The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  During the French and Indian War, Washington participated in two British military campaigns to take the strategically crucial Forks of the Ohio from the French. The first, in which he gave General Edward Braddock bad advice, was a disaster; the second, in which he predicted failure and tried to undermine General John Forbes, succeeded. Indians determined the outcome of both.

  For Washington the so-called French and Indian War was primarily a war against Indians. As commander of the Virginia Regiment defending western areas of the colony against Indian raids, he learned much about frontier warfare, and about fighting with limited means. Indian diplomacy helped end the fighting in Washington’s theater of operations. Indian actions at the close of the war shaped Crown policies that set the American colonies on the road to revolution and helped push Washington’s personal break with Britain. The Anglo-Cherokee War and the multitribal resistance movement known as Pontiac’s War prompted the British government to take two crucial steps: impose a limit on westward expansion, which threatened Washington’s investments in Indian land, and keep a standing army in America, which required taxing the colonies to pay for it. For Americans the Revolution was a war for independence, and it was also a war for Indian land; for Indians, the Revolution was a war for their land, and it was also a war for their independence. The Indians’ fight, which for many tribes meant allegiance to the British, provided patriots with an important unifying cause.21

  Washington never moved west himself, but the West beckoned him and the nation he led. His long association with the region as surveyor, speculator, soldier, landowner, and politician shaped his career and his vision of America’s future tied to western development. As a young man, he pursued wealth in land and a military reputation in the West; in his later years, the West became a key to building national unity.22 By the end of his life, according to one of the editors of the monumental Papers of George Washington, he probably knew more than any other man in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country.23 He had also accumulated more than 45,000 acres of prime real estate in present-day Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and West Virginia.24 It was the West, says another of his editors, that “made the Virginia farmer lift his eyes to prospects beyond his own fields and his native Virginia”; the West that “stretched his mind” to embrace an expansive vision of a republican empire; the West that, more than anything else except the Revolutionary War, prepared him for his role as nation builder.25

  Washington knew that the frontier was Indian country and that the future he envisioned would be realized at the expense of the people who lived there. He presided over and participated in their dispossession. He dispatched armies into Indian country; he lost an army in Indian country. The bulk of the federal budget during his presidency was spent in wars against Indians, and their affairs figured regularly and prominently in the president’s conferences with his heads of departments.26 He promoted policies that divested Indians of millions of acres; he sent treaty commissioners into Indian country and signed the treaties they made, even as he sometimes studiously avoided conversations about purchasing land with Indian delegates who came to the capital. His conduct of Indian affairs shaped the authority of the president in war and diplomacy. He participated in, indeed insisted on, the transformation of Indian life and culture. In the course of his life, he met many of the most prominent Native Americans of his day: Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Scarouady, Guyasuta, Attakullakulla, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, Jean Baptiste DuCoigne, Alexander McGillivray, Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, Piominko. He also met many lesser-known individuals, who cropped up time and again in dealings between Indians and colonists, men like the Seneca messenger Aroas or Silver Heels, the Oneida-French intermediary Andrew Montour, and the Seneca Kanuksusy, who appeared in colonial negotiations under his English name, Newcastle. Having more than one name was not uncommon. Washington himself was given or assumed an Indian name, Conotocarious, meaning “Town Destroyer” or “Devourer of Villages,” and an Indian messenger who arrived at Fort Harmar in July 1788 was identified as “George Washington, a Delaware.”27 He was not the only Indian to bear Washington’s name.

  Washington knew and associated with men who knew and associated with Indians: soldiers who fought against Indians; merchants who traded with Indians; interpreters who moved back and forth to Indian country; agents who implemented his policies there; missionaries who lived and prayed with Indians; men who hunted, traveled, ate, and drank with Indians; men who shared lodges, beds, and relatives with Indians; western politicians who built their political reputations fighting and dealing with Indians; speculators who, like Washington himself, acquired large amounts of Indian land as a way of elevating their status in society. Washington’s world was one where eastern elites as well as frontier folk were steeped in Indian affairs.28 Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental and Confederation Congresses from 1774 to 1789, brought Washington word of his election to the presidency and traveled with him to the inauguration. Thomson was an adopted Delaware. As a young man, before he shifted his attention to business and politics, he had immersed himself in Indian affairs: a Latin tutor at the Quaker school in Philadelphia, he served as a clerk and copyist for the Delaware chief Teedyuscung, acted as secretary at the Treaty of Easton in 1757, and wrote a tract blaming Indian support for the French on Pennsylvania’s record of unscrupulous treaty practices—in which he also criticized Washington’s conduct in dealing with the Indians in the Ohio country.29 Charles Lee, one of Washington’s generals in the Revolution, claimed to have married an Iroquois woman, was adopted by the Iroquois, and had an Iroquois son. (The child inherited his clan and tribal identity from his mother).30 Benjamin Hawkins, whom Washington appointed superintendent of the southern Indians, spoke Muskogee, was adopted by the Creeks, and had seven children with his common-law wife, Lavinia Downs, said by some to be a Creek woman. The Irishman Richard Butler, appointed superintendent of Indian affairs after the Revolution, traded with the Shawnees, had a Shawnee wife, sent Washington a Shawnee vocabulary when Catherine the Great of Russia asked the president for information on Indian languages, and died with a Shawnee tomahawk in his skull. Washington moved among networks of men who were deeply interested in Indian affairs and were sometimes intimately acquainted with individual Indians. For many of these men, acquiring Indian lands seemed as natural as breathing. Some swindled each other out of land with as few qualms as they swindled Indians out of land.

  Indians were of central importance in Washington’s world, but for most of his life he operated on the peripheries of theirs. When he speculated in Indian lands, fought Indian enemies, and exchanged wampum belts with Indian chiefs, he touched the edges of an indigenous continent crisscrossed by networks of kinship, exchange, and alliance among multiple nations. For most of his life, several colonial powers competed for that continent but none controlled it, and indigenous power in the interior affected and limited imperial ambitions.31 In Washington’s administration, the process of creating the “United States” occurred “in dialogue with other nations,” including Native nations. Establishing the sovereignty of the United States required wrestling with the sovereignty of Indian nations and their place in American society.32 By the time Washington died, Indian power remained formidable in many areas of the continent, and American sovereignty remained contested in many spaces, but the United States had become a central presence in the world of all Indian peoples east of the Mississippi, and American expansion into Indian country was well under way. Washington, in association with men like Henry Knox, developed and articulated policies designed to divest Indians of their cultures as well as their lands and that would shape US-Indian relations for more than a century.

  Washington’s paths through Indian country connected his story to indigenous peoples who told their own stories, organized and lived their lives in distinct ways, and had different visions of America and its possibilities. But theirs was not the Indian world Washington
saw and knew; the Indian world he saw was the world most Americans saw. He found little to admire in Indian life. Few of its ways of living or thinking rubbed off on him. No gallery of Native American artifacts graced Mount Vernon as it did Monticello. When Washington looked at Indian country, he saw colonial space temporarily inhabited by Indian people. What he regarded as new lands were in fact quite ancient, but he showed little awareness that the ancestors of Shawnees and Cherokees had walked those lands for thousands of years before he set foot or his surveyor’s gaze on them. Jefferson was interested in the ancient petroglyphs on the banks of the Kanawha River;33 Washington was more interested in the extent and fertility of his lands on those riverbanks. When he looked at Indian people, he saw either actual or potential enemies or allies. They and their lands feature recurrently and prominently in Washington’s correspondence, and on occasion he expressed sympathy for Indian people. But his writings tell us little or nothing about Indians’ family life, clan affiliations, kinship networks, gender relations, languages, subsistence strategies, changing economic patterns, consensus politics, traditional religious beliefs and ceremonial cycles, distinctive Christianity, or social ethics. There was much he did not see or understand. He did not—could not—comprehend how mythic stories, clan histories, and spiritual forces shaped how Indian people perceived their world. He did not understand many of the words and sounds he heard in Indian country. Rarely if ever did he show any appreciation that the societies there functioned according to their own rules, rhythms, beliefs, and values. He demonstrated no understanding of the roles of women in Native society, beyond being farmers, and he wished to see Indian men take over that role. In all of that, he was not much different from most of his contemporaries.

  Indian country was not exclusively Indian, and had not been for a long time. It was a porous world undergoing profound and far-reaching changes. Imported diseases had scythed through populations and continued to wreak demographic havoc; imported animals, crops, and plants had altered the environment; new religions, ideas, and influences had infiltrated and sometimes divided Indian societies; imperial rivalries intruded into tribal politics; goods manufactured in European mills tied Indian communities to an Atlantic world and an emerging global trade system. By the time Washington encountered Cherokees, Iroquois, or Delawares, he met men who wore deerskin leggings and moccasins and displayed body and facial tattoos but who also often wore linen shirts and wool coats, and even the occasional three-cornered hat. He spoke with chiefs who wore armbands of trade silver and displayed European symbols of distinction like the officer’s crescent-shaped silver gorget he himself wore around his neck when he posed for his portrait by Charles Willson Peale in 1772 (see plate 1). He would have seen women who wore calico blouses and kept their children warm with blankets of red-and-blue stroud, a durable woolen cloth produced in England’s Cotswolds. Some of the Catholic Indians Washington encountered from the St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes wore crucifixes, spoke French, and had French names. Like anyone else who spent much time on the eighteenth-century frontier, he would also have met white men who wore breechcloths, moccasins, and hunting shirts and bore facial tattoos.34 Constantly pressing the edges of Indian country were Scots-Irish, Anglo-American, and German settlers, the kind of people that Washington and his kind of people—Tidewater planters and gentlemen—characterized as more savage than savages. He might have seen black faces; at a time when buying and selling people was as common as buying and selling land, traders, Indian agents, army officers, and settler colonists took African slaves with them when they crossed the Appalachians. Indians also sometimes owned and trafficked in African slaves and harbored runaways. Some of the chiefs who ate dinner with Washington in New York or Philadelphia would not have been surprised to be waited on by black slaves; like Washington, they were slaveholders.

  Washington sometimes spent days at a time in Indian villages. He would have seen cows, pigs, and chickens: Indians got pigs from Swedish settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth century, and Delaware people called chickens tipas, mimicking the sound Swedish settlers used to call poultry.35 If he entered Indian lodges he would have seen many familiar objects: brass kettles, copper pots, candles, looking glasses, awls, needles, and threads. If he shared a meal, he would have eaten indigenous food—corn, beans, squash, pumpkin, venison, elk, bear’s meat, fish, hominy cakes, berries, nuts, acorns, wild onions, maple sugar—perhaps supplemented by beef, chicken, pork, milk, apples, peaches, watermelon, turnips, peas, potatoes, honey, and many European imports that Indians had added to their diets.36 He might have met Indian people who had developed a taste for tea and sugar; he certainly met people with a taste for rum. He would have spoken with Native people who could speak English and who, their own languages lacking profanity, had learned to swear in it.37 (A British officer traveling in the Wabash country in the 1760s was called a “D—d son of a b—ch” by one Indian and given a copy of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra by another.38) Washington also saw people whose faces, like his own, were marked by smallpox. Even the landscape Washington coveted bore evidence of change. Invasive weeds and grasses from Europe altered the meadows he found so attractive. By the time Virginians crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky, bluegrass and white clover, initially brought from England as fodder and in the dung of the animals that ate them, had spread ahead of them and taken root as “Kentucky bluegrass.” European birds, bugs, seeds, and weeds had transformed the lands Washington viewed as “wilderness.”39

  Washington lived in, shaped, and eventually presided over a colonial world. At the same time, he lived his life in a world of Indian omnipresence, enduring power, and recurrent encounter, where Indian people acted as well as were acted upon and changed the societies that changed them. As happened elsewhere in the world, the colonized affected the colonizers, and cultural interactions produced new hybrid societies. Like slavery, some aspects of Native America were so commonplace in Washington’s world that they hardly merited mention in his writings: he does not tell us, but we know, that indigenous foods formed part of his—and his slaves’—diet, that Native herbal medicines were part of the colonial medicine cabinet, and that when he traveled the country before the Revolution, which he did more often and more extensively than almost any other colonial American, he generally followed Indian trails.40

  Indian people and Indian lands affected key developments in Washington’s life and the emerging American nation he helped to create. Indian relations were interwoven with questions of empire (whether European or American). Indians’ actions contributed to the outbreak and course of the French and Indian War, and their reactions to its outcome prompted British policies that turned Washington and other Americans to revolution and independence. Indian lands furnished the territorial and philosophical foundations for the new expansionist republic that emerged. At the same time, the power Natives wielded, the resistance they mounted, and the diplomatic influence they exerted exposed the limits of federal power, aggravated tensions between federal and state governments, fueled divisions between East and West, and threatened to fragment the nation Washington was building.41 Washington and the new government interpreted and applied the Constitution to establish nation-to-nation relationships with Indians conducted through war and treaty, but Indians preexisted the United States and its Constitution and conducted their own relations in their own way, and for a long time the United States lacked the power to make them do otherwise. Fighting, fearing, and hating Indians had helped forge a common identity among white peoples before; now the shared experience of Scots, Irish, Germans, English, and others in fighting and dispossessing Indians helped forge a common bond as Americans. Washington disparaged unruly frontier folk as disturbers of order and tranquility, but by harnessing their aggressive expansionism the government created a new, racially defined empire and a nation of free white citizens that excluded Native Americans as it also excluded African Americans. It was the national identity of a nation built on Indian land.42
r />   The Indian world Washington knew was very different when he died in December 1799 than it had been at his birth in 1732. His life spanned most of the eighteenth century, an era of momentous change in North America when, as the historian James Merrell puts it, “the balance tipped irrevocably away from the Indians.”43 Washington, more than most, had a hand on the scales and was instrumental in the dispossession, defeat, exploitation, and marginalization of Indian peoples. He rarely used the term “Indian country”—he called it “wilderness,” “the frontier,” “the Ohio country,” “the West”—but he lived his whole life with one eye on it and one foot in it. Neither his life nor that of his nation would have developed the way it did without his involvement and experiences in Indian country. Washington may not have been personally affected by his own interactions with its inhabitants, but the Indian world that he changed and his nation eventually displaced was also the world that, in many important and overlooked ways, shaped Washington and the nation he led.

  Scholars of Washington’s life and times owe an incredible debt to the teams of editors who have collected, meticulously edited, published, and digitized the voluminous papers of the first president. Their endeavors provide an invaluable and accessible resource, and one that makes it impossible to deny that Indian America mattered in Washington’s day. The editors note, however, that some of the papers have been previously edited—by Washington himself. Washington kept letter books during his service on Braddock’s campaign in 1755 and three years subsequently as colonel of the Virginia Regiment. In the 1770s and probably later, he made major revisions to these manuscripts “not once but at least twice.” He made most of his revisions by striking out words, lines, or sentences and inserting new ones. But sometimes “he carefully scraped the original ink off the paper with a knife and then wrote his changes there.” For the most part, the alterations and insertions did not produce important differences, but they do reveal Washington as someone concerned with his reputation.44 In Indian country, he had good reason to be.