The August woods above the Bronx river hold their heat. Muskets crack among the oaks, and a small company of Native soldiers turns to face the horsemen closing in.
It is 1778.
He does not just farm the valley his people had long held. He watches colonial landholders, chief among them the Philipse family, claim a vast tract the Wappinger said had been taken from them by fraud.
He does not just complain among his own. He carries the Wappinger case before the colonial council of New York in 1765, and when the council ruled against him, he did not let the matter drop.
He does not just petition at home. He crosses the ocean to London and lays the grievance before the Board of Trade, which found reason to look into it and sent the matter back to New York, where the council dismissed it once more.
He does not just seek justice through paper. He takes up a commission when the Revolution came, joining the Patriot cause in the hope of recovering by war what the courts had denied.
His Spark of Liberty was a claim no council would honor.
For most of his life he fought not with muskets but with petitions. He was a sachem, a leader who believed the law might return stolen ground if pressed hard and long enough. By most accounts he never stood before the King, though he did press his case among men close to the government. When those doors closed, he turned to the field, and his son Abraham led a company of Stockbridge men who served the new nation as scouts and skirmishers.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
He was born around 1726, a sachem of the Wappinger people of the Hudson Valley. The land dispute that defined his life centered on holdings the Philipse family controlled, which the Wappinger maintained had been taken from them wrongly. In 1765 he brought the case before the colonial council of New York, which ruled against him. Backed by supporters of the anti-rent cause, he then traveled to London and laid the grievance before the Board of Trade. The board sent the matter back to New York, where the council dismissed it again.
When the Revolution came, he saw in the Patriot cause a chance to recover what the courts had refused. He accepted a commission and joined the fight. His son Abraham led a company of Stockbridge men, Native soldiers who served as scouts and skirmishers for the new nation.
On the thirty-first of August, 1778, that company was drawn into an ambush near Kingsbridge, at the northern edge of what is now Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. British and Loyalist horsemen under John Graves Simcoe surrounded them. By an account long repeated, the old sachem, outnumbered and unwilling to run, chose to stand and die among his men. Estimates of the Stockbridge dead range from seventeen to forty. The engagement is remembered as the Stockbridge Massacre.
For decades he had asked one government after another to return his people’s land. In the end he died for the country that kept it.
His name was Daniel Nimham.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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