The Sullivan Campaign

I am a native of the Finger Lakes region of New York and ever since I was young I’ve had a deep love for local history. My father lived in Seneca Falls, NY in his family home where I spent the remaining weekends, holidays and most of my summer vacation. The family house was only three doors up from the Women’s Rights Convention site and I remember visiting the museum on multiple occasions during my childhood.

My mother and stepfather lived in Auburn, NY where I would spend the school week and every other weekend and holiday. Auburn has a rich history that seems to be missed by much of the outside world. Auburn is where Theodore Case invented the method of putting sound on film that ended the silent film era, William Seward, President Lincoln’s campaign rival turned Secretary of State who secured the purchase of Alaska and survived an assassination attempt the night Lincoln was assassinated, lived as did Harriet Tubman whose descendants still live here.

The way Auburn and Seneca Falls are positioned on opposite sides of Cayuga Lake we would have to follow the same road to get from one parent’s house to the other. Along this road, I noticed a New York State historical marker, its blue and gold design made it stand out from its wooded surroundings and I was curious to know what it said. We were always moving so fast I would only be able to read a few words each time we passed it. After many failed attempts to read it in the car, I realized I could look it up online and after a few Google searches, I found the marker and was surprised by what it said:

“Sullivan’s Campaign

One mile west

Col. Butler crossed

Cayuga Lake and destroyed

Cayuga village of Tichero”

-State Education Department 1932

My curiosity was piqued and I set off to research this Sullivan’s Campaign further. I had never heard anything about it and soon found scattered details about it. I learned that following the Battle of Saratoga the British armed loyalists and members of the Iroquois Confederacy aligned with the British. This force was sent out to attack and raid settlements on the New York and Pennsylvania frontiers to try to distract the colonists and force them to divert forces and supplies from the other theaters of the war.

The Sullivan Campaign was a military action devised by then General Washington to end the raids by destroying the Iroquois villages in the frontier and seizing Fort Niagara which would have been another strategic victory in the war. Many of the villages that were targeted were in the Finger Lakes, yet I had never heard of the campaign which I found to be strange. In school, we had learned early on that the land we now lived on belonged to the Iroquois and after the Revolutionary War they had signed a lot of their land away, but the reason why they signed the land away was omitted. I later discovered the reason to be the Sullivan Campaign and wondered why such an important piece of local history was not in our history book.

I began telling others about the campaign and found that I was not the only one who never heard of it. In fact, the only people I encountered who knew about it were historians. I have always dreamed of writing a book about the campaign and focusing it on the locations. I want to go out to the locations of the raids, the villages that were destroyed, the battles and skirmishes of the campaign, photograph them all, and note them in the book. My passion is to bring this forgotten chapter in my region’s history back into the light and encourage others to learn more about it.