The Story of Logan

Jefferson's first account in the Notes of the incidents necessary for understanding Logan's speech was terse: "In the spring of the year 1774, a robbery and murder were committed on an inhabitant of the frontiers of Virginia, by two Indians of the Shawanee tribe. The neighbouring whites, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way. Col. Cresap, a man infamous for the many murders he had committed on those much-injured people, collected a party, and proceeded down the Kanhaway in quest of vengeance. Unfortunately a canoe of women and children, with one man only, was seen coming from the opposite shore, unarmed, and unsuspecting an hostile attack from the whites. Cresap and his party concealed themselves on the bank of the river, and the moment the canoe reached the shore, singled out their objects, and, at one fire, killed every person in it."

Jefferson continues, "This happened to be the family of Logan, who had long been distinguished as a friend of the whites. This unworthy return provoked his vengeance. He accordingly signalized himself in the war which ensued. In the autumn of the same year, a decisive battle was fought at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, between the collected forces of the Shawanese, Mingoes, and Delawares, and a detachment of the Virginia militia. The Indians were defeated, and sued for peace. Logan however disdained to be seen among the suppliants. But, lest the sincerity of a treaty should be distrusted, from which so distinguished a chief absented himself, he sent by a messenger the following speech to be delivered to Lord Dunmore."⁷

A letter by Devereux Smith, a Pennsylvanian at Pittsburgh, written to the governor and Council of Pennsylvania a few weeks after the events, generally confirms Jefferson's account but adds important information. Smith conveyed the disturbing news of impending war in the Ohio valley and of the criminal provocations of the bellicose Virginians who were intruding on both Pennsylvanian and Indian territories. Smith reported that a party of Virginians led by Michael Cresap had attacked peaceable Shawnees, ostensibly in revenge for a previous murder, killing and scalping three and wounding two more. About the same time, a party led by Daniel Greathouse killed and scalped nine Indians, including Logan's kin, at Baker's Tavern, fifty-five miles down the river, across from the mouth of Yellow Creek (which enters the Ohio several miles above present Wheeling, West Virginia). It was these last murders and the mutilation of Logan's pregnant sister that spurred Logan to take revenge. According to Smith, Logan's attacks were directed particularly at settlements along the upper Monongahela River and in the neighborhood of Redstone Creek, whence Cresap's and Greathouse's men had come.⁸

While these events were taking place on the frontier, Jefferson was busy with the early politics of the Revolution. In late April 1774, when the murders of Logan's kin occurred, Jefferson was in Williamsburg preparing to attend the meeting of the House of Burgesses and helping to establish the Virginia Committee of Correspondence. The Virginia Assembly met in May, resolved on a general day of fasting and prayer to protest the closing of the port of Boston, and was promptly dissolved by Lord Dunmore. Jefferson returned to Albemarle County, where he prepared his instructions to the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress, later published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America. It was during this spring and summer that Logan and his war party collected their thirteen white scalps and one prisoner along the Monongahela, terrorizing the settlements and causing thousands of refugees to flee eastward. Illness prevented Jefferson from attending the first meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the fall, but he was active during this time on patriotic business. In October the decisive battle of Point Pleasant was fought at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, and at the subsequent peace treaty the Shawnees relinquished their land claims in Kentucky.

How did Jefferson obtain the text of Logan's speech? It was first published in William Bradford's Pennsylvania Journal on January 20, 1775, from a copy sent Bradford by James Madison of Montpelier as "a specimen of Indian Eloquence and Mistaken Valour." Two weeks later Logan's speech, in less polished language, appeared in Dixon and Hunter's Virginia Gazette. Jefferson's text is almost identical to the Madison version. But in his Appendix to the Notes on the State of Virginia, which was published separately in 1800, Jefferson claimed that he had heard the speech at Lord Dunmore's in 1774 and had written it down in his memorandum book in the form published in the Notes. His informant, he said, was General John Gibson, to whom Logan had delivered his speech and who had translated it into English for Lord Dunmore--an assertion confirmed by Gibson.⁹

Despite certain inaccuracies in Jefferson's narrative, it was not publicly challenged until 1797, when a testy Federalist politician, Maryland Attorney General Luther Martin--Michael Cresap's son-in-law--published letters in the press claiming that Logan's speech was a fabrication and that the charge against Michael Cresap of murdering Logan's family was a calumny. Jefferson, now vice-president and future candidate for the presidency, felt it necessary to rebut this attack. He solicited depositions from surviving participants and observers of the affair and in 1800 published an amended version of the story of Logan. The speech remained the same in this Appendix, but Jefferson provided a new narrative of the preceding events.

The new version corrected a couple of errors. The initial Indian provocation was characterized as robbery only, not murder, of "certain land adventurers on the Ohio." Cresap, no longer described as "infamous" for many murders of Indians, was now a captain, not a colonel (his father, the famous frontiersman and Indian trader Thomas Cresap, was the colonel and was not involved in the massacre). The murder of Logan's family occurred across from Yellow Creek on the Ohio River, not the Great Kanawha, at Baker's Tavern, across from a Mingo town near Steubenville, Ohio. Jefferson failed to mention that the massacre had been perpetrated in Cresap's absence; however, some of Cresap's party, led by Daniel Greathouse, had taken part, and Cresap had participated in two other attacks that resulted in the death of some of Logan's other relatives.¹⁰

The Appendix also contained the text of a note tied to a war club left behind by Logan at the scene of one of his attacks, comparing the outrage at Baker's Tavern to the infamous massacre of twenty peaceable Conestoga Indians along the Susquehanna ten years before.

Captain Cresap
What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin, at Conestoga, a great while ago; and I thought nothing of' that. But you killed my kin again, on Yellow Creek, and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must kill. too; and I have been three times to war since; but the Indians are not angry-, only myself. Captain John Logan.¹¹

Logan had in fact been born along the Susquehanna, about 1725, a son of the notable Cayuga chief Shikellamy, who served among the population of displaced Indian refugees along that river as a kind of viceroy from the Iroquois confederation known as the Six Nations. In the community where Logan grew up, Moravian missionaries were a familiar presence. After his father's death in 1748, Logan for a time took his place as Six Nations deputy, but after the French and Indian War and the murder of his Conestoga kin by the "Paxton boys," he, like many other Indian residents, moved to western Pennsylvania and then on to the Ohio River valley, where he and the other Iroquois became known as Mingoes. There he took a Shawnee woman as wife. He entertained white visitors with civility (according to the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder) and preferred to live close to white settlements.¹²

The modifications Jefferson inserted into the Appendix seem to have satisfied, or at least stifled, his critics. But in 151 the historian Brantz Mayer published a book, Tah-Gah-Jute; or, Logan and Cresap: An Historical Essay, defending Cresap and attacking Jefferson. Mayer revealed that Jefferson had suppressed a letter from General George Rogers Clark, written in response to Jefferson's appeal for testimony, that exculpated Cresap from the murder at Baker's Tavern and blamed Greathouse, whose actions were "more barbarous" than Jefferson had described. According to Mayer, Logan's sister's unborn near-term child had been ripped from the womb and "stuck on a pole." And while granting the literary excellence of Logan's Lament as reported by Jefferson, Mayer also implied that the original speech, if ever there was one, was merely an "outburst" from a drunken "blood-stained savage."

Clark's letter was found among Jefferson's papers after his death, and historians have puzzled ever since over his motives in concealing it. Jefferson had accepted other testimony that partially exonerated Cresap; and Clark, an old friend of Jefferson's from Revolutionary War days and a companion of Cresap's in the spring of 1774, was probably the best-informed observer Jefferson could have consulted. Jefferson left no written explanation for his failure to print Clarks letter in the Appendix though he did entrust a verbal message to Samuel Brown, who had forwarded Clark's letter to Jefferson, explaining "what was thought best as to General Clark's deposition." This cryptic remark in his thank-you note to Brown remains his only known comment on this episode of censorship.¹³

Clark's letter itself, however, suggests the reason for its suppression; Jefferson did not want to see his protege Clark and other brave settlers portrayed as conspirators in a scheme to precipitate a general war against the Ohio Indians for the purpose of seizing their lands. Ever protective of his idealized yeomanry, Jefferson used Cresap and Greathouse as scapegoats for a horde of frontier speculators, surveyors, and settlers who were planning that summer to establish a permanent settlement in Kentucky and were prepared to make war on the Shawnees and any other Indians who claimed hunting rights in the region. Clark was a member of one well-armed, organized body of nearly a hundred men, and Michael Cresap joined it along the way. During the summers of 1773 and 1774, several other groups of thirty to forty armed men each were also roaming through Kentucky and along the Ohio, surveying likely town sites for George Washington and other eastern speculators (of whom Jefferson was one) and provoking increasingly violent retaliation by the Shawnees and Cherokees.

Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary who visited the region in 1772-1773, recalled conditions on the frontier at the time: "The whole country on the Ohio river, had already drawn the attention of many persons from the neighbouring provinces; who generally forming themselves into parties, would rove through the country in search of land, either to settle on, or for speculation; and some, careless of watching over their conduct, or destitute of both honour and humanity, would join a rabble (a class of people generally met with on the frontiers) who maintained, that to kill an Indian, was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo, and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way;--nay, more, would decoy such as lived across the river, to come over, for the purpose of joining them in hilarity; and when these complied, they fell on them and murdered them, Unfortunately, some of the murdered were of the family of Logan, noted man among the Indians."¹⁴

Before the Logan massacre, John Connolly, Lord Dunmore's man in Pittsburgh, had circulated an inflammatory statement falsely accusing the Indians of planning a general war. Crucial passages of Clark letter reveal that Connolly's circular prompted Cresap's "little army," already bent on attacking a Shawnee town, formally to declare war: "The War Post was planted, a Council Called and the Letter read and the Ceremonies used by the Indians on so important an Occasion acted, and War was formally declared."¹⁵ It was after this declaration of war that the massacre of Logan's family occurred. Historians and contemporary observers have intimated that the massacre of Logan's family was planned by Lord Dunmore or other Virginians with the expectation that the inevitable retaliation by Indian kinsmen would so terrorize the frontiers that Virginia would be forced to conquer the Shawnees and Delawares and terminate the presence of these tribes in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania."¹⁶

Whether Jefferson was privy as early as 1774 and 1775 to the information contained in Clark's letter may be doubted. But his intimate correspondence with Clark in the conquest of the Ohio valley during the Revolution suggests that he might have been aware of Clark's information well before receiving the letter, perhaps even while he was writing his version of the events in the Notes in 1781. By 1797, when Jefferson was preparing his rebuttal to the charges of Cresap's son-in-law, the split between the eastern-based Federalists and the western-favoring Republicans was widening, and Jefferson's political ambitions were becoming more dependent on the support of voters west of the Appalachians. He would not have been eager to condemn the fathers of the voters of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and western Virginia (including present West Virginia and Kentucky) as murderous Indian-haters or as irresponsible land-grabbing adventurers.

This reluctance would have been especially persuasive after Kentucky in 1792 became a state with its own electoral votes and after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794--an uprising to protest a federal excise tax on whiskey producers. The whiskey tax, along with its heavy-handed military suppression by Washington and Alexander Hamilton, aroused Jefferson anti Federalist ire. The "rebellion" itself (which amounted mostly to verbal protests, mass meetings, and the tar-and-feathering of a few well-to-do tax collectors) was centered among Scotch-Irish settlers in the valley of the Monongahela and especially the Redstone district, where Cresap's party had originated. This area had become one of the two principal routes of entry into Kentucky and the Ohio valley, the other being the Cumberland Gap at the southern edge of Virginia, and as such was important to Jefferson's own political aspirations. Under these circumstances, it would have been difficult for Jefferson to condemn a whole population as war mongers; and no doubt many honest, well-meaning farm families disapproved of the barbarous acts of Cresap's and Greathouse's men and their kind.

In reality, Lord Dunmore's War, though precipitated in 1774 by the massacre of Logan's family, was not about Cresap, or Logan's murdered family, or Logan's reprisals. It was about the taking of Indian land.¹⁷ Jefferson's transformation of these events, and the economic and political maneuverings behind them, into an atrocity story full of drama and pathos tells much about Jefferson and his public-relations strategy in Indian affairs. Irving Brant, biographer of James Madison, has claimed that Clarks letter, in exonerating Cresap, was merely "an attempt to wash out blood with whitewash."¹⁸ But Jefferson's presentation of the massacre of some inoffensive Indians on the upper Ohio as the cause of Lord Dunmore's War may be seen as an attempt to wipe out ink with blood. For by focusing intensely on a single atrocity perpetrated by a few violent white men, it distracted attention from a larger set of legal and political issues involving rights to the land west of the Appalachians--issues of which Jefferson was undoubtedly aware.

These included, foremost, the questionable validity of Virginia's purchases from the Iroquois Confederacy of land in Virginia, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. But also at issue was the ongoing effort of the Shawnees and other local groups who used and occupied these lands to resolve their complaints by peaceful negotiation with British and Virginia authorities, even after the Logan massacre. Another sticking point was the mutually contending claims of large speculative land companies, of General Washington's regiment and of Washington himself, and of thousands of settlers pouring over the Allegheny Mountains through the Monongahela valley to the north and the Cumberland Gap to the south, not to mention the ongoing boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia over the Monongahela region.

Jefferson himself, in this period, had an interest in lands claimed by at least two of the well-known land companies, the Loyal Company and the Greenbrier Company, and had taken initial steps toward investing in a small independent speculation at the month of the Great Kanawha. There is no reason to suppose that he colored his account later to defend these claims. But these investments, and his connection with the principals in several companies and enterprises, suggest that he must have been well informed about the issues in dispute. Dr. Walker, chief agent of the Loyal Company, was his father's friend, one of Jefferson's guardians in his youth, and later one of his consultants on Indian affairs. Patrick Henry, soon to become Jefferson's predecessor as governor of revolutionary Virginia, was an associate of Jefferson in land speculations in the west. Jefferson knew George Washington as a fellow burgess in Williamsburg and as an any in opposing the pretensions of the Grand Ohio Company to carve a new colony, Vandalia, out of Virginia's western marches. Jefferson was interested in buying up lands surveyed by Andrew Lewis, chief agent of the Greenbrier Company and commander of the Virginia force that defeated the Shawnees at Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Great Kanawha, where Washington as well as Jefferson had land interests. Jefferson would shortly delegate to his friend George Rogers Clark the task of wresting Virginia's western lands from British and Indian dominion. And finally, he was personally acquainted with several of Virginia royal governors, including Lord Dunmore himself (who was a silent partner in the Vandalia scheme).

Thus, while Jefferson was composing A Summary New of the Rights of British America in the summer of 1774 and preparing to attend the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the fall, he was surely cognizant that the territory claimed by Virginia between the Allegheny Mountains and the Ohio River, from Pittsburgh down to the Kentucky River, was in chaos. The lands south of the Ohio River as far down as the Great Kanawha supposedly had been ceded to Virginia by the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix in 1768, in a treaty at which Thomas Walker was Virginia's representative; and lands from the Great Kanawha on down to the Kentucky or even Tennessee rivers had been ceded to Virginia by the Cherokees at treaties to which Virginia appointed Andrew Lewis as negotiator. But the title to these lands had been obtained at treaties negotiated by royal superintendents of Indian affairs--Sir William Johnson with the Iroquois and John Stuart with the Cherokees--and therefore were defined as Crown lands. As yet the Crown had not sold or granted any of this territory and was denying Virginia and the other colonies the right to dispose of it themselves because it lay west of the Proclamation Line of 1763, which restricted English settlement west of the Appalachians.

In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, after comparing the American taking of Indian land to the Saxon invasion of England, Jefferson accused King George III of falsely applying to America the feudal notion, so foreign to Saxon law, that the Crown held an underlying title to all lands. Under color of this claim, Jefferson said, the Crown was now making the settlers' acquisition of new lands for cultivation extremely difficult.¹⁹ In defying the Crown, the emigrating settlers hoped to gain title by surveying and improving tracts that they could later purchase as squatters with pre-emption rights, from whoever eventually established ownership.

Thus, to Washington, Jefferson, Clark, and no doubt Cresap and many others, movement onto the western lands was not only a personal economic move but a patriotic art in defiance of illegitimate restrictions imposed by a distant authority. What appeared to later observers as atrocities against the Indians may have been perceived by many frontier families--remembering atrocities perpetrated on their own relatives and friends less than a decade earlier--as a necessary process of ethnic cleansing (to use a later generation's phrase), a displacement of inveterate enemies who refused to let God's people settle upon land they had recently bought from the Indians in fair and public treaty. By an ironic twist, Logan, as an Iroquois, was a member of the confederacy that had sold these very lands.

But by 1781 and 1782, when Jefferson was writing his Notes on the State of Virginia, the Revolution against the British had been won. With the task ahead being the orderly acquisition and settlement of western lands, it was time for reconciliation. Lord Dunmore's War had been a minor skirmish compared with the campaigns of the Revolution. It was time to bury the disputes among land companies and between states; time to absolve the western populace generally of crimes against innocent Indians; and time to recognize the virtues of America's native peoples. In short, it was time to mourn for Logan, even as the new nation sought its destiny in the western world, where now--it would henceforth be claimed by Jefferson--the land had always been legitimately acquired by purchase, not by force of arms.

In addition to finding the necessary scapegoats for the bloody murder of Logan's family, Jefferson's story of Logan carries another, more subtle, and perhaps subconscious, message about the darkening prospects for civilizing the Indians. In the passage which introduced Logan's speech as an example of native eloquence, Jefferson praised the intelligence of the American Indians and asserted that their savage state, like that of his own Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was merely a result of historical and environmental circumstance, and that they, like the northern Europeans, had the capacity to rise up the ladder of progress. Proposals to Christianize and educate Indians were not new in 1780, but the results were as yet equivocal. Without saying so explicitly, Jefferson, in presenting Logan as the apotheosis of Indianhood, was suggesting that the attainment of civilization might never be the Indians' fate, despite their aspirations to it. Just as the line of Logan, the friend of the white man, who had "thought to live with you," had been unfairly extinguished by white men, so the race itself was destined one day to become extinct. Ultimately, in Jefferson's view, the Indian nations would be either civilized and incorporated into mainstream American society or, failing this--as in the prototypical case of Logan's family--"exterminated." The Jeffersonian vision of the destiny of the Americas had no place for Indians as Indians.

Despite Jefferson's wish to put the bloody past into a kind of historical limbo, the massacre at Baker's Tavern and the ensuing conflict had a grisly sequel. In 1781, during the Revolution, Virginia militiamen from the Monongahela district, in revenge for Indian raids on their settlements, massacred a group of Delawares--"civilized" and pacifist Moravian converts, men, women, and children, ninety in all--at Gnadenhütten on the Tuscarawas River, a branch of the Muskingum. Starving in refugee camps farther north, the Indians had returned to their old town to scavenge for food. In circumstances of barbarity comparable to the Logan killings and to the slaughter of the peaceable Conestoga Indians by the "Paxton Boys," the militiamen, after a vote, imprisoned, then tomahawked, clubbed to death, scalped, and burned the victims in their own houses.

The following year Colonel William Crawford, Washington's land agent and surveyor, was captured while retreating from a failed mission against the Delawares, and as commander of a force that included veterans of the Gnadenhütten massacre, was burned at the stake in retribution. Those events were not reported by Jefferson in the Appendix in 1800, although he must have known of them, for the Gnadenhütten massacre gained great notoriety as the criminal action of "white savages." Even some white people believed that the commander at Gnadenhütten, Colonel Daniel Williamson, should have been brought to trial for murder.

Neither Logan nor Cresap long survived Lord Dunmore's War either, and they never knew of the fame, or infamy, they acquired from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. Cresap fought in the Pont Pleasant campaign and died of illness in New York a year later after marching his company of Maryland riflemen to join Washington before Boston. Logan died about 1780. During the Revolution, he had allegedly collected additional American scalps and prisoners. But his rage tamed to melancholy and, according to Heckewelder, he became increasingly intemperate and deranged and was murdered at last by an Indian kinsman. Jefferson was advised of Logan's death in January 1781.²⁰ Thus ended the tragic life of Captain John Logan in circumstances of which Jefferson was probably unaware while he was originally writing the Notes, circumstances which were communicated to him by Heckewelder and published in the Appendix in 1800.²¹

Logan's murderer was a nephew, chosen and deputized to execute his uncle because, as the victims closest relative, he would be immune from obligatory revenge. Years later he told a white visitor on the Allegheny River why the council ordered the killing: "Because he was too great a man to live...he talked so strong that nothing could be carried contrary to his opinions, his eloquence always took all the young men with him...He was a very, very great man, and as I killed him, I am to fill his place and inherit all his greatness."²² By a twist of fate, the eloquence that earned Logan immortality led also to his death.

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