Joseph Brant

Chief

• Born: 1742
• Birthplace: Ohio Country (now Ohio)
• Died: November 24, 1807
• Place of death: Near Brantford, Ontario (now in Canada)

Mohawk chief and military leader

Brant demonstrated the impact an educated Native American leader could have on his people’s destiny, as he led the way for a great Mohawk migration to Canada after the American Revolution, in which he fought for the British against American revolutionaries.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, warfare and conquest, military, diplomacy

Early Life

Known to his Mohawk kin as Thayendanegea, meaning “he who places two bets,” Joseph Brant was the son of Argoghyiadecker (also known as Nickus Brant), a prominent leader on the New York Indian frontier during the mid-eighteenth century. He had an older sister known as Molly Brant who became an extremely influential tribeswoman. She combined her own political acumen with her role as consort to the American Indian superintendent for the British, William Johnson, to build a powerful network within the tribe. Some observers believed she was capable of influencing tribal decisions in a major way. Major Tench Tilghman, an American observer in the Iroquois Country in 1776, observing Molly Brant and the other Iroquois women, reflected that “women govern the Politics of Savages as well as the refined part of the world.”

Brant grew up in the Mohawk village of Canojohare, where he enjoyed the traditional teachings of the tribal elders as well as the efforts of Anglican missionaries who came to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity and to teach them basic educational skills. So bright was the young Brant, however, that this village education was insufficient. Accordingly, when David Fowler and Samson Occum visited the Mohawk country as representatives of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock’s school in Lebanon, Connecticut, Brant was one of three young Mohawks designated to return eastward for additional education.

Upon their arrival in Lebanon, Brant and his Mohawk companions were so frightened by their surroundings that they kept their horses ready at a moment’s notice for flight back to their village. Of the three new students, the schoolmaster had the highest praise for Brant: “The other being of a family of distinction among them, was considerably cloathed, Indian-fashion, and could speak a few words of English.”

Within three months, Brant’s two companions returned to the safety of their home country, but Brant remained to study and to help teach the Mohawk language to a young missionary named Samuel Kirkland. When Kirkland went west in November on a recruiting mission, Brant went along to interpret and help persuade two more Mohawks to attend school. During his sessions in Lebanon, Brant improved his written Mohawk and his English skills, which would serve him well as both interpreter and then spokesperson for his people. As early as March of 1768, he assisted Ralph Wheelock in conferring with an Onondaga chief, to the visitor’s obvious approval: “By Joseph Brant’s help I was able to discourse with him, and delivered to him my discourse to this nation.”

Brant’s stay at school was curtailed by the outbreak of war in the West. When Pontiac and his followers attempted to drive the British out of the Ohio Country, Brant’s sister Molly urged her brother to come home, lest some revenge-seeking colonist murder him.

Although he never returned to Wheelock’s school, Brant retained not only his literary skills but also his belief that education was the key to success and survival for his people. In time he was regarded as the most able interpreter in the British northern American Indian department. He had the advantage of being a respected Mohawk who could attend such important meetings as the tribal council at Onondaga, where he could take notes on the proceedings and then report them accurately to the British officials.

In the years before the American Revolution, Brant married Margaret, daughter of the Oneida chief Skenandon. At her death, he married her sister Susanna, who cared for Brant and his young children until her death. His third wife was Catherine Croghan, the Mohawk daughter of George Croghan, a member of the British Indian department and a confidant of William Johnson.

Life’s Work

The coming of the American Revolution turned the world of Joseph Brant and the Mohawks upside down. He would emerge from his position as an official in the British Indian department to become the most feared Mohawk warrior of the time. Indeed, some historians have since described him as the most ferocious American Indian leader of the colonial period. Such accusations, however, were largely frontier hyperbole.

What Brant did during the American Revolution was accompany Guy Johnson, who had succeeded to the office of Indian superintendent at the death of his uncle in 1774, to London in 1775-1776. Feted by the royal court, Brant dined with the famous and had his portrait painted, both alone and as a figure in the background when Benjamin West painted Colonel Guy Johnson. In both cases, the depiction of a powerful and dignified young man suggests the sagacity Brant would use to lead the Mohawks through the difficult war years.

When Brant finally made his way back to America, he had to slip through the countryside in disguise to avoid capture. To his dismay he found the Mohawk country in an uproar over the war, with many Mohawks already planning to emigrate to the British post at Niagara. Brant first went to Niagara to secure the safety of his family and then recruited warriors to return with him to the Mohawk country, where they might attempt to drive out American invaders and aid British expeditions coming through American Indian country. Despite the accusations of frontiersmen in later years, there is no evidence to support the contention that Brant was a bloodthirsty killer. For most of 1777 and 1778, Brant was active in the Mohawk country with his band of warriors. In 1779, however, they had to withdraw toward Niagara in the face of the major expedition launched through the Iroquois country by the Americans under General John Sullivan.

After he had a disagreement with his old friend Guy Johnson in 1780, he withdrew to the Ohio Country in an attempt to rally the indigenous peoples of that territory. In 1781 he joined an attack on an American flotilla on the Ohio River, destroying supplies destined for George Rogers Clark in the Illinois country. This success, however, did not change the plight of the Ohio Indians, for as Brant heard at Detroit late in 1781, many of the western tribal leaders believed the British would walk away from them when the end of the war came. As Brant soon came to know, the fear was well-founded, for the rumors of peace first heard in late 1781 were confirmed in early 1782.

Immediately, Brant wrote to General Frederick Haldimand in Canada, seeking to hold the British officer to his promise of sanctuary in Canada for the Mohawks. A man of his word, Haldimand agreed that Brant and his people had sacrificed too much. By March, 1783, Brant and Haldimand agreed on a Mohawk homeland along the Grand River in present-day Ontario. As a reward for his faithful service, Brant was commissioned by Haldimand as captain of the Northern Confederate Indians.

With this commission in hand and with the general’s help in clearing title to the land, Brant began leading the Mohawks and others to Canada. By virtue of his newfound rank, Brant assumed the role of spokesperson for all the pro-British Iroquois, especially those migrating to Canada. In his role as tribal leader and frontier entrepreneur, Brant would have his critics. Some accused him of profiting from the establishment of the Mohawks in Canada, and his opponents were especially bitter when he opened unused Mohawk lands for settlement by whites, from whom he collected a kind of real estate commission. Others may have resented the baronial style he had copied from William Johnson, as the following attests:

Captain Brant . . . received us with much politeness and hospitality. . . . Tea was on the table when we came in, served up in the hansomest China plate and every other furniture in proportion. After tea was over, we were entertained with the music of an elegant hand organ on which a young Indian gentleman and Mr. Clinch played alternately. Supper was served up in the same gentel stile. Our beverage, rum, brandy, Port and Maderia wines . . . our beds, sheets, and English blankets, equally fine and comfortable. . . . Dinner was just going on the table in the same elegant stile as the preceding night, when I returned to Captain Brant’s house, the servants dressed in their best apparel. Two slaves attended the table, the one in scarlet, the other in coloured clothes, with silver buckles in their shoes, and ruffles, and every other part of their apparel in proportion.

In the face of criticism, Brant often countered by using his support system within the traditional Iroquois matriarchy, the mothers and aunts who dominated village politics, nominated the sachems, and influenced the councils. With their assistance, he silenced opposition. Since his sister was the brilliant and powerful Molly Brant and his wife, Catherine, was from a prominent Iroquois family, he well understood the most effective means of playing politics within the Iroquois council.

One of Brant’s long-term goals was advancing the cause of Christianity and advancing education among the Iroquois. Within a few years after his relocation in Canada, he was joined by his longtime friend and supporter, Daniel Claus, in editing the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church in Mohawk. This new volume, published in 1786, contained not only the Mohawk version of the Book of Common Prayer but also the Gospel of Mark.

In the 1780’s, funds were obtained to build a church in the Grand River settlement. Then, in 1788, the former Anglican missionary at Canojohare, the Reverend John Stuart, came to visit, bringing with him some of the silver communion plates that once had been in the Mohawk church at Fort Hunter in New York. According to Stuart, the church Brant had seen constructed “in the Mohawk village is pleasantly situated on a small but deep River—the Church [is] about 60 feet in length and 45 in breadth—built with squared logs and boarded on the outside and painted—with a handsome steeple & bell, a pulpit, reading-desk, & Communion-table, with convenient pews.” Stuart had no great love for Brant; he was convinced that Brant would accept no clergyman for the Mohawk church whom he could not dominate. Indeed, believed Stuart, the Mohawks “were afraid of the restraint which the continued residence of a Clergyman would necessarily lay them under.” Evidently there was some substance to this belief, since the number of white missionaries at Grand River remained quite low as long as Brant was in a position of influence there.

Brant remained the active frontier speculator until the last years of his life. Constantly involved in land transactions, travel, and farming, he never lacked for activity, yet his home was always the place of choice for visitors. As many callers pointed out, he lived in a grand style, and when he decided to build a new home early in the nineteenth century, it closely resembled Johnson Hall, the home of Sir William Johnson in New York where Brant had spent so much time as a child and as a young adult. From youth to death, Brant lived in two worlds.

Significance

Joseph Brant’s life was a success story, judged by most standards. He grew up among the elite of the Iroquois. His father was a prominent leader and his sister Molly Brant a respected woman among the Mohawks. Because of his intellectual ability, he was offered a chance for an education enjoyed by few of his contemporaries. Once he had acquired that education, he chose to walk the extremely narrow path between the two worlds of his own people and the neighboring new Americans and the European immigrants.

One of the most powerful role models in his life was Sir William Johnson, whose splendid home was the center of conviviality, diplomacy, and trade in the Mohawk Valley. Watching the success with which Johnson played patron to the Iroquois, military leader, land speculator, colonial politician, and wilderness baron had to have an impact on Brant. During the course of his travels, Brant was always careful to cultivate his patrons and the right politicians. Such adroitness served him well in maintaining his leadership position in the face of all opposition.

While Brant had his enemies and his detractors, he succeeded in surviving and in guaranteeing the survival of the Mohawks who followed him. While a strictly traditionalist tribal leader might not have approved of Brant’s feet being in two worlds, others might agree that he found the only way for Native American peoples to survive in a world of rapid change.

Bibliography

Fenton, William N. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A comprehensive history that also examines Brant’s role in Iroquois relations with the British and with American revolutionaries from 1760 to 1794.

Fischer, Joseph R. A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign Against the Iroquois, July-September 1779. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. A military analysis of the Continental army’s first expedition against the American Indians, focusing on field operations.

Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. An overview of the Iroquois in the American Revolution by the leading student of Six Nations affairs. While a bit naive about the motives of the missionaries, it is extremely useful for its accounts of the battles in which the Iroquois took part.

Johnson, Charles. The Valley of the Six Nations. Toronto, Ont.: Champlain Society, 1964. An indispensable source for understanding Brant and the Mohawks in Canada. Reprints a number of sources that reveal the tensions with which Brant had to contend.

Mintz, Max M. Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Focuses on the military campaigns against the Iroquois and their Tory allies from 1777 through 1779. Mintz contends the American Revolution was not only a struggle for freedom but also a battle for American Indian lands, “and the jewel was the upstate New York domain of the Iroquois’ Six Nations.”

O’Donnell, James H., III. “Joseph Brant.” In American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity, edited by R. David Edmunds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. An analysis of Brant, his role models, and his career.

Stone, William L. The Life of Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea. New York: G. Dearborn, 1838. The classic nineteenth century account, in which the author tries to unearth every story and scrap of evidence, both real and imagined, about Brant. It is still the place to start for anyone doing serious research on Brant.

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