SHE HEARD THE SIGNAL CANNON and made her way toward the sound. She was looking for her husband’s camp. After the battle, after the defeat, everyone scattered. She carried a child, who could not have been more than a few months old. Tired, she wandered the countryside in the late summer heat.
It is not clear how long she walked, or how far, or from whence she came, but she found the camp. Her husband served under Colonel Butler. This she knew. She asked a sentry to take her to the officer and the soldier obliged. For the first time in a while she sat down.
The woman sought out a British camp, and the Tory officer Col. John Butler. She found herself, instead, in an American camp. She realized her error when Lt. Col. William Butler of the 4th Pennsylvania regiment greeted her. In the words of Jeptha Simms, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who recorded this story, “the truth flashed upon her mind—she was in the American camp, in the presence of those who would protect her.” So she told them her story. Born in Danbury, she married and then joined the movement of Connecticut settlers into Pennsylvania. She and her husband settled in the Wyoming Valley. In July 1778, Seneca and Tory raiders attacked. “That delightful country” Simms wrote, “was devastated by the enemy.” Her husband fell in the fighting, one “among the numerous victims of savage cruelty.” She had “two small boys, and an infant at the breast.” The attackers killed the baby, and gave the boys each to a grieving Indigenous family. They then took her prisoner and, Simms said, “compelled her to live with an Indian as his wife.”
It was this husband who she sought out in what she expected would be a British camp. But in Simms’ telling, the Americans amongst whom she arrived saw things differently. She had “providentially” entered this American camp. God was at work and he liked white Americans. The baby she carried in her arms was “the fruit of her late unhappy connections.”
The American soldiers she encountered were part of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779, a large American invasion of the Haudenosaunee homeland. Before they commenced their march, Sullivan’s men drank toasts, “civilization or death for all American savages.” These men were killers, menacing “Long Knives,” who threatened Iroquois lives, liberties and property, and killing Indians and taking their lands was fundamental to who they were. These Americans, who declared their independence from Great Britain because George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers, had delivered this poor woman from evil. Her baby, Simms tells us, died shortly after she arrived in the American camp. “It was suspected,” Simms wrote, “that an American soldier, from sympathy to the woman, had given it poison.”
I AM WORKING on a history of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. I am at the early stages of my research. I am not certain that the Simms’ story is true, but I am also not sure that it would be impossible to find out. I plan on spending some time trying to figure that out. This story has stuck with me, like a hook in my lip, pulling me along. I came across this story on the same day that the President threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy bridges, power plants, desalinization facilities, all targets that would have made life even more miserable for Iranians. Civilians would have suffered. Children would have died.
The President’s “Secretary of War,” a vicious, scripturally illiterate weirdo who relishes violence when it is meted out and upon someone else, said of the American raids on Iran that “God deserves all the glory,” and that thousands of sorties had been “carried out under the protection of divine providence” and “miraculous protection.” Pete Hegseth follows no law, one of his dwindling number of admirers said, outside of Biblical Law.
But that’s not right, is it. One of those laws, it seems to me, is pretty clear:
“Cease to do evil,
Learn to do good,
Seek justice,
Correct oppression,
Defend the fatherless,
Plead for the widow.”
Kill babies. Extirpate savages. Burn their fields. “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” They are more than words. They conjure a reality that is world-churning and evil, the black heart of America.
I write these words safely at home in western New York. No bombs fall on me. I have water, fuel, and food, and the means to obtain more if I need it. On the day I read Simms’ account, the President woke up to launch an angry, frightened (and frightening) series of threats against the people of Iran. The crisis deescalated. Diplomats allowed the president to save face. Still, his threats were significant. I have not forgotten them. Announcing that you are willing to annihilate Iranian civilization is not all that different from saying “civilization or death” to “merciless Indian savages.” The words have been set free and I am not sure they can be called back. I cannot say that Donald Trump would not use nuclear weapons. Neither can you.
So what do we do? I have seen a growing number of Democrats call for invoking the fourth section of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is an important gesture, I suppose. It is worth putting it on the record. But let’s harbor no illusions. A flawed constitution cannot stand when the men and women who hold power no longer feel bound by its limits, and know that too many of their supporters know too little about what that Constitution says to call them to account. And we certainly ought to know by now that “the vice-president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments, or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” are unlikely to “transmit to the President Pro-Tempore of the senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” There is no reason to expect Republicans to experience an epiphany. Trump is, for them, a useful idiot. He says obnoxious, frightening and dangerous things, but they get to dismantle the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans have done nothing to stop the President and we should not expect them to start now. Nobody is coming to help us. If we want to stop this, we are going to need to shut it down ourselves, and that will take much more than a “No Kings” party held on a weekend every couple of months. It is going to take so much more than clever signs and an open calendar.
I am wearied by Democrats who say that Trump’s behavior is “unAmerican,” that he behaves in a way that does not represent “who we are.” Nearly 60% of white people voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, despite his felony convictions, his amoralities, and the corruption of him, his cabinet, and his skanky kids. Hungary has shown us that absolutists can be brought down by committed people organizing to actively oppose autocracy. I am hopeful that the Republicans will lose, eventually, because they are fighting against time and the very real gains that have been made over the last half century in building a society that certainly is imperfect and appears like a wasteland to younger people but that is more free and more equal than the world of our parents. Millions of Americans are committed to building and defending a country that is more free and equal than the white-supremacist world white Republicans want to restore. And that is what worries me. White people voted for white supremacy in the last three elections. That white supremacy has been there from the beginning. That cruelty, that violence and that despair. That, too, is America.
