A Mohegan Mother Lost Five Sons to Free America
She gave five boys to the patriot cause, a loss like the Sullivan family's, in a war Burns says left Native Americans with no winning side.
The Rest Is History · Ken Burns on Why America Really Declared IndependenceThe find was not a letter or a speech, just a document with a name on it. It listed a Mohegan woman, a Native American mother living in what is now north central Connecticut, and noted beside her that five of her sons had fought and been lost for the American patriot cause.
Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker who is telling a new history of the Revolution, says his team came across the paper while doing research. He does not dress up what it means. Native Americans, he says, were "screwed whatever happens" in the war.
That list is why her story sticks. A mother sent five sons to fight for the patriots, a sacrifice on the scale of the Sullivan family in World War II, yet her name is little known.
Americans know the Sullivans of Waterloo, Iowa. In World War II, the five Sullivan brothers died together when their ship sank off Guadalcanal in 1942. The shock led the military to separate family members so brothers would never serve in the same place, a rule meant to spare other mothers from ever getting that kind of shattering news again.
The Mohegan mother received that kind of news five times over, more than 160 years earlier, when no such rule existed.
Her sons were among the Native American troops who served the patriot cause. Burns says local militia commanders sought Black soldiers as well as Native soldiers, and that George Washington was more willing to arm Native Americans.
Many other Native people chose the other side. Burns says many tribes, especially on the western frontier, sided with the British in the hope, as he tells it, that Britain would better check the taking of their land.
Burns argues that hope was an illusion, because the push to spread across the whole continent would have happened even if Britain had won and kept the colonies.
What the Mohegan mother lost was those five sons. The document that lists them survives, while the Sullivan name became national history.
Questions people ask
Who were the Sullivans?
They were five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, Joseph, Francis, Albert, Madison, and George Sullivan, who enlisted together in the Navy and served aboard the same ship, the USS Juneau. All five died when the ship sank in November 1942 in the naval battles around Guadalcanal. Their deaths led to the military's Sole Survivor policy, which seeks to keep members of the same family from serving together in combat.
Why would Native Americans fight for the patriots at all?
Motives varied by community, place, and personal circumstance. Some were paid, promised freedom or land, or tied by trade and local alliances to patriot neighbors and militia commanders who wanted them. Others hoped that service would earn fair treatment from a new American government, a hope that was largely disappointed.
Did the British ever try to protect Native land?
For a time, yes. After 1763, Britain barred colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains, in part to avoid costly wars with Native nations. Many colonists resented the line and ignored it, and Burns argues that land hunger was a driving force for independence, which is why the protection did not last.