Crawford expedition
The Crawford expedition, also known as the Battle of Sandusky, the Sandusky expedition and Crawford's Defeat, was a 1782 campaign on the western front of the American Revolutionary War, and one of the final operations of the conflict. The campaign was led by Colonel William Crawford, an experienced officer who had served in the Continental Army and a childhood friend of George Washington. Crawford's goal was to destroy enemy Native American towns along the Sandusky River in the Ohio Country, with the hope of ending Native attacks on American settlers. The expedition was one in a series of raids against enemy settlements that both sides had conducted throughout the war.
In late May 1782, Crawford led about 500 volunteer militiamen, mostly from Pennsylvania, deep into Native American territory, with the intention of surprising the Natives. The Indigenous groups and their British allies from Detroit learned of the expedition and gathered a force to oppose the Americans. A day of indecisive fighting took place near the Sandusky towns on June 4, with the Americans taking refuge in a grove that came to be known as "Battle Island." Native and British reinforcements arrived the following day. The Americans, finding themselves surrounded, retreated that night. The retreat became disorganized, with Crawford becoming separated from most of his men. As the retreat became a rout, another skirmish was fought on June 6. Most of the Americans managed to find their way back to Pennsylvania. Around 70 Americans were killed in both the fighting and subsequent executions; Native and British losses were minimal.
During the retreat, Crawford and an unknown number of his men were captured. The Indigenous combatants executed many of these captives in retaliation for the Gnadenhütten massacre that occurred earlier in the year, in which about 100 peaceful Indigenous people were murdered by Pennsylvanian militiamen. Crawford and surgeon Dr. John Knight were personally invited into the Delaware Nation village of Wingenim by the Native chiefs under the guidance of woodsman Simon Girty, a former Loyalist. As they sat, Crawford and Knight noticed the severed head of an American officer, Lt. John McClelland, which tribal members were kicking around as a ball for entertainment.
The two men were led by Girty to the tribal fire, where Crawford "was stripped naked, ordered to sit down by the fire and then beaten." At the chiefs' direction, Crawford was held down while his ears were cut off. In Knight's first-hand sworn testimony, Crawford pleaded with Girty to shoot him, to which the man "laughed heartily, and by all his gestures seemed delighted at the horrid scene." Crawford's subsequent execution was particularly brutal: he was tortured for at least two hours before being burned at the stake. His execution was widely publicized in the United States, worsening the already-strained relationship between Indigenous groups and Americans.
Background
When the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Ohio River marked a tenuous border between the American colonies and the Natives of the Ohio Country. Ohio Natives—Shawnees, Mingos, Lenapes, and Wyandots—were divided over how to respond to the war. Some Native leaders urged neutrality, while others entered the war because they saw it as an opportunity to halt the expansion of the American colonies and to regain lands previously lost to the colonists.The border war escalated in 1777 after British officials in Detroit began recruiting and arming Native war parties to raid undefended frontier American settlements. An unknown number of American settlers in present Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania were killed in these raids. The intensity of the conflict increased in November 1777, after American militiamen murdered Cornstalk, the leading advocate of Shawnee neutrality. Despite the violence, many Ohio Natives still hoped to stay out of the war, which proved difficult because they were located directly between the British in Detroit and the Americans along the Ohio River.
In February 1778, the Americans launched their first expedition into the Ohio Country in an attempt to neutralize British activity in the region. General Edward Hand led 500 Pennsylvania militiamen on a surprise winter march from Fort Pitt towards the Cuyahoga River, where the British stored military supplies that were distributed to Native raiding parties. Adverse weather conditions prevented the expedition from reaching its objective. On the return march, some of Hand's men attacked peaceful Lenapes, killing one man and a few women and children, including relatives of the Lenape chief Captain Pipe. Because only non-combatants had been killed, the expedition became derisively known as the "squaw campaign".
Despite the attack on his family, Captain Pipe said that he would not seek vengeance. Instead, in September 1778, he was one of the signers of the Treaty of Fort Pitt between the Lenapes and the United States. Americans hoped this agreement would enable American soldiers to pass through Lenape territory and attack Detroit, but the alliance deteriorated after the death of White Eyes, the Lenape chief who had negotiated the treaty. Eventually, Captain Pipe turned against the Americans and moved his followers west to the Sandusky River, where he received support from the British in Detroit.
Over the next several years, Americans and Natives launched raids against each other, usually targeting settlements. In 1780, hundreds of Kentucky settlers were killed or captured in a British-Native expedition into Kentucky. George Rogers Clark of Virginia responded in August 1780 by leading an expedition that destroyed two Shawnee towns along the Mad River, but did little damage to the Native war effort. As most of the Lenapes had by then become pro-British, American Colonel Daniel Brodhead led an expedition into the Ohio Country in April 1781 and destroyed the Lenape town of Coshocton. Clark then recruited men for an expedition against Detroit in the summer of 1781, but Natives decisively defeated one hundred of his men along the Ohio River, effectively ending his campaign. Survivors fled to the militant towns on the Sandusky River.
Several villages of Christian Lenapes lay between the combatants on the Sandusky River and the Americans at Fort Pitt. The villages were administered by the Moravian missionaries David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder. Although pacifists, the missionaries favored the American cause and kept American officials at Fort Pitt informed about hostile British and Native activity. In September 1781, to prevent further communication between the missionaries and the American military, hostile Wyandots and Lenapes from Sandusky forcibly removed the missionaries and their converts to a new village on the Sandusky River.
In March 1782, nearly 200 Pennsylvania militiamen under Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson rode into the Ohio Country, hoping to rescue American captives and find the warriors who were responsible for raids against Pennsylvania settlers. Enraged by the gruesome murder by Natives of a white woman and her baby, Williamson's men detained about 100 Christian Lenapes at the village of Gnadenhütten. The Christian Lenapes had returned to Gnadenhütten from Captive Town to harvest the crops they had been forced to leave behind. Accusing the Christian Natives of having aided hostile raiding parties, the Pennsylvanians beat them to death and left the bodies to rot. The Gnadenhütten massacre, as it came to be called, would have serious repercussions for the next American expedition into the Ohio Country. When George Washington learned of the Gnadenhütten massacre, he warned soldiers not to let themselves be taken alive by Natives, but by that time the Sandusky expedition had already begun.
Planning the expedition
In September 1781, General William Irvine was appointed commander of the Western Department of the Continental Army, which was headquartered at Fort Pitt. Although a major British army under Lord Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, virtually ending the war in the east, the conflict on the western frontier continued. Irvine received word that Americans living on the frontier wanted a military expedition against Detroit to end ongoing British support for the American Indian war parties. Irvine investigated, then wrote to Washington on December 2, 1781:It is, I believe, universally agreed that the only way to keep Indians from harassing the country is to visit them. But we find, by experience, that burning their empty towns has not the desired effect. They can soon build others. They must be followed up and beaten, or the British, whom they draw their support from, totally driven out of their country. I believe if Detroit was demolished, it would be a good step toward giving some, at least, temporary ease to this country.
Washington agreed with Irvine's assessment that Detroit had to be captured or destroyed to end the war in the west. In February 1782, Irvine followed up by sending Washington a detailed plan for an offensive. Irvine estimated that with 2,000 men, five cannons, and a supply caravan, he could capture Detroit. Unfortunately, Washington's reply was that the bankrupt U.S. Congress would be unable to finance the campaign, writing that "offensive operations, except upon a small scale, can not just now be brought into contemplation."
All Irvine could do was grant permission for volunteers to organize their own offensive. Detroit was too distant and too strong for a small-scale operation, but local militia commanders such as Williamson believed that an expedition against the American Indian towns on the Sandusky River was feasible. To reduce expenses, each volunteer would have to procure his own horse, rifle, ammunition, rations, and other equipment. Their only payment would be an exemption from two months of militia duty once the campaign was finished, plus whatever plunder might be taken from the Natives. Because of ongoing Native raids — the wife and children of a Baptist minister were killed and scalped in western Pennsylvania on May 12, 1782 — there was no shortage of men willing to volunteer.
Irvine did not seek command of the expedition himself out of concern that doing so as a uniformed Continental soldier would be considered illegal, but he worked to influence the planning of the campaign. Irvine wrote detailed instructions for commander of the volunteers:
The object of your command is, to destroy with fire and sword the Indian town and settlement at Sandusky, by which we hope to give ease and safety to the inhabitants of this country; but, if impracticable, then you will doubtless perform such other services in your power as will, in their consequences, have a tendency to answer this great end.