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Notes and Documents
From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap
Robert G. Parkinson
| THE graveyard at Trinity Church is a veritable who's who of eighteenth-century American heroes. At the corner of Broadway and Wall streets in Manhattan, Trinity Churchyard was the burial ground for many of early America's famous politicians, generals, inventors, and magnates. The gravestones of John Peter Zenger, Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Horatio Gates, Robert Fulton, and John Jacob Astor litter this urban cemetery now dwarfed by New York's skyscrapers. In the shadow of these giants lies another grave, that of Michael Cresap, a militia captain from western Maryland who died in New York in October 1775. Cresap was an unusual figure to be buried with full military honors in one of the most prestigious colonial burial grounds: his notoriety came from his expertise in killing Indians, especially for murdering the family of Mingo Indian Chief Logan in the Ohio valley the summer before. How, then, did the man whom Thomas Jefferson labeled a "man infamous for the many murders he has committed" on the frontier get to Trinity?1 |
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The answer lies in the particular needs of the revolutionary project itself. As colonial rebels watched by the candid world, Whig leaders had to initiate and shape interpretations that explained what they were doing and, ultimately, who they were, a process that largely took place in the press.2 During the first months of the Revolutionary War, the life and death of Cresap became the subject of one of those interpretations. Though he was condemned as a brutal murderer only months before, the new revolutionary context transformed the terms in which Cresap's behavior was portrayed. As colonists read report after report in their newspapers about British attempts to enlist the Indians in the summer and fall of 1775, the press also cast Cresap in a different light. The alleged killer of several innocent Indians now embodied perfectly the immediate needs of the war. Though he had never fired a shot, Cresap's actions in 1775 supplied the patriots with a symbol that encapsulated many of the messages they wanted to publicize: that the rebellion needed west as well as east, that the army needed the expertise of the noble-savage—like frontier riflemen, and that the rebellion needed patriotic soldiers who would enthusiastically defend American rights from all who challenged them, whether Briton or Indian. Newspapers throughout the colonies helped broadcast the image of Cresap as a quintessential American, and the notorious Indian killer became one of the war's first icons. |
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The ways in which New Yorkers welcomed Cresap to the Manhattan churchyard, the language used to mourn his death, and the sheer amount of press his funeral received reveal the larger process of nation-making and identity formation at work. The revolutionary transformation of Cresap's reputation illustrates not only the difficult contortions Whig leaders performed to promote the common cause and create a people but also the legacies of that process. As the patriots printed stories that defined themselves, they drew distinctions between Britain and the colonies and also began to draw important and durable lines between friend and enemy, citizen and savage, American and Indian.
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| Michael Cresap killed Indians. This is just about all anyone outside the frontier knew about the Maryland settler prior to the Revolution. By the age of twenty-one, Cresap had already surfaced in the Philadelphia newspapers for this avocation, responding to raids known collectively as Pontiac's Rebellion. After the Treaty of Paris, Cresap pushed further west from Frederick, Maryland. Ignoring the king's Proclamation of 1763, he set up an unsuccessful store near Redstone Creek, a tributary of the Monongahela River. By 1773, Cresap had relocated to lands below Wheeling, in present-day West Virginia. Soon, however, he would find himself embroiled in a contest between several rival groups fighting for land in the Ohio valley.3 |
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