Behind closed doors President Washington railed at Harmar as one cause of the failure. “I expected little from the moment I heard he was a drunkard” he raged. Harmar’s conduct in the field had been “disgraceful,” he told Knox. But the real reason for the thrashing, Washington and his secretary of war agreed in private, stemmed from the inherent liabilities of a militia force. Reports had reached the president’s office that the militiamen had been disorderly and undisciplined, and that they had broken under fire. Given their inveterate hostility toward trainband units, Washington and Knox seized upon such accounts and promptly made the decision to urge a second Northwestern campaign.38
Their conduct reeked with duplicity. In public the administration spoke of the campaign as necessary to force the Indians to listen to the “humane overtures” of the United States. In private, however, Knox admitted that the government’s end was to “extirpate, totally if possible,” the Miami tribes in the Ohio Country; anything less, he argued, might stimulate separatist aspirations among the frontiers settlers. In addition, whereas Washington privately held the expansive, lawless Kentuckians at least as responsible as the Indians for the onset of frontier hostilities, he publicly enumerated only the “provocations” of the Indian “aggressors.” The proposed new campaign also provided a golden opportunity for the Washington government to augment the United States army, an end that the nationalists had cherished since the end of the War of Independence. Soon after learning of Harmar’s misfortune, the president proposed that the ranks of the army be doubled.
The regular army now would exceed two thousand men, but many soldiers would be unavailable for a renewed offensive in the Ohio Country. About half the men would be stationed elsewhere, many garrisoning a string of forts that the war department planned throughout the vast frontier. Thus, Washington proposed that the regulars be augmented by “levies,” volunteers who would enlist for the duration of this mission. In January 1791, Congress assented to Washington’s design. Sometimes, the president reflected, “acts of force . . . [were] the safest means of compelling ... an amicable settlement.” Besides, if full-scale war was to engulf the frontier, better for it to result from “a deliberate plan, not . . . an accidental collision.”39
Governor St. Clair, a former Revolutionary War general, was appointed to command the operation. By the fall he had a force one-third again as large as Harmar had possessed, but recruiting problems had foiled Washington’s hopes for a largely regular force. Three quarters of this army would consist of semi-trained or untrained militiamen and volunteers. Naturally, that troubled the president, as did his selection of St. Clair to lead the force. Not only did the governor have even less experience as an Indian fighter than had the ill-prepared Harmar, he—like Braddock—was an ex-British officer, trained more for Europe’s wars than for America’s wilderness battles.40 Washington’s fears were not ill founded.
St. Clair pursued a strategy somewhat akin to that which young Colonel Washington had followed on the Virginia frontier in the 1750s. He, too, set about building a string of forts, his line of garrisons running northward up the Miami River. St. Clair had completed only two of the installations when disaster struck. A swelling Indian force led by Little Turtle attacked, catching the invading army off guard and sending its poorly trained volunteers fleeing southward in a panic. St. Clair was not able to restore order and reassemble his army until he reached a point twenty miles above the Ohio. There to his horror, he learned that over six hundred of his men had been killed; another three hundred had been wounded. He had suffered a calamity nearly as great as that which had befallen Braddock almost thirty years before, and greater even than that which would strike General George Custer at the Little Big Horn a century later.41
The news of the latest tragedy provoked a wave of criticism of the administration’s bellicose policies, yet as with virtually every preceding debacle for which he had borne some responsibility, Washington escaped unscathed. Critics blasted the cost of the war and the loss of human life, but the president was not openly attacked. The failure, many now said, was due to the abysmal quality of the men raised through the levies. These recruits had been dragged from “the prisons[,] wheelbarrows and brothels of the nation,” as a Northwest Territory judge put it.42
Be that as it may, after three years Washington’s Northwest policy could only be judged a failure. To make matters worse, he now faced the task of securing Congress’s approval for still another frontier expedition. The administration, not about to give up, staged an artful public-relations campaign, promising that fresh negotiations would be attempted. Indeed, Washington sent out a new team of commissioners to treat with the Indians, emissaries who took along the president’s pledge that he would “be gratified with the opportunity of imparting to you all the blessings of civilized life....” Privately, however, Washington noted that there were “strong evidences” that the Indians would not agree to peaceably surrender any territory, and he ordered Knox to “proceed as if war was inevitable.”43
Meanwhile, the administration called for the creation of a huge regular army, one that would be five times the size of the force it had shepherded into being in its initial year in power, an army ten times larger than that which had existed at the time of the Constitutional Convention. Washington and Knox wanted an army of five thousand men, a force that would cost three times as much to raise as had St. Clair’s legion. Debating the issue in secret sessions, a sectionally divided Congress consented, authorizing the creation of an army of five regiments, the soldiery enlisting for three-year hitches. Washington finally had attained what he had sought almost since the moment of his arrival in Cambridge in July 1775 to take command of the Continental army: he had fashioned a large standing army and had achieved the simultaneous downgrading of the militia. It was a victory which “Congress and the public gave the administration,” historian Richard Kohn has observed, “in order to restore the peace to the frontier which many felt the administration had bungled away.”44
The new army required a new commander, but while there were plenty of candidates Washington faced a difficult choice. He thought only two of the nine major generals possessed the necessary qualities to lead such an army. Benjamin Lincoln was the best of the lot, he believed, but he was too infirm for frontier duty. Steuben was nearly his equal, yet he was a foreigner and perhaps a bit too impetuous. Interestingly, given his zeal during the Revolution for the loyal Anthony Wayne, Washington now characterized him as nearly unfit, as too injudicious and “open to flattery; vain, easily imposed upon; and liable to be drawn into scrapes.” The cabinet and Thomas Jefferson concurred in Washington’s assessments. Among the other candidates, some were inexperienced or unknown quantities, others were heavy drinkers or political appointees, some were judged to be imprudent, illiterate, in ill health, or wanting in spirit. There were some good brigadier generals, especially Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; Washington, however, not only harbored doubts about Pinckney, he thought it unwise to elevate the South Carolinian above several superior officers, a step certain to unleash much anger and a bevy of resignations. The president thought “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was the best candidate of all, but because Lee never had risen above the rank of colonel during the War of Independence, his appointment also was certain to bring on a firestorm of protest. In the end, early in 1792, Washington selected Anthony Wayne, not because he was particularly sanguine about his chances for success, but because he was deemed to be the lesser of the available evils.45
The southern frontier was no less combustible than its counterpart to the north, but here Washington chose to pursue a more pacific policy. The immediate results were more beneficial. Four years before his inauguration the backcountry in Tennessee and Georgia ignited, an explosion wrought by the settlers’ rapacious quest for land and by the speculators’ unquenchable avarice. In 1785 the government under the Articles thought it had settled matters in Tennessee. The Treaty of Hopewell defined the Indian country and United States territory; the United
States, moreover, pledged not to protect those of its citizens who resided on the lands of the Cherokees. The United States adhered to the treaty. Its citizens did not, however, and Tennessee Territory alternately simmered and boiled with clashes between the squatters and the tribesmen. The Georgia frontier also burst into flames at about the same moment that the war in Tennessee commenced, friction there arising in part from the desire of southern sodbusters to gain Indian lands that today lie within the south-central part of that state. In its inimitable way the Georgia assembly also stirred the pot by laying claim to the Yazoo Strip.
The Yazoo Strip was a wide belt of no man’s land that stretched across the lower portion of present-day Alabama and Mississippi. It was a region claimed both by the United States and Spain, the confusion arising because the two former co-belligerents had signed separate peace treaties with Britain in 1783, neither of which categorically specified the southern boundary of the one’s territory nor the northern border of the other’s domain. To further complicate matters, at the end of the War for Independence, Georgia also still claimed that zone, and in 1787 its legislators sold 15 million acres within the Strip to three Yazoo land companies. The entrepreneurs began to organize colonists, families that would descend on lands occupied by Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, all of whom soon threatened to unsheathe their tomahawks.
As if it was not bad enough to find the frontiers in turmoil upon taking office, President Washington faced an additional quandary in the Southwest: the specter of Spain. Spanish North America included the colonies of Louisiana, West Florida, and East Florida, a continuous region that extended from west of the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and north—according to Madrid—to above the 32nd parallel. Nearly twenty-five thousand whites lived in these dominions, mostly folk of French ancestry. They discovered a natural ally in their Indian neighbors, an affiliation born of trade and a shared desire to stop the advance of the United States frontier. To forestall this human tidal wave Spain fashioned a three-pronged policy: by closing the Mississippi River to American navigation it sought to render the Southwest unattractive for settlement; by enticements of reopening the river, it sought to lure the farmers already in that region away from the United States and into the Spanish Empire; and as frontier wars always had proved a hindrance to migration, it armed the Indians. To one degree or another Spain by 1789 was pursuing each of these policies.46
Washington’s antidote for the impasse in the Northwest had been to use force. But conditions in the South, especially in Georgia, compelled him to seek a solution through different means. In such a thinly populated area, a large militia force was out of the question. Moreover, if—as he was contemplating—he treated Georgia’s Yazoo land deal as an illegal infringement upon United States sovereignty, he could hardly expect to get many trainbandsmen from that state. In addition, having already opted to use the army in the Ohio Country, he did not have enough regulars left over to send to the South. Besides, Washington knew that the northern states abhorred the thought of financing a war for the sole benefit of a southern state. Perhaps for all these reasons Washington and Knox made a genuine effort to secure peace on the southern frontier. From the beginning they viewed war in this region as likely to produce “complicated evils,” and they insisted that “no degree of success could render a war [in the South] honorable or profitable.” There was no talk of a “just war,” only a realization that the trouble in those parts arose from the “corrosave [sic] conduct of the whites.” Thus Washington sought to accommodate the Native Americans. Such a course might lure the tribesmen from the Spanish. It surely would buy time. At some point the United States would have a stronger hand from which to deal, and at some point, too, one of Europe’s interminable wars would embroil and distract Spain, giving the new nation the wedge it needed to resolve its southwest dilemma once and for all.47
One of Washington’s first acts as president, therefore, had been to dispatch General Lincoln as head of a diplomatic commission to discuss peace terms with the Creeks. Those talks sputtered on through the last days of 1789 with no success. But the next year an occurrence as remote to the Georgia frontier as a July snowfall in Savannah helped transform matters. Spain, already isolated by its Bourbon ally’s preoccupation with the revolution sweeping across the French countryside, found itself on the verge of war with Great Britain over rival claims in the Pacific. Suddenly, the Creek leader, Alexander McGillivray, son of a Creek half-breed and a Scottish trader, grew ready to parley. Responding to an invitation from Secretary Knox, McGillivray, accompanied by twenty-nine additional sachems and braves, rode to New York to confer in person with the president.48 Their transit northward was a spectacle not to be missed, and silent crowds lined the streets in the villages and cities through which they passed, witnesses to a little caravan of chiefs on horseback, warriors in wagons, and a United States envoy ensconced in a sulky and tagging along in their dust.
The entourage reached New York in July 1790, where its leader immediately was welcomed as a head of state. When those festivities were out of the way, McGillivray was escorted to the Macomb House, there to be greeted by a wan, still weak president, only slowly mending from his spring bout with pneumonia. Their discussions were cordial, but brief, for the busy chief executive left most of the negotiating to Secretary Knox. During the next two weeks the obese former general and the thin, almost emaciated chieftian talked, their sessions interrupted frequently by tours of the city, parades, a military review, worship in an Episcopalian church, and one good roaring drunk by the Creek sovereign. Finally the Treaty of New York was completed: boundaries were set, with Georgia getting just about everything in dispute, almost all the land between the Oconee and Ogeechee rivers; compensation was to be paid the Native Americans for the territory they ceded; all United States captives were to be returned; the United States pledged to prevent its citizens from straying beyond its boundaries; trade was to be opened between the Creek nation and the United States; and bribes and payoffs went to the leading Creek officials, including McGillivray, who was made both a brigadier general in the United States Army and an Indian agent, for which he was to be paid twelve hundred dollars annually. On August 7 the sachem and his headmen returned to the President’s House for the signing, after which Washington gave each guest a string of beads and a pouch of tobacco, and the Native Americans performed their “song of peace.” Talk had bloodlessly secured for the South what force had failed to attain in the North.49
The Creek issue resolved, Washington moved immediately to pacify the other major southwestern tribes. McGillivray hardly had departed New York before the president issued a proclamation through which he endeavored to suffocate the Yazoo land bonanza. Barely two years beyond the ratification battle, he did not wish to provoke a fight over the jurisdiction of the new Constitution. Therefore, instead of proclaiming the act of the Georgia legislature to be an unconstitutional usurpation of the federal government’s sovereign powers, he maintained that the state’s sale of Yazoo lands violated federal treaties with the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. The United States, he added, would not aid any of its citizens who moved into that area. Almost simultaneously the administration moved into negotiations with the Cherokees over long-disputed regions in Tennessee, and news of the Treaty of Holston greeted him upon his return to Philadelphia from the southern tour in 1791. Signed early in the summer in Knoxville, it opened to white settlement new areas further down the Tennessee River. At the end of that year, in his third State of the Union Address, Washington was remarkably candid. The wilderness war in the South, he said, had arisen from the frontiers settlers’ unrestrained encroachment on Indian lands. His administration, he went on, had sought the “preservation of Peace,” hoping to “accomplish it on the most humane principles.” With regard to the southwestern frontier, his was an accurate statement.50
Nearly four months elapsed between Washington’s return to Philadelphia in midsummer 1791 and the commencement of the Second Congress that autumn. Indian affairs
kept the president busy during this period, but physical ills occupied almost as much of his attention. Late in July another tumor appeared in Washington’s leg, incapacitating him for a week and leaving him debilitated and easily fatigued for an even longer period. He barely was beginning to feel better when ominous news arrived about his nephew and estate manager, George Augustine Washington. Early in the fall Washington’s old friend Dr. Craik wrote that the young man was coughing and spitting blood; his cough was not new, but the suddenly progressive severity of the illness was quite alarming. On his doctor’s orders the young man had taken leave of his duties and set out on the melancholy ride to Berkeley Springs, bouncing and jostling across the same dreary route that Lawrence Washington had taken four decades before. The president, by now nearly fully recovered from his own ills, hurried home, both to see George Augustine and to oversee the autumn harvest.51
A month later Washington was back in the capital, hastening to Philadelphia for the scheduled congressional session. This time he anticipated fewer headaches from the lawmakers than he had experienced in the past. He soon was disappointed. He discovered that the policies of his administration had caused greater polarization than he had realized. Earlier rifts had eddied men toward the formation of rival political parties, and in this session, as well, the legislators hardly had been gaveled to order before the wedge that separated the emerging factions was driven deeper. Once again it was a report by Secretary Hamilton that stirred the fury.52
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