The Mohawk chief Abraham pursued a precarious and perilous neutrality and stayed behind when most of his people went to Canada. In the winter of 1779–80 he and another Mohawk named Crine, together with two Oneida leaders, Good Peter and Skenandon, set out through the snow to Niagara, carrying letters and hoping to arrange an exchange of prisoners. They met with a cold reception. The British and their Iroquois allies at Niagara regarded them as traitors. Sayenqueraghta, who had negotiated alongside Abraham at Fort Stanwix, drank to the health of the other Indians, “omitting the four Rebels as a Mark of his Contempt.” Guy Johnson threw the emissaries into the fort’s dungeon, where they languished in cramped confinement for several months. By the time Johnson agreed to release them, Abraham was dead.186
Richard Peters did not have time to profit from the Revolution; he died six days after the Declaration of Independence was signed.187 The Revolution ended the Penn family’s control of Pennsylvania. John Penn was the last colonial governor of Pennsylvania. He pursued a careful policy of neutrality and managed to hold on to his private lands but the Pennsylvania Assembly divested the proprietorship of twenty-four million acres.
Unlike many of his associates, Croghan sided with the Patriots and became chairman of the Pittsburgh Committee of Correspondence. But he kept in contact with Loyalists as well as Patriots as he struggled to make his speculations pay off. He was a natural candidate for Indian agent at Pittsburgh, but the post went first to Richard Butler and then to George Morgan, who had little time for Croghan. Accused of being a Loyalist, Croghan had to move from Pittsburgh to Lancaster. There, still struggling with debts and with most of his remaining lands heavily mortgaged, he lived his old age in poverty. He died on the last day of August 1782. After his death more lands were sold to settle debts. Croghan Hall, his home for much of his life near the growing city of Pittsburgh, was lost through mortgage foreclosure. A man who had spent most of his life speculating in Indian lands died essentially landless.188
Andrew Lewis was appointed brigadier general in the Continental Army and he attended the United States treaty with the Delawares at Fort Pitt in 1778. He resigned his commission owing to ill health and died in 1781. Thomas Walker fared rather better. In 1775 he bought more than a million acres from George Croghan,189 and by the time he died in 1794 he was one of the richest men in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Samuel Wharton was in London when the Revolution broke out, still working to secure the Crown’s approval for the land grant. When some of his letters to rebels were made public, he was forced to flee to France. Returning to America in 1780 he took an oath of allegiance to the American cause. In 1782 and 1783 he was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he seems to have worked quietly but unsuccessfully to secure recognition for his western landholdings. After the Revolution, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware ceded their western land claims to the federal government; Virginia ceded its claims to lands north of the Ohio but retained its claims south of the river. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 governing the territory north of the Ohio, and Virginia refused to confirm private purchases. Wharton’s claims came to nothing.
Unlike his father, William Franklin remained loyal to the Crown. He continued to serve as governor of New Jersey until 1776 when he was arrested and imprisoned on the orders of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey. He was released in a prisoner exchange in 1778 and continued to be active in the Loyalist community. He joined other Loyalists leaving for England in 1782. He met his father once more, during Benjamin’s trip to England in 1785, but in his will Franklin senior left him only some land in Nova Scotia, explaining, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”190 William died in London in 1813.
By the terms of the Peace of Paris in 1783 Britain recognized American independence and handed over to the new United States all lands south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi, and north of Florida. The Indians who inhabited this territory were neither included nor consulted and were left to make their own terms with the victorious Americans. Britain’s Indian allies were outraged. They were “thunderstruck” when they heard that British diplomats had sold them out to the Americans: “the peacemakers and our Enemies have talked away our Lands at a Rum Drinking,” declared a Cherokee chief named Little Turkey. They were not defeated subjects of King George; they were independent nations still fighting to defend their territorial boundaries as set by colonial treaties to which at least some of them had agreed. “These people,” Governor Frederick Haldimand of Canada wrote to Lord North in November 1783, “have as enlightened Ideas of the nature & Obligations of Treaties as the most Civilized Nations have, and know that no Infringement of the treaty in 1768 … Can be binding upon them without their Express Concurrence and Consent.” Indians saw the treaty as an act of betrayal “that Christians only were Capable of doing.” The British responded lamely that they had only ceded the right of preemption to Indian lands.191 For Indians the fighting did not end in 1783; it merged into a longer war to halt American expansion at the Ohio River—the boundary established at Fort Stanwix.
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Treaty Making, American-Style
The outbreak of the Revolution and the uncertainties it created generated feverish diplomatic activity as Indian nations explored their options and reshuffled alliances and relationships. Indian messengers carrying wampum belts ran forest trails from Indian village to Indian village as well as to Albany, Detroit, and Fort Pitt. Employing the rhetoric, metaphors, and rituals of wampum diplomacy, the Americans competed with the British to secure the support, or at least the neutrality, of Indian tribes, and they negotiated treaties that emphasized alliance and friendship. Major General Philip Schuyler, together with other commissioners appointed by the Continental Congress and commissioners appointed by the government of New York, held a series of treaties with the Iroquois.1 Operating out of Fort Pitt, George Morgan, who as a trader and junior partner in Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan had built connections in the Ohio Indian country, held councils with the Six Nations, Shawnees, Delawares, and Wyandots.2
Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the United States endeavored to stake its place as a new nation by establishing relations with the nations of Europe and entering the system of treaties and diplomatic customs by which supposedly civilized nations dealt with each other. At the same time, the United States established relations with the Native nations of the American continent, which required conforming to the system of treaties and diplomatic customs that Indians had developed with colonial powers, although its participation in these treaties involved performance of protocol more often than commitment to substance.3 The United States’ first formal recorded treaty with an Indian nation was held at Fort Pitt in 1778. US commissioners and Delaware delegates led by White Eyes exchanged pledges of perpetual peace and friendship on a wampum belt depicting the thirteen states and the Delaware nation holding the chain of friendship. The United States guaranteed the Delawares’ territorial rights as defined in previous treaties and even laid out the possibility that other tribes that were friendly to the United States might join the alliance and “form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have representation in Congress.” But the final version of the treaty committed the Delawares to an offensive and defensive alliance, allowed American troops free passage through Delaware country, and permitted US soldiers to build forts there. The Delawares complained that the American commissioners “put a War Belt & Tomahawk in the hands of said Delaware Nation & induced some of their Chiefs to sign certain Writings” that contained “declarations & engagements they never intended to make.” They returned the war belt and tomahawk. The speaker for the Delaware Council said he had “looked over the Articles of the treaty again & find that they are wrote down false, & as I did not understand the Interpreter what he spoke I could not contradict his Interpretation, but now I will speak the t
ruth plain & tell you what I spoke.” George Morgan, who was not present at the treaty, said the Delawares had “a very wicked false Interpreter,” and he denounced the treaty as “villainously conducted.” He subsequently submitted his resignation to Congress “as Policy may require a certain conduct toward the Indians which Col. Morgan is not capable of.”4 The peace and friendship pledged at Fort Pitt did not last long. White Eyes died in November, murdered by American militia. William Crawford, a friend and business associate (read: fellow land speculator) of George Washington and who had attended the treaty, died four years later, ritually tortured to death by Delaware warriors exacting vengeance for the slaughter of their relatives. Needless to say, nothing came of Delaware representation in Congress. Between the treaty with the Delawares in 1778, and 1871, when Congress terminated treaty making, the United States ratified and passed into law about 370 treaties. The conduct and consequences of the first US treaty did not bode well for those that followed.
In 1783 Indians were massively affected by a treaty in which they took no part: the lands Britain ceded to the United States at the Peace of Paris were Indian lands. For the Americans those lands were both a natural resource and the economic engine of the new nation. Acquiring and selling the lands would provide homes for citizens, fill the empty treasury, and ensure the growth and survival of the young republic. Western lands, said Richard Henry Lee, abounded with “all those primary and essential materials for human industry to work upon, in order to produce the comfort and happiness of mankind.”5 In other words, the new nation would build on Indian homelands and also transform them into productive commodities. That meant uprooting Native people, severing their ties to places where generations of ancestors had lived and died, and restricting and then eradicating mobile patterns of subsistence that had sustained Indian societies from time immemorial. “Our lands are our life and our breath,” a Creek chief named Hallowing King explained. “If we part with them, we part with our life.”6 In the terms Richard Henry Lee and Hallowing King understood the contest for land, the future of the American nation and the survival of Indians as Indians were incompatible. Treaties had developed as an American blend of Indian and European diplomacies in which the participants met to establish or renew peace, alliance, and trade; settle disputes; and exchange land for gifts; now treaties were instruments for transferring Indian land to American ownership and treaty negotiations became life-and-death struggles.
Following British precedent, the Confederation Congress planned initially to establish a boundary line that could be renegotiated and moved westward as Indians retreated before the advancing tide of American settlement. But the US government was no better able than the imperial government to maintain such a boundary and was not the only player in the game. Individual states also made their own treaties with Indians, often in defiance of federal wishes, and sometimes they challenged the authority of the federal government to conduct Indian affairs. Between 1783 and 1786 twenty-one major treaties were held but the Confederation Congress negotiated only six of them. Spain made four; Britain, one; individual states, seven; and private interest groups made three. “Nowhere along the seaboard or in the backcountry on either side of the Ohio River was there a clear-cut center of authority, white or red,” writes the historian Dorothy Jones.7 The northern states and Virginia ceded their claims to land north of the Ohio to the federal government, but south of the Ohio Virginia retained its claims to Kentucky, North Carolina did not cede Tennessee until 1789, and Georgia claimed Alabama and Mississippi until 1802. In the North and South, private companies and land speculators also tried to get in on the act; in fact, Congress worked with private land companies to try and settle the territory northwest of the Ohio in a systematic and orderly way. Like the Indian confederations that formed to resist the insatiable American assault on tribal lands, the American confederation was subject to internal divisions and tensions. Meanwhile, the British in Canada and Spaniards in Florida watched from the wings and maintained their own alliances among the tribes as a potential buffer against an aggressive new republic.
US negotiators continued to adhere to forms of intercultural diplomacy as they had been developed and fine-tuned in countless councils in colonial America and as practiced in the treaty system that Britain had operated. The first secretary of war, Henry Knox, saw no point in “waging war for an object which may be obtained by a treaty” and argued that “the independent nations and tribes of Indians ought to be considered as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any particular state.”8 American treaty commissioners smoked peace pipes, spoke on wampum, and gave gifts. The federal government also built on European precedents in bringing Indian delegations to the nation’s capital, where they toured the sights, sat for portraits, and sometimes met the president.9 American commissioners had no qualms about employing “fathers and children” terminology in their dealings with Indians; however, rather than a kinship metaphor indicating reciprocal relations it increasingly served as a way to infantilize Indians and emphasize their dependence on the Great Father for protection, guidance, and subsistence. The United States continued colonial practice and issued medals to Indians. These medals bore a likeness of the president on the obverse (with the exception of John Adams, every president from Washington to Benjamin Harrison issued one) and were known as peace medals because of the clasped hands of friendship embossed on the reverse. Without medals, Thomas McKenney, the head of the Indian Office, explained in 1829, “any plan of operations among the Indians, be it what it may, is essentially enfeebled.” The Indians esteemed them as “tokens of Friendship,” “badges of power,” and “trophies of renown” and regarded the receipt of medals as an “ancient right.” But as the balance of power shifted dramatically to the United States, peace medals increasingly became tokens of “good behavior” rather than symbols of allegiance.10 Indian oratory continued to find a receptive audience in the early years of the Republic and examples of Indian eloquence appeared in print, but increasingly they were sentimentalized as befit a tragic people who were assumed to be dying out.11
The power dynamics that had produced the intercultural diplomacy of the colonial era were changing. Americans were eager to expand and impatient with long-winded protocols that allowed all parties ample time for reflection and discussion. As American power increased, respect for Indian customs and concerns diminished and long-standing practices and rituals of reciprocity eroded. More and more often, treaties were conducted on American terms and by American schedules. Treaties established boundaries but the boundaries became ever more permeable and impermanent. Henry Knox admitted that breaches of treaties were the main cause of Indian wars. Unless the federal government restrained its citizens, the Indians could “have no faith in such imbecile promises, and the lawless whites will ridicule a government which shall, on paper only, make Indian treaties, and regulate Indian boundaries.”12
Few Americans shared Knox’s concerns that the United States deal honorably with the Indian nations and maintain the traditions of wampum diplomacy. James Duane, a congressional delegate from New York and chairman of the committee on Indian affairs, urged his state to dispense with wampum and abandon “the disgraceful system of pensioning, courting and flattering them as great and mighty nations.” “The Stile by which the Indians are to be addressed is of Moment also,” he wrote. “They are used to be[ing] called Brethren, Sachems and Warriors of the Six Nations. I hope it will never be repeated. It is sufficient to make them sensible that they are spoken to[,] without complementing 20 or 30 Mohawks as a nation and a few more Tusceroes and Onondagoes as distinct nations.” They were defeated dependants and should be treated as such.13
The United States approached its first post-Revolution treaties with the assumption that they had already acquired the Indians’ lands by right of conquest. General Philip Schulyer told the Six Nations they were deceived if they thought that Britain had made provision for them in the Peace of Paris: “the treaty does not contain a single stipulation for th
e Indians,” he said. “They are not so much as mentioned.” The Indians had chosen the wrong side and had lost. “We are now Masters of this Island, and can dispose of the Lands as we think proper or most convenient to ourselves,” Schulyer declared. The government would make peace with the Indians but in doing so would establish “lines of property” that would be “convenient to the respective tribes, and commensurate to the public wants.” Because the United States had pledged grants of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War but “the public finances do not admit of any considerable expenditure to extinguish the Indian claims,” the Indians would be required to give up land as atonement for their participation and barbarities in the war.14 American commissioners replaced elaborate speeches and wampum rituals with blunt talk and forceful demands. Treaties, they said, consisted of the United States granting peace to Indians and giving back to the tribes those lands it did not immediately require. Asserting its rights of conquest, the United States assumed it could abolish the boundary line of 1768, and it demanded hefty cessions of territory from the Indians as the penalty for fighting on the wrong side in the Revolutionary War.15
US commissioners Richard Butler, Arthur Lee, and Oliver Wolcott held a second treaty at Fort Stanwix with the Six Nations in October 1784. In fact, they hurried to Fort Stanwix to participate in a treaty that New York had already initiated and the conference involved multiple negotiations between representatives from Congress, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Six Nations. The Seneca chief Cornplanter and the other Iroquois delegates argued for the Ohio River boundary but the American commissioners would not hear of it: most of the lands had been ceded in the treaty at the same place eighteen years before. Divided and bitter, intimidated by the presence of American troops, and cowed by the American demand for hostages, the Iroquois ceded all land west of the western boundary of Pennsylvania. The tone of negotiations at the treaties in 1768 and 1784 could not have been more different.16 The Iroquois delegates met with scorn when they returned home and Cornplanter feared for his life. Seven years later in Philadelphia, Cornplanter and his fellow Seneca chiefs Half Town and Big Tree met President Washington, “the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires” (whom they also knew as “the town destroyer” after his scorched-earth policies in Iroquois country during the Revolution), and delivered a lengthy complaint about injustices and deceptions in the Fort Stanwix treaty of 1784. “You have compelled us to do that which has made us ashamed,” they said. And they were not convinced by Washington’s assurances of future protection for their lands: “Father: Your speech, written on the great paper, is to us like the first light of the morning to a sick man, whose pulse beats too strongly in his temples, and prevents him from sleep. He sees it, and rejoices, but he is not cured.”17
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