Newtown Battlefield: The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign

The quiet state park you are passing holds the site of one of the most consequential and most destructive campaigns of the American Revolution, a scorched-earth offensive that permanently altered the map of the Northeast.

By the summer of seventeen seventy-nine, Haudenosaunee warriors allied with Britain had struck American frontier settlements at Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania and Cherry Valley in New York, killing settlers and burning farms. General George Washington ordered a response at a scale the young republic had never attempted: a coordinated, two-column invasion of Iroquois territory designed not merely to win a battle but to destroy a civilization's food supply.

General John Sullivan marched north from Pennsylvania while General James Clinton swept down from the Mohawk Valley. They joined forces on August twenty-fifth, seventeen seventy-nine, and pushed up the Chemung River. Four days later, on August twenty-ninth, they met the only serious resistance of the campaign right here, at the Haudenosaunee village of Newtown.

Awaiting them were roughly six hundred Iroquois warriors, two hundred Loyalist rangers, and a handful of British regulars, all under the Seneca war leader Sayenqueraghta and the Mohawk commander Joseph Brant. The defenders had prepared a well-concealed breastwork along the hillside, hoping to stop the American advance and protect the towns further upriver.

The breastwork did not hold. Sullivan's artillery broke the Iroquois line, and his flanking infantry turned the retreat into a rout. American casualties were three killed and thirty-nine wounded. But the consequences fell almost entirely on the Haudenosaunee.

In the weeks that followed, Sullivan's army burned more than forty Indian villages, destroyed an estimated one hundred sixty thousand bushels of corn, and reduced orchards, gardens, and winter provisions to ash. The expedition ended the Iroquois Confederacy's military power in the region and forced thousands of Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Mohawk people to flee west and north into British Canada, where many would spend the rest of their lives.

Historians now describe the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign as one of the earliest examples of total war in American military history.