(From the January/February 2002 Historical Society Newsletter)
American history is complex, and the ways we interpret it continue to evolve. As part of our yearlong celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we will be sharing local histories written by community members. While these materials reflect the times in which they were written, they remind us that how history is told is also part of history.
Sarah Bradford (1818-1913) lived in Geneva during the mid-19th century. After her husband’s death she ran a girls’ school out of her home and wrote several books. Today her best-known work is the autobiography of Harriet Tubman, who dictated the story of her life to Sarah Bradford in 1869.
Sarah Bradford was the first to write a history of the City of Geneva from its days as a Seneca village to “modern” times. Her history was published in the 1862 Geneva Directory. While not comprehensive, Sarah Bradford’s history is one of the earliest accounts of the founding of Geneva. The excerpt below is her account of Geneva’s first inhabitants and their extirpation from the area in Sullivan-Clinton’s Campaign. Over the course of the year, more selections from Sarah Bradford’s history will follow.
Note about contemporary interpretation of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign: The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, or Genocide, of 1779 was an American military offensive against the British and Haudenosaunee during the Revolutionary War. Planned by George Washington, with the financial backing of the American government, the campaign was intended to entirely eradicate the Haudenosaunee in the northeast through property and food destruction. The main goal was to acquire more land.
Many Indigenous villages were empty, including Kanadesaga (near present-day Geneva), when the army came through. The noise of the soldiers could be heard from miles away and gave ample notice for the residents to leave. Some groups fought, but Native American use and awareness of land usually allowed them to avoid direct conflict with the troops.
No official number of casualties is known, but scholarship estimates between 473 and 580 Haudenosaunee died during the campaign. The thousands displaced arrived at Fort Niagara in late September.
The year 1862 opens upon the village of Geneva, and sees it a flourishing place of between six and seven thousand inhabitants, with its many churches, its college and schools; its beautiful and busy streets and fine dwellings and surrounded by highly cultivated farms, and elegant dwellings, and surrounded by highly cultivated farms and elegant mansions. The whistle of the engine, or the propeller, announces many times a day, that the means of transportation to all points of the compass are at hand. The smoke of the mill, and the whirr of machinery, assure us that here the agent steam is at work in another direction while the magic wires which thread the land in its length and breadth, convey the subtle fluid which has become the slave of man, and by whose agency we are able to converse with friends thousands of miles away, as rapidly as if they were sitting by our side.
Let us close our eyes to all this evidence of the ingenuity and labor of man, and by the aid of imagination transport ourselves to a period a century back and fancy the scene which would present itself to our eyes upon this very spot, if they were suddenly to happen upon it.
The wilderness is around us, undisturbed by the hand of man.
The Aborigines are the sole possessors of the region…Here near the shores of the lovely Kandadesaga (beautiful water) with their unusual appreciation of all that is charming in nature, they have built one of their castles (fort) and established one of their villages…
The Revolutionary was broke out, and with few exceptions, the Six Nations took part with Great Britain in the struggle. From the British on the frontier, they could easily obtain supplies of blankets, rum, and her imported articles, and thus interest bound them to the British cause. Many of the Tories who had been compelled to fly from settled parts of the United States, took refuge among these Indians, adding to their strength, without diminishing their ferocity. They lived with the Indians in their villages and joined them in their terribly sanguinary and cruel expeditions against the Americans.
These border wars, in which British agents, adopting the savage mode of warfare, assisted with tomahawk, and scalping-knife continued from the year 1775 till 1779, the stealthy foe making descents by land and water, through unguarded avenues, upon defenseless settlements, accomplishing their work of death and then retreating to their strongholds at Oswego or Niagara…
But a terrible retribution awaited the Indian tribes, and before long it burst most suddenly and furiously upon them. In the year 1779, it was determined by Gen. Washington, that to put a stop to the incursions of these ruthless invaders, it was necessary that they should be crushed and that in order to do this, the war must be carried into their own region; that the Indians must be killed, captured, or driven out and, if possible, Fort Niagara must be taken.
The command of the expedition was entrusted to Gen. Sullivan and the story of the desolating march of his army through this fair and lovely region, still makes the blood curdle. Coming up through Pennsylvania, they struck the Kanadesaga at Catherine’s Town (now Watkins) and passing down the eastern shore of the lake, they came round to Kanadesage (or Geneva)… on to Canandaigua, and the Indian towns west of it. Everywhere as they march, leveling orchards, burning villages and corn-fields, killing, capturing and leaving in their track only blight and ruin. Ah, then the shores of this lovely lake echoed with the cries of the hunted and terrified fugitives, whose blood was destined to mingle with its waters, while the smoke of their burning homes ascended and the glare of the flames lighted up the horror of the scene. Before the tide of desolation, fled all who could make their escape, and the Indians never again had any permanent occupancy of the villages east of the Genesee River.
Historians attempt excuses for this deed of cruel retaliation and Gen. Washington himself justifies it a an act of absolute necessity; but to these far-removed times, it seems very like a piece of vandalism, and as if the object to be accomplished was accompanied by a cruelty and vengeance, unbecoming the approval of the mild and humane Father of his Country. The writer herself remembers the mingled curiosity and horror with which she looked upon the snowshoes, which had upborne the feet of those who wept in this desolating march. Great numbers of these were left in a barn on the farm of the venerable Major Reese, a sudden thaw probably having made it necessary to cast them at this spot.
From about out 250th commemoration activities, visit our calendar of events and current exhibits page.
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Sarah Bradford’s History of Geneva, Part 2
Sarah Bradford’s History of Geneva, Part 3
Sarah Bradford’s History of Geneva, Part 4