The 1780 British Counter-Offensive to the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign

“The Expedition of Genl Sullivan against the six nations seems by its effects to have exasperated than to have terrified or disabled them,” wrote Continental Congressman James Madison in June 1780.[1] This 1779 Patriot offensive, known as the Sullivan Campaign or the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, was meant to teach the Loyalists and their Native American allies a violent lesson it was hoped they would not soon forget. The brutal effects from this epic military incursion are well documented, but much of the more widely-known published materials are concerned with the large-scale engagements throughout the state of New York rather than the more intimate but equally bloody and fierce smaller-scale fighting in neighboring Pennsylvania. John Reed, Pennsylvania’s President of the Supreme Executive Council, was so affected by the death and destruction caused in his state by vengeful Loyalists and Iroquois that he almost ordered a retaliatory attack, on the same scale of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, using the state’s own military resources; however, he was persuaded to wait for diplomats to negotiate the end of the war. Pennsylvania and New York has many scars received in 1780 that can still be viewed through the many memorials, gravestones, monuments, and historical markers scattered across both states.

In 1779, Gen. George Washington had ordered Maj. Gen. John Sullivan to command an expedition by Continental troops, supported by militia and a considerable amount of military resources, to end the “considerable mischief on the North East Corner of Pennsylvania” by the forces of the Crown.[2] Washington it was to the “highest degree distressing to have our frontier so continually harassed by this collection of Banditti under Brand [Joseph Brant] and Butler [Walter Butler].”[3] Washington was referring to the destructive raids launched the previous year against Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley and the New York settlements of German Flats and Cherry Valley. Although, there had been numerous previous attacks by British forces throughout these border regions since the outbreak of the war, these specific violent actions forced the Continental Congress to order Washington to conduct a purely punitive and devastating expedition against the Iroquois.

On paper, it appeared that Sullivan and Brig. Gen. James Clinton had successfully completed their assignment of annihilating the Iroquois threat by the fall of 1779. Their 4,000 soldiers leveled over forty Native American towns and villages, devastated countless orchards, and destroyed approximately 160,000 bushels of corn. The Iroquois had been compelled to abandon their homeland and seek refuge with their British allies at Fort Niagara while constantly suffering the pains of hunger and death from starvation during harsh winter of 1779-80.