Colonial Secretary Gálvez and the other Spanish ministers were committed to the reinvigoration of their colonial empire. They hoped New Orleans would become the hub of a trade network that would join the Spanish king’s far-flung colonies in California, the Rio Grande Valley, and Texas to its new conquests in Florida. America’s western ambitions would challenge this plan. The French ambassador in Philadelphia communicated Spain’s opposition as early as January 1780. “It is the idea of the cabinet of Madrid,” Chevalier de la Luzerne wrote, “that the United States extended to the westward no farther than settlements were permitted by the royal proclamation . . . of 1763.”29 The ambassador went on to note that since the lands between the Appalachians and the great river had been declared off-limits to American settlement by the British, they were “proper objects against which the arms of Spain may be employed for the purpose of making a permanent conquest for the Spanish crown. . . . Such conquest may,” he added, “be made during the present war.”30
The French agreed that the Indians’ territory west of the Appalachians should be divided between Spain and the Americans. The French ambassador pointed out that his nation was “[u]nited . . . in treaties of alliance” with both Spain and the United States and was therefore “exceedingly desirous of conciliating” them. Luzerne reminded the Americans that Spanish support would be essential to an American victory. The revolution was not “past all danger of unfavorable events,” he wrote, “until his Catholic Majesty [Spain] and the United States shall be established on . . . terms of confidence and amity.”31
Though serious discussions among the diplomats in Paris began in early 1782, the situation remained fluid. American diplomats in Paris remained determined to press their demand for a western boundary on the Mississippi, but the leadership in Philadelphia appeared willing to accept something less. Robert Livingston, the rebels’ secretary for foreign affairs in Philadelphia, warned Franklin that “our western and northwestern extent will probably be contested with some warmth” and suggested: “If the mediators should not incline to admit our claim, perhaps it would not be difficult to bring them to agree that the country . . . belongs to the nations that inhabit it [and] that it should enjoy its independence under the guarantee of France, Spain and Great Britain and America. . . .”32 Similarly, while the British crown was also determined to defend the Appalachians as the Americans’ western border, circumstances had brought Franklin’s old friend Lord Shelburne into Rockingham’s cabinet as home secretary. The two had worked closely together at the end of the Seven Years’ War and perhaps would be able to strike a deal again. “I find myself returned nearly to the same situation which you remember me to have occupied nineteen years ago,” the new minister wrote Franklin, “and I should be very glad to talk to you as I did then upon the means of promoting the happiness of mankind, a subject much more agreeable to my nature than . . . plans for spreading misery and devastation.”33
The final source of uncertainty was the fact that despite their recent victory, the Americans remained militarily weak. They had been unable to dislodge the British from New York and Charleston or to challenge the king’s navy on the high seas. The Americans had few weapons other than their resolve—and Franklin’s pen. Tellingly, at a moment when he sought every possible advantage, America’s most experienced international diplomat turned to the most scurrilous form of racist propaganda. In late April 1782, as serious negotiations with the Spanish and British were about to begin, the American ambassador in Paris sent a broadside titled “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle,” dated March 12, to the American ambassadors in Spain and the Netherlands and to several British newspapers. His goal was to undermine any claims Indian tribes may have had to recognition in Paris and to weaken the hand of his British adversaries.
Franklin’s “Supplement” purported to be a special issue of the Boston newspaper that carried a letter from one Captain Gerrish of the New England militia. Gerrish’s letter reported the interception of several packages of European scalps shipped from Britain’s Indian allies to their commander, Governor Haldimand, in Quebec. A letter from a British officer was also reprinted in the broadside. His dispatch announced that there were nearly one thousand scalps in the shipment and included a request that his commanders “give farther encouragement” to the warriors who had collected them. The document was a complete fabrication and had been printed on Franklin’s own press in Paris.34
In a letter accompanying the copy of the “Supplement” he sent to John Jay, the American representative at the Spanish court, Franklin noted that while he “suspected” that the document was false, “it is undoubtedly true as to substance . . . the English cannot deny such a number of murders having been really committed by their instigation.”35 While few were fooled by Franklin’s ploy—it appeared in a few English papers but was widely dismissed—it provides a clear measure of the lengths the American ambassador would go to demonize the Native people occupying the lands the Americans coveted and encourage the Europeans to abandon their Indian allies.36
As treaty discussions got under way in Paris in May 1782, the Americans held to this anti-Indian theme while tiptoeing quietly away from their obligations to their European allies. French and Spanish commanders seemed hardly to notice because they were deeply engaged in planning the coming year’s military offensives against the British. The French had already dispatched a fleet to India to challenge London’s bases there, and the Spanish had begun planning for a massive September assault on the king’s fortress at Gibraltar.37 Meanwhile, in London, Shelburne and his colleagues were searching for a way to end the war honorably and at minimal cost. They rejected Franklin’s initial offer of an immediate peace that would have added Canada to the new United States, but they made no counterproposal. As spring turned to summer, Franklin and his fellow Americans began to consider direct negotiations despite their treaty obligation to work solely in concert with Spain and France.38
Rockingham’s death on July 1 and Shelburne’s sudden appointment as prime minister produced the opportunity the Americans had been looking for. Hoping that Franklin and his colleagues could be persuaded to retain some link to Britain, the new prime minister pressed for a direct meeting with rebel envoys despite his refusal to agree to their precondition of a public recognition of their independence. While the Americans and the British sparred over these preliminaries, John Jay (now acting alone in Paris because Franklin had fallen ill and Adams was away in Amsterdam) attempted to resolve the rebels’ differences with Spain and France.
The New York lawyer insisted that his European allies recognize the U.S. claim to a western border at the Mississippi. As Jay, Spain’s ambassador, the conde de Aranda, and the French minister, the comte de Vergennes, wrestled over the boundary issue, each began to realize that it was Britain that might resolve the conflict. Because it had been the imperial ruler of eastern North America, Britain could legally cede all of its territories to the Americans. At the same time, the Spanish minister knew that legal precedents would support Shelburne if he wished to set the new nation’s border at the Appalachians. Aranda estimated that the Continental Congress (and the weary American electorate) would not continue the war simply to acquire the Ohio country and the Tennessee Valley.
Jay devoted much of August to exploring the boundary issue with Aranda. At their first meeting the Spanish ambassador confronted Jay with a large map of North America and, after reminding him that his country had been engaged in the region for more than two centuries, pointed out the obvious fact that regardless of the location of the future boundary, “that dividing line would have to run, in greater part, through the lands of the Indians. . . . All the territory we were looking at beyond the principal line of the boundaries of the colonies,” the ambassador insisted, “was Indian land, to which both [the Spanish and the Americans] had equal rights, or equally unjust claims.”39
Aranda did not mention his government’s potential new allies in Fl
orida and along the Gulf Coast. The Spanish understood that British authority in the Southeast had rested on the crown’s ability to supply local traders like Lachlan McGillivray with sufficient protection and commercial support to maintain the alliances they had forged with the region’s tribes. While Aranda was not yet aware of Alexander McGillivray’s interest in forming an alliance with his government, he certainly knew that Creek warriors had fought alongside the British defenders of Pensacola in 1781 and that a program of local diplomacy could stitch this territory into Spain’s North American empire.
Aranda told Jay that his government was ready to compromise, insisting that he and his colleagues “would not quibble over some leagues more or less in such a vast extent of territory.”40 When Jay remained adamant, Vergennes suggested bringing into the conversation Gérard de Rayneval, a member of the Council of State. Fluent in English and experienced in dealing with the American delegation (he had been among those who first welcomed Franklin and John Adams to Paris four years earlier), Rayneval convened a joint meeting at which he reviewed the international customs affecting imperial claims. He pointed out that by custom, establishing European jurisdiction over American territory required a nation either to conquer the local Native tribes or to negotiate treaties of alliance with them. He noted that the United States had not fulfilled either of these requirements. Much of the Ohio and Mississippi country, he noted, was occupied by Indians “not even as yet brought under control by anyone.” He also reminded the Americans that when France ceded Canada to Great Britain in 1763, the diplomats at the peace conference had identified the Ohio River as the southern boundary of the former French colony. The new nation could not claim the Great Lakes, he reasoned, “not having taken possession of Canada.” Similarly, the area south of the Ohio that lay “behind Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia” was technically still part of British Florida and currently under the control of its latest conqueror, Spain.41
When Jay still refused to budge, the French offered the Spanish ambassador something new: an extensive legal memorandum that detailed the legal principles underlying their united opposition to the American land grab. Rayneval’s memorandum reiterated European support for a compromise boundary and recognition of the Indians’ right to be represented in future negotiations. It represented their strongest attempt to force their American partners to acknowledge the Indians’ claims to sovereignty in the interior of North America. While falling short of accepting Native people as equal in status to themselves, the French and Spanish ministers pressed Jay to accept the reality that the continent contained a distinct group of independent political communities.42
In the end Ambassador Jay and his colleagues deflected Rayneval’s arguments by immediately opening separate talks with the new Shelburne government in London. They quickly persuaded the prime minister to accept a western border at the Mississippi. Their efforts were assisted by a remarkable turn of events in the western Mediterranean. In late September the British learned that early in the month the long-anticipated French and Spanish assault on Gibraltar had been repulsed. This brilliant victory meant that King George’s forces now faced no significant military threat outside North America. Whatever negotiating strength the French and Spanish may have had prior to their defeat had disappeared. The final negotiations were conducted by Franklin and the entire team of American ministers over the coming weeks. The Americans made several concessions to the British—granting them access to the Atlantic fisheries and recognizing the claims of Loyalists—but they would not retreat from their territorial demand. One British diplomat wrote that “these Americans are the greatest quibblers I ever knew.” A draft treaty was initialed by both sides on November 30.43
Once the deal was struck, the Americans’ European allies had no choice but to accept it. By concluding a separate peace, the Americans destroyed the diplomatic customs Aranda and Reyneval had struggled so hard to impose on them the previous summer, a world where Indians had a legal presence and an internationally recognized claim to their tribal homelands in the continental interior. Those customs had been erased by British opportunism and American greed. Over those lost customs the Americans laid the foundations of a new country that sought to ignore the Indian nations within its borders.
It took nearly a year for the British and American agreements to be translated into a finished document. It was not until September 1783 that the United States emerged as a recognized state. This document also erased, on paper, North America’s indigenous people from international concern. While the reality of the Indians’ military power and economic influence would require the Americans to continue dealing with Native communities through diplomacy and treaty making for decades to come, the Treaty of Paris eliminated the requirement that those interactions pass standards of international conduct or the scrutiny of foreign powers. From 1783 forward the struggle of Native peoples with the United States for recognition and accommodation took place within the boundaries of a nation that encompassed vast territories “unsettled” by its citizens. The American diplomats in Paris had achieved peace abroad but sparked new conflict within their new borders.
THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE
Seasoned leaders like Joseph Brant and Alexander McGillivray could appreciate the political pressures that had caused their British patrons and American adversaries to betray them, but they continued to reject the settlers’ claim, made on their government’s new official seal, that the United States represented Novus Ordo Seclorum¸ a “new order of the ages.” Indian communities outside American settlements tried to ignore the new boundaries. Some dismissed the Americans’ growing presence by describing their expansion in religious terms, as prophets in the Great Lakes and the South preached that the Americans were sent by evil spirits. Others renewed their prewar military alliances with the British or Spanish. The Mohawks negotiated with Governor General Haldimand for a new Canadian homeland where Joseph Brant, his sister Molly, and other Iroquois leaders could settle in peace. After the war, Brant moved north to the Grand River in modern Ontario.
Even after he resettled on the Grand River reserve, Brant remained in contact with his tribal allies at Fort Niagara and in the Ohio country. He dreamed of reclaiming some part of the Mohawks’ original homeland, but he did not hold out much hope for a new military offensive. In the summer of 1784 he attended a council with New York State officials, but he refused to recognize their authority. Brant returned to Montreal to press his British commanders to devise some strategy for countering the ambitions of the new government in Philadelphia. Haldimand welcomed the Mohawk chief’s loyalty, but he remained powerless. “To this day I remain without any answers,” the general reported to the crown’s Indian agent for North America, adding that this “painful” fact forced him “to remain silent when called upon for advice by these unfortunate, deserving people.”44
Joseph Brant traveled to London at the end of 1785 to explore the possibility of organizing military resistance to American expansion. He found the English receptive but wary. Shelburne’s government had fallen, and public criticism of the Paris accords had stiffened the crown’s resolve to block the young nation’s ambitions. Citing the former rebels’ refusal to pay damages to displaced Loyalists, the new prime minister, William Pitt, had announced that his forces would not vacate their posts at Niagara, Detroit, Mackinac, and Green Bay. His declaration effectively blocked American expansion across the Great Lakes. It also encouraged Brant and his Ohio allies to imagine that the western territories might yet be made an Indian homeland, protected from Americans by British power.
But Brant also discovered that his hosts were reluctant to commit themselves. The Mohawk leader had a long, private meeting with the home secretary, Lord Sydney. The government quickly arranged cash payments to him and his family to compensate for their losses in New York, but no one was interested in a new war. Whig politicians were quick to condemn Lord Shelburne’s concessions to the Americans in the Paris treaty, but they
fell silent when asked to explain how they might repair the damage that the peace agreement had done to their Native comrades. The best Brant could get was a letter from Lord Sydney urging the king’s “Indian allies to continue united in their councils” in hopes that they might ultimately “secure to themselves the possession of those rights and privileges which their ancestors have . . . enjoyed.” Words; nothing more.45
To the south, Spanish administrators preparing to take control of East and West Florida adopted a more confrontational approach. Continuing the effort to keep the Americans as far from New Orleans and the Mississippi River as possible, King Charles’s first minister, Floridabianca, announced that because his country’s peace agreement with Britain had granted the Spanish king the right to “retain” West Florida, it would recognize the northern border of that province at the mouth of the Yazoo River, a point more than one hundred miles north of the border claimed by the Americans. Extended east from the Mississippi, this expanded version of the Florida’s boundaries would encompass large parts of modern Mississippi and Alabama and a generous portion of Alexander McGillivray’s Creek homeland. In addition, Floridabianca announced that effective in June 1784 the Mississippi would be closed to American shipping.46
Charged with implementing his government’s new policies, Vicente Manuel de Zespedes, the new governor of East Florida, encouraged Loyalists in Georgia and South Carolina to resettle in his province and cast their lot with Spain. At the same time, Alexander McGillivray (who was already negotiating with Arturo O’Neil in Pensacola) persuaded an old friend, William Panton, an Englishman who had planned to abandon his St. Augustine trading business once the Spanish took control, to stay on and continue the flow of European merchandise into the Creek homeland. Panton readily agreed, offering to seal the agreement by making the Creek leader a silent partner in his business. The two of them, soon joined by a second Englishman, John Leslie, persuaded Zespedes and his superiors to allow them to expand their business by establishing new trading houses at Pensacola, Mobile, and the Chickasaw Bluffs, a point on the Mississippi River near modern Memphis. The firm would be allowed to ship goods to and from Britain without paying the normally prohibitive Spanish tariffs. With encouragement from McGillivray and other local Native leaders, Zespedes in effect created an anti-American free trade zone along the Gulf.
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