I tracked the direct connection between the Mohawks and the Irish Republic. It's a pretty interesting story.


(Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 1797)

Lord Edward Fitzgerald was an officer in the British Military. He'd been wounded in the American revolution, fighting for the crown.

He later came back to the Americas, and was involved in some diplomacy with the Mohawks.


(Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), 1786)

He became friends with Joseph Brant, renowned Mohawk war leader--who had managed to carve a Six Nations homeland in Canada after the American Revolutionary War. So, while they were being buddies--they must have discussed politics. Fitzgerald also attended an "indian council", with some 200 "chiefs" present, plus clan mothers. If I can give you a modern analog... that would be like if you took a U.S. Army officer occupying Iraq and then dropped him into a Zapatista Encuentro. Or took the same soldier in Afghanistan and had him spend months with RAWA.

Fitzgerald travels with one of the other Mohawks, Captain David Hill (Hill and Brant were quite fluent in English). When the trip came to Detroit, Hill has Fitzgerald adopted into the Bear clan.


(Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye (Captain David Hill), 1776)

(Capt. David Hill was part of a group of Mohawks from the Ft. Hunter area. He was one of Brants' Captains and was active in the Valley throughout the war. The Ft. Hunter Mohawks had moved to Carlton Is. to escape the rebel abuse in the Valley.
84th RoF Royal Highland Emigrants: A Brief History)

If you've read my article, you know what a big deal that is to get adopted like that.

Fitzgerald goes back to Ireland. Only three years later, Fitzgerald is visiting Paris and bunking with Thomas Paine. Keep in mind, in Fitzgerald first time in the Americas, before the Mohawks... he was fighting the likes of Paine. Fitzgerald marries a Frenchwoman, goes back Ireland.

Where, while in the Irish Parliament, promptly gets himself arrested for violently denouncing the government. He then abandons constitutional reform, joins the United Irishmen to agitate for an independent non-sectarian (read secular) Irish republic
He has the reputation of being a leveller.

He leads the Irish Rebellion of 1789. 15,000-30,000 united irishmen die in the Rebellion, including Fitzgerald. That is, Fitzgerald leads a rebellion against England, only 9 years after he was adopted as a Mohawk.

---

"In May, 1785, Miss Powell, probably a sister of of Captain Powell before mentioned, visited an Indian council on Buffalo creek, and has left an interesting description... She was accompanied by Mrs. Powell (Jane Moore), and several British officers. One of her companions, (who had also been an officer, though perhaps he was not then one,) was a young Irish nobleman whose name was soon to be raised to a mournful prominence, and whose fruitless valor and tragic fate are still the theme of ballad and story among the people of his native land. This was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who manifested a great fondness for visiting among the Indians, and who found an especial charm in the society of Brant."

"She declares there were two hundred chiefs present as delegates of the Six Nations, which, as there were not over two thousand warriors in all, was a very liberal allowance of officers."

"The chiefs of each tribe formed a circle in the shade of a tree, while their appointed speaker stood with his back against it. Then the old women came, one by one, with great solemnity and seated themselves behind the men. Miss Powell noted, with evident approval, that "on the banks of Lake Erie a woman becomes respectable as she grows old;" and added that, though the ladies kept silent, nothing was decided without their approbation."

Conflicting Claims of Massachusetts and New York, page 58

...

"Now and then some fair English maiden has been so smitten with the appearance of a native American warrior as to become his bride, and make her residence within his wigwam. Miss Powell, however, was not quite so much charmed by Captain David as that, since she returned to Fort Erie that evening on her way to Detroit, leaving Edward Fitzgerald and others to be entertained that night by the dancing of their dusky friends."

Conflicting Claims of Massachusetts and New York, page 59

Excerpts from "The life and death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald"

"Frederick's Town, New Brunswick,
Sept. 2d, 1788.

" DEAREST, DEAREST MOTHER,


"There

1788. LOUD EDWAUD FITZGERALD. 91

is something in a wild country very enticing ; taking its inhabitants, too, and their man-
ners into the bargain.

"I know Ogilvie says I ought to have been a savage, and if it were not that the people I love and wish to live with are civilized people, and like houses, &c., &c., I really would join the savages ; and, leaving all our fictitious, ridiculous wants, be what nature intended we should be. Savages have all the real happiness of life, without any of those inconveniences, or ridiculous obstacles to it, which custom has introduced among us. They enjoy the love and company of their wives, relations, and friends, without any interference of interests or ambition to separate them. To bring things home to oneself, if we had been Indians, instead of its being my duty to be separated from all of you, it would, on the contrary, be my duty to be with you, to make you comfortable, and to hunt and fish for you: instead of Lord * *'s being violent against letting me marry G * *, he would be glad to give her to me, that I might maintain and feed her. There would be then no cases of looking forward to the fortune


92 MEMOIRS OF 1788.

for children, of thinking how you are to live : no separations in families, one in Ireland, one in England : no devilish politics, no fashions, customs, duties, or appearances to the world, to interfere with one's happiness. Instead of being served and supported by servants, every thing here is done by one's relations by the people one loves; and the mutual obligations you must be under increase your love for each other. To be sure, the poor ladies are obliged to cut a little wood and bring a little water. Now the dear Ciss and Mimi, instead of being with Mrs. Lynch, would be carrying wood and fetching water, while ladies Lucy and Sophia were cooking or drying fish. As for you, dear mother, you would be smoking your pipe. Ogilvie arid us boys, after having brought in our game, would be lying about the fire, while our squaws were helping the ladies to cook, or taking care of our papouses: all this in a fine wood, beside
some beautiful lake, which when you were tired of, you would in ten minutes, without any baggage, get into your canoes and off with you elsewhere.

...

"though it is a mistake to refer so far back the origin of his republican notions, yet that to America, on this, his second,

1788. LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 97

visit to her shores, and through a very different channel both of reasoning and of feeling, he may have probably owed the first instilment of those principles into his mind, every reader, I think, of the foregoing letter will be inclined to allow. It is true, the natural simplicity and independence of his character, which led him habitually, and without effort, to forget the noble in the man, was in itself sufficient to incline him towards those equalizing doctrines which teach that

"Where there is no difference in men's worths, Titles are jests."

In the small sphere, too, of party politics to which his speculations had been hitherto bounded, the line taken by him had been, as we have seen, in conformity with the popular principles of his family, and on the few occasions that called for their assertion, had been honourably and consistently followed. But farther or deeper than this he had not taxed his boyish thoughts to go ; and what with his military pursuits, while abroad, and the course of gaiety and domestic enjoyments that awaited him at home, he could have but

VOL. i. H

98 MEMOIRS OF 1788.

little leisure to turn his mind to any other forms or relations of society than those in which he was always, so agreeably to himself and others, engaged.

At the time, however, which we are now employed in considering, a great change had taken place in the complexion of his life.

Disappointment in what, to youth, is every thing the first strong affection of the heart, had given a check to that flow of spirits which had before borne him so buoyantly along ; while his abstraction from society left him more leisure to look inquiringly into his own mind, and there gather those thoughts that are ever the fruit of long solitude and sadness. The repulse which his suit had met with from the father of his fair relative had, for its chief grounds, he knew, he inadequacy of his own means and prospects to the support of a wife and family in that style of elegant competence to which the station of the young lady herself had hitherto accustomed her; and the view, therefore, he had been disposed naturally to take of the pomps and luxuries of high life, as standing in the way of all simple and real happiness, was thus but too pain-

1788. LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 99

fully borne out by his own bitter experience of their influence.

In this temper of mind it was that he now came to the contemplation of a state of society (as far as it can deserve to be so called) entirely new to him ; where nature had retained in her own hands not only the soil, but the inhabitants, and civilization had not yet exacted those sacrifices of natural equality and freedom by which her blessings are, in not a few respects, perhaps, dearly, purchased. Instead of those gradations of rank, those artificial privileges,
which, as one of the means of subduing the strong to the weak, have been established, in some shape or other, in all civilized communities, he observed here no other distinction between man and man than such as nature herself, by the different apportionment of her own gifts, had marked out, by a disparity either in mental capacity, or in those powers of agility and strength, which, where every man must depend mainly on himself, and so little is left conventional or uncontested, are the endowments most necessary. To these physical requisites, too,
Lord Edward, as well from his own peril
2

100 MEMOIRS OF 1788.

sonal activity, as from the military notions he in general mixed up with his views of human affairs, was inclined to attach high value.

In like manner, from the total absence, in this state of existence, of those factitious and
imaginary wants which the progress of a people to refinement, at every step, engenders, he saw that not only was content more easy of attainment, but that even happiness itself, from the fewness of the ingredients necessary to it, was a far less rare compound. The natural affections, under the guidance less of reason than of instinct, were, from that very cause, perhaps, the more strong and steady in their impulses : mutual dependence kept the members of a family united ; nor were there any of those calls and attractions out of the circle of home,
which in civilized life so early strip it of its young props and ornaments, leaving the paternal hearth desolate.

With a yet deeper interest was it, as bearing upon his own peculiar fate, that he had observed among those simple, and, as he thought, happy people, that by no false ambition or conventional wants were the

1788. LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 101

warm, natural dictates of affection frustrated, nor the hopes and happiness of the young made a sacrifice to the calculations of the old.

The conclusion drawn by Lord Edward, in favour of savage life, from the premises thus, half truly, half fancifully, assumed by him, much of the colouring which he gave to the picture being itself borrowed from civilization, had been already, it is well known, arrived at, through all the mazes of ingenious reasoning, by Rousseau ; and it is riot a little curious to observe how to the very same paradox which the philosopher adopted in the mere spirit of defiance and vanity, a heart overflowing with affection and disappointment conducted the young lover.

Nor is Rousseau the only authority by which Lord Edward is kept in countenance in this opinion*. From a far graver and more authentic source we find the same startling notion promulgated. The

* See also Voltaire's comparison between the boors (whom he accounts the real savages) of civilized Europe and the miscalled savages of the woods of America. Essai sur les Mceurs.

102 MEMOIRS OF 1788.

philosopher and statesman, Jefferson, who, from being brought up in the neighbourhood of Indian communities, had the best means of forming an acquaintance with the interior of savage life, declares himself convinced "that such societies (as the Indians) which live without government, enjoy, in their general mass, an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments ;" and, in another place, after discussing the merits of various
forms of polity, he does not hesitate to pronounce that it is a problem not clear in his mind that the condition of the Indians, without any government, is not yet the best of all.

Thus, where the American President ended his course of political speculation, Lord Edward began, adopting his opinions, not, like Jefferson, after long and fastidious inquiry, but through the medium of a susceptible and wounded heart, nor having a thought of applying the principle of equality implied in them to any other relations or institutions of society than those in which his feelings were, at the moment, interested. This romance, indeed, of savage happiness was, in

1788. LORD P:DWARD FITZGERALD. 103

him, but one of the various forms which the passion now predominant over all his thoughts assumed. But the principle, thus admitted, retained its footing in his mind after the reveries through which it had first found its way thither had vanished ; and though it was some time before politics, beyond the range, at least, of mere party tactics, began to claim his attention, all he had meditated and felt among the solitudes of Nova Scotia could not fail to render his mind a more ready recipient for such doctrines as he found prevalent on his return to Europe; doctrines which, in their pure and genuine form, contained all the spirit, without the extravagance, of his own solitary dreams, and, while they would leave Man in full possession of those blessings of civilization he had acquired, but sought to restore to him some of those natural rights of equality and freedom which he had lost...

" Fort Erie, June 1, 1789.

" DEAREST MOTHER,

"I am just come from the Falls of Niagara...

"I set out to-morrow for Detroit : I go with one of the Indian chiefs, Joseph Brant, he that was in England. We have taken very much to one another. I shall entertain you very much with his remarks on England, and the English, while he was there. Instead of crossing Lake Erie in a ship, I go in canoes up and down rivers. In crossing Lake Ontario, I was as sick as at sea, so you may guess, I prefer canoeing ; besides, my friend Joseph always travels with company ; and we shall go through a number of Indian villages. If you only stop an hour, they have a dance for you. They are delightful people ; the ladies charming, and with manners that I like very much, they are so natural. Not-withstanding the life they lead, which would make most women rough and masculine, they are as soft, meek, and modest as the best brought up girls in England. At the same time, they are coquettes as possible. Conceive the manners of Mimi in a poor squaw, that has been carrying packs in the woods all her life.

"I must make haste and finish my letter, for I am just going to set off. I shall be at Michilimackinack in nineteen days. My journey then will be soon over, for from that I shall soon reach the Missisippi, and down it to New Orleans, and then to my dearest mother to Frescati, to relate all my journey in the little book-room. I shall then be happy. Give my love to all. I think often of you all in these wild woods : they are better than rooms. Ireland and England will be too little for me when I go home. If I could carry my dearest mother about with me, I should be completely happy here."

VOL. I. L
146 MEMOIRS OF 1789.

"Detroit, June 20.

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"It is so hot I can hardly hold the pen. My hand trembles so, you will be hardly

1789. LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 147

able to read my letter. My journey quite answered my expectations. I set out tomorrow for Michilimackinack, and then down the Missisippi. I am in rude health. As soon as I get to the Missisippi I reckon my journey half over. I can say no more, for really it is too hot for any thing but lying on a mat. Kntre nous, I am in a little sorrow, as I am to part tomorrow with a fellow-traveller who has been very pleasant and taken great care of me : les plus courtes folies sont les meilleures. I have been adopted by one of the Nations, and am now a thorough Indian."

His adoption by the native Indians, which he here mentions, took place at Detroit, through the medium of the Chief of the Six Nations, David Hill, by whom he was formally inducted into the Bear Tribe, and made one of their Chiefs. The document by which this wild honour was conferred upon him has been preserved among his papers, and is, in Indian and English, as follows :

L 2

148 MEMOIRS OF 1789.

"David Hill's letter to Lord Edward Fitz-
gerald, Chief of the Bear Tribe.

"Waghgongh Sen non Pryer
Ne nen Seghyrage ni i
Ye Sayats Eghnidal

Ethonayyere David Hill

Karonghyontye

lyogh Saghnontyon

21 June, 1789.

" /, David Hill t Chief of the Six Nations,
give the name of Eghnidal to my friend
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, for which I hope
he will remember me as long as he lives.

" The name belongs to the Bear Tribe' 9


The life and death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald


"Captain David Hill's letter purports to be in the Mohawk, but the orthography as given by Moore is very erroneous. According to O. H. Marshall, who commented on this letter, "Karong hyontye" is the Indian name of Captain David. "Tyogh Saghnontyon" is the name of Detroit, where the letter was written.

...

"Lord Edward Fitzgerald has been some months at Niagara before us, and was making excursions among the Indians, of whose society he seemed particularly fond. Joseph Brant, a celebrated Indian chief, lives in that neighborhood. Lord Edward has spent some days at his house, and seemed charmed with his visit. Brant returned to Niagara with his Lordship. He was the first, and indeed the only savage I ever dined at table with."

"As the party was large, he was at too great a distance from me to hear him converse, and I was by no means pleased with his looks. These people pay great deference to rank; with them it is only obtained by merit. They attended Lord Edward from the house of one Chief to another, and entertained him with dancing, which is the greatest compliment they can pay."...

"On seeing this respectable band of matrons I was struck with the different opinions of making. In England when a man grows infirm and his talents are obscured by age, the wits decide upon his character by calling him an old woman. On the banks of Lake Erie a woman becomes respectable as she grows old, and I suppose the greatest compliment you can pay a young hero, is that he is as wise as an old woman, a good trait of savage understanding. These ladies preserve a modest silence in the debates (I fear they are not like women of other countries) but nothing is determined without their advice and approbation."

...


"We only staid to hear two speeches; they spoke with great gravity and no action, frequently making long pauses for a hum of applause. Lord Edward and Mr. Brisbane remained with them all night, and were entertained with dancing.

...

"Lord Edward and his friend arrived just time enough to join us; they went round the Lake by land, to see some Indian settlements, and were highly pleased with their jaunt. Lord Edward speaks in raptures of the Indian hospitality; he told me one instance of it, which would reflect honor on the most polished society. By some means or other, the gentlemen lost their provisions, and were entirely without bread in a place where they could get none; some Indians traveling with them, had one loaf, which they offered to his Lordship, but he would not accept it; the Indians gave him to understand they were used to do without and therefore it was less inconvenient to them; they still refused, and the Indians then disappeared, and left the loaf of bread in the road the travelers must pass, and the Indians were seen no more."

"David Hill, one of the chiefs of the Six Nations, is referred to in Stone's "Life of Red Jacket," 1st ed., p. 95. Miss Powell is in error in writing that Lord Edward "had been some months at Niagara" before she arrived. His letters show that he was there in May; "some weeks" was perhaps meant.

"Lord Edward finished his journey, returning to Ireland by way of New Orleans, much as planned."


BUFFALO

Historical Society Publications

VOLUME FIFTEEN

Edited By Fbank H. Severance

t «nb

STUDIES OF
THE NIAGARA FRONTIER

By FRANK H. SEVERANCE

BUFFALO. NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY THE

BUFFALO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
1911

"Two Early Vistors"

Studies of the Niagara Frontier: Two Early Visitors