The savages respected the whites when they showed cunning, and they did
not hate them the more for not showing mercy in fight; but we have seen
how fiercely they resented the crime of horse stealing in Kenton’s case,
though they were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers;
and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt
to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their
enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they
were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the
Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is
record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the
whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone
it in some of their dealings with the Indians, but I cannot call to mind
any act of theirs that seems so black, so wholly without justice and
without reason. It is no wonder that it embittered the hostilities
between the red men and the white men and made the war, which outlasted
our Revolution ten years, more and more unmerciful to the very end.
The missionaries of the Moravian Church were more successful than any
others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of
them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were
vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when
practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to
kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work,
and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations
and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and
Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the
disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded
to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the
chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited
them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the
Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject
to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum.
Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the
Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian
Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled
there at three points which they called Schönbrun, the Beautiful Spring,
Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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