White Eyes - Revolution and Death

Revolution and Death

When the American Revolutionary War began soon after the end of Dunmore's War, White Eyes was negotiating a royal grant with Lord Dunmore that was intended to secure the Lenape territory in the Ohio Country. After the American revolutionaries forced Dunmore out of Virginia, White Eyes had to begin anew with the Americans. In April 1776, he addressed the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on behalf of the Lenape and two years later completed an alliance with the United States by a treaty signed in 1778 at Fort Pitt. It called for the establishment of a Lenape state, with representation in the American Congress, provided that the Congress approved. White Eyes died before the treaty was submitted to Congress, and the matter was dropped.

The treaty provided for the Lenape to serve as guides for the Americans when they moved through the Ohio Country to strike at their British and Indian enemies to the north, in and around Detroit. In early November 1778, White Eyes joined an American expedition under General Lachlan McIntosh as a guide and negotiator. Soon after, the Americans reported that White Eyes had contracted smallpox and died during the expedition. After his death, the Lenape alliance with the Americans eventually collapsed.

Years later, George Morgan, a US Indian agent, trader and close associate of White Eyes, who had helped negotiate with Native Americans in the Fort Pitt area, wrote a letter to Congress claiming that the chief had been "treacherously put to death" by American militia in Michigan. He further wrote that the murder of White Eyes had been covered up to prevent the Lenape from abandoning the revolutionaries. No other details of what happened have survived; historians generally accept Morgan's claim that White Eyes had been murdered, though the reasons remain obscure.

White Eyes' British-Lenape wife Rachel Doddridge was reportedly murdered by white men in 1788. Their mixed-race son George Morgan White Eyes (1770?–1798) was cared for by the family friend George Morgan. Later he was educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), where his tuition was paid by the Continental Congress. He graduated in 1789.

White Eyes Township in Coshocton County, Ohio was named after the chief as a tribute to his influence on the early history of the county.