Mission of Christian Frederic Post

The overtures of peace were accepted and the Delawares, Shawanoes and Mingoes were no longer enemies of the English.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in Montcalm and Wolfe, Volume 7 of the French in Canada series. Continuing Chapter 22.

The Moravian envoy made his way to the Delaware town of Kushkushkee, on Beaver Creek, northwest of Fort Duquesne, where the three chiefs known as King Beaver, Shingas and Delaware George received him kindly and conducted him to another town on the same stream. Here his reception was different. A crowd of warriors, their faces distorted with rage, surrounded him, brandishing knives and threatening to kill him; but others took his part and, order being at last restored, he read them his message from the Governor, which seemed to please them. They insisted, however, that he should go with them to Fort Duquesne, in order that the Indians assembled there might hear it also. Against this dangerous proposal he protested in vain. On arriving near the fort, the French demanded that he should be given up to them and, being refused, offered a great reward for his scalp; on which his friends advised him to keep close by the campfire, as parties were out with intent to kill him. “Accordingly,” says Post, “I stuck to the fire as if I had been chained there. On the next day the Indians, with a great many French officers, came out to hear what I had to say. The officers brought with them a table, pens, ink and paper. I spoke in the midst of them with a free conscience and perceived by their looks that they were not pleased with what I said.” The substance of his message was an invitation to the Indians to renew the old chain of friendship, joined with a warning that an English army was on its way to drive off the French and that they would do well to stand neutral.

He addressed an audience filled with an inordinate sense of their own power and importance, believing themselves greater and braver than either of the European nations and yet deeply jealous of both. “We have heard,” they said, “that the French and English mean to kill all the Indians and divide the land among themselves.” And on this string they harped continually. If they had known their true interest, they would have made no peace with the English but would have united as one man to form a barrier of fire against their farther progress; for the West in English hands meant farms, villages, cities, the ruin of the forest, the extermination of the game and the expulsion of those who lived on it; while the West in French hands meant but scattered posts of war and trade, with the native tribes cherished as indispensable allies.

After waiting some days, the three tribes of the Delawares met in council and made their answer to the message brought by Post. It was worthy of a proud and warlike race and was to the effect that since their brothers of Pennsylvania wished to renew the old peace-chain, they on their part were willing to do so, provided that the wampum belt should be sent them in the name, not of Pennsylvania alone but of the rest of the provinces also.

Having now accomplished his errand, Post wished to return home; but the Indians were seized with an access of distrust and would not let him go. This jealousy redoubled when they saw him writing in his notebook. “It is a troublesome cross and heavy yoke to draw this people,” he says; “they can punish and squeeze a body’s heart to the utmost. There came some together and examined me about what I had wrote yesterday. I told them I writ what was my duty. ‘Brothers, I tell you I am not afraid of you. I have a good conscience before God and man. I tell you, brothers, there is a bad spirit in your hearts, which breeds jealousy and will keep you ever in fear.'” At last they let him go; and, eluding a party that lay in wait for his scalp, he journeyed twelve days through the forest and reached Fort Augusta with the report of his mission.

[1: Journal of Christian Frederic Post, July, August, September, 1758.]

As the result of it, a great convention of white men and red was held at Easton in October [1758]. The neighboring provinces had been asked to send their delegates and some of them did so; while belts of invitation were sent to the Indians far and near. Sir William Johnson, for reasons best known to himself, at first opposed the plan; but was afterwards led to favor it and to induce tribes under his influence to join in the grand pacification. The Five Nations, with the smaller tribes lately admitted into their confederacy, the Delawares of the Susquehanna, the Mohegans and several kindred bands, all had their representatives at the meeting. The conferences lasted nineteen days, with the inevitable formalities of such occasions and the weary repetition of conventional metaphors and long-winded speeches. At length, every difficulty being settled, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in behalf of all the English, rose with a wampum belt in his hand and addressed the tawny congregation thus: “By this belt we heal your wounds; we remove your grief; we take the hatchet out of your heads; we make a hole in the earth and bury it so deep that nobody can dig it up again.” Then, laying the first belt before them, he took another, very large, made of white wampum beads, in token of peace: “By this belt we renew all our treaties; we brighten the chain of friendship; we put fresh earth to the roots of the tree of peace, that it may bear up against every storm and live and nourish while the sun shines and the rivers run.” And he gave them the belt with the request that they would send it to their friends and allies and invite them to take hold also of the chain of friendship. Accordingly, all present agreed on a joint message of peace to the tribes of the Ohio.

[Footnote 2: Minutes of Conferences at Easton, October, 1758.]

Frederic Post, with several white and Indian companions, was chosen to bear it. A small escort of soldiers that attended him as far as the Alleghany was cut to pieces on its return by a band of the very warriors to whom he was carrying his offers of friendship; and other tenants of the grim and frowning wilderness met the invaders of their domain with inhospitable greetings. “The wolves made a terrible music this night,” he writes at his first bivouac after leaving Loyalhannon. When he reached the Delaware towns his reception was ominous. The young warriors said: “Anybody can see with half an eye that the English only mean to cheat us. Let us knock the messengers in the head.” Some of them had attacked an English outpost and had been repulsed; hence, in the words of Post, “They were possessed with a murdering spirit and with bloody vengeance were thirsty and drunk. I said: ‘As God has stopped the mouths of the lions that they could not devour Daniel, so he will preserve us from their fury.'” The chiefs and elders were of a different mind from their fierce and capricious young men. They met during the evening in the log-house where Post and his party lodged; and here a French officer presently arrived with a string of wampum from the commandant, inviting them to help him drive back the army of Forbes. The string was scornfully rejected. “They kicked it from one to another as if it were a snake. Captain Peter took a stick and with it flung the string from one end of the room to the other and said: ‘Give it to the French captain; he boasted of his fighting, now let us see him fight. We have often ventured our lives for him and got hardly a loaf of bread in return; and now he thinks we shall jump to serve him.’ Then we saw the French captain mortified to the uttermost. He looked as pale as death. The Indians discoursed and joked till midnight and the French captain sent messengers at midnight to Fort Duquesne.”

There was a grand council, at which the French officer was present; and Post delivered the peace message from the council at Easton, along with another with which Forbes had charged him. “The messages pleased all the hearers except the French captain. He shook his head in bitter grief and often changed countenance. Isaac Still [an Indian] ran him down with great boldness and pointed at him, saying, ‘There he sits!’ They all said: ‘The French always deceived us!’ pointing at the French captain; who, bowing down his head, turned quite pale and could look no one in the face. All the Indians began to mock and laugh at him. He could hold it no longer and went out.”

[3: Journal of Christian Frederic Post, October, November, 1758.]

The overtures of peace were accepted and the Delawares, Shawanoes and Mingoes were no longer enemies of the English. The loss was the more disheartening to the French, since, some weeks before, they had gained a success which they hoped would confirm the adhesion of all their wavering allies. Major Grant, of the Highlanders, had urged Bouquet to send him to reconnoiter Fort Duquesne, capture prisoners and strike a blow that would animate the assailants and discourage the assailed. Bouquet, forgetting his usual prudence, consented; and Grant set out from the camp at Loyalhannon with about eight hundred men, Highlanders, Royal Americans and provincials. On the fourteenth of September, at two in the morning, he reached the top of the rising ground thenceforth called Grant’s Hill, half a mile or more from the French fort. The forest and the darkness of the night hid him completely from the enemy. He ordered Major Lewis, of the Virginians, to take with him half the detachment, descend to the open plain before the fort and attack the Indians known to be encamped there; after which he was to make a feigned retreat to the hill, where the rest of the troops were to lie in ambush and receive the pursuers. Lewis set out on his errand, while Grant waited anxiously for the result. Dawn was near and all was silent; till at length Lewis returned and incensed his commander by declaring that his men had lost their way in the dark woods and fallen into such confusion that the attempt was impracticable. The morning twilight now began but the country was wrapped in thick fog. Grant abandoned his first plan and sent a few Highlanders into the cleared ground to burn a warehouse that had been seen there. He was convinced that the French and their Indians were too few to attack him, though their numbers in fact were far greater than his own.

[4: Grant to Forbes, no date. “Les rapports sur le nombre des Français varient de 3,000 à 1,200.” Bouquet à Forbes, 17 Sept. 1758. Bigot says that 3,500 daily rations were delivered at Fort Duquesne throughout the summer. Bigot au Ministre, 22 Nov. 1758. In October the number had fallen to 1,180, which included Indians. Ligneris à Vaudreuil, 18 Oct. 1758.]

Infatuated with this idea and bent on taking prisoners, he had the incredible rashness to divide his force in such a way that the several parts could not support each other. Lewis, with two hundred men, was sent to guard the baggage two miles in the rear, where a company of Virginians, under Captain Bullitt, was already stationed. A hundred Pennsylvanians were posted far off on the right, towards the Alleghany, while Captain Mackenzie, with a detachment of Highlanders, was sent to the left, towards the Monongahela. Then, the fog having cleared a little, Captain Macdonald, with another company of Highlanders, was ordered into the open plain to reconnoiter the fort and make a plan of it, Grant himself remaining on the hill with a hundred of his own regiment and a company of Maryland men. “In order to put on a good countenance,” he says, “and convince our men they had no reason to be afraid, I gave directions to our drums to beat the reveille. The troops were in an advantageous post and I must own I thought we had nothing to fear.” Macdonald was at this time on the plain, midway between the woods and the fort and in full sight of it. The roll of the drums from the hill was answered by a burst of war-whoops and the French came swarming out like hornets, many of them in their shirts, having just leaped from their beds. They all rushed upon Macdonald and his men, who met them with a volley that checked their advance; on which they surrounded him at a distance and tried to cut off his retreat. The Highlanders broke through and gained the woods, with the loss of their commander, who was shot dead. A crowd of French followed close and soon put them to rout, driving them and Mackenzie’s party back to the hill where Grant was posted. Here there was a hot fight in the forest, lasting about three quarters of an hour. At length the force of numbers, the novelty of the situation and the appalling yells of the Canadians and Indians, completely overcame the Highlanders, so intrepid in the ordinary situations of war. They broke away in a wild and disorderly retreat. “Fear,” says Grant, “got the better of every other passion; and I trust I shall never again see such a panic among troops.”

From Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter 22 by Francis Parkman

To be continued.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the “Paris Documents” procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic.

I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time.

Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years’ War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the Union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor.

The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.

BOSTON, Sept. 16, 1884.

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