Delphi complete works of.., p.1225
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1225
It had been the custom of some of the settlers to steal the horses of the Brethren, and the entire population of the border seems to have inherited that stupid hatred which everywhere attended the enterprises of the Moravians. Sometimes large bodies of pioneers, bent upon errands of theft and murder among the hostile Indians, would pass through the Christian country. Such a body once halted at Salem and asked provision; and then, while the greater part remained with their commandant, who was conversing with Heckewelder and assuring him of his respect for the Brethren, and his confidence in their neutrality, certain of the men stole away to destroy the other villages, and could scarcely be restrained from that purpose by their leader, to whom knowledge of it was happily brought in time.
On the other hand, the war parties of the Wyandots grew more and more insolent and exacting. They appeared in larger numbers and with greater appetites, and the hospitality offered them came to be a very oppressive tribute, which they occasionally acknowledged by threatening the lives of the teachers, whom they had often plotted to carry off to the English commandant at Detroit.
During the long summer months the Christian territory was infested by these unwelcome guests. It was a grateful relief, therefore, that the winter brought the teachers and elders, when the last party of warriors, in their paint and savage panoply, marched down the peaceful streets, chanting their melancholy farewell song, and doubtless taking some hearts among their civilized kindred; for here and there a young girl must have melted to look on their splendor, here and there a boy’s heart leaped with delight in those free wild men; and even in some of the Brethren tempting memories of other days, when they, too, had trodden the war-path, may have been stirred by these sylvan notes. But the wives and mothers all rejoiced with the Moravians, when the distance hid the nodding plumes, and the last echo let the farewell song die. A profound peace fell upon the solitudes with the falling snow; for even if the woods had not now become impassable to the warriors, the drifts would have betrayed their steps beyond hope of concealment, and pursuit and vengeance would have too surely attended any raid upon the white settlements. And now, life in the Muskingum villages lapsed into a tranquillity broken only by the advent from the forest of some poor heathen, on whom the words of the ministers had wrought, and who came at last, with prayers and tears, entreating to be received into the brotherhood of the Christians. It was the season of social enjoyment, and the people, released from the labor of their farms, paid friendly visits between village and village, and from house to house, or all met in their chapels to celebrate those Love-Feasts, by which their church remembered the earliest Christians, — eating and drinking together, and joining in worship. It was also the time of in-doors industry; the loom clattered at the window, and the wheel murmured beside the hearth much the same music that the children made over Father Zeisberger’s spelling-books in the well-ordered schools. No sound but that of the chapel bell broke upon these homely harmonies, save when some peaceful soul departed to its inheritance, and the people, according to the Moravian fashion, hailed its release from earthly tribulations with the jubilant sound of horns and clarionets, continuing their solemn exultation while the bearers of the dead carried their burden through the street to the house where it was prepared for burial. The winter was the great harvest of the missionaries, and they wrought zealously in their pious work, animating those who had grown cold, and call ing the unconverted to repentance. The churches grew in numbers and activity; and it must have been with something like a pang that the Moravians and their assistants saw the buds beginning to swell upon the naked boughs, and found the first violet in the woods.
All was changed with the return of spring, and with the renewal of every year the dangers of their people increased.
Most of the allies of the Delawares had at last joined in the war against the Americans, and there had grown up among the Delawares themselves a hostile faction, which constantly increased. The leaders of this party perceived that nothing but the presence of the Christian Indians hindered them from dragging the whole nation into the war, and all their efforts were bent to their removal. The commandant of the Americans at Pittsburg was also perfectly sensible of this fact. He seems to have been one of those humane, enlightened, and faithful soldiers who have been only too rarely intrusted with the control of our Indian relations, and the Delawares held him in the greatest love and honor. When they applied to him for advice, he counselled them to treat the wards of their nation with favor and kindness; and we may well believe, from the report of the missionaries, and from concurrent facts, that something better than mere policy prompted this advice. But his friendship in the end furnished the war Delawares with an accusation against the Moravians, and determined the English commandant before whom it was made to remove the Christians from the Muskingum. The letters from Pittsburg to the nation were craftily carried to the missionaries to be read and answered. They could not refuse this service, but they rendered it sorely against their will, for they feared that it would bring upon them the charge of alliance with the Americans and unfaithfulness to their neutrality, as indeed finally happened. When the missionaries confronted their chief accuser before the English commandant, the savage with deep grief and shame owned his fraud and declared them wholly innocent; but in the mean time the ruin of the villages had been compassed.
All the events leading to the final disaster are pathetic enough in themselves, and fantastic enough in their travesty of the fatalities by which greater states have fallen. A little wicked diplomacy, a great deal of ineffectual persuasion, appeals to the common sense of danger answered by a few weak souls, and a coup de main at last accomplished the purposes of the Indians against the Brethren. The war faction amongst the Delawares had already fruitlessly urged the Moravians to remove to the Miami country, when, on the 10th of August, 1781, a chieftain of the Hurons called the Half-King appeared in Salem at the head of a hundred and forty armed men, flying the Cross of St. George, and accompanied by Captain Elliott and a trader named McCormick. It does not appear certain that these Englishmen were regularly in the king’s service, but on this occasion they gave his authority to the whole transaction, and the Half-King and his warriors acted under the direction of Elliott, who was deputed to this service by the governor of Detroit. They marched down the startled village street, and, after a halt on the borders of the place, passed on to Gnadenhütten, where their number was increased to three hundred by the arrival of Monseys and war Delawares. A week of riot and debauchery in the heathen camp celebrated these preliminary steps, but no acts of violence were committed against the Brethren; and, as soon as his followers had recovered from their drunken stupor, the Half-King, in full council, urged the converts to abandon a place where they were in continual peril from the Virginians, and to place themselves under the protection of the British at Sandusky. Being answered by the assistants that they were at peace with all men, and had no fear of the Virginians, and that, moreover, they were too heavy with substance to think of leaving their present homes, and must in any case delay giving a final answer till spring, the Half-King and his men declared themselves satisfied, and, as a clear expression of their minds, fired upon the British colors. Loskiel and Heckewelder dwell with sad unction upon the events which we need only allude to, telling us with much circumstance how Elliott now turned to evil account the departure of two of the Brethren to Pittsburg, whither they went to inform the commandant of their affairs, and to beg that he would not interfere, lest he should thereby confirm the Indians in their suspicions; how the warriors, incensed by Elliott’s report that the Virginians were marching to the rescue of the Brethren, shot down their cattle and threatened their teachers; how the savage politicians tampered with the weaker converts, alluring them with pleasant pictures of the Sandusky country, and terrifying them with the fate that awaited them if they remained on the Muskingum; and how about one tenth of the Christians were brought to favor removal, and some were unhappy enough to give the hint upon which the savages afterwards acted, saying, “We look to our teachers; what they do, we likewise will do!”
By this time all the villages were in the utmost confusion; and at Gnadenhütten the women and children were in terror of their lives; many of the houses were sacked, and the cattle which had been shot down in the streets and fields sent up an intolerable stench. Well might Zeisberger write to Heckewelder: “It has the appearance as if Satan is again about to make himself merry by troubling and persecuting us. No wonder he grows angry when he sees how many of his subjects he loses by our preaching the gospel. His roaring, however, must not frighten us; we have a heavenly Father, without whose will he dare not touch us. Let us rely on Him who so often has delivered us from his machinations.” In the midst of these sorrows and troubles this good man meekly gathered his flock about him at Gnadenhütten, and preached to them for the last time in the beloved chapel, while enemies compassed them about; giving “a most emphatic discourse,” says Heckewelder, “on the great love of God to man,” and charging them in no event to place themselves “on a level with the heathen by making use of weapons” for their defence.
Soon after, the heathen, having received a repetition of the answer originally made them by the Christians, when they urged the removal of the latter, resolved to seize upon the missionaries, and compel their followers to abandon the Muskingum country. Their capture was easily effected, for they made no effort to escape, and the fears of the savages that the Brethren would attempt their rescue were idle. They patiently submitted to the outrage and insult offered them by the Monseys into whose hands they fell, and who, having stripped them of nearly all their clothing, carried them prisoners before Captain Elliott. The Englishman, who seems to have undertaken the expedition chiefly through a desire to profit by the distress and necessities of the Brethren, and who was particularly bent upon buying their cattle for a trifling sum to sell again at a great price in Detroit, had the grace to express some shame when these harmless men were brought maltreated and almost naked into his presence; but he did nothing to relieve them; indeed, he speculated in the clothing of which the savages had plundered their houses, and they were kept from bodily suffering only by the compassion of some of the heathen, who gave back part of their stolen gear, and the Brethren who brought them blankets. Their calamity was not the less real because it took at this and other times the face of comedy. Heckewelder’s coat, restored to him without the skirts, and worn in that amusing state of mutilation, covered an aching heart, and the fortune that similarly made a jest of his associates, not the less afflicted them with anguish for the wreck of their just and good hopes, for the unhappiness of their people, and for the cruel state of their families: for their wives and children had likewise been seized by the heathen, and Sister Sensemann was driven from one village to another, with her babe four days old in her arms. As to their treatment by the warriors, in whose camp they were confined, “What incommoded us most,” says Heckewelder, with a quaint pathos, “was their custom of repeating the scalp yell so often for each of their prisoners during the night, as well as in the daytime; but this is a general custom with them, and is continued until the prisoner is liberated or killed. Another very incommoding custom they have is that of performing their war dances and songs during the night near their prisoners, — all which we had to endure, exclusive of being thereby prevented from enjoying sleep. Otherwise the addresses paid us by a jovial and probably harmless Ottawa Indian, who, having obtained of the Wyandot warriors sufficient of our clothes to dress himself as a white man, and placing a white nightcap on his head, being mounted on a horse, would ride through the camps, nodding to us each time he passed, caused much amusement through the camp, and in some measure to us also.” The men to whom this moderate diversion was offered had already been entertained by threats against their lives, and were at the moment of the Ottawa’s pleasantries perhaps sufficiently amused in guessing what fate was reserved for them. They were very glad to be released at last on their promise (exacted by Elliott’s command) that they would no longer resist the will of their captors, but would prepare at once to go with them to Sandusky. It was hard to persuade the Brethren that they were indeed to abandon their homes; and the missionaries had to call them, not only from the labors of the field, but from their efforts to repair the damages done by the warriors to their gardens and houses; and of one it is related that he was summoned to the general meeting at Salem, away from the new cottage on which he had just put the last touches of loving industry. But they all obeyed the appeals of their teachers, and on the 9th of September assembled from Gnadenhütten and Schönbrunn at Salem, where for the last time the three congregations met together in worship. “A most extraordinary sensation of the presence of the Lord comforted their hearts,” says Heckewelder; the gospel was preached, the holy sacrament was administered to the communicants, and, even in this hour of earthly extremity, a convert was baptized.
The Christians were in the mean time guarded by a body of the hostile Delawares. Many of these attended the service, which was in their tongue, and all treated the congregations with perfect decorum and respect; but on the next day the Half-King and his followers arrived, and renewed at Salem the scenes of rapine and devastation already enacted at Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten. Then the teachers besought their captors to delay no longer, and on the third day, which was the 11th of September, the Brethren turned their faces from the valley of the Muskingum.
“Never,” says Heckewelder, “did the Christian Indians leave a country with more regret;” and he and his brother annalists, Holmes and Loskiel, briefly relate the losses the Brethren underwent, most of all lamenting the destruction of the writings and records of the little state, of the books of instruction and worship prepared with so much pains and labor for the converts and children, and now heaped into the streets and burned by the Wyandots, as a century before the Bibles of the Moravians were burnt by the Austrians. The total loss of the Christians is computed at twelve thousand dollars, — a great sum for that rude time and country and that humble people. The Wyandots had destroyed six hundred head of swine and cattle, and hundreds of young cattle had wandered into the woods. The crops of the last year were left in the garners; and three hundred acres of corn, ripe for harvest, nodded in the September sunshine, as the captives looked their last upon their beloved villages.
At Sandusky the Brethren halted and prepared to pass the winter; while their teachers were carried on to Detroit, where they confronted their accusers before the English governor, and were honorably acquitted. The season was very cold, and the miserable people, assembled on the bleak Sandusky shores without proper food and shelter, suffered greatly, and many little children died of cold and famine; but our story follows the fate only of those who from time to time stole back to the Muskingum, and gathered the corn yet standing in the fields for the rescue of the starving Brethren.
In March, 1782, a larger party than usual arrived at the deserted villages and began their belated harvest. Great number of these were women and children, and the men bore only such arms as served them in hunting. Even if their bloodless creed had permitted them to guard against the attacks of enemies, they would not have prepared to defend themselves in a region now abandoned by hostile Indians, and lying near the settlements of the whites whom they had so often befriended; for it was the firm belief of these ill-starred people that they had only to fear savages of their own race, and that they were all the safer for their proximity to the Americans. They worked eagerly and diligently, gathering the corn, and securing it in sacks for removal to Sandusky, and it would scarcely have alarmed them to know that Virginian spies had noted their presence and reported it in the settlements.
But on the border deadly influences were operating against them. In February, a party of Indians from Sandusky had fallen upon a lonely cabin, and had murdered all its inmates, with facts of peculiar atrocity. Earlier in the winter, a number of the Christians had been taken, while gathering corn on the Muskingum, and sent to Fort Pitt, where they were promptly liberated by the commandant. It was the public sentiment of the border, that these captives ought to have been killed, religiously as Canaanites and politically as Indians; and there was a very bitter feeling against their liberator, ex tending to Colonel Williamson, who had taken the prisoners and might have butchered them on the spot, instead of sending them to Fort Pitt. Williamson had been the most popular man in the backwoods, and he was deeply hurt by the reproach his clemency had brought upon him. He was, according to the testimony of the annalist who most severely condemns the Gnadenhütten massacre, “a brave man, but not cruel. He would meet an enemy in battle, and fight like a soldier, but not murder a prisoner.” Out of these evil elements — bigotry, lust of vengeance, and a generous but weak man’s shame — was shaped the calamity of the Christian Indians. As soon as it was noised through the settlements of Western Virginia and Pennsylvania that a large body of the converts had returned to the Muskingum, a band of a hundred and sixty pioneers hastily assembled, and, under the lead of Colonel Williamson, who burned to wipe out the stain of his former pity, advanced upon the deserted villages with the avowed purpose of putting the Indians to death. We must record, upon the unquestionable authority given below, that these murderers were not vagabonds or miscreants, but in many cases people of the first social rank in the settlements; and perhaps we ought to respect them as vigorous and original thinkers, whose ideas of an Indian policy still largely inspire us.
