Quotes from Ray Raphael

A key weapon in this tug-of-war was liquor. West Indies rum flowed freely

The drinking continued, Chickasaw warriors failed to rally to the king's cause, and men who might have been killed in battle died by the bottle instead. On a different level, the failure of Chickasaws to come through for the British can be explained by simple geography: they were not in the direct line of fire.

and by the 1790s, isolated acts of violence escalated into full-scale hostilities. Once again, Native Americans wound up fighting each other because of their differences in strategies: whether to accommodate or resist the white Americans.

The pan-Indian confederation in the South during the 1780s and 1790s was a direct consequence of the Revolutionary War. With Great Britain defeated, American settlers swarmed from Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas into the region between the southern Appalachias and the Mississippi.

On October 8 Washington convened a war council to determine "whether it will be adviseable to re-inlist any Negroes in the new Army—or whether there be a Distinction between such as are Slaves & those who are free?" The Council voted "unanimously to reject all Slaves, & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.

The term maroon, like Seminole, derives from cimarron—"wild and untamed.")184 While Native American populations in other areas east of the Mississippi plummetted, the number of Seminoles increased dramatically. The Seminoles fared better than others because they lived in a colony which did not come under the jurisdiction of the land-hungry United States.

The American Revolution, a fight for freedom from colonial rule, was also the most extensive and destructive "Indian war" in the nation's history. Whereas other wars affected individual nations, the Revolution affected all Native Americans east of the Mississippi.

By the end of the year, however, Washington suddenly reversed this decision. In his general orders of December 30 he announced this: "As the General is informed, that Numbers of Free Negroes are desirous of inlisting, he gives leave to the recruiting Officers, to entertain them, and promises to lay the matter before the Congress, who he doubts not will approve of it.

On January 16, 1776, Congress reluctantly resolved "that the free negroes who have served faithfully in the army at Cambridge, may be re-inlisted therein, but no others."154 During the course of 1776 all northern states issued some sort of restrictions on the recruitment of African American soldiers.

Quakers, Shakers, Moravians, Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders—these radical spiritualists took the Reformation to heart by giving precedence to the life of the soul over the affairs of the state. Around 80,000 people, or one in every thirty free Americans, claimed membership in one of these communities at the eve of the Revolution.

When the rebels tried to get them to join the army, or pay extra taxes for the war, or at the very least sign a loyalty oath, the Mennonites just said no.

Since free people of color, almost invariably poor, came cheaply, prior restrictions against their enlistment were either overturned or ignored. Despite national policy, even slaves were allowed to enlist; some towns paid bounties to masters who allowed their slaves to join the army.

Although pacifists were exempted from military service in some states, they were still required to hire substitutes. Those who refused were fined, and if they refused to pay the fine, they could be jailed. Religious dissidents, like everyone else, were also expected to sign oaths of allegiance to the Revolutionary government—and when they failed to do so, they were subjected to both formal and informal harassment:

Free blacks tended to enlist for "three years or the duration" while slaves promised to serve until the end as a condition of obtaining their freedom.

Most Quakers stayed true, many deviated, and all felt pressure from opposing directions: the Revolution demanded they join, their Meetings insisted they not.

The Moravians were more lenient. Although one of their principles was "not to fight with carnal weapons but with prayer," they still allowed that "a soldier could become and remain a member.

In April of 1778 the assembly got tougher yet: failure to take the oath could result not only in imprisonment but in the loss of citizenship, banishment, and the confiscation of property. On the day the new law went into effect, nineteen Moravians were arrested

White resistance to putting African Americans under arms was strongest in areas with the greatest concentrations of slaves. But even in Virginia, the heart of tobacco land, patriots could not ignore the possibilities for exploiting black manpower. More than half the free Negro males of military age in Virginia joined the army, probably for the same reason that freemen from the North enlisted: it was the best or only job available.

As of April 1, 1779, those who refused to take the oath were barred from holding public office or serving on juries—and that was all. There would be no more imprisonment or threat of confiscation for the crime of not signing an oath. As much as the government wanted loyalty, it could not afford to lose tens of thousands of hard-working citizens for the lack of their names on a piece of paper.

The intrusions upon the civil liberties of religious pacifists in the American Revolution revealed an ironic twist: the rebels who professed to carry the torch of freedom did their best to extinguish it, while those they accused of demonstrating a "destructive tendency" to subvert "freedom and independence" were the ones who kept that torch ablaze.

The choice, really, was to join the Revolution or suffer the consequences. In Farmington, as in most communities, the alternative to the Revolution was jail or banishment, but in Morristown, New Jersey, it was the gallows. There, the local court sentenced 105 suspected loyalists to hang, but it reprieved all those who enlisted for the duration of the war.

In New York, "An Act More Effectually to Punish Adherents of the King" declared that "preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, [or] printing" opinions favorable to the Crown was a capital offense, commutable by a three-year tour on a ship of war.

The fear of slaves on the one hand, and the military potential of mobilizing slaves on the other, gave a peculiar twist to the logic of war in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland.

The jury which informed Potter he would be drawn and quartered was not an undisciplined mob but an official body representing the interests of the Revolutionary government. Humiliation with barnyard symbolism—goose feathers or hog's dung—had regressed to archaic forms of torture.