The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  He was not the only one. In March 1786 a group of self-described “reputable, industrious, well-informed men” of “wealth, education, and virtue” met at a tavern in Boston and formed the Ohio Company of Associates. Most of them were New Englanders, and most were veterans of the Revolutionary War who had not been adequately paid for their services. The company planned to sell stock to speculators and then petition the federal government for enormous grants of land. It offered one thousand shares at $1,000 in continental paper currency to raise up to $1 million and then purchase 1.5 million acres of land from Congress, ostensibly with the goal of settling veterans in the territory beyond the Ohio. In effect, the Ohio Company would buy land the United States had won during the war by giving back to Congress the nearly worthless paper it had issued to finance that war.137

  The associates appointed as company directors General Samuel Parsons, a Harvard graduate who had served in the Revolution and negotiated the Treaty of Fort McIntosh; Rev. Manasseh Cutler, a former lawyer, doctor, merchant, and chaplain in the Revolutionary army and now pastor of the Congregationalist church in Ipswich, Massachusetts; and General Rufus Putnam, a surveyor, land speculator, and engineer who had served in the French and Indian War and with Washington in the Revolution. Winthrop Sargent, a Harvard graduate who had served in Henry Knox’s artillery regiment in the Revolution, was secretary.138 Putnam played on his connection to Washington to promote his own and his company’s land schemes and, like Washington, saw his own interests and the national interest as compatible if not identical. “I am Sir,” he had told Washington a couple of months after the Peace of Paris, “among those who consider the Cession of so grate a tract of Territory to the United States in the Western World as a very happy circumstance; and of grate consequence to the American Empire.” And he was impatient to get at that territory: the settlement of the Ohio country occupied “many of my thoughts, and much of my time,” he told Washington. Thousands would emigrate to that country as soon as Congress made provision for granting lands. Putman submitted a petition in 1784 and warned that the officers would not “lie long upon their Oars, waiting the decision of Congress.” In 1785 Congress made Putnam the surveyor of western lands.139

  The members of the Ohio Company promoted their scheme as an opportunity for settling the West and paying down the national debt that Congress could not afford to miss.140 Cutler sold shares to leading government officials, including Arthur St. Clair, who was president of Congress at the time, and the secretary of the Confederation’s Treasury Board, William Duer.141 Duer was a political and business crony of Alexander Hamilton and became his assistant secretary in the Treasury Department after the Constitution was adopted. Duer was also a business partner of Secretary of War Knox, who also owned stock in the Ohio Company.

  Washington told Thomas Cresap that he was not a member of the Ohio Company, did not know who its members were, and was not involved in its affairs.142 Nevertheless, he “took a decided interest” in promoting schemes for settling Ohio. Settlements north of the river would give added security to his lands on the south bank; he was anxious to bind the West to Virginia and the East; he sympathized with the veterans’ complaints, and many of the men promoting the project were former comrades-in-arms. Who better to settle the West, Washington asked, than “the disbanded Officers and Soldiers of the Army, to whom the faith of Government hath long since been pledged, that lands should be granted at the expiration of the War?”143

  A congressional committee in fall 1786 reported that the Indian opposition comprised the Shawnees, Miamis, and Lakes Indians, joined by “a banditti of desperadoes” made up of “outcasts from other nations” who had moved into the Ohio country “for the purpose of war and plunder.”144 It was rather more than that. Two months later, delegates from the Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, Hurons, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Ottawas, Piankashaws, Weas, Miamis, and Cherokees gathered in council at Brownstown, a Wyandot town near Detroit, and sent Congress a message denouncing its divisive policies of making separate treaties. “As landed matters are often the subject of our councils with you, a matter of the greatest importance and of general concern to us,” they said, all treaties with the United States should be “with the general voice of the whole confederacy, and carried on in the most open manner, without restraint on either side.” The treaties at Fort Stanwix, Fort McIntosh, and Fort Finney were “partial treaties” and therefore “void and of no effect.” The chiefs proposed making another treaty and, as a first step toward peace, asked Congress to remove surveyors and settlers from lands on the Indian side of the Ohio River. They were determined their demands should “appear just and reasonable, in the eyes of the world.”145

  In the spring of 1787 Washington traveled to Philadelphia, where he would preside over the Constitutional Convention as it worked to form a more perfect union, but even as he did so, the Indian tribes beyond the Ohio were forming a union of their own to resist the American expansion to which Washington was committed. Indian power stood squarely in the way of the new nation’s ability to turn real estate into revenue and alleviate the postwar tax burden on its citizens. The threat of Indian war kept surveyors and settlers out of the lands they coveted. “Had it not been for the hostile appearances in the Indians,” Massachusetts congressman Nathan Dane told his state assembly in 1786, “7,000,000 acres of the land belonging to the United States would now have been surveyed, and ready for sale.”146

  In July 1787, in one of its last acts, the Confederation Congress issued another land ordinance, commonly known as the Northwest Ordinance. Cutler went to New York and, at dinners and private meetings, worked on members of the government and key members of Congress to get them to agree to the Ohio Company’s purchase of land in the Northwest Territory.147 He also worked out a deal with Duer that would give another company, the Scioto Company, an option on an additional 3.5 million acres.148 On July 27 Congress, some of whose members held stock in the Ohio Company, passed the Northwest Ordinance and approved granting the Ohio Company a total of 5 million acres of land. The Ohio Company kept 1.5 million acres for itself and allowed Duer and his cronies in the Scioto Company to acquire the other 3.5 million.149 (The Scioto Company sold land through agents to European emigrants but never paid the government for the land, and immigrants arrived to find they had been swindled.) The government’s price for the land was nominally one dollar an acre, but it deducted one-third for poor-quality lands and surveying expenses, reducing the cost to sixty-six cents per acre.150 Cutler got Congress to agree to accept payment in depreciated government securities and devalued military warrants, so the real cost to the company was more like eight or nine cents per acre.151 Cutler pronounced it “the greatest private contract ever made in America.”152 Before long, “almost every army officer owned shares in the Ohio Company.”153

  Written by a congressional committee chaired by James Monroe, the Northwest Ordinance created a blueprint for national expansion and a uniform model of statehood. The Northwest Territory, some 220,000 square miles of it, would be surveyed, divided into districts and lots, sold, and settled. The territory would have its own territorial government, with a governor, a secretary, and judges appointed by Congress. Once the adult male population reached five thousand, they would elect an assembly. The ordinance provided for proportionate representation of the people in a territorial legislature, freedom of religion, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and judicial proceeding according to common law. It encouraged education and schools; it prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude north of the Ohio. It stipulated that “not less than three nor more than five States” should be formed in the territory. Unlike colonial status under the British Empire, territorial status was temporary: once its population reached sixty thousand, a territory could petition to become a state. The ordinance harnessed the potentially divisive forces of western expansion into a national project. Eventually Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin entered the Union as states carved from the Northwest Territory. Ultimately, mo
re than thirty states entered the union through the process it established.

  At the same time as the ordinance committed the nation to expansion onto Indian lands, however, it also pledged that the United States would observe the “utmost good faith” in its dealings with the Indians. Their lands would not be taken from them without their consent, and they would not be attacked except “in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.”154 In keeping with Washington and Knox’s views, Congress would try to acquire Indian land by treaty rather than by war. Knox doubted that Indians and whites could ever be good neighbors: the former were determined to defend their lands and the latter determined to have them. But if it appeared “that we preferred War to Peace,” Knox wrote in his report to Congress in July, “the United States may have the verdict of mankind against them; for men are ever ready to espouse the cause of those who appear to be oppressed provided their interference may cost them nothing.” The result would be “a stain on the national reputation of America.” And if national honor was not enough to require such a course of action, the nation’s financial situation rendered it “utterly unable to maintain an Indian war with any dignity or prospect of success.” A war would cost much blood and much more money, but Indian lands could be bought for a small amount. A congressional committee accepted Knox’s recommendations. The government must deal with Indians on an equal footing. Treaty commissioners should stop using “a language of superiority and command” and convince the Indians “of the Justice and humanity as well as the power of the United States and of their disposition to promote the happiness of the Indians.” Instead of dictating treaties and demanding Indian lands by right of conquest, the United States would return to the British practice of negotiating treaties and purchasing Indian lands.155 The new US Congress reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance in its first session.

  Washington and others entertained notions that colonial status could be temporary for Indians as well as western settlers. Territories shed their colonial status when they became states; Indians could shed it when they became “civilized” and incorporated into the Republic. But the fact that the Indians’ lands were the basis for territorial expansion, state formation, and nation-building meant that federal colonial control over Indians would be indefinite.156 The fact that Indians would resist meant that the rhetoric of “just and lawful wars” in the Northwest Ordinance was less an aspiration to high ideals than a justification of the violence inherent in US Indian policy. What Patrick Wolfe labeled “intentional fallacies”—declared good intentions that were never going to come to fruition—became a hallmark of US Indian policy.157

  The new governor of the Northwest Territory was Arthur St. Clair, former president of the Congress (see plate 9). Born in Scotland in 1734 or 1736, St. Clair had attended the University of Edinburgh, purchased a commission in the British army, and served in the French and Indian War under Jeffery Amherst at the capture of Louisburg in 1758 and James Wolfe at the capture of Quebec in 1759.158 After the war he married the niece of Governor James Bayard of Massachusetts and settled in western Pennsylvania. During the Revolution, he fought at Trenton, Princeton, Ticonderoga, Brandywine Creek, and Yorktown and developed a close relationship with Washington. His abandonment of Ticonderoga in 1777 brought an inquiry, but he was exonerated and ended the war a major general. He was elected president of the Confederation Congress in 1787. In his fifties, St. Clair was corpulent and suffered from gout, but he brought military and political experience to the position of territorial governor, and he owned Ohio Company land. Like Washington, St. Clair wanted to see the country settled in an orderly manner. Arriving at Marietta, the model town established by the Ohio Company at the mouth of the Muskingum River in the spring of 1788, he made it the seat of his territorial government and named the area Washington County.

  This was exactly how Washington thought the nation should grow. “No Colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum,” he wrote in a letter to one correspondent “If I was a young man, just preparing to begin the world or if advanced in life, and had a family to make a provision for, I know of no country, where I should rather fix my habitation.” With an efficient government, America would be the best country in the world for hardworking, frugal people with a little capital; “the lowest class of people” would also benefit because there were “plenty of unoccupied lands,” equal distribution of property, and ample means of subsistence. The only obstacles were the Indians and the difficulty of transportation, and both could be dealt with by the proper application of federal power.159

  As the Constitutional Convention wrapped up its business, Washington wrote his land agent in western Pennsylvania instructing him not to sell his property for two dollars an acre; once the new Constitution was ratified, Washington had “no doubt of obtaining the price I have fixed on the land, and that in a short time.” (He eventually sold it for more than seven dollars an acre). It was, notes John Ferling, “a remarkably candid letter” offering “a clue to the private interests that combined with his nationalistic concerns to bring him to Philadelphia.”160

  Washington and his fellow delegates were not the only ones creating a stronger union. As the states debated and then voted to ratify the Constitution, so the Indians, Joseph Brant and several Seneca chiefs told Samuel Kirkland in July 1788, had been debating for a long time what was best for themselves and decided “that the Indian interest must be one; that they must all unite as Indians independently of white people.” To that end, some twenty chiefs from the Six Nations had gone as an embassy to the southern and western nations to argue the case for a plan of general union. They had traveled for seventeen months and recently returned, having conferred with twenty-two different tribes from the Great Lakes down to the Mississippi and as far south as the Upper Creeks, and they had received belts from all of those nations signifying their compliance with the proposal. Brant and the Seneca chiefs asked Kirkland if he did not think that every true friend of the Indians would approve of the scheme; wouldn’t the Great Spirit approve? Their immediate objective was the peace and good of the Indians, not war with either Britain or the Americans, although they acknowledged it would put them in a better state of defense, in the event a war did break out. And after all, they observed to Kirkland, “Congress could not blame them for such a conduct, neither ought they to be jealous of them; for what had Congress done, but to unite thirteen states as one; all their wisdom and strength to become one.”161 The new United States would have to contend with the uniting Indian nations.

  PART THREE

  The First President and the First Americans

  Chapter 14

  An Indian Policy for the New Nation

  From the time the united states was born, images of Indians, which Europeans had used for centuries to represent the New World, began to appear on American maps, medals, and buildings as emblems of an independent American nation based on freedom.1 The association of American Indians with American freedom continued. In 1988, just after the bicentennial of the US Constitution, the House of Representatives, with the Senate concurring, issued a declaration that “the original framers of the Constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy” and that the confederacy influenced the formation of the Republic and provided a model for the Constitution.2

  The evidence is circumstantial, but here is the logic behind the argument: an Onondaga chief named Canasatego recommended to the colonists in 1744 (on July 4, incidentally) that they form a federation of their governments as the Six Nations had done; Franklin took note of this speech and published it; Franklin called the Albany Congress in 1754 where some of the colonies drew up their first plan of union; the colonists were negotiating with the Iroquois while the Continental Congress met in 1775 and 1776. And thus the founding fathers discussed the Iroquois federation when they debated the Constitution. Washin
gton, who presided over the debates in the Constitutional Convention, said nothing to indicate such a debt, though not everything gets written down, and influences may have seeped from the decentered federated governance of the Iroquois into the new federal system of the United States without being documented. While some people took this as an article of faith, most scholars see all this as a stretch. Few accept the role of the Iroquois in shaping the US Constitution. A war of words and essays ensued and continues to this day, with people taking sides in what became a yes-or-no debate.3

  Whether or not the founding fathers modeled the Constitution on Iroquoian structures and philosophies of governance, they certainly took Indian nations into account as they built their own, if in a less celebratory way than the 1988 declaration. Concerns about the government’s weakness in dealing with Indian nations, implementing Indian policies, and defeating Indian enemies featured prominently in correspondence and debates about creating, drafting, and ratifying the Constitution, and in arguments for a stronger federal state and a stronger national army. Many western settlers and people farther east with a financial stake in western lands supported the Constitution because they hoped a stronger federal government and army would defend them, or their investments, against Indian attack. Georgia became the first southern state and the fourth state in the nation to ratify the Constitution in large part because it was embroiled in conflict with the Creek nation.4 Debates about the sovereignty of the United States acknowledged the sovereignties of Native nations as well as of the states and federal government. As the legal scholar Gregory Ablavsky puts it, Indian issues were refracted “through the lens of federalism.”5