Schenectady massacre

Background

The Beaver Wars, a late 17th-century struggle between the Haudenosaunee and New France over the fur trade, set the stage for a brutal attack. In August 1689, after England and France had declared war but before word reached North America, the Haudenosaunee raided the French settlement of Lachine. In retaliation, New France's governor, Frontenac, organized an expedition from Montreal to strike English outposts to the south. His goal was to punish the English for backing the Haudenosaunee and to pressure the Haudenosaunee into abandoning their English trade ties.

This was one of three such expeditions aimed at isolated northern and western settlements, originally targeting Fort Orange, now Albany. The force included 114 French Canadians, mostly coureurs de bois and some marines, along with 80 Sault and 16 Algonquin warriors, plus a few converted Mohawks. They marched 200 miles overland in about 22 days. At what is now Fort Edward, the French leaders—Jacques le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène and Nicolas d'Ailleboust de Manthet, with Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville as second-in-command—held a council to plan the attack.

They crossed the ice of Lake Champlain and Lake George toward English settlements on the Hudson River. Finding Fort Orange well-defended, a scouting party reported on February 8 that the stockade at Schenectady, a small frontier village to the west, was unguarded. The village was mostly Dutch American and held many Black slaves. Political divisions from the 1689 Leisler's Rebellion had left Schenectady and Albany so polarized that they could not agree on setting guards.

Schenectady, whose name comes from the Mohawk word skahnéhtati, meaning "beyond the Pines," was a farming patent granted to the Dutch in 1661, about seven miles west of Rensselaerswyck's border.

Attack

Just before dawn on a winter morning, a raiding party slipped into Schenectady through an open gate, reportedly finding only two snowmen standing guard. They set fire to homes and barns, killing men, women, and children, most still in their nightclothes and unable to arm themselves. By daybreak on February 9, the settlement was destroyed, with over sixty buildings burned. Sixty people died, among them thirty-eight men, ten women, and twelve children.

Eleven of the dead were Black slaves, listed in records as "negroes." The French reported that roughly fifty to sixty residents survived, and that twenty Mohawks were deliberately spared to make clear the attack targeted the English, not Native people. Among the killed was Dominie Petrus Tessemacher, the first Dutch Reformed pastor ordained in the Americas; the French had hoped to capture him for questioning, but he died in his house. Reynier Schaets, a surgeon and son of an Albany dominie, was also killed along with one of his sons.

His wife Catharina Bensing and three other children survived. Many who fled the town died from exposure in the extreme cold before reaching safety. The raiders left with twenty-seven prisoners, including five Black slaves, and fifty horses. John Alexander Glen, who lived across the river in Scotia and had previously helped the French, was given the chance to claim relatives among the captives.

He took as many as he could; the rest were marched to Montreal. Along the two-hundred-mile journey, captives too young, old, or weak to keep up were killed. As in later raids, many younger prisoners were adopted into Mohawk families in Canada. Some survivors, like Symon Schermerhorn, escaped to the fort at Albany.

Aftermath

The massacre united New York’s rival political groups against New France. The Albany Convention, previously opposed to Jacob Leisler, now recognized his rule. With Connecticut’s help, Leisler planned a retaliatory strike on Montreal.

Connecticut general Fitz-John Winthrop led the expedition, but it failed in August 1690 due to disease, scarce supplies, and too few boats on Lake Champlain. In 1990, Schenectady commissioned composer Maria Riccio Bryce to write Hearts of Fire for the massacre’s 300th anniversary, tracing townspeople’s lives through 1689 as the French marched from Montreal. Despite heavy losses in deaths and captives, the settlers chose to stay and rebuild, honoring their lost relatives.