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— 187 — RethinkingtheGnadenhuttenMassacre: TheContestforPowerinthePublicWorld oftheRevolutionaryPennsylvaniaFrontier L e o n a r d S a d o s k y And it came to pass in those days, that the devil entered into Colonel Williamson (who lived fifteen or twenty miles west of us) and stirred him up, to raise a company of men, to go against a town of friendly Indians, chiefly of the Delaware tribe, and professing the Moravian religion, who had taken no part with the hostile Indians, and who lived on the waters of the Muskingum. —Capt. Spencer Records, in an autobiographical narrative, 1842.1 [U]pon the whole I find that it will be Impossible to git an Impartial and fare account of that affair . . . it is really no wonder that those who have lost all that is near and Dear to them go out with determined revenge, and Exterpation of all Indians. —Dorsey Pentecost, Esq., in a letter to President Moore of the Pennsylvania Executive Council, 9 May 1782.2 I hear nothing of what is going on in any other part of the world. There never was, nor I hope will there ever be such a wretched, villainous place as this. I do not remember any part of my life spent in so little purpose as at present and so exceedingly disagreeable to myself. —Brig. Gen. William Irvine, Commandant of Fort Pitt, in a letter to his wife, 29 May 1782.3 In early 1782, the town of Pittsburgh and the garrison of Fort Pitt together formed one of the westernmost redoubts of the American Revolution. Although the October 1781 victory of General George Washington, Admiral the Count de Grasse, and General the Count de Rochambeau at Yorktown had all but ended the American War for Independence, the armed conflict still raged on the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains. Great Britain L e o n a r d S a d o s k y — 188 — and its American Indian allies remained a formidable threat to the Pennsylvanians and Virginians who had settled in the Ohio Valley during the 1760s and 1770s. In response, the Continental Army centered its defensive strategies of the American states’ western frontiers on the men inside the battlements of Fort Pitt. Yet, as the winter of 1781–82 dragged on, it became increasingly clear to many that the greatest danger to the Continental garrison at Pittsburgh was not from British soldiers at Detroit or Wyandot warriors at Sandusky, but from the very western Pennsylvania farmers they had been charged with protecting.4 In February and March 1782, the Revolutionary War in western Pennsylvania turned into an outright and open rebellion against the Continental Army. This rebellion took on various forms and had many causes.5 Disaffection with the garrison at Fort Pitt began years beforehand, as a result of the command of Colonel Daniel Brodhead. Order in the greater Pittsburgh area was tenuous when William Irvine took command in late 1781; with his departure in January 1782 on a trip to Congress, that order quickly collapsed. Rumors of mutiny circulated in early February 1782. Hostility toward the Fort Pitt garrison and Continental Indian policy finally erupted in violence in March 1782. Washington County militiamen attacked, killed, and burned an entire village of neutral, Christian Indians with ties to the Continental commandants. Many of these same militiamen were part of a Washington County group that then attacked and killed a small band of Delaware Indians with Continental commissions. Finally, these men threatened to kill the acting commandant of Fort Pitt, Colonel John Gibson. Although Irvine’s return in late March quelled the disturbances, order continued to remain tenuous.6 For most historians, the central event in this extended period of rebellion was the destruction of the Delaware village of Gnadenhutten on 8 March 1782, an event that has come to be known as the Gnadenhutten Massacre. 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.7 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.8 Although the descriptions of the Gnadenhutten Massacre offered by these and other historians are generally...

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