Faith Works 3-03-07
Jeff Gill

Crawford Died For Your Sins

A man once died a particularly cruel and painful death, to make up for the evil actions of others, of which he himself was entirely innocent. His death led to the birth of a religious community which counts many adherents all around us to this day. The place of his death is well known, but not a scrap of his body can be found to this day.

No, not Him.

It was in Ohio, beginning 225 years ago this week.

One phase of this tragic narrative began on the morning of March 8, in 1782, as almost 100 old men, women, and children of the Moravian Delaware Indian community were massacred, mostly by mallet and hand axe, about an hour east of us at Gnadenhutten. Two boys survived, one by playing dead after a blow to the head, lying still under a pile of his family and fellow worshipers; the other was small enough to sneak out between the logs of their church building, where the community was kept overnight in singing and prayer before their execution at dawn.

They, too, were innocent. The adult men of the community had been working to plant the next season’s corn, and a few other Indians from Fort Detroit may have sheltered with them overnight who had raided across the Ohio, but of those killed there was no blood on their hands. That didn’t keep their blood from watering the ground at the Moravian log church’s door.

The blood of those 96 or 98 victims actually fueled the flames of hostility on the frontier, the western theater of the American Revolution, where British officers taught the fine art of scalping to young rootless warriors and offered money for European scalps. Some Native leaders like Chief Cornstalk and Killbuck had argued for a neutral stance, but the temptations of cash for killing led enough across the Ohio that reprisal parties answered raiding parties, leading to the senseless slaughter of Gnadenhutten, or "Huts of Grace" in the German of the David Heckewelder’s missionary efforts.

Innocent blood called out to warriors and leaders who had stayed so far aloof from the irregular combat. A massing of Native people came together at Upper Sandusky, and a second expedition was planned near Washington, PA, to cross again at Fort Henry (Wheeling, today) and find a new, more fitting target for their vengance.

The two groups met at Tymochtee Creek, just south of Carey, OH, with the Pennsylvanians led by George Washington’s friend Col. William Crawford, sent somewhat against his will to keep tighter control on the angry and undisciplined frontier militia, most of whom had been at Gnadenhutten a few months before.

The Americans were attacked, broke, scattered, and Crawford was captured. It was explained to him that he must die to satisfy the debt incurred in his fellow soldier’s killings. By all accounts, his courage and relative calm was moving to all, but not enough to end the torture and death designed for him.

Could Indians and Americans share in building a culture and a home across the Ohio Territory? Logan and Cornstalk and Guyasuta and Killbuck and White-eyes all thought so, and the Moravian pastors John Heckewelder and David Zeisberger both believed it, and began to prove it at Schoenbrunn, at Lichtenau, and at Gnadenhutten.After 1782, with Gnadenhutten a smoking, bloody ruin, and the other settlements abandoned, the likelihood of the two cultures sharing in the land dwindled to nothing. The rationale for the massacre, or the relative atrocity of Crawford’s death, were points of dispute well into the 1900’s, and only in recent years has a truly honest assessment been possible.

But buried in those recriminations of the early 1800’s and into the twentieth century are stories of those violent and angry young men, hearts set on useless vengeance, who grew to be husbands and community leaders and respected figures when territories became states.

The religious revivals of the Upper Ohio valley that led to the Restoration Movement, the teachings of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell against the harsh Calvinism of their day, found fertile soil in the hearts of men who believed that there was no forgiveness for those who had such evils in their past, and they knew what they had done was evil. Baptist and Presbyterian practice of their day was that you could not join or commune until you could honestly say that you knew your sins were forgiven.

The Restoration Movement preachers like Walter Scott said "come, be baptized, and receive forgiveness; you don’t have to say you are forgiven to have the right to receive baptism, you enter the water to find it waiting for you there."

They taught Christ’s baptism, but the example of Crawford dying in their place surely lit the way for those now 50 & 60 year old men who came forward, and brought their families with them.

Today’s Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ, independent Christian Churches, and United Church of Christ folk have a solemn anniversary of sorts this week, and I plan to make the brief pilgrimage myself to a silent mound, still marked with prayer and offerings, in Gnadenhutten.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.