The Battle of Oriskany and General Nicholas Herkimer: Revolution in the Mohawk Valley

By Paul A Boehlert

A gripping account of events before, during, and after this British defeat in New York’s Mohawk Valley, and the man who led the Continental army to victory.

During the critical Battle of Oriskany in August 1777, Continental forces led by General Nicholas Herkimer defeated the British army under St. Leger in the heart of New York’s Mohawk Valley. It was a hard-won victory, but he and his brave troops prevented the British from splitting the colonies in two.
 
Although they did not succeed in relieving the British siege of Fort Stanwix, Herkimer’s citizen-soldiers turned back the British and protected Washington’s northern flank from attack. The Continental army survived to fight the decisive Battle of Saratoga the next month. Herkimer was mortally wounded, but his heroism and leadership firmly placed him in the pantheon of Revolutionary War heroes. Paul Boehlert presents a gripping account of the events before, during and after this critical battle.
 
Includes photos and illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625847003

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book was begun, I suppose, when I was seven years old.

Outside the Dunham Public Library in my hometown of Whitesboro, New York, stands a granite marker about four feet tall. One morning on the way to school, I stopped and read the weathered bronze plaque on its face:

The Rear Guard of General Herkimer’s Army Encamped Along the Highway Near This Spot on August 5th, 1777, the Night Before the Battle of Oriskany.

There was a map, too, showing the Tryon County Militia’s line of march from the Herkimer Homestead in Little Falls to the battle site and on to its intended destination at Fort Stanwix in Rome. The little boy who stood reading this plaque hadn’t yet heard about the battle, but I knew that Oriskany was only a few miles up the road. My dad even worked there, at the county airport.

And whatever had happened up there was important enough that, way back in 1912, the Fort Schuyler Chapter of the Sons of the Revolution had caused a big block of granite to be carved, a plaque to be cast and bolted on and the finished marker placed next to the sidewalk. All this just so a seven-year-old boy could learn that part of an army had camped a few feet from what would someday be Mrs. Dunham’s house on Main Street. In later years, I would discover that my marker was just one of fourteen dotted all along the militia’s route. I hope many young girls and boys have read them in the century since they were placed and had their imaginations fired as mine was.

Route marker at Dunham Public Library, Whitesboro. Author photo.

Ever since then, I’ve had an abiding interest in the events of that miserably hot first week of August 1777. But beyond the ambush in the gloomy ravine and the shocking butcher’s bill the fighting produced on both sides, the salient feature of the Battle of Oriskany, for me, is the man whose name is cast so prominently on that weathered bronze plaque: General Nicholas Herkimer.

Herkimer was different in so many ways from other leading lights of the Revolution; he was no aristocratic intellectual like Thomas Jefferson or Dr. Joseph Warren, who once addressed a Boston meeting of the Sons of Liberty dressed in a Roman toga. He was neither a revolutionary firebrand like Samuel Adams nor a philosopher of law and government like Sam’s cousin John. He wasn’t of English descent and didn’t regard England as his mother country. In fact, in many ways, Herkimer and his family were more akin to the waves of European immigrants who would land at Ellis Island a century hence than to the Dutch patroons or English shopkeepers who were his contemporaries.

Yet when called upon, Herkimer mustered a few hundred men of the Tryon County Militia, half-trained citizen soldiers and his own neighbors, and led them in a desperate attempt to delay a superior enemy force that would have driven a wedge between New England and the rest of the colonies. Despite rashness and tactical errors on Herkimer’s part, his men and their Oneida allies fought the enemy to a standstill and halted his advance. In so doing, Herkimer himself gave the last, full measure, suffering a wound that would prove mortal a few days later.

What makes a man do these things? Why would a wealthy planter and trader of German descent who was not a professional soldier fight for the independence of his adopted land and the freedom of its people? It would have been so easy to regard the conflict between the colonies and Britain as someone else’s problem, yet he championed the Revolution and gave it everything he held precious, ultimately including his blood. What was it about America that made it worth Herkimer’s life?

Those are some of the questions this small book will attempt to address. The process of writing it has revealed Nicholas Herkimer as a complex and fascinating man—in some ways a product of his upbringing and times but in others a resolute individualist to whom we twenty-first-century Americans can relate.

For those of us who live in the Mohawk Valley and central New York, the events chronicled in this book recall a time when our region strode the world stage. George III of England read maps, issued orders and discussed strategy directly related to our valley. The battles at Oriskany and Stanwix, and the events that surrounded them, affected the course of a war and helped give birth to a new nation.

In a very real sense, the Mohawk Valley helped change the world. What I hope to do in the following pages is to paint a portrait of the valley in colonial times and show how Herkimer and his contemporaries—native, as well as those of European and African descent—fitted into the land and the times. There were giants in the earth in those days, each of whom will contribute his or her part to this story.

Learning Herkimer’s story isn’t easy. If this book contained only facts that could be firmly established, it would be a very short work indeed. The Battle of Oriskany is pretty well documented, but Herkimer’s personal life is lacking in detail and hard to substantiate. Little is known about him for certain. It’s not that he was a particularly secretive man, but there’s little written evidence either from Herkimer himself or in letters or documents about him. He had no Boswell chronicling his life and adventures, nor did the farmers in the militia apparently keep diaries of the events surrounding Oriskany.

Even in death, he remains shadowy and hard to pin down. The Herkimer Home family cemetery followed common German practice of the time and didn’t have tombstones, so historians can’t even say exactly where his remains are buried.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does literary narrative. In the absence of hard facts about Herkimer and the battle, much of what has come down to us is tradition, folklore or legend. Some of this material, based on oral narratives or documents written soon after the battle, can be regarded as fairly reliable. Other tales have the ring of legend about them.

Okay, no problem—I’m a storyteller. If stories are all we have, I’ll tell stories. No publisher’s blurb or review will ever use the phrases meticulously researched or 100 percent accurate when describing this book, unless they’re preceded by the words this book is not.

So in the following pages, you will read a number of anecdotes that are not firmly substantiated with factual evidence. They’re often the most colorful threads in the tapestry, and I’m grateful for the enormous vitality and life they bring to this work. But if a story is unsupported, I’ll at least try to include a phrase such as it is said that… or local tradition states… Conversely, if you read a simple unqualified statement like two barrels of oysters arrived at the Herkimer home on October 14, 1772, you’ll know that statement is backed up by hard evidence—in the case of this example, the household accounts.

Even in those parts of the story that are well documented, such as the battle itself, there are gaps between the events history records. To fill those gaps, and stitch the facts into a contiguous and readable narrative, I’ve added conjectural material here and there based on typical details and behavior of the time. In other words, I made some stuff up. Be gentle, then, as you read this, and think of it as history with the accent on story.

I hope that these facts and tales will give you who read this some context in which to view the social and economic climate of the Revolutionary-era colonies, the British and colonial military strategies that led to St. Leger’s march from Oswego and the string of small and improbable events that enabled seven hundred German farmers and sixty or so Oneida men and women to turn back an invading force three times their size—and very likely save the newborn nation.

But more important even than facts and stories are the people who lived, fought and died in the events chronicled in the following pages. In the course of writing this book, I’ve met descendants of Klocks and Deygerts and many more people, like myself, who are related to the makers of these events by love if not by blood. They make Herkimer and Oriskany real. It is for all of them that this book is written, in the hope that these great stories will once again come to life and fire the imaginations of little boys and girls. As Marjorie and C.H.B. Quennell state in the foreword to their Everyday Life in Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman Times, It will make our history more intimate; the people we read about are not pale ghosts, but our ancestors.

Central to all of these momentous events was an energetic, dark-haired man with a thick accent and a deep, quiet religious faith who apparently could never decide how his last name should be spelled. Intensely, vibrantly human, Nicholas Herkimer did great deeds when they were required of him and became a local hero in the finest sense of the word. Come and meet him.

Chapter 1

NICHOLAS HERKIMER, AMERICAN PATRIOT

He was born in the year 1728, some say in March, in the town of Danube on the banks of the Mohawk River in Governor Burnetsfield’s Patent, on the northwestern frontier of the colony of New York. His parents, Han Yost Herchkeimer and the former Catherine Petrie, owned two hundred acres of good farmland, which they were steadily clearing and making productive. Nicholas was their firstborn and the first in the family to be born in the New World; his parents had come to the American colonies as children eighteen years before, with some 2,800 other refugees from the Palatine district of southwestern Germany.

Although born in this country, Nicholas Herkimer in many ways was an archetypal immigrant. Throughout his life, he was far more comfortable speaking German than English, and he was ridiculed by his English neighbors for his foreign ways and thick accent. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of respect, he became an economic overachiever. His grandfather and father were penniless when they docked in New York, but by the end of the French and Indian War, Nicholas was so affluent that he built a fine brick Georgian mansion overlooking the river and had a set of dishes custom-made in China and shipped around the world to grace his dinner table.

He was a complex, paradoxical man as well: a quietly religious man who rowed across the river to church each Sunday and read his Bible aloud as he lay dying, but one who owned more than thirty slaves and regarded them like cattle; a tall, handsome, energetic man with a pretty eighteen-year-old second wife who fathered no children; a calm and even-tempered man who sent dozens of men to their deaths by losing his temper at a moment of crisis.

It may have been his father’s stories of the mistreatment given to the Palatines by the British that sparked in him a revolutionary attitude. Or it may just have been a wealthy man’s reluctance to pay ruinous taxes that inspired his support of the rebellion. But whatever the cause, Nicholas Herkimer’s life and legacy would come to be defined by the role he played in the fight for American independence. He led the local militia, his neighbors and friends, into a savage battle that had a decisive effect on the course of the Revolutionary War, and in the course of winning an improbable victory, he sustained a wound that would claim his life.

If we wish to understand this enigmatic man just a little, a good way to start is by understanding his origins. The Herkimer family’s journey, and that of all the other Palatines in America, began in the last years of the seventeenth century.

THE FLIGHT OF THE POOR PALATINES

Herkimer and his family probably would never have ended up in the American colonies had it not been for the plight of the Germans who lived in a region known as the Electorate of the Palatinate. Roughly centered on the city of Neustadt in southwestern Germany, the Palatinate had been a battleground during the War of Spanish Succession. French armies under Louis XIV, the Sun King, repeatedly invaded this part of Germany during the war, burning and pillaging. The main occupations of the area, farming, winegrowing and animal husbandry, were obliterated by the destruction the French left behind