The Indian World of George Washington

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The Indian World of George Washington Page 18

by Colin G. Calloway


  While Lewis and his men floundered toward the Shawnee villages, Washington left his troops and the Virginia frontier and traveled to Boston. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts became commander in chief of the British forces in North America on Braddock’s death, and Washington went to solicit him in person for a regular officer’s commission. He was not successful, but he stopped off in Philadelphia and New York for some shopping, socializing, and card playing.9

  By the time he was back in the spring, Indians were raiding in greater numbers than ever. They had killed several people not far from Winchester and boldly attacked forts in broad daylight. Despite Washington’s efforts to calm the inhabitants, he could not prevent them abandoning their homes and taking flight. His little army could do little to help. “I see their situation, know their danger, and participate [in] their Sufferings; without having it in my power to give them further relief, than uncertain promises,” he told Dinwiddie. By the end of April, the Indians had pushed Virginia’s frontier back to the Blue Ridge Mountains.10 In May, Washington started building a fort—called Fort Loudon—on the high ground just north of Winchester. He designed the log-palisaded fort and complained about the slow progress of construction that dragged on for more than two years and was never completely finished. He originally planned for a garrison of one hundred men, but the number fluctuated. The fort served as a deterrent for Indian attacks on the town. It also operated, like Fort Duquesne, as a base for Indian allies raiding the enemy frontier, although the absence of clear Native American archaeological evidence at the fort suggests their presence was temporary.11

  Washington desperately needed reinforcements and resources, but more than anything he needed Indian allies. “Five hundred Indians have it more in their power to annoy the Inhabitants than ten times their number of Regulars,” he wrote. “For, besides the advantageous way they have of fighting in the Woods, their cunning and craft are not to be equaled; neither [are] their activity and indefatigable Sufferings. They prowl about like Wolves and, like them, do their mischief by Stealth. They depend upon their dexterity in hunting, and upon the Cattle of the Inhabitants for provisions.” Virginia would never be able to defend its frontiers unless it had Indian allies. “Indians are the only match for Indians; and without these we shall ever fight upon unequal Terms.” In short, “without Indians to oppose Indians, we may expect but small success.”12

  Dinwiddie was doing his best to provide them, but the Lower, Middle, and Overhill towns were pursuing their own agendas, not Virginia’s. The Cherokees were allies who had to be courted and cultivated, different chiefs took different positions, and they were adept at playing European rivals to their own advantage. Lower Cherokees had long-standing relations with South Carolina. Overhill chiefs negotiated to secure better trading terms and have Virginia build a fort that would provide protection to their women and children. They also negotiated with the French on the western edge of their country, where the governor of Louisiana, Louis Billouart, chevalier de Kerlerec, planned to build a fort at the mouth of the Tennessee River. Overhill chiefs sought the same trade and the same assurances of security from the French that their British allies promised but failed to deliver with consistency. They made a preliminary treaty of peace and alliance with Kerlerec in December 1756. Two months later the ubiquitous Silver Heels brought William Johnson news that ten Cherokees had visited Fort Duquesne and that many more looked likely to join the French.13 Cherokees also weighed fears of French retaliation and the arguments of Shawnee emissaries who came to their towns urging them to side with the French. Whereas most British officers and officials viewed Cherokee alliance with the French as treachery, Henry Timberlake, a British officer who served with Washington and later as a peace emissary to the Cherokees, recognized it as a masterstroke of policy, equal to those executed by European minsters.14

  In recognition of Ostenaco’s assistance in Lewis’s abortive campaign, Dinwiddie invited him to Williamsburg. On his way to and from the capital the chief stayed with the family of young Thomas Jefferson. When he arrived he rode down Duke of Gloucester Street in the governor’s coach between lines of militia forming an honor guard. Dinwiddie promised Ostenaco and Attakullakulla that in return for sending warriors to come to Virginia’s defense he would provide guns, ammunition, clothing, and supplies and build a fort in Overhill Cherokee country.15 He sent Lewis to build the fort—also called Fort Loudon—across the river from the town of Chota, on the north side of the Little Tennessee, and recruit warriors.16

  Ostenaco said he was ready to go to war and eager to see Colonel Washington. Both Attakullakulla and Hagler, chief of the Catawbas, said they picked up the war hatchet when they received Dinwiddie’s messages but were waiting for the supplies he had promised, which would confirm that Virginia was committed to the alliance. Ostenaco maintained that he needed to be sure his own people were safe before he headed north; Dinwiddie assured him he would send soldiers to garrison the fort and protect his women and children. William Henry Lyttelton, who replaced Glen as governor of South Carolina, reminded Ostenaco of his many promises to take up the hatchet against the king’s enemies, and urged him to go to war now with as many warriors as possible.17 Glen had thought Attakullakulla was a troublemaker in cahoots with the French. Attakullakulla had spent time as a captive of French-allied Indians, and as an Overhill chief he may have had pro-French leanings. But Captain Raymond Demere at Fort Loudon assured Lyttelton that “Little Carpenter is a very sensible Fellow and has a great deal of Influence over the Indians” and was thought to be “a Welwisher to the English.”18 Indeed, having been there in his youth, Attakullakulla made it known that he wanted to visit England again.19 Colonial officials saw such a trip as expensive, inconvenient, and going over their heads; Attakullakulla likely saw it as a “state visit” to restore the chain of friendship with the king agreed upon in 1730.

  Cherokee warriors trickled northward in bands ranging from a dozen to sixty during the spring of 1756, as did some Nottaways and Catawbas. Washington waited anxiously for them to arrive at Winchester and became more anxious once they had arrived.20 Virginia had no Indian allies except those coming from the south, and he knew how much depended on them. Their assistance was vital, but “One false step might not only lose us that, but even turn them against us,” he wrote Dinwiddie. He regarded Indians as a dilatory and mercenary lot who expected to be well rewarded “for the least service” and required careful handling.21 To prevent trouble with the locals he dispatched a sergeant and drummer to beat through the town ordering the soldiers and townspeople “to use the Indians civilly and kindly; to avoid giving them liquor; and to be cautious when they speak before them: as all of them understand English and ought not to be affronted.”22 In the words of his biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, “Washington was almost as uneasy when he had Indian warriors as when he lacked them.”23

  Virginia was short on Indian trade goods and short on competence in Indian diplomacy, as Washington’s own recruiting efforts demonstrated. In August 1756 he sent Nottoway messengers to the Tuscaroras to deliver a wampum belt and a speech. Invoking “that chain of Friendship, which has subsisted between us for so many ages past,” he asked them to take up the hatchet for their English friends. His ignorance of history could hardly have helped his cause. The “Tusks,” as Washington called them, would have remembered what he either forgot or never knew—that most of their nation had migrated north thirty-four years before to join the Iroquois League after the English had driven them out of their North Carolina homelands. Nevertheless, somewhat surprisingly, thirty-three Tuscaroras “heartily accepted the Invitation.” On their way north the following spring, along with thirteen Nottaways, seven Meherrins, and a couple of Saponis, they stopped off at Williamsburg to request arms, ammunition, clothing, and paint. They showed the letter Washington had sent them “and said what the Colonel had writ was very agreeable to them.”24

  Although some Tuscaroras, Nottaways, and Saponis turned out, Cherokees and Catawb
as provided most assistance. Washington and Dinwiddie often complained they did not come in the numbers promised and hoped for, and worried that French hands were at work, but many parties made the five-hundred-mile journey to Winchester.25 Many more Cherokees operated in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. When they finally committed to the British, Attakullakulla and many Overhill Cherokees preferred to canoe down the Tennessee and raid French bateaux on the Ohio and Mississippi or the new French fort at Massac, defending their own western frontier rather than trekking north to defend Virginia’s frontier.26 Indian allies intercepted enemy raiding parties, raided French posts, took prisoners for questioning, brought intelligence on enemy movements, acted as mediators with other tribes, and intimidated the French and their Indian allies. They inflicted casualties on the Shawnees and Delawares, taking the sting out of their incursions.

  Washington and Dinwiddie complained long and loud about the havoc visited on innocent frontier families by Indian scalping parties in the pay of the French, but they sent their own Indian allies out in scalping parties. Virginia offered £10 for Indian scalps, which meant a bounty hunter could earn with one killing what it would take him three months to earn as a laborer. In October 1755, at Dinwiddie’s request, the Assembly extended the payment of scalp bounties to “our friendly Indians.” Dinwiddie and Washington told their allies they would receive the reward for every scalp or prisoner they brought in. Knowing this “barbarous Method of conducting war” would not sit well with his superiors in London, Dinwiddie blamed the French for introducing it, which left Virginia no choice but to follow suit in self-defense.27 Washington was not averse to paying scalp bounties. Indeed, he urged Dinwiddie to pay a bonus to Virginian troops who brought in the scalp of a French ensign named Douville; although it was not an Indian’s, they deserved a reward because it was “of much more consequence.”28 The House of Burgesses increased the bounty paid on Indian scalps to £15 in 1757, but, fearing that scalp bounties led to indiscriminate killing of any Indians, which only drove more Indians to join enemy war parties, Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier repealed the bounty law the following year.29

  Pennsylvania abandoned its long tradition of pacifism in the spring of 1756. Deputy Governor Hamilton declared war against the Delawares and their allies first in the Indian manner, presenting Scarouady and Andrew Montour with a war belt and hatchet to send to the Susquehanna tribes and the Six Nations, and then with a formal proclamation. Pennsylvania put militia into the field and offered scalp bounties in Spanish dollars or pieces of eight: $130 for the scalp of every adult male over twelve years old, $50 for every adult female scalp, and $700 for Shingas the Terrible’s scalp. Pennsylvania offered significantly more ($130) for the capture than the scalp of an Indian woman, but no Indian women were reported captured during the war. Few bounties were paid out, but everyone understood that bringing in a scalp was much less troublesome than bringing in a prisoner.30

  Washington disagreed with Dinwiddie and the government in Williamsburg about how the war was being run, and he made his feelings known in his letters to them. He denounced “Chimney Corner Politicians” for meddling in military matters that should be left to soldiers. He did not have enough troops, enough supplies and equipment, or enough Indian allies. And the Assembly’s strategy of trying to protect the frontier inhabitants by a line of forts was not working. Instead of relying on forts purely for defense, Washington favored using them as bases for dispatching ranger companies and allied Indians against the enemy. He repeatedly argued that Fort Cumberland was unsuitable for defense and unfit for a fortification. The precipitous flight of colonial settlers left the fort exposed as the tide receded, and it was more of a liability to the English than an obstacle to Indian raiding parties, who slipped past it with ease. It should be used for launching offensive operations, or it should be abandoned. Washington advocated building a strong fort at Winchester, which he was doing. Dinwiddie, in failing health, took umbrage at Washington’s constant complaints and his whining and petulant tone. Their correspondence became increasingly testy.31

  Despite the failure of the Sandy Creek campaign against the Shawnees, taking the war to the Indians as Washington recommended did have some impact. In a surprise attack in September 1756, Colonel John Armstrong and three hundred Pennsylvania troops destroyed part of the Delaware town at Upper Kittanning on the Allegheny River. It was hardly a victory: they killed the Delaware war chief Tewea, known to the English as Captain Jacobs, along with his wife and son, but suffered more casualties than they inflicted and rescued only seven of the more than one hundred captives held there.32 Nevertheless, it demonstrated that Indian settlements west of the Allegheny Mountains, like white settlements east of the mountains, were vulnerable. To escape the expanding war zone, Delawares moved up Beaver Creek to Kuskuski and, with the consent of the Wyandots, settled on the headwaters of the Muskingum and Cayuhoga Rivers and other locations in eastern Ohio. Kuskuski became a cluster of four or five Delaware towns, known as the Kuskuskies, and the political center of the Delawares in the West.33

  Washington insisted the only way to end Indian raids was to stamp them out at their source. He wanted to strike Fort Duquesne, that “Hold of Barbarians,” and he wanted to lead the expedition. Dinwiddie answered that it was not in his power to order an evacuation of Fort Cumberland; John Campbell, Earl of Loudon (after whom the forts were named), was coming to replace Shirley as commander in chief and would decide. Instead, the governor and council responded to Washington’s barrage of complaints by strengthening Fort Cumberland with men from the garrison at Winchester and ordering Washington to get himself to Fort Cumberland and establish his headquarters on the front line, not in the comparative safety of Winchester.34 Washington went behind Dinwiddie’s back and over his head. He complained to the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and he sent the Earl of Loudon a lengthy epistle containing “a Concise, Candid, and Submissive Account of Affairs on the Quarter,” in other words a list of complaints. Depending on a chain of forts allowed the Indians to range almost at will across Virginia’s frontier, “while we, by our Defensive Schemes and Pusillanimous Behaviour exhaust our Treasury; reduce our Strength and become the Contempt and Derision of these Savage Nations, who are enriching themselves in the meantime with the plunder, and Spoil of our People.”35

  In February 1757 he traveled to Philadelphia to see Loudon in person. Loudon kept him waiting for two weeks—Washington passed the time gambling, shopping, and attending dances—and then gave him short shrift and his orders. There would be no campaign against Fort Duquesne that year, and Fort Cumberland was to be strengthened and reinforced from Maryland.36 Loudon’s snub aggravated Washington’s discontent. He chafed at garrison duty on a frontier far from the centers of power and society in Virginia. Posted “for twenty Months past upon our cold and Barren Frontiers,” he felt he had been assigned an impossible task with an inadequate force. Worse, he felt like an exile, “Seldom informd of those oppertunitys which I might otherwise embrace of corrisponding with my friends.”37

  He fell out with Dinwiddie over the conduct of Indian affairs. Like other British and colonial officers, Washington thought Indian allies were unreliable, mercenary, and fickle, and did not trust them. Feeding and supplying them placed a constant strain on the alliance. “The Indians are all around, teasing and perplexing me for one thing and another, so that I scarce know what I write,” he told Dinwiddie in April 1757.38 He complained endlessly about the Cherokees’ cost and effectiveness. They watched which way the wind was blowing, sold their services to the highest bidder, and switched sides as it suited them. He assumed that if Indians did not rally to the English cause it was because they were being seduced by the French, and he said as much to the Cherokees.39 His appreciation of their importance as allies was not matched by an appreciation that they served on their terms, not his, in accordance with their own customs, and for their own reasons.

  The Indians’ objectives and strategy were consistent. They fought to preserve
their independence and security, and they selected their allies and enemies accordingly—just as Washington would do when he allied with former French enemies and fought against former British comrades to win his fight for independence. The Indians expected to be paid for their services and had every reason to expect their British allies would give them gifts. Gift-giving was part of an established pattern of cultural exchange in the Southeast, and the British employed it for decades to lubricate the wheels of diplomacy and to encourage or reward military service. Allies who gave gifts unstintingly demonstrated their power, reliability, and friendship; withholding or giving gifts reluctantly signaled wavering commitment and diminishing strength. Both sides recognized the importance of gifts, but they differed over the “rules of the game” and the obligations gifts created. The British expected that Indians who accepted British gifts should do as the British ordered; the Cherokees accepted the gifts but refused to accept that in doing so they put themselves under British command and control. The British expected the Cherokees to be grateful and act as subordinates; instead they found them demanding and independent. The Cherokees expected the British to be generous and to act like brothers; instead they found them miserly and domineering. Cherokees who were serving on the Virginia frontier were not hunting to feed their families. They expected their allies to outfit them while they were on campaign, to supply and support their families while they were away, and to provide goods to take home, and they became disgruntled by recurrent delays in providing gifts. Cherokees at home expected Lewis’s fort on the Little Tennessee to bring direct trade with Virginia but waited in disappointment.40 Washington distrusted the Indians as mercenary and evidently expected them, unlike his militia or himself, to serve without pay. Indians had little compunction about getting all they could from allies whom they did not trust.

 

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