Preserving Red Jacket’s Peace Medal

This portrait shows the Seneca leader Red Jacket wearing the silver medal engraved with a symbolic picture of him meeting President George Washington in 1792.

In the early 1800s, Red Jacket faced pressures from both inside and outside his community. White settlers bought and encroached on the land in western New York that he had helped to negotiate for the Senecas. Many of his fellow Haudenosaunee were pushed west to Wisconsin, though he remained.

Red Jacket also adhered to his traditional religion, resisting the revivalist faith preached by Handsome Lake and the Christianity that his second wife and her children espoused. At his death, his family had him buried in a Christian cemetery.

When Red Jacket died in 1830, he left the medal to a nephew named James Johnson, another Seneca leader. According to an article in the 29 Oct 1865 New York Times:

In 1851, however, unknown to the Indians generally, some parties prevailed upon Johnson to part with it for a small consideration, to the New-York State Museum at Albany. In its transit it was intercepted by Col. Parker, then living at Rochester, New-York, who paid the consideration that Johnson expected for it.

Ely S. Parker (1828-1895) was also a Seneca, more distantly related to Red Jacket. He had studied the law but was prevented from taking the bar exam because he wasn’t white, so he then trained as an engineer.

According to the Times article about the medal:

Col. Parker retained it until 1852, when the principal sachemship of the the Senecas and the Six Nations having become vacant by the death of John Blacksmith, he was installed into the office and formally invested with the medal as an official badge.

Col. Parker has since retained the medal as an official medal, although it is not probable that it will be continued after his death, as the Indians are gradually abolishing the system of government by chiefs and adopting republican forms of government.

Parker himself wrote about the medal in 1891:

…at my installation as leading Sachem of the Iroquois Confederacy in 1851, I was formally invested with it by the master of ceremonies placing it about my neck, the speaker remarking the fact that it was given by the great Washington to my tribal relative, Red Jacket, and that it was to be retained and worn as evidence of the bond of perpetual peace and friendship established and entered into between the people of the United States and the Six Nations of Indians at the time of its presentation.

In late 1865, when that New York Times article appeared, Parker had arranged for the medal to be displayed at a jewelry store in New York. By then he was well known as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s adjutant, the man who wrote out the terms of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. When Grant became President, he made Parker the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Parker left the federal government after two years and started investing in the stock market. But his early returns were wiped out by the Panic of 1873. By then married with a daughter, Parker had to seek state and local government jobs that let him support his family. He died in poor straits in Connecticut in 1895.

Members of the Seneca nation prevailed on widow Minnie Parker to send her husband’s body to Buffalo for burial on what once was tribal land. At the same time, the Buffalo Historical Society convinced her to sell it the Washington Peace Medal—an ironic turn of events, given Parker’s action more than forty years earlier to keep the object out of the state museum.

The society has treated the artifact as a treasure in its Buffalo History Museum, and in 1919 it published a biography of Parker. However, as a symbol of peace between the U.S. government and the Seneca nation, passed along as an emblem of office, the engraved medal qualified as cultural patrimony of the tribe, not the property of any individual.

Last fall the Seneca Nation asked for the medal to be returned under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This month the Buffalo History Museum delivered Red Jacket’s Peace Medal to the Senecas. It is now being held at the Onohsagwë:dé Cultural Center in Salamanca, New York.

A Washington Peace Medal for Red Jacket

Yesterday I described the conference between leaders of the Five Nations (Haudenosaunee or Iroquois) and of the U.S. government in Philadelphia in March and April 1792.

President George Washington addressed the gathering at one point, though he left the details to commissioner Timothy Pickering. The Haudenosaunee delegates chose Sagoyewatha or Red Jacket, a man known for his oratory, to deliver their main response.

At some point afterwards, the federal government commissioned a large silver medal showing Red Jacket and Washington interacting, as shown above. It is about seven inches tall and five inches across, but the metal is very thin and thus light. It says at the bottom, “George Washington / President / 1792.”

There are symbols of peace all over this design, at least in one direction. The Native man has dropped his hatchet and is smoking a peace pipe—but “a European/American style, long stem clay pipe, not a carved soapstone Indian pipe,” Will at Stories in Time has observed. Behind the men a farmer is plowing the land with an ox team in American style. Yet Washington still wears his military uniform and sword, not his civilian suit.

The other side of the medal is engraved with a version of the U.S. seal: thirteen stars, the motto “E Pluribus Unum,” and an eagle clutching both an olive branch and arrows.

The U.S. government gave this medal to Red Jacket as a reminder of his encounter with Washington in 1792. Some have interpreted that date to mean the medal was presented to Red Jacket at that Philadelphia conference, but there wouldn’t have been enough time to commission the engraving. I think it was created in the following years as a way to thank Red Jacket and to remind him of the promises made in that meeting.

The U.S. government issued many medals like this, now called “Washington Peace Medals.” They came in three sizes, with Red Jacket’s being one of the largest. At the same time the young republic was also commissioning medals for European diplomats, as were other nations. While the medals for other countries’ ambassadors were always seen as tokens of gratitude, Washington’s administration appears to have expected Native leaders who accepted such gifts to pledge loyalty.

Spain accused the U.S. of using such medals to bribe Native leaders who owed their principal allegiance to the Spanish Empire. In June 1793 Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson addressed that accusation by writing:

4. Giving medals and marks of distinction to the Indian Chiefs. . . . This has been an antient Custom from time immemorial. The medals are considered as complimentary things, as marks of friendship to those who come to see us, or who do us good offices, conciliatory of their good will towards us, and not designed to produce a contrary disposition towards others. They confer no power, and seem to have taken their origin in the European practice of giving medals or other marks of friendship to the negotiators of treaties, and other diplomatic Characters, or visitors of distinction.

Jefferson was being disingenuous, as was often the case. Just the month before, President Washington had told leaders of the Wabash and Illinois Indians:

…as a further token of my regard for you, I present each with a Medal, which you must wear as a sign of your attachme⟨n⟩t to the United States.

Red Jacket did help conclude the Treaty of Canandaigua, which guaranteed his Seneca nation more land in the western part of New York state. Though he saw that property wheedled away in the following decades, he still supported the U.S. of A. in the War of 1812 and continued to wear this medal until his death in 1830.

TOMORROW: Preserving Red Jacket’s medal.

The Exchange between President Washington and Red Jacket

During George Washington’s first term as President, the War Department had primary responsibility for dealing with the Native nations living on land that the young U.S. of A. claimed.

Sometimes this went very badly, as in the Harmar Campaign of late 1790 and Battle of the Wabash in November 1791. Those were utter defeats of the small U.S. army in the Northwest Territory by a confederacy of Miamis, Shawnees, and Delawares. They made it imperative for President Washington’s administration to forge better relations with nearby Indian nations.

The Haudenosaunee or Iroquois was an ancient confederation which had split during the Revolutionary War but formed again afterward. Some of the Stockbridge community had moved into western New York and allied with them. The U.S. government wanted this confederation to serve as intermediaries with the other Native nations further west.

In March 1792, a delegation of about fifty Haudenosaunee men arrived in Philadelphia for talks with the U.S. government. Timothy Pickering handled the negotiations, with Secretary of War Henry Knox watching over his shoulder.

On 23 March, President Washington himself spoke to the delegation. At the end of his remarks he delivered a “large White belt” to the visiting diplomats.

On the same day, Washington wrote to the Senate to confirm his main goal was “that the chiefs should be well satisfied of the entire good faith and liberality of the United States…conditioned on the evidence of their attachment to the interests of the United States.” Feeling his way within the U.S. Constitution, he asked Senators for their “advice” on whether the Congress would agree to this provision:

The United States, in order to promote the happiness of the five nations of indians, will cause to be expended ann[u]ally the amount of one thousand five hundred dollars, in purchasing for them clothing, domestic animals and implements of husbandry, and for encouraging useful artificers to reside in their Villages.

On 31 March, a Seneca leader named Sagoyewatha or Red Jacket replied to Washington’s speech. As reported by the War Department, Red Jacket held up Washington’s belt and proffered another in returned. He declaimed:

The President of the thirteen fires, while continuing his Speech made also this remark. That in order to establish all his words for the best good of Your nation & ours—we must forget all the evils that were past, and attend to what lies before us, and take such a course as Shall cement our peace, that we may be as one.

The President again observed, That it had come to his ears, that the cause of the hostilities now prevailing with the Western Indians, was their persuasion that the United States had unjustly taken away their lands. But he assured us this was not the case. That it was not the mind of any of his Chiefs to take any land on the whole Island without agreeing for it. . . .

Now Brother, which you continue to hear in behalf of the United States let all here present also open their ears, while those of the five nations, here present Speak with one voice. We wish to see Your words verified to our Children & Childrens children. You enjoy all the blessings of this life: to you therefore we look to make provision that the same may be enjoyed by our Children. This wish comes from our hearts. but we add, that our happiness cannot be great if in the introduction of your ways, we are put under too much constraint.

Within the Seneca nation, Red Jacket was a traditionalist. He wanted the Senecas to be able to continue to live and worship as they had, not pressuring into adopting European ways. But all the Haudenosaunee at that conference wanted the Americans to respect their territories and independence.

In April, the Senate approved Washington’s proposal for annual grants to the Haudenosaunee. While this is sometimes labeled as a treaty, it was internal U.S. legislation, not signed by Indian delegates. Washington passed the news along, and Knox and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson formally affirmed the promise.

The 1792 meeting led to another conference two years later, when Pickering negotiated the Treaty of Canandaigua. Red Jacket was among the Haudenosaunee leaders who signed that document. It promised “perpetual peace and friendship,” affirmed Native land claims, and tripled the annual payment. The last provision is the only one the U.S. of A. has faithfully observed; each year the federal government supplies $4,500 worth of cloth to the Haudenosaunee.

TOMORROW: A remembrance of the 1792 meeting.