Gnadenhutten was a town founded in 1772 by Moravian missionaries for Native Americans in eastern Ohio. Its 50-60 cabins housed several hundred Delaware and other Christian Indians who farmed and sought to remain neutral during the Revolutionary War (1775-83).

These Indians lived better than most European-American frontiersmen and had glass in their windows, pots and pans, and even a piano in their community. If anything, the Christian Indians seemed to favor the United States in the war because they often supplied local officials with information about the activities of the British and their allied Indians. Concerned about these contacts, the British compelled the Gnadenhutten Indians to abandon their prosperous settlement in September 1781 but gave permission to a group of them to return in early 1782 to obtain food and supplies. At about the same time, a party of Pennsylvania militia entered the area in search of Indians who had raided European-American settlements during the summer of 1781.

Unable to find the hostile Indians, the Pennsylvania men stumbled into Gnadenhutten on March 7, 1782, and seized its Christian Indians. The militiamen held a mock tribunal to determine the Native Americans' guilt, and since the Indians had kettles, clothing, and various goods that the militia believed only European Americans could own, they concluded that the Gnadenhutten Indians had to be guilty of the raids on Pennsylvania. Ninety-six Indians--all the men, women, and children in the town--were sentenced to die and locked in their cabins overnight. The next morning was a bloodbath as the Pennsylvania militia took wooden mallets and crushed the Indians' skulls and then scalped them. After the slaughter, the Pennsylvanians burned the town's buildings to the ground. During the same campaign, the militia raided several Shawnee towns, raping and killing women and murdering children. This path of destruction further antagonized the Native Americans in the Ohio area, intensifying the war on the frontier.

Bibliography:

Earl P. Olmsted, Blackcoats among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1991).

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