Red Jacket and the Decolonization of Republican Virtue

Abstract

History has not always been kind to Sagoyewatha, or, as he is more commonly known, Red Jacket. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for Native sovereignty in the early national period, Sagoyewatha was nonetheless accused by his peers of cowardice, alcoholism, and egotism. Although none of these character allegations damage his contributions to Indian nationalism (many of the charges originated in political rivalry), the more insidious argument about Red Jacket's life treats him like one of James Fenimore Cooper's vanishing race. An influential Seneca leader after 1790, Sagoyewatha is generally recognized as a principal engineer of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which guaranteed Indian sovereignty over four million acres of upstate New York. In other achievements, he defended arrested Senecas from state prosecution, made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Seneca rights, and he stridently opposed missionary presence on Indian lands after 1803. Echoing the social opinions of the late 1820s, however, Euroamerican and Indian historians alike have characterized him as the last of the Senecas, a tragic figure who represented the final days of his nation.' Fortunately, this picture is beginning to change. Christopher Densmore's recent biography has helped to clear away the cloud of demonization that obscured Red Jacket's life. Literary scholars and historians, such as Maureen Konkle and Matthew Dennis, have begun to frame Sagoyewatha's career as an influential contribution to discourse about Native sovereignty. Furthermore, given the existence of a large number of Red Jacket speeches with good provenance, his work provides an archive of Indigenous political thought and action that has yet to receive the study it deserves.2