5.2: New York, Cradle of Empire
Supplement to Endnotes
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More than four decades before George Cole’s birth in the Finger Lakes region, revolutionary soldiers marched there to exterminate the Iroquois who had committed atrocities against white patriot settlements. As the old folks in Cole’s childhood knew, families along the frontier before and during the Revolution had lived in daily dread of Indian attacks. It seemed to have started in late 1777, when a party of Indian warriors, and Hessian and British soldiers, attacked the patriot-held Fort Stanwix (its namesake was painted on the face of the hotel where Cole would kill Hiscock). The fort was the last outpost between American settlers and the fertile land they coveted to the west. The British-led forces ambushed and obliterated the American Rebels, but the Indian warriors paid dearly, losing nine chiefs. The Seneca Iroquois alone had lost six -- a kind of loss that, for them, demanded revenge.
As a result, the British lost their tenuous control over their Iroquois allies, who would not be restrained by white men’s arbitrary codes of warfare. After a year of grisly attacks, in February 1779, General Washington and Congress authorized a sweeping multi-pronged attack against the Indian tribes in the western regions of Pennsylvania and New York. The main objective was for two large forces to converge around thirty miles south of the Finger Lakes, the Iroquois heartland.
Washington tapped Major General John Sullivan, a hard-drinking lawyer with a checkered military record, to lead the expedition. Washington instructed him to aim for “total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” He was to take as many captives as possible -- men, women, children. All crops, seeds, and implements were to be destroyed. When they reached Iroquois villages, Washington continued, they were to “lay waste” in the “most effectual manner.” Sullivan’s men needed to operate in a manner “that the [Iroquois] country may not merely be overrun, but destroyed.” It was to be a caravan of extermination. No peace overtures from the enemy were to be countenanced until their homes, crops, and possessions lay in ashes.[1]
Public outrage over atrocities perpetrated on white settlers apparently compelled Washington to approve the cruel expedition.[2] But underneath the outrage was a widespread lust for Iroquois land. The act of rooting out the “savages” from the Lake Country was not easily separated from visions of seizing fertile earth for white families -- commonplace dreams of green summers and tall crops. With the booming American population, farm families, especially in New England, looked west to escape exhausted and crowded soil. Many saw the Iroquois as an impediment to improving their condition.
Sullivan’s soldiers were charged with stamping out savagery, but the destructive mission soon revealed the soldiers’ own capacity for savagery. As diaries attest, the soldiers’ own hearts were palsied by greed and violence during their mission to exorcise “demons” from the region. All along the way, they found reasons to meet brutality with ruthlessness. And the closer they came to the Lake Country, the more their journals reveal their craving to possess the very things they had set out to destroy.
In the summer of 1779, Major General Sullivan led his men up the Susquehanna Valley toward the New York and Pennsylvania border. The troops first passed through Wyoming Valley where a notorious massacre of helpless captives had taken place the previous year. Sullivan’s men recorded haunting sights in their journals. “Among the number of skul bones that we found none was without the mark of the tommahok,” wrote one officer. The men discovered a mass grave of seventy-three men. They found bones strewn across nearly two miles of ground -- gashed and split skulls along with some charred corpses of captives. Perhaps hoping to steel soldiers’ nerves for the coming weeks, officers brought the men to the “bloody rock” and displayed the maul that Queen Esther, a leader of the Indians, reportedly used to dash out the brains of captives, who after getting pulled from a river, stood sopping wet in a circle with their heads bowed.[3]
Days after arriving at the scene of death, Samuel Kirkland, one of five chaplains on the expedition, wrote to his wife that, “the savage barbarity” made the need for speedy retaliation clear to all. Their eyes were met everywhere with devastation. Fields once flourishing were “now desolated country....upwards of 150 widdows were here made upon this ground in the short space of one hour & a-half.”[4] On their journey towards upstate New York, the more the soldiers saw, the more certain they grew that they did not share humanity with the enemy. That same day, in a thirteen-part toast for the Fourth of July, many of Sullivan’s soldiers raised their glasses and captured in a toast the essence of the chaplain’s words: “Civilization or death to all savages.”[5]
In mid-August Sullivan then led more than 4,000 into the poorly-mapped Finger Lakes region.[6] Incinerating towns and fields along the way, they cut northward between the Cayuga and Seneca Lakes (where George Cole would grow up) and marched westward along the northern tips of the fingers all the way to Chenussio (Genesee), the largest Seneca town. From there, the troops turned back upon their tracks, scorching both sides of the Cayuga and Seneca Lakes on the return.
When Sullivan’s troops returned to their starting point, they had burned nearly forty Iroquois towns to the ground. The swarming army spent entire days hacking down and setting crops ablaze, and girdling fruit trees. The soldiers often piled ears of corn in the Iroquois long houses (massive communal structures built for several families) and then torched food and shelter together.[7] At the end of the raid, one soldier reflected on the improbability of having accomplished such a bold mission: “yet a march of three hundred miles was performed, a battle was fought, and a whole country desolated in thirty days.”[8]
During the raids, from time to time, Indians stealthily picked off and scalped stragglers and scouts in Sullivan’s cavalcade. But only in the earliest stage of the raid did the Iroquois and British mount serious resistance. When they did, it led to ruin. After Sullivan’s men averted an ambush outside the town of Newtown, they hounded down the enemy on a hillside, nearly rolling them into a trap. The Iroquois barely averted what would have been a bloodbath. During their chaotic exit, they uncharacteristically left behind more than a dozen dead or dying. American Rebels found a slain Indian girl and scalped her along with the other cadavers.[9] One lieutenant tomahawked to death an Indian who was only slightly wounded.[10] A day after the battle, another junior officer wrote in his diary that a small party spent part of the day searching for “dead Indians.” When the soldiers eventually found two bodies some men grabbed their blades and skinned them from the hips down to the feet in order to make boots. “One pair for the Major the other for myself,” wrote the soldier.[11]
The remarkably similar diary entries from Sullivan’s soldiers reveal how, as soldiers made a swath of desolation, their exposure to atrocities by Indians fed the orgy of ruin. Besides starting the raid by witnessing the grisly remains at Wyoming from the previous year, the men witnessed other extremes of Indian violence; they often saw it just before their most destructive acts upon the Iroquois. Just as they reached Genesee, the largest town in the line of desolation, they discovered two mutilated bodies of their comrades. Days before, the comrades -- Lieutenant Thomas Boyd and Sergeant Michael Parker -- had taken a small party to scout out a surprise attack upon the town. When they spotted four Indians heading toward the town, they threw caution to the wind. Hot for blood, they rashly launched an attack in the middle of Iroquois country. They scalped one Seneca warrior and then -- after an Oneida Indian scout in their own party warned them against it -- discovered and chased another five Seneca. The five Indians were the bait for an ambush by some 400 Indians, British troops and Tories.
Most of the scouting party was killed in close-range combat. But Boyd and Parker were taken captive and marched toward Fort Niagara, some eighty miles away. On the way, some Indians became so enraged by the destruction of Iroquois homes that they wrested Boyd and Parker away from the escorts. They hacked off the soldiers’ heads, gouged out their eyes and lopped off their ears. Soon after, Sullivan’s men discovered the bodies. The cadavers showed signs of frenzied whipping and spearing. The flesh had been gnawed by dogs. The soldiers spotted a scar on one of the corpses, which allowed them to identify the remains as Parker’s. The finger and toe nails had been wrenched out. Skin had been flayed from Boyd’s penis and scrotum. After carving Parker’s backside to pieces, the attackers left the knife standing upright in his back.[12]
All this in a place like Eden.
The patriot soldiers turned to their journals to work through scenes of beauty and revenge. The journals provide the richest surviving accounts of the Revolution as seen through the eyes of patriot soldiers themselves. The entries consistently tack between their growing admiration for the soil’s fecundity and their numbed accounting of their latest acts of destruction.
Lieutenant William Barton, of New Jersey, wrote typical entries after entering Catherine’s Town, the first village in the Iroquois nation destroyed in the campaign. The Indians had just fled and left a frightened woman of nearly one hundred years of age, lying in the field. “Here we made up a small hut for the old squaw on the side of the creek, having destroyed all the huts belonging to the place at our departure, leaving her plenty to subsist on,” noted Barton with some relief and pride in his officer’s humanity. “She appeared very thankful when she found we did not kill or misuse her,” he added. The next day Barton and comrades passed through the vicinity that would someday become home to George Cole and his family. He described it as “a very large, level tract of land bordering on the Senakee lake: its timber walnut, ash, hickory and oak, by far the largest tract of good land in one body I have yet seen.” Two days later he reported: “land continuing rich and fertil as before.”
The marching, coveting, and torching continued. So did the reminders of Indian barbarity. A week later, Barton was still reporting on how his men were ordered in the early morning to destroy the corn by throwing the ears into the creek. Later that afternoon they stumbled upon Boyd’s and Parker’s mutilated bodies. Parker’s head was lost, but they found Boyd’s alongside a body skinned to the ribs. The next day Barton wrote about burning nearly 100 huts filled with more corn than he had ever seen, and then, in the next sentence, he returned to Iroquois cruelty: a “white woman with a young child” stumbled into their camp after having escaped from the Indians two or three nights before. The nearly starving white mother seemed to prepare him for what his own men would soon do. After scorching a returning path back down through the lakes, Barton wrote in his journal about the corpse of an Indian woman who had tried to take care of, the “old squaw” he had proudly written about days before. The younger woman had been shot and left to decompose in a wet ditch. “Who killed her, I cannot ascertain,” he confessed, “but it is generally believed to be three men of ours....” [13]
When Major John Burrowes confessed in his journal about the murdered young Indian (that is, the savagery of his comrades) his entry almost seamlessly ended with his admiration of the region’s natural bounties.
The young squaw that had come to take care of the old one after we passed through, we found shot and thrown into a mud hole, supposed to be done by some of the soldiers. Encamp at sunset on the side of a large brook, it empties into Seneca lake and affords a great variety of fish. Capt Reading caught a Salmon out of it two feet and four inches long.[14]
With only a series of pen strokes, he darted from a dead woman in a mud hole to measurements of fish.
The beautiful earth seemed to justify revolting deeds. Trout, hickory trees, and green beans were somehow the necessary other half to the story about the murdered woman. Sergeant Moses Fellowes reported how men glutted themselves before laying the crops to waste. They destroyed the fields, with bits of flesh from the greens and fruits still in their teeth: “what Corn, Beans, peas, Squashes, Potatoes, Inions, turmips, Cabage, Cowcumbers, watermilions, Carrots, parsnips & c. our men and horses Cattle &c could not Eat was Distroyed this Morning Before we march.”[15]
Many of the soldiers, like Jeremiah Fogg, hailed from New Jersey (as did George Cole’s ancestors). In his journal, Fogg stitched together scenes of horror and natural wonder. In one paragraph he wrote about measurements of the grass and the width of the creek. In the next paragraph, he reported finding the grisly remains of Boyd and Parker. Only the combined malice that “all the infernal devils could dictate,” he reasoned, could explain their torture and decapitation. The next day he reported finding the captive white woman with the child at her breast. She had escaped the “devils.” His blending of revulsion for Indian brutality and amazement at their land is striking:
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She was taken [captive] at Wyoming last spring with five children, where her husband was killed, and child was scalped before her eyes. This day was spent in destroying corn which had become so ripe that we were obliged to burn it in the kilns. Some corn-stalks were seventeen feet long....A most joyful day!
Reflecting on a mere two-day period, Fogg wove together past massacres, the “infernal” deeds of the Iroquois, how the Indians allowed tall corn to grow too ripe, and how the expanse of lush beauty had the potential to become one of the greatest towns in America. Fogg and his comrades filtered much of what they saw through a kind of irresistible vision of vengeance and future prosperity. Reflecting on what he had witnessed as he burned his way between the two major Finger Lakes -- the future fields of George Cole’s family and neighbors -- he wrote:
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The Land between the Seneca and Cayuga lakes appears good, level and well timbered; affording a sufficiency for twenty elegant townships, which in process of time will doubtless add to the importance of America…
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In the chaos of destruction, the timbers and level fields evoked visions of orderly, well-drained American farms. He wondered, as he wrote, why God had allowed the Indians to possess such exceptional land. He couldn’t make sense of why the God of nature had left “such a noble part of his creation,” to remain uncultivated by “an unprincipled and brutal” set of creatures, the Indians. “However," he continued, “had I any influence in the councils of America, I should not think it an affront to the Divine will, to lay some effectual plan, either to civilize, or totally extirpate the race...[16]
Sullivan’s soldiers saw themselves as part of a civilizing force that had come to tame nature. The white race would improve upon divine creation by cultivating the fields. If necessary, they believed they had to exterminate the savage people who seemed to surrender to the world’s natural state, instead of transforming it.
Sullivan’s soldiers rarely expressed doubt or regret about the punitive mission they were carrying out, as a certain Dr. Jabez Campfield did early in the expedition. Before the destruction began in earnest, Campfield confided to his journal that there was “something so cruel, in destroying the habitation of any people, (however mean they may be, being their all) that I might say the prospect hurts my feelings.”[17] But once drawn into the Iroquois heartland, his feelings recovered. He never again expressed such regrets in his journal.
Instead, his daily entries became one of the richest records of the land’s natural splendor. He too imagined the role this blessed land would play in the future of America; the alternating scenes of beauty, fire, and blood seemed to be building toward some appointed purpose.[18] When Campfield reached Genesee, the western end of the destructive line, he had clearly been transformed. Summing up an especially long entry, he wrote that from the first town “to this place, 95 miles at least, is undoubtedly the best land, and capable of the greatest improvement, of any part of the possessions of the U. States.”[19]
Nothing so consistently and clearly flows from the journals as the lure of the generous soil. More than revenge, it was the life-giving beauty of the land that seemed to draw them in: the “smell of garden balm,” sweet mandrakes; Indian apples; fruit orchards; the “fine forrists of White Pine” and the medley of hardwoods, the “clover and spear grass.” Starry-eyed soldiers, with their bellies stuffed with greens, roamed about measuring the girth of trees and comparing notes. The journals are a record of overflowing senses -- and superlatives when the beauty reached the mind’s brim: “surpasses all description”; “a most exalted prospect”; “the Soyl Eaqual to or Rather Superior To any”; “the most beautiful [lakes] I have ever seen.” Or, as the chaplain put it even before entering into the richest valleys: “Surely a soil like this is worth contending for.”[20]
The “contending” invaders flushed the Iroquois to Niagara and Canadian borderlands where they faced one of the harshest winters in local memory. Many refugees froze or starved to death. The Iroquois, of course, did not lay down their weapons. Retributions continued and the vengeance only helped white settlers justify their subsequent taking of the lands.
What would happen to the Iroquois of New York, roughly between 1785 and 1800, would happen throughout the western interior to Creeks in the Southwest and to Ohio Valley Indians like the Shawnee and Delaware tribes. New York State systematically wrested lands from the Iroquois (both friendly and enemy tribes), through guile, cunning, treaty, and threats. State representatives wooed cooperative, sometimes double-dealing, tribal leaders with bribe-like offerings of annuities, clothing, trinkets, and cash. In 1788, one critic from Connecticut warned of the need for a stronger Federal government to hold back such “rapacity” of New York. “Do we not already see in her the seeds of an over-bearing ambition?” he asked rhetorically.[21]
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The lands that George Cole’s family would soon inhabit were infused with a history of military conquest and speculative fever. By the summer of 1782, the state of New York had already promised its veterans much of the Iroquois land. Except for a few reservations, the lands were divided into a grid for white settlement. During the raid, forty maps of the region had been produced by army surveyors. The maps, no less than the torches, were the weapons for empire. When one of the raid surveyors, Simeon De Witt, later became the Surveyor General of New York, he was primed to transform the region into parcels of private property for eager Americans ready to migrate to the Lake Country.
Some of DeWitt's assistants had been Sullivan’s soldiers. They helped map the towns and lots -- in which the entire DeWitt team would invest their own personal fortunes.[22] The “New Military Tract,” intended for soldiers, consisted of over one-and-a-half million acres, converted into grids of straight lines and right angles. The square lots were the expression of the Jeffersonian vision of a republic made up of farmer citizens who would take part in rational, orderly land ownership and town planning. Unlike the Iroquois (or benighted Europeans) American settlers would tame nature and make the lands conform to mathematics.
The mathematical, clear-cut boundaries, though, facilitated land speculation. Hard-up veterans sold their lands (often for a song) to strangers living hundreds of miles away from the promised lot. In place of the European system of “metes and bounds,” in which surveyors make boundaries according to landmarks -- a large stump, an alder tree, a ravine -- DeWitt and company mapped out abstract, geometric lots. Seeming mathematical precision converted the lands into assets that bankers and jobbers could peddle like bonds.
The grid system fit hand-in-glove with the speculative market revolution which had been unleashed by the military revolution. The surveyors carved the Military Tract into twenty-five rectilinear townships, most of them given names of ancient fame like Romulus, Cincinnatus, Ovid (Cole’s township), Pompey (Hiscock’s), Cato, Cicero, Virgil and so on. The names mostly evoked the Roman Republic before it was transformed into an ungovernable and corrupted empire. Perhaps the names were assurance to the world, and maybe to settlers themselves, that Americans were emulating virtuous republics of the classical world, not Britain’s grasping empire.[23]
But the new nation was a grasping empire. Nothing could stifle the desire of ordinary Americans for fertile frontier soil in the West. As Washington admitted in 1796, the government would have to build a “Chinese wall” or form a line of troops to restrain landjobbers and the “encroachment” of settlers upon Indian territories. Sullivan’s men returned to their homes with tales of verdant lands now cleared for the taking. Many of them would soon return with many other aspiring men at their side. In 1789, the same year that the survey for the Military Tract began, a few parties from New Jersey and Pennsylvania made their way up to the lakes along the same Indian trails that Sullivan’s Army had taken. They were the trickle from the dam before tens of thousands of families poured into western New York.[24]
Before the Coles arrived, and nearly since the first squatters had begun building cabins on the Tract, well-heeled bankers and speculators were there, plotting to transform the region into bustling farm towns and centers of commerce. For example, in 1791, Elkanah Watson, an entrepreneur from Albany, led a party of speculators into the Military Tract to gauge the potential for a system of canals that would connect the Ontario and Seneca Lakes to the Hudson River (an early vision of what would become the Erie Canal). They dreamed that doing so would give future farmers and craftsmen access to markets in New York City and the Atlantic world --and give New York City access to the frontier. This would ensure handsome returns on land investment by driving up the demand for plots that promised lucrative harvests. At Watson’s side were two veterans from the Raid along with a former U.S Congressman and board member of the Bank of Albany. They had come, as many others would throughout central and western New York, to convert the untamed lands into capital.[25]
The clean grids allowed Watson to methodically rate the lots in his journal, ranking their economic potential by timber, drainage, and access to rivers and imaginary canals. Watson, too, was smitten by the very stretch of land that would soon attract George Cole’s grandparents. He proclaimed that the “vigorous arm of freemen” would convert it into “the paradise of America.”
The Cole family came around 1800. George’s maternal and paternal grandparents settled in the southwestern corner of the New Military Tract (several years after Mary Cole’s maternal grandfather had arrived). It is not clear if the Coles’ migration was connected in some way, as it had been for others, to Sullivan’s Raid. Family legend held that George’s grandfather, David Cole, Sr., had served in the “First New Jersey Grenadiers.” Any Lake Country local would have known that the First New Jersey had played a role in Sullivan’s scorched-earth expedition.
But there is no proof that David took part in the raid, or that he was ever an officer in the First New Jersey.[26]
When the destroying armies -- with or without grandpa David -- swept through the Finger Lakes, they did so with “plots” in mind. Settlers and developers came with plots on the brain too: Farm plots made possible by General Washington’s plot of destruction. All of these, though, were subplots to the master plot of progress and American empire.[27]
George Cole’s life unfolded from America’s story -- an irresistible, violent plot about personal advancement and opportunity. War promised progress. The love of natural beauty, hope for prosperous green summers, along with vengeful destruction and savagery -- these had prepared the way for those people who planted seeds and raised children in the region that George called home.
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[1] Sullivan could offer them supplies to survive the winter, but only if the devastated Iroquois first delivered up key Indian and Tory leaders. This was a mission to foment “terror” with fire, the “war-whoop and fixed bayonet.” See: Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington, Being his Correspondence, Addresses, Messages and Other Papers, Official and Private.... Volume VI (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Metcalf, and Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1834), pp. 264-67.
[2] Max M. Mintz takes issue with Alexander C. Flick’s claim, made long ago, that Washington encouraged the expedition mostly because of shortages of foodstuffs in the Continental Army, and his eagerness to broaden the potential borders of the new nation when peace terms were negotiated with England. See: Max M. Mintz, Seeds of empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 191-94; Alexander C. Flick, ed., The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign in 1779: Chronology and Selected Documents (Albany, N.Y., 1929), passim.
[3] Journal entry of Henry Dearborn, July 2, 1779 in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779, with Records of Centennial Celebrations [JMEMGJS] (Auburn: Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), 64; Journal entry of James Norris, July 2, 1779, JMEMGJS 225; Journal entry of William Rogers, July 5 and 8, 1779, JMEMGJS, 250-51; Journal entry of Samuel M. Shute, July 8, 1779. JMEMGJS, 268n.
[4]Christine Sternberg Patrick,“The Life and Times of Samuel Kirkland, 1741-1808: Missionary to the Oneida Indians, American patriot, and founder of Hamilton College." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1993, p.327-28; While waiting for nearly at month at Wyoming, Sullivan worried about the rampant deism within his troops and composed a discourse designed to prove the existence of God and the divinity of the Bible. Patrick, “The Life and Times of Samuel Kirkland,” p.327.
[5] Journal entry of Thomas Blake, July 5, 1779, JMEMGJS, 39.
[6] General James Clinton -- who had made his way down the Mohawk Valley, leaving destruction in his wake -- first combined forces with Sullivan at Tioga, the last point on the map before plunging northward into Iroquois territory. Meanwhile over 600 soldiers under General Daniel Brodhead swept through northwest Pennsylvania and southwestern New York, destroying Seneca villages.
[7]Mintz, Seeds of Empire, pp. 153-54; Journal entry of Daniel Gookin, August 11, 1779, JMEMGJS, 104.
[8] Journal entry of Jeremiah Fogg, September 30, 1779, JMEMGJS, p.101.
[9] Mintz, Seeds of Empire, pp. 127-28; Journal entry of Jabez Campfield, August 29, JMEMGJS, p.56.
[10] Journal entry of Henry Dearborn, August 29, JMEMGJS, p.72.
[11] Journal entry of William Barton, August 30, JMEMGJS, p. 8.
[12] Mintz, Seeds of Empire, pp.140-45.
[13] Journal entry of William Barton, September 2--September 23, JMEMGJS, p. 9-12.
[14] Journal entry of John Burrowes, September 23, JMEMGJS, p. 49.
[15] Journal entry of Moses Fellows, September 9, JMEMGJS, p. 90.
[16] Journal entry of Jeremiah Fogg, August 27-28 and September 14-15, JMEMGJS, p. 94, 99.
[17] One soldier did write about the possibility of “Coal, Pewter, Lead, Copperas, &c.” but this was in Wyoming, Pennsylvania before coming into the Iroquois nation. See: Journal entry of Sergeant Major George Grant, June 23, JMEMGJS, 107-108. Journal entry of De. Jabez Campfield, August 11, JMEMGJS, pp. 107-108; for another soldier who expressed guilt in a letter to his lover, see: Mintz, Seeds of Empire, p. 186.
[18] Dr. Jabez Campfield, August 16, JMEMGJS, p. 58.
[19] Dr. Jabez Campfield, September 14, JMEMGJS, pp. 59-60. This entry is particularly representative of the long lists of trees, sizes of waterways, and other descriptions of the countryside, interspersed with descriptions of the Indians’ ways.
[20] Quotes found throughout JMEMGJS. Quote by Reverend William Rogers, August 11, p. 260.
[21] See speech by Oliver Ellsworth, in The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of Federal Constitution. Volume II. (Washington: 1836), p. 186.
[22] They carved into the beech tree, which marked the northeast corner of the new tract: “N.E. corner / Township No.1 / Virtuous and Victorious Military / 1789.” See: Richard H. Schein, “Framing the Frontier: The New Military Tract Survey in Central New York” in New York History (January 1993, Vol 74:1), pp. 5, 10-11; Mintz, Seeds of Empire, pp. 173-186.
[23] Andrea Hammer, “Memory Lines: The Plotting of New York’s New Military Tract,” in Anne Teresa Demo and Bradford Vivian, eds., Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 15-32; Schein, “Framing the Frontier,” pp. 4-28.
[24]Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 69-71; From the arrival of the first squatters until 1820, migrants would increase the upstate population from under 30,000 to over 700,000. The migration followed certain patterns. New England Yankees and east New Yorkers moved westward. The main migratory current flowed into the northern and western regions of the state, particularly through the Mohawk Valley. But a smaller, significant group of families, like the Coles, journeyed northward. They came up the Susquehanna valley from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Many of them were the soldiers under Sullivan who had torched the villages and filled their journals with disbelief over the tall grass and limy soils. See: James W. Darlington, “Peopling the Post-Revolutionary New York Frontier” in New York History (Volume 74, October 1993, no.4), pp. 340-381. John Delafield, “Survey of Seneca County,” in Transactions of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society, Vol. X. (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, Printer of the Legislature, 1851), p.391.
[25] Hammer, “Memory Lines,” pp. 26-29.
[26] Had grandfather David Cole been in Sullivan’s Raid? I think it to be unlikely. If grandpa David had indeed only served in the militia, there were good reasons why the sharp lines of his military past became blurred in family lore. Because hundreds of soldiers’ names are missing from the regimental lists around the time of the Sullivan Expedition, it is possible that David was there. Perhaps David’s descendants knew what the patchy records of war could not verify. But a tattered militia roster in the National Archives suggests another story: David actually served in a New Jersey militia unit, not in the Continental Army. He is listed on the roster of Samuel Forman’s militia regiment, from Monmouth New Jersey, in captain John Covenhoven’s company. See: Revolutionary War Rolls, compiled 1894-1913, documenting the period 1775-1783. RG93, NARA M246; Roll 64, folder 70, “Forman’s Regiment of Militia, 1778-1780.”
Militiamen held a dubious place in the war effort. For many, they symbolized brave citizen soldiers. But according to many officers (like George Washington who blamed militias for the stinging losses of Manhattan and Long Island to the British), militiamen had lacked proper training and failed to follow orders. There is a private David Cole in the 2nd New York Regiment, but this appears to be another soldier by the same name. In Cornelius’ memoirs he refers to his grandfather as a captain. In another family history David is called a lieutenant. David Cole is not found on the rosters of the First New Jersey Regiment, nor in various compiled records or histories. In “List of New Jersey Troops, 1775-1780,” Roll 15, Target 2, Volume 4 (microfilm in National Archives) there are various Coles but no David. Proof of his service in the militia can be found in RG94, entry 502, Records Cards, 1889-1904, file #711454. For reference to “captain” Cole see: Cole, Memoirs, p. 4. Also see: Phillips, Cornelius Cole: California Pioneer and United States Senator, pp, 6-7, 9-10.
Of the 834 enlisted in the First Regiment, only 232 were reported to have been on the expedition. Albert Hazen Wright, The Sullivan Expedition of 1779: The Regimental Rosters of Men. (Heritage Books, 2009), esp. pp.8-9.
In the authorized biography of Cornelius, Catherine Philips wrote that the maternal grandfather, John Townsend “served in the Ludington Regiment of the New York Militia” during the war. Phillips, Cornelius Cole: California Pioneer and United States Senator, pp, 9-10; The story of Silas Halsey can be found in: John Delafield, “Survey of Seneca County,” pp. 394-396.