an American
army would have done if, with Iroquois savages as allies, it had made
war in an English county. We know what loathing a parallel situation
aroused against the British army in America. The Indians, it should be
noted, were not soldiers under British discipline but allies; the chiefs
regarded themselves as equals who must be consulted and not as enlisted
to take orders from a British general.

In war, as in politics, nice balancing of merit or defect in an enemy
would destroy the main purpose which is to defeat him. Each side
exaggerates any weak point in the other in order to stimulate the
fighting passions. Judgment is distorted. The Baroness Riedesel, the
wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who was in Boston in 1777, says that
the people were all dressed alike in a peasant costume with a leather
strap round the waist, that they were of very low and insignificant
stature, and that only one in ten of them could read or write. She
pictures New Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English
ladies. When educated people believed every evil of the enemy the
ignorant had no restraint to their credulity. New England had long
regarded the native savages as a pest. In 1776 New Hampshire offered
seventy pounds for each scalp of a hostile male Indian and thirty-seven
pounds and ten shillings for each scalp of a woman or of a child under
twelve years of age. Now it was reported that the British were offering
bounties for American scalps. Benjamin Franklin satirized British
ignorance when he described whales leaping Niagara Falls and he did not
expect to be taken seriously when, at a later date, he pictured George
III as gloating over the scalps of his subjects in America. The Seneca
Indians alone, wrote Franklin, sent to the King many bales of scalps.
Some bales were captured by the Americans and they found the scalps of
43 soldiers, 297 farmers, some of them burned alive, and 67 old people,
88 women, 193 boys, 211 girls, 29 infants, and others unclassified.
Exact figures bring conviction. Franklin was not wanting in exactness
nor did he fail, albeit it was unwittingly, to intensify burning
resentment of which we have echoes still. Burgoyne had to bear the odium
of the outrages by Indians. It is amusing to us, though it was hardly so
to this kindly man, to find these words put into his mouth by a colonial
poet:

I will let loose the dogs of Hell,
Ten thousand Indians who shall yell,
And foam,