The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Meanwhile, smallpox raged throughout the Southeast, killing Christopher Gist in the summer of 1759.74 Catawbas continued to come to Winchester in the summer of 1759, but warriors returning home in the fall took the disease with them. Catawba population dropped by about 60 percent in six months; by 1760, fewer than sixty warriors remained. The Catawba population had dwindled to just 4 percent of what it had been a century before, and the survivors requested a reservation with a stockade fort to protect their women and children when their men were gone. Catawba raiders spread the disease to Cherokee villages in October 1759.75

  Escalating tensions exploded in full-blown war. Adair blamed provocations and misconduct on the part of Virginia and South Carolina: “We forced the Cheerake to become our bitter enemies, by a long train of wrong measures.”76 Warriors who had fought alongside British soldiers now fought against them. Ostenaco, who had joined Washington as an ally in 1756, now took up arms against the colonists. If the Cherokees united with the Creeks, Stewart wrote Washington, “I tremble for our Southern Colonies!” The Ohio Indians had been enemy enough; imagine how formidable a combination of these nations would be.77 The dire prospects of a powerful southern Indian alliance would haunt Washington well into his presidency.

  The war raged across the South Carolina backcountry. Had Washington remained in the army he would have led the Virginian war effort. Instead, as Fauquier wrote William Byrd III, “Washington has resigned his command of the Virginia forces (and is married to his agreeable widow).” Byrd, who had been second-in-command under Washington, was now appointed commander of the Virginia Regiment and inherited many of the problems that had frustrated Washington—reluctant and ill-trained recruits, inadequate supplies, and uncertainties over pay.78 Washington could only watch from the wings as his colony went to war against his former allies. He was confident that Britain’s generals would have little trouble conquering Canada that summer, but was less sure about the fate awaiting Colonel Archibald Montgomery as he advanced into the heart of Cherokee country: “Let him be wary—he has a crafty Subtil Enemy to deal with that may give him most trouble when he least expects it.”79

  Neither Montgomery’s Highland troops nor Byrd’s Virginians arrived in time to save Fort Loudon. In August 1760, after a siege of six months, Ostenaco’s warriors captured the fort they had wanted the British to erect in their country. Accusing the British of violating the terms of surrender, they killed twenty-three of the garrison, avenging the twenty-three Cherokees executed by Lyttelton, and tortured to death Captain Paul Demere (who had succeeded his brother Raymond as commander). Attakullakulla saved his friend John Stuart’s life.80 Montgomery’s army burned the Lower Cherokee towns but, true to Washington’s predictions, met stiff resistance in mountainous terrain when he pushed on to the Middle towns and was forced to turn back. The following year, 1761, Lieutenant Colonel James Grant, who had fought alongside Cherokees in the Forbes campaign and who had been ransomed after his capture in the ill-advised raid on Fort Duquesne, invaded Cherokee country with an army of 2,600 men. With Lieutenant Quentin Kennedy’s corps of rangers and Indian allies screening his advance, Grant burned fifteen towns, destroyed more than 14,000 acres of cornfields, and drove hundreds of people into the woods and mountains.81

  Some of Washington’s former comrades-in-arms took part in the war. The ubiquitous Silver Heels, who had fought with Washington at Fort Necessity and in Braddock’s campaign, served with Grant’s Indian allies. According to one British officer, Silver Heels in a drunken fit tomahawked three Indians—a man and two women—who lived near the camp. Only Grant’s intercession prevented his execution, which his own clan relatives offered to carry out.82 Adam Stephen took over command of the Virginia Regiment when Byrd resigned, but the Virginia provincials saw no action, and Stephen dealt with Cherokee peace initiatives rather than Cherokee war parties.83

  Washington was more concerned with affairs at Mount Vernon and his accounts with the London merchant house Robert Cary and Company, but he kept half an eye on developments in Cherokee country. “We catch the reports of Peace with gaping Mouths, and every Person seems anxious for a confirmation of that desirable Event provided it comes as no doubt it will, upon honourable terms,” he wrote to the London merchant Richard Washington (no relation). He believed the Cherokees would make peace on almost any terms, not because they feared British military power but because they were dependent on the supplies that only the British could provide. The Cherokees had been asking for peace for some time. “I wish the Powers of Europe were as well disposd to an accommodation as these poor Wretches are,” he wrote to the Cary firm; “a stop would soon be put to the Effusion of Human Blood.”84

  Washington’s assessment was accurate. Already ravaged by smallpox, the Cherokees now faced starvation. Attakullakulla, Ostenaco, and Oconostota sued for peace. Attakullakulla, who had been a voice for peace throughout the crisis, impressed one of Grant’s officers as an amiable individual and “a Man of great Sense.” The Cherokees made peace with South Carolina at Charleston in December 1761.85 Oconostota, the chief warrior and Attakullakulla’s chief rival, made peace with Virginia and traveled to Williamsburg to confirm it. Fauquier thought him a man of integrity, “not talking, as they express themselves with a double tongue.”86 Ostenaco, who had worked to build relations with Virginia before the war, now worked to rebuild them.87

  Ostenaco urged sending a delegation to England to confer with the king. A royal visit would increase his prestige at the expense of Attakullakulla, and would reduce South Carolina’s dominance in Cherokee relations. Fauquier and his council agreed to the visit, reasoning it would impress the Cherokees with the grandeur of the king and the power of his military.88 Ostenaco and two other Cherokees, Cunne Shote (Stalking Turkey) and Woyi (Pigeon or Pouting Pigeon), accompanied by Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, made the hazardous voyage. They met George III at St. James’s Palace, saw the sights, attended the opera, attracted the attentions of English ladies, and had their portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Ostenaco came home determined to maintain the alliance.89 The Cherokees needed peace: “Our women are breeding children night and day to increase our people,” he said, “and I will order those who are growing up to avoid making war with the English.”90 In December 1762 the Virginia Regiment that Washington had led for four years was disbanded.91

  washington’s military service during the French and Indian War had primarily involved fighting Indians. It was hardly an unqualified success. He had embarked on it as a means of personal advancement, and he frequently behaved like a young man on the make. As Edward Lengel acknowledges, “some unattractive facets of Washington’s personality arose during the French and Indian War, and they would continue to mark his conduct twenty years later.” He made lots of mistakes and did not admit them, and he suffered several defeats. Oversensitive and easily hurt, he sometimes reacted to his own failures by blaming others or falling into despondency. He complained constantly, carped to his superiors, and tried to undermine them. His frustrations in dealing with the British army were matched by British officers’ frustrations in dealing with uncooperative colonial assemblies and unreliable provincial troops, and the experience of fighting together generated attitudes that hardened into stereotypes as relations between British armed forces and colonial Americans deteriorated in the troubled times to come.92 His frustrations in dealing with Indian allies were matched by Indian frustrations in dealing with British and colonial allies. His only victory was questionable—achieved over a party of French soldiers caught off their guard, and marred by the assassination of Jumonville. The image of Tanaghrisson washing his hands in Jumonville’s brains surely had an enduring influence on Washington’s attitudes toward Indians, and perhaps on his later Indian policies as well.

  After witnessing and surviving debacles and disasters—some brought about by his own rash actions in pursuit of victory—Washington had watched a dying general who ignored his advice secure a huge victory without even fighting a battle. Wa
shington had urged an assault on Fort Duquesne, but credit for its capture belonged to Forbes, who succeeded despite Washington’s bickering, and to Indian diplomats, who conducted their business off Washington’s radar. There were those who questioned Washington’s fitness for command. He hardly deserved the military reputation he had acquired by the end of the war, and the Revolutionary War would demonstrate, time and again, that he still had plenty to learn. He experienced and grudgingly acknowledged the effectiveness of the Indians’ war of attrition, but, contrary to popular myth, he did not learn how to defeat the British in the Revolution by fighting in the “Indian style” he learned in the French and Indian War.

  Nevertheless, he had displayed personal courage in the face of disaster, he had racked up valuable experience, and he had built up a well-trained and effective provincial regiment. As Fred Anderson notes, “the war had been a kind of education, in many aspects of life, for a man who had undergone very little formal education.” It took Washington some time to grow into that education, but lessons he learned about leading men; organizing campaigns, supplies, and defense; and the value of patience, planning, and perseverance would serve him well in years to come. He may also, as he found himself powerless to stop Indian warriors filtering past his forces to kill people he was supposed to be protecting, have learned humility.93

  He had been lucky—to escape with his life and without blame for the debacles in which he was involved—and he knew it. Writing to Adam Stephen in July 1776, when both men were fighting the British, not the French and Indians, Washington noted that he did not let the anniversaries of July 3 and 9 pass “without a grateful remembrance of the escape we had at the Meadows and on the Monongahela.” Providence had protected them at Fort Necessity and during Braddock’s defeat, and he hoped it would do so again.94

  PART TWO

  The Other Revolution

  Chapter 8

  Confronting the Indian Boundary

  When george washington rebuilt mount Vernon, he placed his elegant new parlor and dining room on the west side of the house.1 On the other side, in Washington’s mind, the Potomac River that flowed past his home always pointed west, to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Ohio, and beyond. In his house perched on the eastern edge of the continent, with English-style architecture and furnishings, Washington spent a lot of time and energy, as the historian Joseph Ellis says, “dreaming and scheming about virgin land over the western horizon.”2 However, the land was not virgin, and the end of the Anglo-French war did not end the Indians’ war to defend it. In fact, just when “we thought ourselves fixed in the utmost tranquility,” wrote Washington to his friend Captain Robert Stewart, “another tempest … arose upon our Frontiers, and the alarm spread wider than ever.”3 In response, Britain erected a new barrier that thwarted Washington’s dreams and schemes in the West.

  The French and Indian War had disrupted the land business, and the Ohio Company lay dormant from 1754 to 1759. Now, with the French driven from the Ohio and his military service over, Washington was eager to jump back into the business. He used his position in the Assembly to push for western land, and he wanted to secure title to lands in the Ohio country. He was determined to get a share—actually far more than his share—of the 200,000 acres of bounty lands on both sides of the Forks of the Ohio that Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie had promised Virginian soldiers in 1754. As was common with such incentives to enlist, Dinwiddie’s bounties were almost certainly intended for rank-and-file soldiers; officers had their own rewards and compensation. Washington insisted that the bounties applied to officers as well, and he argued that they applied only to the men who served in 1754, that is, his command on the Fort Necessity campaign. He made every effort to acquire the best land for himself and buy up the shares of his fellow officers and men. Even before he left the army, in collusion with Captain George Mercer, his former aide-de-camp, and Robert Stewart, Washington sent Christopher Gist’s son Nathaniel into the Ohio country to scout out the best land and establish their claims to it before others did. As Mercer told Washington, they would “leave no Stone unturned to secure to ourselves this Land.” Others were not far behind. Thomas Bullitt, who had been caught in the exchange of friendly fire with Washington, and Adam Stephen, who took over as commander of Virginia’s army after Washington left, both filed surveys of Ohio country lands in Williamsburg in 1760 and lobbied the Assembly to validate their claims, much to Washington’s alarm.4

  Stephen not only competed with Washington for land, he also ran against him for the Assembly seat from Frederick County in 1761. It was the end of their friendship. In the Revolution, Stephen rose to the rank of major general, but after the Battle of Germantown in 1777, amid allegations of drunkenness, he was court-martialed for “unofficerlike behaviour,” inattention to duty, and lack of judgment. “From Fort Necessity onward,” reckons the historian John Ferling, “every defeat suffered by Washington required a scapegoat.”5

  By the time Washington turned his attention to developing his estate in the 1750s, Virginia planters knew they had to diversify to protect themselves from the boom-and-bust cycles that plagued the tobacco economy. Still heavily dependent on British credit and committed to their plantation system of agriculture, Washington and his contemporaries sought to achieve greater economic independence by developing new crops, new markets, new commercial networks, and new territory. Lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains that had long attracted the attention of eastern speculators now attracted settlers and promised to sustain an expanding plantation economy and support the growth of eastern towns.6 British population in North America was increasing by leaps and bounds: a quarter of a million in 1700, nearly 1.2 million in 1750, 1.6 million in 1760—and immigrants kept coming. Between 1760 and 1775, 222,000 people arrived in the British colonies from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Germany, and as slaves from Africa, more than the total Native American population east of the Mississippi.7 Planter speculators who could obtain a large swath of land from the Indians and then rent or sell it in parcels stood to make huge profits.8 Unless the British government stood in their way.

  Ohio Indians had made peace on condition that the British would leave their country after the French were defeated, an assurance given by Christian Frederick Post and reaffirmed at various times subsequently by British officers and officials.9 Just a couple of weeks after Fort Duquesne fell, Colonel Henry Bouquet had assured the Delawares: “We are not come here to take Possession of yr hunting Country in a hostile Manner, as the French did when they came amongst you.”10 Nonetheless, Indians were skeptical, and the atmosphere around Fort Pitt—formerly Fort Duquesne—remained tense. Tamaqua warned the British “to go back over the mountain and stay there.” If they did not, said Keekyuscung, “all the nations would be against them; and he was afraid it would be a great war, and never come to peace again.” Post said that when Tamaqua told Colonel Bouquet to take his soldiers back over the mountains, George Croghan and Andrew Montour, who were acting as interpreters, refused to translate the speech.11 Croghan, of course, had land claims of his own west of the Appalachians. Pisquetomen asked what the English meant by bringing a great army to the Ohio country, and many Shawnees “believed ye English only wanted to deceive them to their destruction.”12 There was still work to be done if the peace hashed out at Easton was to hold.

  Tamaqua continued to do that work. When he arrived at Fort Pitt for a council, the garrison greeted him with a cannon salute. Like most Indian councils, this one was conducted through a tortuous chain of communication: Croghan spoke to Montour, who spoke to the Mingoes and then interpreted the substance of what was said to Shingas, “who sat by him & he spoke it very boldly to ye Delawares.” The trader James Kenny, who attended, had difficulty hearing everything that was said in English, but Tamaqua talked about how the king would protect the Indians and confirm their rights. As a mark of his commitment to peace, Tamaqua returned two English women he had taken captive and adopted; one he called his “mother” and the other his �
��sister.”13

  The British army tried to enforce the Easton Treaty and ejected settlers who illegally squatted on Indian land, but the army’s presence encouraged settlement more than it restrained it. Migrants streamed along the roads built by Braddock and Forbes and settled near the military posts. Fort Pitt was a military community that required and attracted traders and tavern keepers, sutlers and settlers, artisans and laborers, camp followers and laundresses.14 Bouquet—whose own speculative schemes were in Maryland rather than the Ohio Valley—refused bribes from members of the revived Ohio Company who offered him a share of company stock in return for letting them sell titles to squatters already occupying “company land” in Indian country. In the fall of 1761 Bouquet issued a military proclamation requiring squatters who had settled west of the Appalachians to leave. The following spring he sent soldiers to burn down their cabins. Bouquet’s proclamation caused alarm in Virginia, and Washington and other Northern Neck planters who owned or claimed grants of land immediately protested to Governor Fauquier.15

  Confronted with attempts to block settlement in America, speculators turned to London. The Ohio Company began pressuring the government in preparation for the end of the war. In September 1761, in expectation of peace the following winter and assuming that His Majesty’s subjects would then be free to settle in the Ohio country, the company submitted a petition stating its case for a grant of lands, or failing that to have its time for settling the lands prolonged.16 Washington, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis submitted a memorial to the king on behalf of the officers and soldiers who had enlisted to defend Virginia against the French and Indians, asking that they not be blocked from taking up the lands promised by Dinwiddie.17