The Nation That Chose the Americans

Of the Six Nations, only the Oneida broke openly with the others to support the American side in the Revolutionary War. Most Haudenosaunee nations either allied with the British Crown or attempted neutrality, but the Oneida, under the influence of the missionary Samuel Kirkland, who had lived among them since 1766 and whom George Washington later credited with an uncommon influence over them, declared support for the colonies and supplied both warriors and intelligence. Oneida fighters served alongside American forces beginning at the Battle of Oriskany in the Mohawk Valley in August 1777, and Oneida women and men are remembered in American accounts for bringing food to Washington's suffering army at Valley Forge that winter.

The choice split the Confederacy's usual unity at the Grand Council and made Oneida territory a target. Loyalist Haudenosaunee forces and their allies burned Oneida towns during the war, and Oneida communities suffered destruction from the same conflict in which they had chosen a side, a cost the historian Barbara Graymont's academic account of the Six Nations in the Revolution documents in detail. The alliance did not spare Oneida land afterward: within a few decades of the war's end, most of the original Oneida territory in New York had been sold or lost under state pressure, the same fate that met nations that had fought against the Americans, and Oneida communities are dispersed today across New York, Wisconsin and Ontario as a result.