“You were the first man in active rebellion, and drew with you the province you live in. You will be one of the first sacrifices to the resentment and justice of the government. Your family will be ruined, and you must die with ignominy.” This was the man to whom Washington turned for a leader when Congress determined, in 1779, to organize an expedition for the destruction of the Six Nations. When the Revolution began the colonial authorities sent delegates to the great council of the Iroquois, to secure, if possible, their neutrality in the coming contest. There was good reason to expect it, for the Provincials had fought with them and for them against the French for years. The confederacy could muster at this time about 2,000 warriors. The delegates returned, confident that an arrangement had been effected, but, as subsequent events proved, any action by the Indians to that end was revoked, and fully 1,200 of them were secured for the British service. It is not necessary, neither was it the intention, to describe here the events occurring on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania during the years 1777 and 1778. The terrible atrocities perpetrated on the defenceless settlers by Indians, Tories, British regulars, and refugees, whose passions were inflamed with hatred against the struggling patriots, were a disgrace to civilization and a foul blot on the British government, which sought to crush the Revolution by such horrible methods. A well-known New York writer, a descendant of some of those who suffered at Cherry Valley, while describing the massacres by the Indians said: “But, after all, I blame much more the English monarch who incited the fiendish warfare, than the red men, who took his gold and fought after their fashion.” He could have truthfully added that but twenty years after, similar deeds were committed without the aid of Indian auxiliaries, by order of the same government, when it crushed, in Ireland, the rebellion of 1798. Many of those who then met their death by the bullet or bayonet, or swung from the gallows, were akin to hundreds who marched and fought under Sullivan in this campaign. A kinsman of one of them, Francis McKinley, who suffered death on the scaffold in Ireland at that time, is now president of the United States. The destruction of the thriving settlement of Wyoming and Cherry Valley, and the devastation along the banks of the Susquehanna, finally brought Congress to a realization of the situation.