Thayendanegea / Joseph Brant: Two Names, Two Identities
While American colonists were ramping up their bid for independence in July 1776, Britons an ocean away found few hints of impending trouble in that month’s issue of the London Magazine. An “Address to the Ladies on the Danger of their Head-Dress” warned of metal hairpins attracting lightning strikes, while another report detailed “Instances of Gluttony at Ordinaries and public Feasts.”
Only an article on the visiting Mohawk leader Thayendanegea (known to the English-speaking world as Joseph Brant) provided a foretaste of the searing divisions that lay ahead. Brant had become an instant celebrity upon arriving in England late in 1775. Educated at a Connecticut missionary school, he dazzled London society with his elegant manners and command of English. According to the London Magazine, it was the growing rift between England and the American colonies that prompted his journey across the Atlantic. “The present unhappy civil war in America occasioned his coming over to England,” the article explained, because “he was solicited by both sides to give his assistance, and found himself perplexed amidst a contrariety of arguments.”
For most of his life, Brant found himself in this position of divided loyalties, a man with two names and two sources of identity. As a young boy, he had straddled both the Mohawk world into which he was born, and the white world he had adopted through his education by Christian missionaries. The impending civil war created further divisions, splintering the white world into rebels and loyalists.
The hybrid nature of Brant’s identity is evident in his portraits. One of the earliest, commissioned in 1776 by the Earl of Warwick, was made in London by the up-and-coming painter George Romney. It was reproduced three years later as a mezzotint engraving by John Raphael Smith, which is currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery. It shows Brant wearing a fanciful style of dress that is neither Anglo-American nor American Indian, but rather a hodgepodge reflecting intercultural exchange. The silver gorget around his neck, presented to him by George III, declares his English associations, while the leggings he wears are authentically Indian. The rest of his clothing and accessories were manufactured in Britain in imitation of Indian designs—elements in a conventional mode of attire adopted by Native Americans engaged in diplomacy and trade, and known in the eighteenth century as “Indian dress.”
Although Brant habitually wore Anglo clothing in his daily life, he adopted some version of “Indian dress” in all of his portraits, which he described on one occasion as more in keeping with his “dignity.” The London Magazine had its own reasons for preferring Brant in Indian dress, noting that when he wore “the ordinary European habit, there did not seem to be anything about him that marked preeminence.” With the greater satisfaction of its readers in mind, the magazine stated, it chose to illustrate its article on Brant with “a print of him in the dress of his nation, which gives him a more striking appearance.”
By the time he returned to America, Brant had decided where his loyalties lay. Convinced that victory for the colonists meant disaster for Native Americans, he persuaded the Iroquois Confederacy to side with the British. Leading a mixed unit of white and Indian loyalists, all of whom donned Indian dress and paint before going into battle, Brant attacked colonial outposts on the New York frontier. In November 1778 he burnished his reputation as a formidable warrior by playing a decisive role in the raid on Cherry Valley, New York. John Raphael Smith’s mezzotint was published three months later, capitalizing on rekindled British fascination with Brant. When Brant returned to London in November 1785 following the conclusion of the war, he was granted a generous pension, and the British government agreed to fully compensate the Mohawk for the losses incurred through their loyalty.
