Rags to riches

Imagine the extent of his holdings: 154 square miles of virgin land north of the Mohawk River; 300 square miles of fine farm land west and south of modern Utica; many more square miles scattered in packets across future New York State. By the end of his life, Johnson’s partners in business included Britain’s foremost soldier in the Colonies, Thomas Gage, the governor of New York, Sir Henry Moore, and the wealthy British statesman Lord Holland. Johnson’s grants included land the Erie Canal would someday cross, land the New York Central would claim for roadbeds and railroad stations, land the New York State Thruway bisects today. No one ever came closer to owning New York State than Chris Johnson’s poor son Billy.
The Johnson dynasty did not survive the War for Independence. Johnson died on the eve of the conflict, and his family, imbued with loyalty to the Crown, led the Tory cause in New York until defeat drove them across the border into Canada. In the aftermath, the Johnson lands were expropriated and auctioned; even Johnson Hall and the family’s properties in Johnstown passed out of their control. The revolution in Upstate New York was more than one decisive battle at Saratoga; it was a bitter civil war that dragged on for seven long years. After it was over, few felt much nostalgia for the exiled Johnson clan or their Tory neighbors.
But Johnson was another matter. True, he probably would have sided with the British had he lived. No leader in Colonial America played a greater role in swaying the allegiance of Native Americans to Britain or consolidating British power along the frontiers. But Johnson was also a hero to many New York patriots. They remembered that in the darkest days of the French and Indian War, it was Johnson, colonel in the New York Militia, jumped-up brigadier of a motley force of frontiersmen and New England farmers, who held the French back above Albany. Had he not, New York City might be speaking French today.
It was Johnson, who at considerable expense to himself, built the forts that guarded the frontier settlements, and then for his troubles took a musket ball in the hip at the Battle of Lake George. In fact, Johnson named Lake George, Fort William Henry, Fort Edward and many of the other hamlets springing up across the New York territory. There were no reliable maps and Johnson’s Iroquois friends pointed him through the valleys and over the mountains to places that would become Binghamton, Rochester, Buffalo. Johnson had not one day of formal military training, but for the first two years of the French and Indian War, he was the only British or American commander to win significant victories.

Friend of Mohawks
Sir William was not “Sir” when he led his ragtag force into the wilderness above Albany. To the men who loved and followed him, he was Billy Johnson, an Irish fur trader with a commanding voice and winning personality. They knew him as a womanizer, a carouser, but a steady man notwithstanding. He was also a special friend of the Mohawk people, who adopted him into their tribe and named him “Warraghiyagey,” doer of big deeds. Two hundred Mohawks rode with Johnson to the Battle of Lake George — and lucky for the Colonies they did. The Mohawk warriors saved their Irish brother and his fledgling army from the same kind of ambush and massacre General Braddock, with his young aide George Washington, fell into just outside of Pittsburgh. Braddock was Johnson’s boss, a haughty British officer dismissive of Irishmen in particular and Americans in general. Worse, Braddock had no use for Indians, even as he led his red-coated troops deep into trackless forests. By the time Johnson limped home the victor from Lake George, Braddock lay in a nameless grave on a wilderness trail. His army, blind in the woods, had marched to its death. Forest fighting, Johnson predicted, would turn out a lot tougher than Europe’s proud soldiers imagined.
Johnson had not only won a victory at Lake George, along the decisive corridor from New York City to Montreal; he had beaten and taken prisoner one of France’s best mercenary generals, Baron von Dieskau. The baron with his Indians ambushed Johnson first, but Johnson’s forces rallied and held, even as their commander staggered with his wound. What else could an appreciative George II do, lacking other successes in the field, but honor Johnson with a battlefield baronetcy — one of only two elevations to the peerage ever received by Americans. Sir William’s hereditary title would pass into extinction with his son Sir John, the Tory.

Attractive character
The prestige and influence of Johnson Hall before the revolution was not based on a single throw of the dice in the dark and dangerous woods, but on Johnson’s lifetime of service to the Colonies as the crown’s supervisor of Indian affairs. Johnson went on to capture Niagara from the French, with the help of the Senecas, and to open the road to Oswego with the aid of the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Onondagas. At the height of his influence over the Iroquois Confederacy, his reach stretched from Johnstown, N.Y., on the Mohawk River, all the way to Detroit, Illinois, and the Mississippi. Which is to say that when Johnson summoned tribal leaders to treaties at Fort Stanwix or Johnson Hall, they made a point of coming. So did the Colonies’ aspiring public men. Johnson’s papers are in the State Archives at Albany. They detail the busy deeds of his life, but we need to remember that his real power rested not only on his business acumen and luck at war — others had that too — but on his personal magic and attractiveness of his character. Native Americans trusted him, where they trusted few white men, and what astonished them most about Johnson was his empathy for their plight and his unwavering fairness towards them in trade and treaty.
What gave him this ability to identify with a people so different from any he had ever known? Johnson saw the Native Americans pushed off their lands, cheated, humiliated by Europeans. He sensed the beauty and vitality of their threatened way of life, and he understood their despair because he had felt it too in Ireland, where an 18th-century tenant system ground down the dignity and initiative of his own kinsfolk.

Well-connected uncle
He came to the Mohawk Valley of New York in 1738 with almost 100 families from Killeen willing to take their chances at the edge of civilization. But the land Johnson settled on, where he built his trading post and farm, was not his own. It belonged to his uncle Peter Warren, who had the good fortune to marry one of New York City’s wealthiest women — the daughter of James De Lancey, after whose family the street in Manhattan is named. She saw to it that her husband was cut in on one of the most fabled land grabs in the province’s history.
For a small consideration, Warren, a rear admiral in the Royal Navy posted to the Atlantic Station, acquired 14,000 acres of virgin land on the Mohawk River. This tract dwarfed the Warren Manor at Warrenstown, Killeen, where he’d begun life as the scion of a powerful Anglo-Irish family. The problem was, however, that Admiral Warren had no intention of interrupting a successful naval career to make his life on the American frontier. He named his new estate Warrensburg and cast around for a surrogate master to send north into the woods.
Now it had happened that Warren’s sister Anne had wed for love, but unfortunately, with a man far below her. A daughter of the manor house, she married a tenant farmer, Christopher Johnson, and bore him a son, William. What to do with William became Anne and Peter’s project. Billy was tutored by a priest and brought up in his father’s faith. But Anne knew that as a Catholic in Ireland, William’s prospects were limited. She dragged him into the Church of Ireland, opened doors for him into Anglo-Irish circles and hoped for the best. The best came with an offer from Warren to install his nephew on the Mohawk River as an estate manager and fur trader. Warren never once visited the Mohawk and Anne would never again see her son, but William had been launched. The rest was his doing — he remained an Anglican to his dying day but also remembered the people of his father, and in dealings with Irish immigrants or the Iroquois, Johnson was no absentee landlord. He lived where he worked, his hand out to Native Americans as well as to Europeans.
New York State has restored Johnson Hall to its original size and furnishings, and highly knowledgeable guides can help visitors imagine the traffic through the halls of wealthy land owners, high colonial officials and native sachems from as far west as the Great Plains. It was a mix that Sir William loved, and serving it, he was the first great New Yorker to define the Empire State.
(Richard Berleth is a professor of communications at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. He is the author of “The Twilight Lords: the Plunder of Elizabethan Ireland” and is currently at work on a book about the Mohawk Valley and Sir William Johnson.)