From “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
On the western edge of the colony of New York, as in the southern colonies, settlers were invading and squatting on the territory of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) by the mid-1770s. As with the Cherokee Nation, the British and the separatists knew that the Haudenosaunee would be an important factor in their war, and, as with the Cherokee Nation, both parties sent representatives to the Haudenosaunee councils to appeal for their support. Each member nation of the confederacy had its own specific interests because each had had different experiences in the previous century and a half of British and French intrusion. Much of the French and Indian War had been fought in their territories, with Indigenous people doing most of the actual fighting on both sides. In 1775, the Mohawk Nation allied with the British against the separatist settlers. The Seneca Nation had early on considered the British to be an intractable enemy but with the separatist war looming was more afraid of the settlers, and so the Senecas followed the Mohawks’ lead into a British alliance. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga Nations did not choose sides. Only the Christianized Oneidas conceded support for the separatist settlers.
In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations, General George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee, “to lay waste all the settlements around…that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed… [Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected…Our future security will be in their inability to injure us…and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”