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Notes and Documents
Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence
Rob Harper
| IN the summer of 1781, Wyandot Indians at war with the United States learned that the Moravian missionaries of eastern Ohio were secretly aiding the Continental army. In retaliation the Wyandot forcibly removed the ministers and their Indian converts from their Muskingum Valley villages to Upper Sandusky, several days' journey to the west. The following winter many of the Moravian Indians returned home to salvage corn they had left unharvested during their involuntary evacuation. Simultaneously, Wyandot and Shawnee warriors renewed their assault on the upper Ohio Valley's white settlements, killing a few colonists and capturing several more. Rumors circulated among settlers that the raiders had launched their attacks from the Muskingum missions. In early March 1782, roughly 160 soldiers of the western Pennsylvania militia, led by David Williamson, set out to investigate. On arriving at the mission town of Gnadenhutten, the militia found the Moravian corn gatherers. The Pennsylvanians initially offered the Indians safe passage to Fort Pitt but then accused them of aiding enemy war parties and condemned them to death. Using a Moravian Indian's cooper's mallet, the militia killed nearly one hundred unarmed captives, including more than thirty children, "while they were praying, singing, and kissing."1 They then plundered and burned the town. They never faced any punishment for their actions. |
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The Gnadenhutten massacre illustrates a common pattern of frontier violence. During the last half of the eighteenth century, white settlers repeatedly retaliated for enemy Indian attacks by killing neutral or allied Indians. This series of murders, among which Gnadenhutten stood out only for the number and religion of the victims, reshaped the trans-Appalachian West, dooming attempts at intercultural accommodation and setting the stage for ongoing war and Indian removal. |
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Most explanations of these events share a heavy emphasis on motive, usually attributing them to a deep and abiding hatred of Indians that permeated the colonial backcountry. This focus, however, yields at best a partial and often distorted understanding of how such atrocities came about. In particular the prevailing concern with why murderers chose to kill has precluded close study of the circumstances that made this choice possible. Reassessing the Gnadenhutten massacre illustrates the inadequacy of motive-centered interpretations and offers a model for more contextually grounded studies of violence. |
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The motive-centered approach to anti-Indian atrocities has survived several major historiographical shifts. Through the 1960s most studies treated such violence as "a dark, unhappy, distasteful side" of national expansion that reflected the harshness of frontier existence rather than the nature of colonial society as a whole. In the 1970s and 1980s, revisionist scholars argued instead that violence against Indians lay at the heart of Anglo-American identity and culture. Beginning in the 1990s, a new wave of studies sought to explain how earlier patterns of intercultural accommodation gave way to hatred, bloodshed, and dispossession. During the last decade, such postrevisionist historians have explored the development and articulation of anti-Indian ideologies in increasingly nuanced and sophisticated ways.2 Despite their sharp interpretive differences, these literatures all focus their assessment of anti-Indian violence on the perpetrators' presumed motives, asking what fostered Indian hating, how prevalent it was, and how it fitted into the larger story of American expansion. Each generation has offered new answers, but the conversation has rarely strayed far beyond this common set of questions. Most studies implicitly assume that motive constituted a sufficient condition for murder, obviating any further study of causation. The scholarly literature on anti-Indian violence, therefore, remains largely a literature on Indian hating, obscuring rather than explaining the social and political context in which these atrocities took place. |
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