But the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, thanks in part to the influence of Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland, joined the American revolutionaries. Most Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas chose to ally themselves with the British. The Six Nations divided over what course to pursue. When the American Revolutionary War began, British officials, as well as the colonial Continental Congress, sought the allegiance (or at least the neutrality) of the influential Iroquois Confederacy. Main article: Northern theater of the American Revolutionary War after Saratoga The Iroquois, after that, mostly limited their incursions into the new United States to isolated hunting parties, the main populations having permanently migrated north of the border. With the Iroquois people decimated by disease and battle, their morale never fully recovered. The Sullivan Expedition devastated the Iroquois crops and towns and left them dependent on whatever the British could provide in the harsh winter of 1779. The devastation created great hardships for the thousands of Iroquois refugees who fled the region to shelter under British military protection outside Fort Niagara that winter, and many people starved or froze to death, despite strenuous attempts by the British authorities to import food and provide shelter via their limited resources. The survivors fled to British regions in Canada and the Niagara Falls and Buffalo areas. The American force methodically destroyed at least forty Iroquois villages throughout the Finger Lakes region of western New York. In response to 1778 attacks by Iroquois and Loyalists on American settlements, such as on Cobleskill, Wyoming Valley and Cherry Valley, Sullivan's army carried out a scorched earth campaign to put an end to Loyalist and Iroquois attacks. The deaths in this battle were 11 Continental soldiers, 12 Iroquois, and 5 British soldiers. The death toll from exposure and starvation dwarfed the casualties received in the Battle of Newtown, in which an army of 3,200 Continental soldiers decisively defeated about 600 Iroquois and Loyalists. With the Haudenosaunee's shelter gone and food supplies destroyed, the strength of the Iroquois Confederacy was broken. While the campaign had only one major battle, at Newtown (since the tribes evacuated ahead of the large military force) along the Chemung River in western New York, the expedition severely damaged the Iroquois nations' economies by burning their crops, villages, and chattels, thus ruining the Iroquois technological infrastructure. Led by Major General John Sullivan and Brigadier General James Clinton, the expedition was conducted during the summer of 1779, beginning June 18 when the army marched from Easton, Pennsylvania, to October 3 when it abandoned Fort Sullivan, built at Tioga, to return to George Washington's main camp in New Jersey. Today this area is the heartland of Upstate New York, with thirty-five monoliths marking the path of Sullivan's troops and the locations of the Iroquois villages they razed dotting the region, having been erected by the New York State Education Department in 1929 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the expedition. Some historians have also related this campaign to the concept of total war, in the sense that the total destruction of the enemy was on the table. Historian Fred Anderson, describes the expedition as "close to ethnic cleansing" instead. Some scholars argue that it was an attempt to annihilate the Iroquois and describe the expedition as a genocide, although this term is disputed, and it is not commonly used when discussing the expedition. With the military power of the Iroquois vanquished, the campaign depopulated the area for post-war settlement and opened up the vast Ohio Country, the Great Lakes region, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky to post-war settlements. The campaign drove 5,000 Iroquois to Fort Niagara seeking British protection. The expedition was largely successful, with more than 40 Iroquois villages and their stores of winter crops destroyed, breaking the power of the Iroquois in New York all the way to the Great Lakes. The Continental Army carried out a scorched-earth campaign in the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Longhouse Confederacy) in what is now western and central New York. The campaign had the aim of "taking the war home to the enemy to break their morale". The campaign was ordered by George Washington in response to the 1778 Iroquois–British attacks on Wyoming, German Flatts, and Cherry Valley, where the Iroquois and British massacred American villagers. The 1779 Sullivan Expedition (also known as the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition, the Sullivan Campaign, and the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide ) was a United States military campaign during the American Revolutionary War, lasting from June to October 1779, against the four British allied nations of the Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee).
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