White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America

The Collaborator

During the 1750s, Sir William Johnson became the most famous American in the British Empire. Not even the amateur scientist and professional lobbyist Benjamin Franklin could compare. George Washington, a wealthy planter and provincial politician in Virginia, lagged far behind. Franklin and Washington now loom much larger in American memory because they won the revolutionary independence that Johnson resisted to his death in 1774. And those revolutionaries erased the Indian power that Johnson had exploited to make himself indispensable to the lost empire.

Born into Irish obscurity, Johnson achieved wealth and power after emigrating to colonial America during the late 1730s. Settling in the Mohawk Valley of New York, he lived on the dangerous margins of colonial society, where the British Empire encountered Indian peoples. He arrived as the imperial wars escalated between Britain and France for control of North America. Rather than blanch at the dangers, Johnson shrewdly exploited his frontier land and his violent times. Adapting quickly, he founded settlements, built mills, traded with Indians, and became the primary colonial official for dealing with them.

Unlike most colonists, who disdained the Indians, Johnson took pains to learn their customs and their words. Remarkably accessible and relatively fair, he impressed the local Mohawks, who ritually adopted him with the apt name of Warraghiyagey, which meant "a man who undertakes great things." A colonial admirer attributed Johnson's influence among the Mohawks to his "compliance with their humours in his dress and conversation."

Johnson saw opportunity in the friendship of his five hundred Mohawk neighbors. Although diminished by disease, war, and migration, they had important allies to the west among their fellow Iroquoian speakers of the Six Nations. By pleasing the Mohawks, Johnson won influence among all the Iroquois -- deemed the most important of the Indian tribes because they occupied the strategic nexus of waterways between French and British America. The Iroquois were the gatekeepers of imperial war. At least, an Iroquois alliance would screen New York from invasion by the French and their Indian allies in Canada. And at best, that alliance would allow the British to invade Canada. Early and often, Johnson pitched himself as the one man who could sway the Iroquois, swinging the balance of power in North America.

By cultivating Mohawk chiefs and royal governors, Johnson became the indispensable broker of imperial relations with the American Indians. During the climactic war of 1754-1763, Johnson secured enough Iroquois support to facilitate the British conquest of Canada. During that war, he led small armies to victory at Lake George in 1755 and Fort Niagara in 1759. But his greatest triumphs came in shaping opinion. A masterful publicist and correspondent, Johnson won extra credit for his victories by dazzling the press and imperial officials. To reward Johnson, Parliament gave him £5,000, while the Crown knighted him as a baronet: he was only the second colonist to be so honored. In 1756 the Crown also promoted him to superintendent of Indian affairs in the northern colonies, with an impressive salary of £600. These rewards from Britain enhanced Johnson's clout in the colonies.

It did not pay to cross Sir William, for he twice toppled Britain's military commanders in North America. In 1755, General William Shirley offended Johnson by competing for Mohawk warriors, who were invaluable to a frontier campaign. When Shirley sent meddling emissaries among the Iroquois, Johnson bristled -- and made sure that almost no warriors joined his superior officer. Johnson's political allies in New York also held up supplies desperately needed by Shirley's army. When his expedition inevitably stalled, Shirley was vulnerable to hostile insinuations cleverly spread in London by Johnson's publicists. Discredited, Shirley was sacked and summoned home to England.

Johnson bagged an even bigger prize in 1763. After the British conquest of Canada, the chief commander, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, cut Britain's costs by curtailing Johnson's budget for Indian affairs. Denied their customary presents and treated harshly by British troops, the Indians rose up in armed rebellion around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. In masterful letters to his superiors in London, Johnson made it abundantly clear that Amherst was to blame -- and that only Johnson could clean up the mess. Impressed and desperate, the imperial lords recalled Amherst and more than restored Johnson's budget. Lavishing attention on the Indians, Johnson restored peace and consolidated his reputation as the most powerful man in Anglo-America.

In the meantime, he assembled in the Mohawk Valley a vast landed estate of at least 150,000 acres, which he named "Kingsland" and "Kingsborough" in honor of his ultimate patron. Within this estate, he founded the village of Johnstown, just south of a palatial mansion known as "Johnson Hall," where he entertained a steady stream of Indian chiefs, provincial officers, and British aristocrats. Fifty-five feet long by thirty-seven feet wide and rising two full stories (plus an attic) above a complete cellar, Johnson Hall was the largest residence on the colonial frontier. Just outside the mansion, two smaller stone structures provided a storehouse for Indian goods and an office for Johnson's records. Nearby, a visitor found a coach house, a blacksmith's shop, barns, and a council house for meeting Indians during inclement weather.

Indians daily visited Johnson Hall, indulging their curiosity and pressing Johnson to redress their grievances. In 1764, Sir William complained that "I have inexpressible trouble, every Room %amp% Corner in my House Constantly full of Indians, each individual of whom has a thousand things to say, %amp% ask and any person who chuses to engage their affections or obtain an ascendency over them must be the greatest Slave living %amp% listen to them all at any hour." While grumbling in private letters, Johnson publicly treated Indians with patience, respect, and good humor. He never forgot that influence with Indians sustained his wealth and power in colonial society and the wider empire.

Visitors to Johnson Hall marveled at the overlap of European sophistication and wealth with American savagery. Johnson's compound seemed to crystallize the diverse cultural and racial strands of empire. Enslaved Africans waited on the family and their guests -- and suffered pain for any infractions. The interior boasted rich furnishings imported from Europe: oil paintings, framed prints of the royal family, mahogany furniture, a billiard table, engraved swords, porcelain china, silver tableware, and fine glasses. But Johnson also proudly displayed curiosities avidly collected from Indians: bows and arrows, wampum belts, baskets, pipes, and deerskin attire decorated with beadwork. He also displayed the pelts and antlers of wild mammals. This celebrated "cabinet of curiosities" attracted inquiring correspondence from gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic.

As with Indian curios, so with Indian women: Johnson transmuted a forest association into an emblem of genteel privilege. With fellow gentlemen of worldly tastes, Johnson bantered about his rakish exploits, hard drinking, and fornicating with women of lesser standing and another color. In 1762 he wrote in a knowing tone to his older friend Goldsbrow Banyar:

Should you deign to pay me a visit, I shall endeavor to make everything agreeable to you, and introduce you to a Princess of the first Rank here, who has large possessions, as well as parts, provided I could be assured of your paying her more civility than you did to the lady I shewed you at Albany, and dischargeing the necessary Duty, which men of years and infirmities are seldom capable of.

During his travels among the Iroquois villages, Johnson accumulated mistresses. A friend noted that "Sir William like Solomon has been eminent in his Pleasures with the brown Ladies." In addition to their carnal pleasures, the liaisons and the children they produced created a kinship network that bound Johnson to Indian families, with their obligations and benefits. Johnson had to bestow particular favors and presents on his Indian kin, while they provided him with inside information and political support. A man of lusty appetites but shrewd calculation, Johnson understood the multiple advantages of his native mistresses and children.

The most enduring and important of those mistresses was Konwatsitsaienni, or Molly Brant, who bore their first child in September 1759. A colonist described her as a "daughter to a sachem, who possessed an uncommonly agreeable person, and good understanding." It was no coincidence that in 1759 Johnson became much better informed about, and better able to manage, the complex inner workings of Iroquois diplomacy. A colonist slyly noted, "As she is descended from and connected with the most noble families of the Indians, she was of great use to Sir William in his Treaties with those people. He knew that Women govern the Politics of savages as well [as] the refined part of the World and therefore always kept up a good understanding with the brown Ladies."

The couple never married, at least not in a colonial ceremony. In his will, Johnson described Molly as his "prudent & faithfull Housekeeper" and as the mother of his "natural children." But he treated her and their eight children with respect, honoring them with his last name and significant bequests (albeit lesser bequests than those received by his three elder children by a European woman). Molly conducted his household with grace, intelligence, and sound judgment, which charmed genteel visitors, who overlooked the irregularity of her status and the color of her skin. After a visit in 1765, Lord Adam Gordon wrote to Johnson, "My Love to Molly %amp% thanks for her good Breakfast."

In grand exaggeration, Johnson's amours became legendary. One story ran that, when asked the number of his children, Johnson smiled and replied, "That is a question that I cannot answer." Crossing the Atlantic, the legend appeared in the popular novel Chrysal: or the Adventures of a Guinea, written by Charles Johnstone and published in London in 1761. The novel featured a superintendent as accomplished in Indian love as in Indian war. He built a village to accommodate his mistresses, who "often amounted to hundreds," and "there was scarce a house in any of the tribes around him from which he had not taken a temporary mate, and added a child of his to their number." Procuring a copy of the novel, Johnson took a sly pleasure in the celebrity of his libido.

His dramatic personality and his multicultural world have long attracted biographers. Appealing for readers, the authors emphasize the cultural overlap in Johnson's world -- and especially his native mistresses and their children. Rarely can authors resist straining for an anachronistic analogy, usually medieval. Time and again, they cast Johnson as a frontier lord living in a stone castle among native retainers. Francis Jennings writes:

What Johnson aimed at, and he achieved it in his own lifetime, was lordship over those Iroquois in the pattern of medieval lords who led tribesmen to battle, acquired title to their lands, and did not disdain the privilege to be free with their maidens.... Johnson championed them exactly as the medieval lord looked after his peasant manpower -- because it was the foundation of his own power.

Bernard Bailyn similarly describes the "biracial manor court where [Johnson] lived the uninhibited life of a marchland baron, surrounded by his illegitimate children."

In White Savage, Fintan O'Toole adopts that motif, but with an Irish spin. He casts Johnson as "a Gaelic lord, an idealized feudal chieftain.... He gathered around him broken shards of the old Irish order: harp music and the Gaelic language, Catholicism and the ancient sacred spring of his Warrenstown childhood." Johnson enjoyed "a kind of feudal Irish lordship in the Mohawk Valley." In O'Toole's view, Johnson was a conflicted man shaped and haunted by his Irish past.

O'Toole defines Irish culture as a tenacious allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith, and to Gaelic words and ways deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this medieval culture was intensified by a relentless confrontation with British invaders who were Protestants. During the 1690s, the invaders completed their conquest by defeating the "Jacobite" supporters of the Catholic King James. The Protestant victor, King William III, tightened English control by imposing penal laws constraining education, inheritance, and office-holding by Irish Catholics. Most of the Irish land passed from Catholic into Protestant ownership, condemning the majority to work as tenants or laborers.

O'Toole insists that the victors inflicted psychological wounds by compelling the defeated Irish to hide their Gaelic and Catholic culture. The victims included Johnson's father Christopher: "He had learned how to live with the slow death of a defeated culture, how to keep his head down, how to hold his tongue, how to move amid undercurrents, how to survive." Taken to America, this inherited pain endowed Sir William with his special asset, an empathetic understanding for Indians facing British conquest: "He, like the Iroquois, had grown up in a culture that felt itself in danger of extinction."

Looking at the same limited sources, other biographers see Christopher Johnson as an opportunist who converted to the Anglican form of Protestantism favored by the British establishment. Undaunted by the lack of evidence, O'Toole insists that father Johnson remained a lifelong Catholic anguished by the British conquest and devastated when his son converted to Anglicanism. But he also discounts the sincerity of that conversion. William was merely following the cynical example of his uncle and patron, Sir Peter Warren, who became a wealthy and powerful admiral in the Royal Navy. Warren invested some of that wealth in Mohawk Valley lands, which he entrusted to Johnson's management: the young man's invitation to colonial America. O'Toole insists that, for both men, Anglicanism was a thin veneer adopted to get ahead "while remaining true to Catholicism in private prayer." He insists that they nurtured "a silent hinterland beyond their public selves." But how can O'Toole know what they thought in private prayer? And how can we discern a private hinterland that remains silent?

He finds Catholic hints in stray slivers of evidence. Peter Warren did not complete the legal formalities of Anglican conversion until the year of his death. In another sliver, an Irish-born teacher, Charles Reilly, sought Johnson's patronage in 1749 by writing a letter in Latin. "As the language of the Mass and the priesthood, Latin had deep importance to the Irish adherents of an outlawed church," O'Toole confides. Reilly "understood, and wished Johnson to know that he understood," that they shared "the painful and never quite total adoption of a new personality."

In 1755, at the Battle at Lake George, Johnson captured the French commander Baron de Dieskau. Sparing his life from the Mohawks, Johnson graciously treated Dieskau as an honored guest. O'Toole notes that a decade before, at the Battle of Fontenoy in Flanders, Dieskau had served in a French army that featured Irish-Catholic refugees, including some of Johnson's Warren cousins. "In his great kindness to Dieskau," O'Toole concludes, "Johnson was perhaps honouring a memory of these kinsmen and remembering how easily ... he could have been their comrade rather than their enemy."

According to O'Toole, a private Irish Catholicism also shaped Johnson's frontier policies, contributing to his unusual respect for Indian beliefs. In 1766 he negotiated peace with Pontiac, a chief who had helped to lead the Indian rebellion. O'Toole insists that "Pontiac and Johnson enacted an elaborate version of the Catholic ritual of Confession." Mohawks introduced Johnson to the sacred and healing waters of Saratoga Springs, which, O'Toole suggests, Johnson equated with a Catholic holy well from his Irish youth.

Catholic Irishness also allegedly framed Johnson's disgust at Pennsylvania's Scotch-Irish settlers, who treated Indians with larcenous and murderous disdain. "The Catholic Jacobite poets of Johnson's youth, and his parents' prime, railed against lower-class Presbyterian settlers in exactly the same terms," O'Toole writes. To develop his frontier estate, Johnson needed tenant farmers, and he preferred to recruit Gaelic-speaking Catholics from the Scottish Highlands. "Outwardly and officially an enthusiastic upholder of the established Anglican Church, he was nevertheless forming an unofficial Catholic colony under his personal protection," O'Toole observes. Johnson even employed an Irish-born Catholic priest to conduct mass for them. This the author considers a "quiet rebellion" against the Protestant establishment.

To clinch his psychological case, O'Toole dwells on an angry letter that Johnson wrote in 1764 to his superiors in London. The letter denounces a rival peacemaker, General John Bradstreet, for pretending that the Indian rebels had submitted to him and had become British subjects. Writing "in terms poignantly redolent of his own Irish Catholic background," Johnson raged against Bradstreet for daring to describe the Indians as subjugated. "A hidden voice from Johnson's own history is sounding out through the words he puts in the mouths of the Indians." Here, then, is O'Toole's trump card to reveal that Johnson privately resented Ireland's subordination and denied that the Irish had accepted British domination.

O'Toole portrays Johnson as a complex character tormented by a psychological tension between his past and present, and between his inner and outer selves. Superficially, he basked in wealth and power won by serving a Protestant empire bent upon subordinating Indians as it had conquered the Irish; but within, he squirmed in psychic pain at having "compromised with the new political, religious, and cultural order." There could never be inner peace for an empire-builder who nurtured "the self-image of the dispossessed Gaelic families." In this double consciousness, Johnson belongs in a modern novel -- which is exactly what O'Toole has produced.

O'Toole's book appeals to the current taste for a secret reality cleverly revealed by gathering deeply hidden clues to subvert an official story. The beauty of secret histories and conspiracy theories is that they need not weigh the preponderance of evidence. Instead, they can freely connect disparate slivers into an ominous pattern mandated by prior conviction. But let us imagine that a historian should seek probability in the most economical explanation: the one that requires the fewest convolutions. If so, the surviving documents consistently reveal Johnson as thoroughly dedicated to the British Empire, its Protestant sovereign, and his Anglican church.

A relentlessly ambitious man, Johnson cultivated a genteel style that disdained overt emotions, especially in religious beliefs. In eighteenth-century Britain and America, a fundamental divide separated the genteel few from the common many who had to work with their hands as farmers, artisans, sailors, or day laborers. Public authority and high social standing belonged to "the better sort" who combined superior wealth with polished manners, some classical learning, and an honorable reputation.

Loyalty, ambition, gentility: these qualities best illuminate the bits of evidence that O'Toole kidnaps from their context. The late completion of Warren's formal conversion attests to the weakening of the penal laws, for it mattered not a whit to his career on behalf of a Protestant monarch. And in his life and his will, he lavished benefactions on Protestant churches and missionaries -- long after any supposed need to cover his convictions. But what of that Latin letter from the Irish schoolteacher? More than a code language for Catholic priests and tormented converts, Latin was coveted by all educated men with genteel aspirations. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson cherished their Latin learning, but neither was remotely Catholic. In 1749, Johnson needed a Latin instructor to teach his children gentility, not Catholicism. And there was nothing Gaelic or Catholic about Johnson's rage against murderous settlers. Amherst's replacement as army commander, General Thomas Gage, made identical characterizations -- and Gage was thoroughly English and just as Anglican as Johnson.

O'Toole also strains credulity by finding an ambiguous allegiance to Britain and Protestantism in Johnson's graciousness to Dieskau. Far more relevant is that Johnson named his summer house "Castle Cumberland" to honor the Duke of Cumberland, who was Dieskau's British opponent at the earlier Battle of Fontenoy. Moreover, in 1746 at Culloden in Scotland, the ruthless duke massacred Catholic rebels, preserving the Protestant establishment in Great Britain. As a byword for Protestant victory, "Cumberland" hardly suggested a hidden fondness for Catholicism.

Indeed, O'Toole knows that Johnson did not need the supposed ambiguity of a convert to treat Dieskau generously. A living and grateful Dieskau was Johnson's greatest asset in 1755: a witness that a colonial commander could live by a European code of elite civility. After speculating wildly, O'Toole belatedly acknowledges "that Dieskau was a very valuable prize, a high-class vehicle in which to carry [Johnson's] reputation far beyond the forests of New York."

Nor did Johnson rebel against Protestantism when he recruited Catholic tenants from Scotland. To develop his estate, Johnson desperately needed tenants, but almost all Protestant colonists preferred their abundant opportunities to acquire freehold farms. Employing a Catholic priest was simply good business for a Protestant landlord seeking the best available supply of tenants. Johnson emulated the hundreds of Anglican landlords of Ireland who employed Catholic laborers and tenants on their estates. By no means were those landlords betraying their empire.

But what about Johnson's rant against General Bradstreet for describing Indians as British subjects? Can that be read as an Irish discomfort with British power? In fact, Johnson regarded Bradstreet as an old and dangerous rival once again meddling in Indian affairs. By pretending that Indians had become subjects, Bradstreet seemed to pull off a coup meant to please the imperial lords in London. Apparently he had trumped Johnson, who had long (and accurately) insisted that Indians were fiercely independent peoples who would become allies but never subjects. Bradstreet's fraud had to be exposed quickly and thoroughly -- hence Johnson's anger.

Dismissive of colonial Protestants, O'Toole lumps their diverse denominations into one malignant mass of "lunatic enthusiasts." This lumping especially distorts when he casts another Johnson foil, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, as representing "pressure from the Anglican Church." In fact, Wheelock was a New England Congregationalist by denomination, and an evangelical Calvinist by theology. This made him a "dissenter" from the official Anglican church led by the king. As a staunch royalist, Johnson distrusted "dissenters" as potential regicides and republicans. Johnson's eventual aversion to Wheelock registered his devotion to Anglicanism -- not some closet Catholicism.

Indeed, initially Johnson found common ground with Wheelock as fellow Protestants united against the influence of Catholicism among the Indians. O'Toole never tells readers that in the early 1760s Johnson supported Wheelock's controversial program for spreading dissenting missionaries and teachers among the Iroquois to counteract the French Jesuits. While Johnson admired the talents of the Jesuits, he dreaded their influence as a menace to British rule in North America. Johnson preferred Anglican missionaries, but they were so scarce in the early 1760s that he had to cooperate with Wheelock to achieve their primary goal, which was to roll back Catholicism.

During the late 1760s, Johnson broke with Wheelock when he foolishly bypassed the superintendent to meddle in Indian affairs. Such meddling was always anathema to Johnson, who jealously guarded his monopoly in Indian relations. The break came more easily because, at decade's end, the Anglican Church could provide a new and growing stream of missionaries to replace Wheelock's dissenters. Sparing no expense, Johnson repaired or built three Anglican chapels, and he subsidized Anglican teachers and missionaries for both the settlers and the Indians throughout the Mohawk Valley. A leading Anglican effused, "Although Sir William, like Solomon, has been eminent in his Pleasures with the brown Ladies, yet he may lay the Foundation of a Building in the Mohawk Country that may be of more real use, than the very splendid Temple that Solomon built."

Indeed, Johnson became the leading lay spokesman for Anglicanism in the colonies. In part, his increased zeal reflected an anxiety over his eternal fate by an aging man in deteriorating health. But it also expressed dismay at the growing colonial resistance to the authority of the Crown. Johnson depended on that Crown for his income and his authority, and painful experience with New York's elected assembly had taught him to disdain popular politics. He hoped to save the empire by increasing American Anglicans, whom he deemed "the faithfullest Subjects of the Crown."

In particular, Johnson urged the Crown to appoint an American Anglican bishop to facilitate the ordination of more clergy. This proposal outraged the colonial majority, who were dissenters. They suspected a plot to impose taxes to support the Church of England. Widely and deeply believed, the anti-bishop propaganda compounded tensions between the colonial dissenters and their British rulers. That tension deepened Johnson's antipathy to the Patriot resistance to British taxes during the 1760s and 1770s. O'Toole's subtitle links William Johnson to "the invention of America," but in fact Johnson worked to prevent the invention of America by defending the empire.

O'Toole repeatedly pulls Johnson out of his eighteenth-century context to plunk him into a continuous stream of Irish nationalism defined in twentieth-century terms. He cannot imagine an Irish authenticity disconnected from Catholicism or informed by values other than Gaelic traditionalism. Of course, he has plenty of company in seeing an unbroken tradition of uncompromising Catholic and Gaelic resistance to British rule leading inexorably from seventeenth-century dispossession to a twentieth-century republic; but that company does not include Irish academic historians of the past thirty years, who have recovered a more nuanced picture of their eighteenth-century past. That century neither reproduced the religious wars of the seventeenth century nor did it anticipate the sectarian nationalism of later centuries. The mid- eighteenth century was an age of compromises, evasions, and new (but later lost) opportunities for mutual tolerance. Official enforcement of the penal laws became sporadic and inefficient, giving Catholics hope that their oppression would wither away.

Far from a trace element, Protestants were one-quarter of the population, and they often expressed a devotion to Ireland that matched any Catholic's. Most were Presbyterians, who resented the official advantages of the Anglicans almost as much as the Catholics did. During the 1790s, that shared resentment led to the United Irish movement, which pursued a secular and rationalist version of nationalism. Violent repression killed that movement and subsequently divided the Protestant minority from the Catholic majority. During the nineteenth century, the division led that majority to develop the more romantic, Gaelic, and Catholic nationalism that ultimately created the Irish republic -- and that O'Toole insists on reading backward.

The shame of O'Toole's misreading is that an Irish heritage did indeed shape Johnson's reaction to his American opportunities -- but he championed an Anglican and a genteel Ireland rather than a Catholic folk culture. In an insightful (but unpublished) doctoral dissertation from 1975, John Christopher Guzzardo offers a more persuasive reading of Johnson's fondness for Irish symbols and Irish friends. Those resonances were overwhelmingly Anglican in faith and British in allegiance. Johnson and most of his cronies belonged to the Ireland of "the Pale": the Anglicized zone near Dublin where ambitious men served the Protestant ascendancy by dominating the Catholic natives. According to Guzzardo, Johnson worked to re-create "a traditional Anglo-Irish countryside" characterized by "the regular army troops, the Anglican chapel and congregation, [and] the creole collaborators." These elements "represented forces which had molded his family's Irish destiny for a century."

Rather than make a painful compromise with the British Empire, Sir William Johnson made it his own, exploiting its distant possibilities to achieve a wealth and power far beyond what he could have achieved at home in Ireland. With good reason, he never stinted in praising the Protestant monarch who was his patron. Far from feeling torn, Johnson was smug in his loyalties and triumphs. He was the consummate collaborator.

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