Two years earlier, while leading an attack on an Indian village northwest of the Ohio, Washington’s local agent, William Crawford, was captured, beaten, scalped alive, and slowly roasted to death. “No other than the extremest Tortures which could be inflicted by Savages could, I think, have been expected, by those who were unhappy eno’ to fall into their Hands,” Washington wrote about Crawford’s capture by the Indians.40 He obviously did not want to suffer a similar fate or risk a possible kidnapping for ransom. Having fought both with and against native tribes during the French and Indian War, Washington always regarded them as barbaric.
At first Washington asked for a military escort from Fort Pitt to his property, which was entirely southeast of the Ohio River. But then he decided to turn back. “I thought it better to return, than to make a bad matter worse by hazarding abuse from the Savages,” he explained to General Knox.41 As it turned out, Washington’s new local agent wrote to him afterward, “The Indians by what means I can’t say had Intelligence of your Journey and Laid wait for you.”42
THE TRIP DISORIENTED and disconcerted Washington. It was as if the frontier and its people were conspiring to frustrate his plans. Even before turning back, the cascading setbacks forced him to confront issues in his personal finances and the country’s future that he might have put off had he stayed at home.
On a personal level, his plans for a comfortable retirement relied on income from his large land holdings at Washington’s Bottom, Miller’s Run, and the Great Kanawha. With America supposedly at peace, Washington had gone west to make these three assets profitable in the postwar economy. He found no present potential for revenue from the first, obstinate squatters occupying the second, and hostile native tribes restricting access to the third. Any investor seeking profit on the frontier would face similar obstacles. Removing them, Washington decided, would require government action.
A lack of national power and resources lay at the heart of the matter. Scarcely a year had passed since Britain signed the treaty recognizing American sovereignty over the entire region east of the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes, and north of Florida. The British continued to occupy forts in the remote corner of this region northwest of the Ohio River, however, where they traded with the native peoples for furs. Set aside by Britain for those natives under the Proclamation of 1763, this district, later known as the Northwest Territory, remained largely undisturbed by colonists and mostly under the control of pro-British tribes.
With virtually no funds or forces, the United States government was powerless to secure the frontier. Moreover, Virginia ceded its claims over the old Northwest to Congress in 1784, making its defense entirely a national problem. If Congress could open, sell, and settle these lands, it could gain authority and revenue. If not, it risked losing them to a foreign power, and with them America’s future. This became Washington’s fear.
As he saw it, the danger was not limited to territory northwest of the Ohio River but encompassed the entire frontier. “The Western settlers, (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot,” Washington wrote upon his return from the West; “the touch of a feather, would turn them any way.”43 Spain controlled the mouth of the Mississippi and the trans-Mississippi West, he noted, and settlers could turn toward it for access to trade. Britain controlled the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, offering another option for settlers. Native tribes still occupied most of the territory claimed by the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains.
He detected little loyalty to the United States or any eastern state in the people he encountered on the frontier. “The ties of consanguinity which are weakening every day will soon be no bond,” he warned.44 “If then the trade of that Country should flow through the Mississipi or St Lawrence,” Washington cautioned a member of Congress, “if the Inhabitants thereof should form commercial connexions, which lead, we know, to intercourse of other kinds—they would in a few years be as unconnected with us, indeed more so, than we are with South America; and would soon be alienated from us.”45 For the good of the country and his personal financial well-being, Washington concluded, America should secure the frontier. It offered another urgent argument for enhanced national power.
Washington returned from his western journey advocating a policy of staged western development he called “Progressive Seating.”46 In letters to friends in Congress, he warned that, to the “great discontent of the Indians,” land speculators were roaming across “the Indian side of the Ohio” marking out and sometimes surveying vast tracts: “fifty, a hundred, and even 500,000 Acres.” They, like the frontiersmen whom Washington met, have “no particular predilection for us.”47 Without firm limits, the entire territory could be lost.
Congress should declare all individual claims of settlers northwest of the Ohio “to be null & void,” Washington advised, then negotiate with the tribes to open the territory for settlement in stages, leading to the creation of one compact new state at time. “Any person thereafter, who shall presume to mark—Survey—or settle Lands beyond the limits of the New States,” he wrote with grim firmness, “shall not only be considered as outlaws, but fit subjects for Indian vengeance.” As for the land opened by Congress for settlement, he added, the government should sell it at prices “as would not be too exorbitant & burthensome for real occupiers, but high enough to discourage monopolizers.”48 By keeping these settlements dense, he explained, “Compact and progressive Seating will give strength to the Union; admit law & good government; & federal aides at an early period.”49 In concept if not in detail, Congress incorporated Washington’s basic ideas into the Northwest Ordinance of 1785.
Washington’s approach to western development aroused opposition. It echoed Britain’s notorious Proclamation of 1763, which closed the Ohio Country to settlement in part to keep colonists from spreading beyond the king’s reach. That proclamation helped to sow the seed of rebellion, and now the Revolutionary War’s leader proposed adopting a modified form of it for similar reasons. He wanted to keep the country together. Even worse, some complained, Washington endorsed a controversial 1785 treaty with Spain closing the Mississippi River to American traffic. The United States should not “push our claim to this navigation,” he advised Congressman Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, because trade would link the trans-Appalachian West to Spain. “It is in our interest to let it sleep.”
Washington could not fathom why Spain wanted to block the traffic. So long as it did, however, and until the West became strong enough to force a change in policy, he saw an opportunity to unite the country through internal inland trade. In particular, he wrote to the states’-rights-minded Lee, efforts should be made to “open all the communications which nature has afforded, between the Atlantic States and the Western Territory, and to encourage the use of them to the utmost.”50 Washington had one such means of communication in mind: Potomac River navigation.
CANALING BECAME THE RAGE in the newly industrializing regions of Great Britain and Western Europe during the 1700s. The economic results were dramatic. Inland market towns located near the source of waterpower or with access to coal, like Manchester and Birmingham in England, exploded into teeming industrial cities producing goods for national and international markets. These expanding centers required a steady flow of raw materials, food, and supplies. In turn, they needed to deliver their products to consumers. During an age before motorized trains and trucks, water transport offered the only realistic option.
Connecting cites situated beyond the reach of navigable water with markets and suppliers necessitated deepening rivers, digging canals, or both. Typically such projects ran along the routes of nonnavigable rivers, using bypass canals with lift locks, dams and gates, or sluices to circumvent rapids and waterfalls or make them passable. Sometimes, builders would dig an entirely new channel next to an existing stream. Quickly becoming a primary means of internal communication and commerce, these overland waterways bound their countries into economic units much tigh
ter than the feudal alliances of counties and shires that marked an earlier era—and made fortunes in the process. Entrepreneurs in the newly independent United States looked on with awe and sought to imitate.
Washington had dreamed of Potomac River navigation long before independence made it a patriotic cause. Not only could such a waterway improve access to his frontier holdings, it would channel western trade through the mouth of the Potomac near his Mount Vernon plantation. Both would increase his wealth. Following independence, he promoted this scheme on public as well as private grounds. But little had actually changed in Washington’s thinking about the project since 1754, when he first suggested using the Potomac River to carry supplies for General Braddock’s planned assault on French forces in the Ohio Valley. After Braddock opted for land transport, one of Washington’s fellow officers in the Virginia militia, George Mercer, began a subscription drive to raise private funds for improving navigation on the river below Cumberland.
This effort made little headway until around 1770, when competing plans surfaced for tackling the river’s toughest stretches with sluices, dams, lift locks, and bypass canals. Because the river ran between them, both Virginia and Maryland needed to authorize such developments. And due to the cost, developers asked both colonies to support the effort with funds. As members of its colonial legislature, Washington and Lee sponsored legislation for the project in Virginia; former Maryland governor Thomas Johnson promoted it in his state. With Washington serving as a trustee for the enterprise, construction began on a bypass canal around Little Falls by 1775, before the Revolutionary War intervened to put the entire project on hold. Now he wanted to revive and expand it.
In postwar Virginia, Washington was not alone in dreaming about a waterway connecting East and West by way of the Potomac. Even if they lacked Washington’s broad prospective on national unity, many farsighted Virginians hoped to capitalize on the western trade by linking the eastern and western parts of their state, which then reached from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Because of his status as a war hero, Washington clearly would be the project’s most effective spokesman and leader.
After consulting with Madison, Jefferson raised the issue in a letter to Washington less than three months after the General’s retirement. Jefferson began by making the case for linking the Potomac and Ohio river systems by reiterating what Washington knew: it offered the shortest route from the upper Midwest to the Atlantic of any possible waterway. The most logical alternatives—either down the existing Mississippi River and around the Gulf of Mexico or across New York State on the course later followed by the Erie Canal—were much longer.
“We must,” Jefferson wrote to Washington on behalf of all Virginians, “in our own defense endeavor to share as large a portion of this modern source of wealth & power that [is] offered to us from the Western country.” He then asked the key question. “You have retired from public life,” Jefferson wrote, “but would the superintendence of this work break too much on the sweets of retirement & repose?” Stressing the project’s significance for Virginia and the West, Jefferson exclaimed, “What a monument of your retirement would it be!”51
Washington needed little encouragement. He wrote back with the next post, “My opinion coincides perfectly with yours respecting the practicability of an easy & short communication between the waters of the Ohio & Potomack, of the advantages of that communication & the preference it has over all others.” Further, he added the patriotic argument for the effort by noting “the immense advantages which this Country would derive from the measure.” If the “undertaking could be made to comport with those ideas,” Washington stated, and “not interfere with” either his “other plans” or his retirement from public life, he would accept a leadership role in the project.52 He viewed it as a major, and perhaps the final, public endeavor of his career.
At the time, no one knew if navigation could be extended beyond Cumberland along one of the Potomac River’s upland tributaries to a practical overland portage for reaching a navigable branch of the Ohio River. Accurate maps of the upper Potomac and Ohio river systems did not exist. Accordingly, on the outbound leg of his western journey in September 1784, Washington asked people along the way about the headwaters of the Potomac and the Ohio, and where the two river systems came closest together. Although their answers often conflicted, he carefully recorded them in the hope of later determining the best transit route.
To reach his frontier holdings, however, Washington’s party left the Potomac River at Cumberland and followed Bradford’s overland road into the Ohio Valley. His travels cut short before reaching his property on the Great Kanawha, Washington decided to salvage what he could of the trip by leaving the known roads and working his way back home through uncharted wilderness in search of waterways. On a journey undertaken with the levelheaded purpose of inspecting his frontier land holdings, Washington abruptly transformed the return leg into a starry-eyed hunt for possible water routes.
A gray-haired retired general, America’s leading citizen set off on September 22 from his land at Washington’s Bottom for a ten-day cross-country trek across an unknown and unmarked route. He traveled light. Sending back most of his supplies and attendants with James Craik over the conventional route, Washington headed on horseback into the wilds with only his nephew, perhaps an attendant or two, and at times a local guide. Stands of white oak mainly covered the rocky hillsides. Washington noted, “In places there are Walnut and Crab tree bottoms, which are very rich.”53 At some points the travelers followed broad trails cut by wandering herds of buffalo that still populated the region; at others, they simply bushwhacked. For directions, the small party turned to the local wisdom of settlers living in isolated cabins scattered along the way, who often offered conflicting advice about the best way to go. It was a final wilderness expedition by a man who had spent much of his youth surveying the frontier.
The rain continued off and on throughout the trip, making the way miserable. Over six feet tall, broad in the hips, and riding high on his great horse, Washington continually pushed through wet branches that soaked him to the bone. The route went over ridges, through glades, and across rivers, with the party covering roughly thirty-five miles per day in a southerly direction. Even though Washington rarely complained about physical hardships in his diary, he did observe at one point that the aptly named “Briery Mountains” were “intolerable” to cross.54 Traveling without a tent in a region lacking taverns or public houses, the party ate and slept in private homes if possible, or outside if not.
Imagine the surprise of isolated settlers when the legendary general appeared unannounced at their door in the backwoods. They could never have expected, nor would ever forget, the encounter. At one remote cabin, Washington noted, “we could get nothing for our horses, and only boiled Corn for ourselves.” Still, it was better than the previous night, when he reported that he slept in a damp meadow “with no other shelter or cover than my cloak and was unlucky enough to have a heavy shower of Rain.”55
On September 29, having reached the South Branch of the Potomac, which he had planned to follow north to rejoin Craik and the rest of his party on the main road, Washington again made a sudden decision to go his own way. Sending his nephew north to tell Craik to proceed without him, Washington continued south over the next ridge to the Shenandoah Valley and then turned east across the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap to the Piedmont and home. Following this course enabled Washington to inquire about a rival route, favored by some Virginians, for a western navigation along the James River. That waterway rises in the central Appalachians, cuts through the Blue Ridge above Lynchburg, and winds through Richmond and Williamsburg before reaching the sea at Norfolk. Already committed to the Potomac route, Washington found that the James River offered inferior passage to the Ohio.
For much of this final portion of his trip, Washington traveled alone or perhaps with a single attendant. Parts of the route had no settlers. Even the settled parts showed the we
ar of war. He described some lodgings as “pitiful” and grumbled about frequently losing his way.56
Nevertheless, the time alone gave him a chance to reflect. “Tho’ I was disappointed in one of the objects which induced me to undertake this journey namely to examine into the situation, quality, and advantages of the Land which I hold upon the Ohio and Great Kanhawa,” Washington wrote in a long entry near the end of his travel diary, “I am well pleased with my journey, as it has been the means of my obtaining a knowledge of the . . . temper and disposition of the Western Inhabitants.”
Despite their indolence and isolation, Washington noted, these settlers could be brought into the sphere of American commerce and governance by extending “the inland Navigation as far as it can be done with convenience” in their direction. His explorations proved it possible, Washington assured himself, and suggested a plausible route up the Potomac’s north branch and across a portage to headwaters of the Ohio on the Cheat River. “The more then the Navigation of the Patomack is investigated, and duly considered, the greater the advantages arising from them appear,” Washington concluded. It became his cause.57
WITHIN WEEKS OF HIS RETURN to Mount Vernon, Washington sent a shower of letters about Potomac navigation to influential Virginians and Marylanders, beginning with Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison. These letters represented such a turning point in Washington’s activities that in 1992 the modern editors of his papers introduced the first of them with the comment that it “marks his return to public life.”58 In this set of letters, Washington boasts of the profits that would flow from western navigation, warns of losing the West without it, and reports on his findings about the feasibility of using a Potomac River route. Unabashedly appealing to the nationalistic concern that largely moved him, he hailed Potomac River navigation as “the cement of interest, to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds—especially that part of it, which lies immediately west of us.”59 Washington was careful not to disparage the James River alternative, however, because he could ill afford to alienate the powerful interests in Richmond favoring that rival route. He needed their support for state legislation incorporating and perhaps funding a Potomac navigation company. Washington felt so confident in his project that he did not care if canaling also went forward along the James River route.
The Return of George Washington Page 6