TORY AND INDIAN MASSACRES.

307

tactics and drill. His services were of great importance at the time.

The year 1778 was made noteworthy by the savage massacres, by the British and their Indian and Tory allies at Wyoming and Cherry Valley. The first occurred on the third of July, and was memorable for its atrocities, the worst of which were perpetrated by the Tories. One of these was commemorated by Whittier in verses entitled The Death of the Fratricide. The main portion of the men was with Washington, and the valley was protected by boys and old men, who were utterly defeated, being driven into a fort which they were obliged to surrender the next day, when most of them were forced to flee from the valley and many died from exposure. The scenes of slaughter are referred to by Campbell in his poem Gertrude of Wyoming.

Sounds that mingled laugh and shout and scream,

To freeze the blood in one discordant jar,

Rung the pealing thunderbolts of war.

Whoop after whoop with rack the ear assailed,
As if unearthly fiends had burst their bar;
While rapidly the marksman's shot prevailed.

The attack on Wyoming was led by a Tory, John Butler, and that on Cherry Valley was directed by his son Walter, then recently escaped from imprisonment at Albany. He was accompanied by Joseph Brant, a chief of the Six Nations, who was allied to the Tories by the fact that his sister was the mother of several of the children of Sir William Johnson, who had given trouble to the patriot cause early in the war. The village was burned and the inhabitants murdered or carried away. The war had at this time degenerated

into petty predatory attempts on the part of the British, and the American Congress had much deteriorated. In fact the sectional feelings of many had led them to forget the interests of the Union, and Washington was forced to say that the "common" interests were "moldering and sinking into irretrievable ruin," and he urged that each State should compel its ablest men to attend Congress and reform the public abuses that had grown out of the "idleness, dissipation and extravagance," the speculation, peculation and insatiable thirst for riches, that he asserted had taken possession of the members.*

Operations were carried on in the West by Colonel George Rogers Clarke, who, secretly commissioned by Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia after the Wyoming massacre, took Kaskaskia (July 4), Cahokia, and Vincennes, and all the important posts on the Wabash and Illinois rivers. Virginia had already in 1776 annexed "the county of Kentucky" to her dominion, and now she took in the lands beyond the Ohio, under the name of "the county of Illinois." It was on the basis of these annexations and of her operations in the French and Indian War, that she made her claims to vast regions of territory in the Northwest, and not on her original charter (1606), which undoubtedly covered the region, nor on the charter of 1619, for all the patents had been cancelled and the London Company dissolved in 1624. Success also attended efforts of the Colonies to obtain possession of the lower Mississippi, and Natchez and other places fell into the hands of the Americans.

*Letter to the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, Dec. 30, 1778.

AN ENGLISH OBSERVATION.

309

The Rev

erend Rich

ard Price,

a friend of

Franklin

(published

in 1776), entitled Obser

vations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, in his Fast-day sermon, de

livered on

the tenth of

February, 1778, speaking of the de

pendence of a nation's

safety on righteous

men, said: "There is a distant country once united to this, where every inhabitant has in his house, as a part of his furniture, a book on law and government,

to enable him to understand his colonial rights; a musket to enable him to defend those rights; and a Bible, to understand and practice religion. What can hurt such a country? Is it any wonder we have not succeeded? How secure it must be while it preserves its virtue against all attacks!"

There were many in England who sympathized with America. Mr. Curwen wrote from London, August 8, 1785, "There appears to be a tenderness in the minds of many here for America, even of those who disapprove of the principles of an entire independence of the British Legislature, and ardently wish an effort may be taken to accommodate." At another

time, Mr. Curwen said that all the middle classes are "warm Americans." The feeling among the higher classes is represented by two extracts from his journal. December 26, 1776, he writes, "Lord Barrington in his private judgment condemns the present war as unjust, and will prove ineffectual, but votes with the government, as a minister of state." March 2, 1778, "In Canon Barlow's sermon in St. Peter's, were these remarkable expressions, which, for a dignitary of the Established Church wishing to rise, are singularly and dangerously bold: He said, 'The war with America is unjust; that they are a religious people and may expect a blessing, and we the reverse.'

For your grieved country nobly dare to die,
And empty all your veins for liberty.
No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours!

Jonathan M. Sewall 1778.

THE

HE scene of operations was now shifted to the southward, and as the Tories were more numerous there than in the North, the country was desolated by a partisan warfare. Clinton sent a force of twentyfive hundred men to attack Savannah, and as the place was protected by only nine hundred Americans, under General Robert Howe, it was, on the twentyninth of December, 1778, obliged to capitulate. Augusta, Ga., was taken soon after. Congress then sent General Lincoln to command the forces in the South. On the eleventh of May the British summoned Charleston to surrender, but the Americans refused, and the British fell back upon Savannah, leaving affairs much the same as at the opening of the year.

The taking of Stony Point, on the Hudson, at the entrance to the Highlands, forty-two miles above New York, was one of the most daring feats of the war. The attack was planned by Washington, and carried cut by "mad" Anthony Wayne, a Pennsylvanian general who had been commended for bravery at Monmouth.* Clinton had taken the place on the first of June, 1779, and had fortified it. With five

Wayne is buried in the churchyard of "Old St. David's at Radnor," near Philadelphia, celebrated in Longfellow's poem.