Asep Mundzir

180410130038
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The Downfall of the Iroquois Confederacy
The Iroquois Confederacy, or the Iroquois League or Haudenosaunee (The People of the
Longhouse) or the Six Nations, consisted of six tribes that were mostly known as the Six Nations:
Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. The League was the sole group of Native
Americans that seemingly managed to defend their territory from European incursion. They, with
Britishs help, destroyed the Frenchs control of Canada in 1763. And there were many more victories
they had achieved in the wars against their neighboring tribes. However, they had to accept their
dissolution in the onset of American Revolution. The American Revolution had brought them
misadventures by giving the League great loss of their lands, thus leading them to war against English
Colonial. In the following passage, we are going to discus of how the Iroquois fell involving the British
and American Colony.
The embryo of Iroquois disunity was already seen when Catholic missionaries made their
entrance into Mohawk people. Isaac Jogues was one of the missionaries that came to the Iroquois people,
but the Iroquois were not ready to accept Catholicism as their religion at the moment, thus causing the
missionary to be killed in 1646. Nonetheless, the missionaries persistence in spreading Catholicism, also
some ulterior motives since they were sent by the French, was apparently successful some time later.
Some of the Iroquois ultimately withdrew from the League and sided with the French. They were even
called French Mohawks.
The discordance within the Iroquois began to appear more obviously during the American
Revolution. When the Revolution War was in the air, the confederacy was not sure of whom to side so
that they chose to remain neutral while giving each tribe freedom to make their own decisions. Joseph and
Molly Brant, members of the Confederacy, were siding with British and successfully convinced most
tribes of the Confederacy to side with British, including Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas. In
the other hand, the Oneidas and Tuscacoras took side with the American Army. At this point, the
discordance had evolved into chaos since the Confederacy couldnt stop the opposite tribes from attacking
each others villages.
Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief, now had become a British Army Captain and leader. He led an
army to attack and destroy the Oneidas village which provided food and supply for Washingtons army.
In response to this situation, General Washington sent troops led by General John Sullivan and General
James Clinton to wipe out the main villages and food supplies of the Cayuga and Seneca Indian Nations.
They were made up of troops from New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. On August, Sullivans
forces arrived at Tioga and began the invasion. They destroyed the mixed Indian/white settlement of
Chemung, and moved on to the next Indian village at Newtown. In the site, Sullivans force met the
British forces led by Colonel John Butler trying to ambush the American Army, but the Sullivans forces
overlooked the strategy and caused the British forces with Indian army to retreat. Until the end of
invasion, the Sullivans forces had destroyed over 40 villages with the loss of only 40 men.
When the war came to an end in 1783, the Indians in both sides had to accept the great loss of
their culture and villages. Their villages and lands had been completely destroyed. After all, the main
cause of Iroquois downfall is that they couldnt maintain the unity of the Six Nation and let them side
with whomever at their own will. However, the American Colony and British are also to blame for
causing the League to fight each other and even destroyed their own villages. Now the Indians have to
reestablish their villages and civilization in the lands that are no longer theirs anymore.
Works Cited
"Encyclopedia: Iroquois Confederacy." Yahoo! Education.
<https://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/IroquoisC>.
"Iroquois." Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois>.
"Native American in the Revolutionary War." StudyZone.org.
<http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ss5/b/natamrevwarl.cfm>.
Outline of U.S. History. U.S. Department of State, n.d.
Sawyer, William. "The Six Nations Confederacy During the American Revolution." National Park Service.
<http://www.nps.gov/fost/historyculture/the-six-nations-confederacy-during-the-american-
revolution.htm>.
"The Clinton-Sullivan Campaign of 1779." National Park Service.
<http://www.nps.gov/fost/historyculture/the-western-expedition-against-the-six-nations-1779.htm>.