1779 Sullivan Expedition

Date: June 18 – October 3, 1779

Location: Upstate New York and Northeastern Pennsylvania

The Sullivan Campaign of 1779—officially the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition—was a calculated military operation executed by the Continental Army against the Iroquois Confederacy during the American Revolutionary War. Ordered by George Washington in retaliation for raids on the Wyoming Valley and Cherry Valley, the campaign unfolded across what is now upstate New York and northeastern Pennsylvania. But beneath its tactical veneer, the expedition reveals a chilling blueprint of cultural annihilation disguised as wartime necessity.

Washington’s instructions made no pretense of diplomacy or restraint. The goal was unambiguous: “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” In response, four brigades of Continental soldiers marched through Iroquois territory, carrying out a scorched-earth campaign that left over forty villages in ashes and more than 160,000 bushels of corn destroyed, along with untold quantities of fruits and vegetables. At the cost of only forty American lives, a complex and ancient civilization was pushed toward the brink of starvation and displacement.

Yet to refer to this atrocity as an “American victory,” as some modern historical sources like Wikipedia do, is a perverse distortion of truth. This was not a battle; it was an extermination campaign. The Sullivan Expedition was less about neutralizing a military threat than it was about dismantling the very fabric of indigenous life. By targeting not warriors but fields, food, and homes, the campaign weaponized starvation, forcing a slow and agonizing defeat upon entire communities.

This brutal strategy was not born in a vacuum. The racial ideology fueling the campaign had been gestating for centuries. By 1779, influential members of the Continental Congress, such as Rhode Island delegate Henry Marchant, were openly dehumanizing Indigenous people, likening them to “fleas” plaguing the American body politic. Such metaphors stripped the Iroquois of humanity and justified a genocidal logic: pests, after all, must be eradicated. The destruction of crops was not merely a military tactic—it was a form of ecological cleansing designed to erase a people by obliterating their means of survival.

The campaign was, in effect, an assault on a way of life. The Iroquois were farmers as much as fighters, and by burning their fields, the Continental Army sought to uproot not only their sustenance but their identity. The act of torching every cornfield and orchard was more than physical destruction—it was symbolic conquest. These acts paved the way for European settlers to impose their own agrarian ideals on a land stripped of its original stewards. In doing so, the Sullivan Campaign advanced a vision of “civilization” rooted in racial supremacy and economic exploitation.

In retrospect, the Sullivan Campaign stands as a harrowing example of how war can be waged not just against people, but against culture, memory, and place. It was not a victory—it was a crime committed in the language of military strategy. To sanitize this campaign as a footnote in the American struggle for independence is to ignore its deeper truth: that the United States, even in its infancy, was capable of unspeakable cruelty in pursuit of its manifest destiny.

The true legacy of the Sullivan Campaign is not its short-term success in silencing Iroquois resistance, but its long-term contribution to a pattern of erasure that has haunted Indigenous peoples ever since. Its malevolence was not incidental—it was systemic, calculated, and cold. And it deserves to be remembered as such.