The Gnadenhütten massacre (8 March 1782) was a mass murder of nearly 100 Native Americans (mostly women and children) by American militiamen during the American Revolutionary War. Even by the extremely brutal standards of frontier warfare of that era, the Gnadenhütten killings were unusually cold-blooded; in modern times such an incident would be called a war crime. "Like the soldiers of My Lai," wrote historian Page Smith, "the militia at Gnadenhütten destroyed unarmed men, women, and children and did so out of some strange reflex of fear and resentment toward people they felt were not quite human."¹

Background

During the American Revolutionary War, the Delaware (Lenape) Indians who lived in the Ohio Country were deeply divided over which side, if any, to take in the conflict. The issue was of critical importance because the Delaware villages, located around the principal village of Coshocton, lay in the path between the two opposing frontier strongholds: the main American military outpost at Fort Pitt, and the British with their Indian allies in and around Detroit.

Some Delawares decided to take up arms against the Americans, and moved closer to Detroit, settling on the Scioto and Sandusky Rivers. Those Delawares sympathetic to the United States remained at Coshocton, signing a treaty with the Americans in 1778, through which they hoped to establish the Ohio Country as an Indian state within the new United States. A third group consisted of those Indians (mostly Delawares) who had converted to Christianity, and lived in several nearby villages run by Moravian missionaries.

White Eyes, the Delaware leader who had negotiated the treaty with the United States, was apparently murdered in 1778 by American militiamen, and the Delawares at Coshocton eventually joined the war against the Americans. Coshocton was destroyed by an expedition out of Fort Pitt led by Colonel Daniel Brodhead on 19 April 1781, and the residents fled to the north. However, the Christian Indians at the Moravian villages, including Gnadenhütten, were unarmed noncombatants and thus unmolested.

Removal and massacre

In September 1781, British allied Indians, primarily Wyandots and Delawares, forcibly removed the Christian Indians and the white missionaries from the Moravian villages, relocating them to a new village on the Sandusky. The missionaries were taken to Detroit and tried for treason by the British—and were acquitted.

At their Sandusky village, the Christian Indians were going hungry. In February of 1782, over 100 of them returned to their old Moravian villages in order to harvest the crops they had been forced to leave behind.

However, the brutal frontier war was still raging, and in early March of 1782 a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson rounded up the Christian Indians and accused them of taking part in the ongoing raids into Pennsylvania. The Indians truthfully denied the charges. The Pennsylvanians held a council, and voted to kill them all anyway. The Indians, informed of their fate, spent the night praying and singing hymns.

The next morning, March 8, the Christian Indians were killed in pairs as they knelt, their skulls crushed with a mallet. In all, 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children were murdered and then scalped. The corpses were then heaped into the mission buildings, and the town was burned to the ground. The other abandoned Moravian towns were then burned as well. Two Indian boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre.

Aftermath

Many white Americans were outraged by the Gnadenhütten massacre. However, many white frontiersmen, embittered by a cruel war unlike anything in the East, voiced support for the militia's actions. No criminal charges were filed.

The Delawares at war with the Americans sought revenge for Gnadenhütten. When General George Washington heard about the massacre, he ordered that no American soldier allow himself to be taken alive; he knew what would happen should the militant Delawares capture an American. However, Washington's friend, Colonel William Crawford, was captured while leading an expedition against the Indians at Sandusky. Crawford, who had not been part of the Gnadenhütten expedition, was tortured for hours by Delawares and Wyandots before finally being burned at the stake.

See also

• Frontier warfare during the American Revolution
• Native American massacres

Notes

• Note 1: Smith, p. 1221.

References

• Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992.
• Olmstead, Earl P. Blackcoats among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier. Kent State University Press, 1991.
• Smith, Page. A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution, volume 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
• Wallace, Paul A. W., ed. Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder. Originally published 1958, Wennawoods reprint 1998.
• Weslager, C. A. The Delaware Indians. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1972.

External link

• "The Gnadenhutten Massacre of Christian Indians", excerpt from The Whiskey Rebellion by Thomas P. Slaughter.