is that the Continental Army or frontiersmen that have been formed into militia?

How does this happen?

Dr. Silverman:
Yes, it’s both. So, you know, there are attacks on Native peoples by the Continental Army ordered by George Washington.

And then there are locally organized attacks on Native people organized sometimes at the state level, particularly in the cases of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. And here I’m thinking about the Cherokees and the Creeks in particular. In the case of the Continental Army’s role, you know, the most notorious example is called Sullivan’s Raid in 1779.

So, you know, the Haudenosaunee’s most prominent among them, Joseph Brant, have been attacking outlying white settlements in New York and Pennsylvania from a base in which they’re being outfitted by the British in Niagara, right by Niagara Falls. To prevent those attacks, Washington orders a three-pronged invasion of Haudenosaunee territory. Three-pronged invasion.

A three-pronged invasion. The major thrust is going straight up the Susquehanna River Valley. Susquehanna River starts in New York, cuts through Central Pennsylvania, Harrisburg is on it, and then empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

Susquehanna River cuts right into the middle of Haudenosaunee territory. So a major U.S. force goes up the Susquehanna River. Another force is coming west from Pittsburgh.

Another force is coming east from Albany. They converge in 1779 in Haudenosaunee territory and just put the entire place to the torch. Most of the Haudenosaunee population have retreated in advance of this invasion.

They’re not going to meet this army face-to-face, but the army destroys everything. Dozens of towns, hundreds of thousands of acres of corn, beans, and squash. As a matter of fact, we have journals from the troops who characterize native people as hunters, as nomadic hunters, not as farmers.

And they say, we’re getting lost in these cornfields surrounding their communities. There’s miles and miles of cultivated fields, peach orchards, and the like. They put it all to the torch.

The next winter, the Haudenosaunee lose upwards of 50% of their population to starvation. It’s a terrible winter. They’re camped in refugee settlements outside of Fort Niagara, the British stronghold in Western New York.

The invasion effectively works. George Washington’s orders are to extirpate them, just to destroy them. I think it’s important to note here, this is the kind of treatment that George Washington would never unleash on loyalists, on white Americans who side with the crown.

There’s a double standard here when it comes to native people. The Continental Army, state militias, and locally organized white forces don’t distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. They launch total war against native people.

Their excuse is, well, that’s how natives war against us. So that’s what they get. Nevertheless, it is a very double standard.

It’s a total double standard when it comes to warring against native people.

Adel:
You know, 1779, when you said three-pronged attack, I sort of repeated that to make sure I heard it correctly. 1779 is still two years before Yorktown and four years before the Paris Peace Treaty.

So the Iroquois people are such a huge problem in the perception of General Washington that he commits this force to confront them in the middle of war.

Dr. Silverman:
Look, half the American Revolution is fought in Indian country. That’s not how it’s taught.

Adel:
No, no.

Dr. Silverman:
That’s not how it’s remembered. But half of the American Revolution is fought in Indian country. When the Declaration of Independence is written, most Americans only read the preamble.

They don’t read the grievances. But the grievances start small and build to a crescendo. And so the last charge against the king is supposed to be the most serious one.

And the last charge makes two accusations against him. One is that he has effectively recruited Black slaves to join the British against the rebellion. They couch it in a euphemism, domestic unrest, but that’s what they mean.

But the final part of that grievance is that he has unleashed the Indian savages, whose known method of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. That is the single greatest accusation that warrants breaking away from Britain. And it sets the tone for the whole war.

Native people are not bid actors. They’re not a side note to the American Revolution. They’re fundamental to it from its beginning, to its end, to its legacy.

Adel:
That’s not how we’ve learned. No. The American Revolution.

Not at all. Do you teach this to your students?

Dr. Silverman:
For as long as I can, I will, to be sure.

Adel:
Wow.

Dr. Silverman:
You don’t have to take my word for it. Read the Declaration of Independence.

Adel:
No, I’m not doubting you.

It’s just… Okay. Wow.

Let’s take a break here. In the next segment, I’ll ask Dr. Silverman how the Native peoples made out after the American Revolution. We’ll be right back.

Adel:
Dr. Silverman, I’m about to ask you a question that to some extent, unfortunately, I know the answer to. And here it is. What was the outcome of the American Revolution for the Native peoples?

Dr. Silverman:
It’s an abject disaster. And indeed, I would go so far as to contend that Native people are the big losers of the Revolution. The British Empire does fine after the Revolution.

Indeed, the British Empire reaches new heights without the burden of having these unruly North American colonies that tend to provoke wars with Indians and then expect Britain to bail them out and pay the cost.

Adel:
When you say, if I may interject one moment, please, Dr. Silverman, when you say Native peoples are big losers, just correct me on this name, please. Joseph Brandt?

Am I saying that correctly? Joseph Brandt. Yeah.

But you said he went to England and he met with King George III and they formed an alliance. So you move forward, you have the Paris Treaty. Are they part of the treaty?

Are they something carved out for him? You’re smiling at me.

Is this a naive, totally stupid question?

Dr. Silverman:
The Paris Treaty to Native people at all. Britain cedes all of its claims east of the Mississippi River to the United States. Let’s be clear, that’s Indian land, not British land.

We have these maps of the Treaty of Paris, this massive territory now claimed by the U.S. Those maps never identify the Native people on the land because they’re designed to project forward U.S. national claims based on Britain’s accession. The assumption, both on the part of the British crown and the young United States, is that Native people are not legitimate polities with legitimate claims to the land. They’re like wolves roving the wilderness, again, from the perspective of the signatories.

But Native people don’t view things that way at all. When they get news of the treaty, by most accounts, they just stared. What are you talking about?

How does the king of England have the right to cede our land which we’ve never given to him to another country? This is a game that’s being played between the U.S. and Britain. Then they start talking back.

There’s a case of the Chickasaw saying, this is an act of cruelty that Christians only are capable of doing. They just throw the hypocrisy of this treaty back in the faces of the white Americans who are trying to convince Native people that now they have no more legitimate right to the land. What Native people are left with, though, is a newly founded nation that is premised on dispossessing them.

Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. The way the Continental Army recruits troops for George Washington’s forces is by giving them land bounties. Well, where is that land supposed to come from?

Let me tell you, it’s not going to come from George Washington’s vast claims. It is premised on the assumption that the United States is going to acquire Native land, whether by conquest or by purchase, and then it will distribute that land to the soldiers. Let’s also be clear about how this war was funded.

The war is funded, and indeed, the early republic is floated almost entirely on foreign loans. Loans from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. As far as Spain, hence the dollar, that’s what we call our currency dollar because of the money we’re getting from Spain, right?

I believe so. Yeah. Those loans are premised on the part of the creditor and the borrower alike on the assumption that the United States will eventually acquire and then sell to settlers millions of acres of Native land.

In the early republic, the federal government has no power of taxation whatsoever. Under the Articles of Confederation, you have to have unanimous consent among the states to raise any taxes, which is to say you’re never going to raise any taxes. The only revenue stream is Indian land.

Then we have the Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787, which is projecting Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan in areas that Native people have not ceded, in which tens of thousands of Native people live and have lived since time immemorial. That’s the vision of this new country, and Native people are left facing it. Native numbers on the eve of the Treaty of Paris have dropped to 200,000 or less.

The size of the United States in 1783 is 2 million plus and climbing, and it’s going to expand exponentially in population over the subsequent decades. What’s more, the people who live in the United States conceive of themselves and their nation as a nation of white people—white people who are granted by their civility and their religion and their God to expand at the expense of savage pagans, as they see Native people. They are willing to launch genocidal wars of extermination against any Native people who will not accept their own abject subjugation.

That’s the situation after the war. Wow.

Adel:
All of a sudden this puts a trail of tears, which comes some 50 years later in perspective.

You know, I have a question, and you tell me if I’m not articulating it correctly. Did Native peoples have agency in all that happened?

Dr. Silverman:
Well, you know—

Adel:
Does my question make sense, Dr. Silverman?

Dr. Silverman:
No, no.

It makes complete sense. If you take a satellite view of this, the answer could appear to be no. You say, oh, this is a numbers game, right?

On one side, you have two plus million people bearing down on 200,000 or less, and that 200,000 is divided into a dozen different groups, and they don’t have a central organization to resist. Okay. Sure.

But within those parameters, Native people do lots of things to try to carve out a viable future. Now, very often they fail, but they try. So Native people are going to keep up the fight, let’s be clear.

They don’t just roll over and surrender. George Washington’s five-sixths of the operating expenses of George Washington’s administration are spent fighting Indians. Five-sixths?

Five-sixths. It’s the central activity of the federal government during Washington’s administration. The central activity.

Adel:
Wow. So we form a nation, and we are in the 1790s, and this is what we’re spending—

Dr. Silverman:
On the march. On the march.

Got to get that land to pay the land bounties and pay back the creditors. That’s what the federal government does during the 1790s. So there is a raging war in Ohio and then in Cherokee and Cree country in the South.

Native people are going to rise again during the War of 1812. They’re going to side once again with Britain. Native people in the Central and Western Great Lakes are going to side with Britain under the leadership of Tecumseh to try to roll back the white American tide.

Likewise, militant Creeks known as Red Sticks are going to rise up in the South during that war. They’re going to get decimated by Andrew Jackson. So they make those choices.

Other Native people say, the best thing we can do is try to work within this new system. And they start hosting Christian missionaries. They begin adopting male plow agriculture.

In the South, some Native people begin adopting Black slavery and growing cotton and building plantation houses. They start to form—back to our original question, tribes or nations—they start to form nations. They start to adopt governments modeled on the United States that make constitutional claims to their land as part of an effort to remain independent.

So in other words, they’re becoming more like white people in order to remain separate from white people. That’s agency at work. That’s the stuff that makes history interesting, as opposed to history being just a teleology of the United States was destined to possess the continent and then it did.

That’s not very interesting. It’s not very nuanced.

Adel:
Yeah.

If you wanted our audience to remember just one point about Native peoples and the American Revolution, just one point after everything we’ve talked about, what would that be?

Dr. Silverman:
It would be that Native people are a fundamental part of the American Revolution in every stage of it, from the beginning to the end.

Adel:
That’s wonderful.

Dr. Silverman, thank you so much for educating me and our audience about the American Revolution. And to our audience, if you know of any history that could provide more perspective about the American Revolution, please share it with us and tell us what’s your perspective. Thank you so much.

This was wonderful.

Dr. Silverman:
My pleasure. Thank you.