The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  The United States made its first treaty with a foreign nation in February 1778, when Benjamin Franklin negotiated a defensive alliance with France in Paris; the United States made its first formal treaty with an Indian nation in September 1778, when commissioners Andrew Lewis and Thomas Lewis negotiated a defensive alliance with the Delawares at Fort Pitt. Washington was pleased Lewis was conducting the treaty, but he doubted it would achieve its goals.41 White Eyes, John Killbuck, and Captain Pipe represented their respective divisions. The commissioners began by reviewing the many treaties the Indians had broken. “You alone of all the Western Indians seem inclined to hold fast the Chain of friendship,” they told the Delawares, “and even in this instance it has Contracted some Rust, of a very Dangerous Nature.” They offered a large wampum belt, on which the thirteen states and the Delaware Nation were depicted in black (purple) beads against a white background of peace; if the Delawares accepted it, the United States would consider them “as their own people” and require nothing of them “but what will be for mutual Good and Happiness.” The Delawares accepted and, on September 19, signed a treaty of confederation, perpetual peace, and friendship. In the third article they agreed to let American troops pass through their country, to provide them with corn and provisions, and to assist them with warriors; the United States agreed to build a fort to protect Delaware women and children while their warriors were away. In the sixth and final article the United States guaranteed to the Delawares and their heirs “all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner.” The article also contained the remarkable stipulation that any tribes friendly to the United States might in future be invited to join the confederation and “form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress.” Whether the provision was an instance of wartime expediency or a rare moment when Indians and colonists imagined a shared future is debatable. The two commissioners and the three chiefs signed the treaty in the presence of, among others, McIntosh, Brodhead, and Crawford.42

  The treaty seemed to offer the Delawares the security and independence that White Eyes had worked hard to achieve.43 However, the prospect of an Indian state with guaranteed boundaries must have been an alarming one to land speculators like Washington and his colleagues in Congress, and the likelihood of such a thing becoming reality was slim. The treaty did little to stop American settlers who were mounting their own invasion. “The emigration down the Ohio from this quarter I fear will depopulate it altogether, unless I have orders to put a timely stop to it immediately,” McIntosh wrote Washington the following March. He expected almost half the people who remained at Pittsburgh to follow suit later in the spring, heading for Kentucky and the Illinois country. “Their design of securing land is so great, notwithstanding the danger of this country, they will go.”44 Like Hand, McIntosh struggled to reconcile the goals of Congress with the demands of the people inhabiting the western frontier.45

  By permitting American passage across their territory, the Delawares reversed the policy spelled out by Guyasuta at Fort Pitt two years before and opened the way for McIntosh to march against the British supply base and center of Indian operations at Detroit. McIntosh’s expedition, however, invaded and exited Indian country with much bombast and little effect. His bedraggled and hungry army never came close to Detroit. Instead, when he called a council with Delawares at Fort Laurens and warned the tribes to make peace or face the wrath of the United States, the Indians “Set up a General Laugh.”46 McIntosh’s soldiers did manage to kill one Indian, possibly their best Native friend in the Ohio country. White Eyes set out as a guide for the expedition but never returned. Americans claimed he died of smallpox, but Morgan said he was murdered by some of the militia.47

  Captain Pipe and his warriors moved closer to the British-Indian alliance. Still, many Delawares endeavored to remain at peace. John Killbuck told Morgan that the written treaty contained things “to which I never agreed.” He had looked over the articles and found they were “wrote down false.” The Delaware council made a formal complaint to Morgan that their intent in making the treaty was to remain at peace, not go to war. They agreed to guide American armies through their country, not to take up arms for the United States. Morgan, who had his own agenda to pursue and axes to grind, declared, “There never was a Conference with the Indians so improperly or villainously conducted.”48 Meanwhile, he reported, Americans continued to invade Indian lands and had purchased about 70 million acres west of the Ohio.49

  In the spring of 1779 Morgan arranged for Killbuck and a Delaware delegation to meet with representatives of Congress and tell their side of the story. At Morgan’s house in Princeton, New Jersey, the chiefs drew up a message reasserting their neutral stance and asking Washington and Congress to prevent any further breaches of the alliance. They wanted to meet with Washington in person, but Morgan assured him the meeting would not take much time because the chiefs had “thrown aside the use of wampum” and wanted Washington’s answer in writing. The Delawares denied they ever agreed to take up the tomahawk and war belt as written into the Treaty of Fort Pitt, and they had returned them to Morgan. They pointed out they had accepted the invitation from Congress to bring three of their children to school. (White Eyes’s eight-year-old son, George, and John Killbuck’s sixteen- and eighteen-year-old sons, John Jr. and Thomas, enrolled in the College of New Jersey, the future Princeton, where they lived in Morgan’s home.) If these children lived, said the Delawares (and it was a big if, given the high mortality rate among Indian students at colonial schools), they would have great influence in Delaware councils. The chiefs were willing to send more students so “that our Nation may the sooner and more effectually be brought to embrace civilized Life, and become one People with our Brethren of the United States.” Nothing could give clearer testimony, they thought, “of their firm Resolution to continue an inviolate Friendship with the United States to the end of time.” Moreover, Delawares had established a mission town where they lived as Christians under the guidance of the Moravian David Zeisberger. All this demonstrated their peaceful intentions. “As a free & independent People (which the Delaware Nation have ever declared themselves to be),” the chiefs outlined the boundaries of their lands. They prayed God would give Washington and Congress wisdom and virtue to establish a permanent union between their respective nations, and reminded Congress it had failed to provide the trade it had promised, leaving the Delawares short of food and clothing.50 McIntosh accused Morgan of framing the speech himself and putting it “into the Mouths of a few Delaware Chiefs” while most of the nation was at war.51

  The Board of War had assured the chiefs that General Washington would receive them with his characteristic “tenderness and friendship.”52 In fact, Washington was less interested in hearing the Delawares’ grievances than in neutralizing them as allies of the British. After leaving Morgan’s home, the six chiefs met Washington in May 1779 at his headquarters at Middlebrook. He was “a little at a loss what answer to give,” he told Congress. “But as an answer could not be avoided, I thought it safest to couch it in general but friendly terms” and refer them to Congress in Philadelphia for more specifics. “Brothers,” he told the Delawares, “I am a warrior. My words are few and plain, but I will make good what I say. ’Tis my business to destroy all the enemies of these states and to protect their friends.” If the Delawares had any inclination to join the British, a “boasting people,” they should forget it. The king of France “has taken up the hatchet with us and we have sworn never to bury it till we have punished the English.” Instead, he advised them “to learn our arts and ways of life and, above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.”53 It was a harbinger of policies to come. Although his own religious beliefs remain ambiguous (according to his biographer Ron Chernow, this was his most explicit reference to Jesus54), Washington as president would continue to promote Christianity as the path to happiness for Indians.

/>   He staged a military review for the chiefs. Martha, who watched from a carriage, accompanied by the wives of Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox, wrote to her daughter-in-law: “Some of the Indians were fine looking, but most of them appeared worse than Falstaff’s gang. And such horses and trappings! The General says it was all done to keep the Indians friendly towards us. They appeared like cutthroats all.”55 Her husband harbored similar sentiments. The same day he delivered his address to the Delawares, he confided in a letter to his brother John Augustine that “all the Indians from the extremest North to the South, are bribed to cut our throats.”56 Nevertheless, he recognized the importance of keeping the Delawares’ friendship. When a soldier murdered a young Delaware man at Fort Pitt in May 1779, Washington ordered him court-martialed. “Exemplary punishment” was absolutely necessary, he told Brodhead, and should be carried out in the presence of Delaware chiefs.57

  The Delaware delegates made it safely to Philadelphia in May, despite several plots by colonists to murder them en route.58 There the chiefs met the French envoy.59 They repeated their desire to remain neutral to the congressional Committee for Indian Affairs. Pipe and other warriors were joining the British-Indian war effort, however, and, despite the chiefs’ insistence that these warriors had been expelled from the nation, Congress regarded all Delawares with increasing suspicion.60 As escalating violence became a racial war, in which killings and atrocities begat more killings and atrocities, the Ohio country was no place for neutrals. The Delawares were in a perilous position. So were Washington’s western lands and the prospects for settlement and profit. “Your houses Down the river is all burnt by the Endians,” Crawford informed him in August.61

  Meanwhile, Washington changed commanders at Fort Pitt. Daniel Brodhead, McIntosh’s lieutenant and senior officer of the 8th Pennsylvania Regiment, told Washington McIntosh was “almost universally Hated by every Man in this department;” all the officers were disgusted with him, and Brodhead doubted any would serve under McIntosh in another campaign. Congress put the Western Department under Washington’s direct command, and Washington urged Brodhead to reach an understanding with McIntosh. Brodhead promised to try but could not promise success.62 McIntosh also had strained relations with Morgan, the Indian agent and deputy commissary at Fort Pitt, who criticized the Fort Pitt treaty, competed with McIntosh for influence among the Delawares, and quarreled with him over supply measures. Morgan’s friend Gouverneur Morris described McIntosh to Washington as an indolent dullard. In March 1779, when McIntosh asked to be relieved from a command that had “become exceedingly disagreeable,” Washington appointed Brodhead in his place.63

  Brodhead was anxious for action. With one thousand men and the necessary resources, he told Washington, he could defeat the Munsees and Mingoes on the Allegheny, strike the Shawnee towns on the Scioto, and push on to Detroit.64 Once again Washington faced the challenge of limited resources and competing objectives. In the spring of 1779 he ordered Brodhead to make preparations to support Sullivan’s campaign against the Iroquois but at the same time cultivate peace with the western tribes. Once the campaign was under way, Brodhead could warn the western Indians that if they interfered, the Americans would turn their whole force against them and “never rest till we have cut them off from the face of the Earth.”65 Washington wanted “to chastise the Western savages” as soon as he could, but an expedition into their country would have to wait until the Iroquois campaign was successfully completed. In the meantime, Brodhead should conserve his dwindling resources, concentrate on defense, and hold the American frontier at the Ohio.66 Forced to choose between contesting British occupation of major cities in the East or supporting a rebellious population in the West, writes the historian Daniel Barr, “Washington essentially gave up on the western Pennsylvania frontier.”67 Brodhead’s defensive measures involved forming three companies of rangers, frontiersmen who fought, dressed, and painted their faces like Indians.68 Having advocated such measures himself many years before, Washington no doubt approved. Brodhead also sent the Shawnees a speech telling them to listen to peace and ignore the intrigues of British agents, but Shawnee warriors burned it in defiance.69

  Like Washington, Brodhead bristled at being confined to defensive duties. He told Washington he wanted to launch a major strike against the Mingoes, “who will not and ought not to be treated with but at the point of the Bayonet,” and Washington thought it could act as a diversion for Sullivan’s expedition.70 In the fall of 1779 Brodhead got his chance to go on the offensive, leading the western thrust of the American campaign into Seneca country in conjunction with Sullivan and Clinton’s invasion from the east and attacking Seneca and Munsee towns on the upper reaches of the Allegheny River.71 But Indian attacks only intensified. In the spring of 1780 the Pennsylvania Council authorized payment of $1,500 for every male prisoner and $1,000 for every Indian scalp. Brodhead feared bounty hunters would scalp friendly Delawares and spark a general Indian war.72

  Brodhead, a Pennsylvanian, competed for resources and reputation as an Indian fighter with George Rogers Clark, a Virginian who, like Washington, had set himself up as a surveyor and begun his career in the upper Ohio country. Clark had experience fighting Indians in Kentucky and made a name for himself in 1778–79, invading the Illinois country, capturing Vincennes by a forced winter match, and taking prisoner the notorious “hair-buying general” Henry Hamilton, the British governor of Detroit. Convinced that negotiating with Indians was wrong-headed, Clark offered them a simple choice between a white wampum belt signifying peace and a “bloody belt” threatening destruction. He backed up his words by tomahawking Indian captives and tossing their bodies into the river in plain view of the garrison at Vincennes.73 He declared that “to excel them in barbarity was and is the only way to make war upon Indians” and looked for an excuse to exterminate the Delawares who had settled on the forks of the White River. When Delawares plundered and killed a party of traders, Clark seized the opportunity to make an example of them and demonstrate “the horrible fate of those who dared to make war on the Big Knives.” He attacked the Indian camps. Clark’s men killed many Delawares on the spot, took others to Vincennes and put them to death, and took women and children captive.74

  Clark’s campaign earned him fame as “the Washington of the West” who won the region for the United States, but it was a pretty hollow conquest. The British remained in control at Detroit, and Clark’s power and presence soon evaporated.75 Even so, Clark saw in the Illinois country an opportunity to seize territory from the British Empire and extend Virginia’s territorial claims north and west of Kentucky, even if some of his militia suspected the objective was to execute a land grab.76 His alleged conquest strengthened the United States’ bargaining position at the peace negotiations in Paris.

  Clark also invaded Shawnee country. Spearheading the defense of the Ohio country, the Shawnees raided settlements; forced the Americans to abandon Fort Randolph, where Cornstalk had been murdered; and effectively closed the Ohio River to American traffic. Henry Hamilton described them as “inveterate against the Virginians,” and Shawnee and Delaware war parties brought scalps and captives to Detroit every day in May 1780.77 Governor of Virginia Thomas Jefferson wanted the Shawnees driven from their country and advocated turning other tribes against them.78 Clark led one thousand men against the Shawnee villages. When the Shawnees made a stand at Piqua on the Mad River, he turned his six-pound cannon on the village council house, where many of the people had taken refuge. His men killed some old people they found hiding in the cornfields and spent three days burning the crops. Some plundered graves for burial goods and scalps. Shawnee losses were slight, but the destruction of their corn hit them hard that winter, and many took refuge with the British at Detroit.79 The war of attrition was taking a toll. As one Shawnee said, they had been fighting the Virginians for almost twenty years.80 Washington remained convinced that capturing or destroying Detroit was the only way to secure peace and security on the western frontier,
and he continued to correspond with Brodhead about plans for a campaign, but nothing came of it.81

  Recognizing that the United States lacked the means to retain the affections of Indians who were well disposed or win over those who were not, Washington ordered Brodhead to foment divisions among the nations of the Ohio country.82 Although Delawares who visited Fort Pitt appeared friendly, and Delawares from the Moravian villages provided the garrison with food, Brodhead believed the majority favored the British. He heard, feared, or simply claimed that Delaware war parties were planning to attack Pittsburgh and warned Washington to expect a general Indian war. In April 1781 Brodhead, to whom the Delawares had given the honorary name Maghinga Keesoch (Great Moon) two years before, assembled a force of three hundred Continental soldiers and Pennsylvania militia and marched against the Delaware capital at Coshocton. John Killbuck, who had been commissioned as a colonel, accompanied him with a party of Delawares. Coshocton was “completely surprised.” Finding only fifteen warriors there, probably youths who were not away with the rest of the men, the militia took them prisoner, tried them, found them guilty of raiding and killing, and sentenced them to death. They then bound, tomahawked, and scalped them. They took another twenty or so noncombatants prisoner, and burned and plundered the town. Brodhead said the plunder sold for £80,000, an enormous sum. Indians denounced the attack as an unprovoked massacre; Brodhead tried to pass it off as a battle (in which, strangely, “I had not a man killed or wounded”) and to pin blame for atrocities on the militia, whom he could not control.83

  It didn’t save him. In early May, Washington ordered Brodhead to answer charges in a court-martial. Hearings dragged on into August. Brodhead was acquitted, but Washington removed him from command, replacing him with Colonel Gibson.