The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  The framers of the Constitution managed to resolve or set aside conflicting interests in their effort to create a more perfect union, but the sparely worded principles of the document they crafted provided few specifics about how to develop a functioning federal government or to conduct Indian affairs. “We are in a wilderness without a single step to guide us,” James Madison fretted to Thomas Jefferson.6 When Washington was inaugurated in April 1789, he had yet to work out the forms and functions of the office he had assumed. On his personal copy of the Constitution he bracketed and noted in pencil those sections outlining the responsibilities of the president. But how should the president be addressed? What were the powers and limitations of the office? What, indeed, were the powers and limitations of the new federal government? Article II stated simply, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States,” but how the first president read those words and how he applied that power established important precedents. Washington told the Boston selectmen in 1795 that “the Constitution is the guide which I never can abandon.” In fact, what Washington did has often proved more significant than what the Constitution said.7

  The new president who took office in 1789 looked west, and so did the new nation. “The Western Country is daily growing into greater importance,” Washington’s old comrade Adam Stephen wrote James Madison that year. “The Strength and Vigour of the United States ly in the Mountains and to the Westward.”8 But Washington knew that if westward expansion was to unite rather than divide the states, it must be a national endeavor, with the federal government controlling Indian affairs and the process of acquiring Indian lands. Between 1789 and 1791 he visited all thirteen states, carrying his vision of an expansive republic and stressing the need for a strong central government to the people.9

  The Constitution gave the federal government increased powers—to raise taxes, regulate commerce, raise an army, call out state militias, govern federal territories, and make treaties—so many powers, in fact, that alarmed states and citizens responded by demanding protections in what became the Bill of Rights.10 The Constitution also reaffirmed the federal government’s authority over Indian affairs. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress could only regulate trade and manage affairs with Indians who were “not members of any state” and could not infringe on the legislative rights of any state within its own borders. It had been a source of considerable tension. The Constitution granted the president the power to make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the commerce clause gave Congress exclusive authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes,” saying nothing about federal authority ceasing at state borders and thereby eliminating the division of authority between the central government and the states that had plagued Indian policy during the Confederation.

  The federal government and its chief executive had the opportunity for a new start in Indian affairs and the power to define and implement a national Indian policy. Yet the five words “and with the Indian tribes” were a slim foundation on which to build. What Indian policy should look like, and what the executive branch’s broad discretion to conduct Indian affairs meant in concrete terms, generated vigorous debate and extensive deliberation. The new president worked to develop a federal Indian policy with his secretary of war, Henry Knox, and to a lesser extent Thomas Jefferson, who arrived back from Paris, where he had served as ambassador, in November 1789 to find he had been appointed secretary of state. In doing so they produced a substantial archive of correspondence and meetings among the president, his cabinet, and state executives, as well as records of treaty negotiations, letters, reports, and instructions to and from officials and Indian agents in Indian country. Washington’s administration based its assertion of federal authority over Indian affairs not solely on the commerce clause but also in the broad array of powers granted by the Constitution to the federal government and denied the states, notably the right to make treaties or to wage war. As commander in chief, the president assumed responsibility for conducting war against Indians. Federal Indian policy developed “bit by bit” as Congress, responding to the executive, enacted laws to regulate trade and intercourse with the tribes.11

  Different people had different hopes and expectations as the new government took shape. Madison anticipated that the increased security it afforded purchasers of western lands would attract speculation, and accelerate population movement and the formation of new states. George Nicholas, a Kentuckian, warned Madison that the government must defend settlers from Indian attacks to stop them drifting into Spanish territory: “No people will remain long under a Government which does not afford protection.”12 Brigadier General Harmar was more forthright, telling Knox he hoped the new government would begin to operate soon and “sweep these perfidious villains off the face of the earth.”13 Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina hoped the Senate would “do something effectual” in Indian affairs but recognized the problems in working out a boundary line: Indians hoped Congress would protect their lands, while whites feared Congress would scupper their land speculations, he told Madison.14 Washington knew that the challenges he faced in Indian country could not be resolved easily. Many of the anomalies that characterized US-Indian relations in the Confederation era—promoting westward expansion while trying to prevent frontier conflict, signing treaties with tribes as sovereign nations while persistently attempting to erode their independence, negotiating with compliant but unauthorized chiefs, dealing with the separate agendas of individual states, and trying to impose unpopular restraints on people who could vote officials out of office—persisted for decades to come.

  Though in search of a practical Indian policy, Washington was not immune to larger philosophical, legal, and constitutional considerations about Indian affairs. As the founding fathers sought to secure a place for the new republic among the nations of the world, they also had to determine what was the place of Indians in the new nation. The Indians in a sense were resident “foreign nations.” This was their homeland, but they had no desire to become part of the new nation that was being built on it. The United States claimed exclusive sovereignty and territorial control, but how should it deal with the Indian nations?15 The founders turned to writings on international law to guide them. “The circumstances of a rising state make it necessary to consult the law of nations,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in the Netherlands who had sent him a copy of The Law of Nations, the influential treatise on international law written by Swiss philosopher and legal theorist Emer de Vattel. (Washington borrowed a copy of The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library in October 1789, evidently on permanent loan.) Sovereign nations made treaties in which they recognized one another’s rights and maintained the balance of power. For the infant United States, international diplomacy entailed making treaties and alliances with Indian nations as well as European nations and paying attention to the rituals of the council fire as well as the etiquette of court.16

  There was widespread agreement that the law of nations should govern relations between the United States and Natives, but European texts said little about indigenous peoples, and Vattel was ambiguous on their status. Washington and his government therefore had to translate international law principles from Europe and apply them to Indian country. The administration asserted its authority to deal with Indian nations as it would with foreign nations, made treaties with them, and recognized aspects of their sovereignty, but it did not consider Indians to be fully independent polities. It drew on Vattel’s position that a nation-state possessed a uniform sovereignty over its national territory to establish its right of preemption to land inhabited by Indian people. Since the Indian nations existed within the borders of the United States, and its government possessed ultimate sovereignty over this territory, the sovereignty of the United States limited the sovereignty of the Indian nations. As territorial sovereign, the government insisted that Indians could not sell their lands to anyo
ne but the United States or make alliances with any other nation.17 The Revolutionary generation also deployed Vattelian precepts to justify the conquest, dispossession, and assimilation of indigenous peoples: so-called civilized nations had the right to take possession of “part of a vast country” from “erratic” and “savage” nations who lived by war and plunder rather than by farming.18

  The Washington administration recognized Indian nations as possessing much greater sovereignty than the Confederation government had recognized. This stemmed from its deliberations about the laws of nations and the nature of federalism but also reflected the reality that Indian nations were powerful and independent. Recognizing Native sovereignty was the right thing to do, but it was also the expedient thing to do. Indians, of course, as Washington was to discover, were unimpressed. When the government tried to get them to acknowledge they were under the exclusive protection of the United States and no other power, they resisted. Much of their power, as it had in the colonial era, rested on their ability to deal with other nations. They insisted they were free, independent, and equal nations. As George Rogers Clark had noted at the end of the Revolution, Indians were as ready to make war on Britain as on the United States if either offended them.19 If the infant United States was to succeed, it must impress Indian nations as well as European nations with its national power.20

  Instead, said Alexander Hamilton, the young republic was hemmed in by Indian power and European powers. The tribes on the western frontier ought to be regarded as natural enemies of the United States and natural allies of Britain and Spain, he wrote in The Federalist Papers, “because they have most to fear from us and most to hope from them.” Since the territories of Britain, Spain, and the Indian nations stretched the length of the Union from Maine to Georgia, posing a common danger to all the states, security required common measures on the part of all the states.21 Hamilton was determined to give the United States the military and financial resources to project national power against foreign powers and Indian peoples and to sustain territorial expansion. That meant a standing army supported by loans and taxes. Whatever method the United States employed to secure Indian lands—war or treaty—it needed a strong government to carry it out and the money to pay for it.22

  The illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant in the West Indies (John Adams called him “the bastard brat of a Scottish pedlar”), Hamilton was brilliant, flamboyant, thirty-something. He was an unlikely ally for Washington, yet they joined their efforts to create a strong government and centralized financial institutions and economic policy.23 In the developing competition between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian philosophies and practices of government, Washington believed Hamilton’s offered the best approach for western expansion. Jefferson hoped the “free” lands of the West would help stave off industrialization and preserve the young nation’s agrarian character. Washington hoped to harness the resources of the West to transform the nation’s economy and believed that Hamilton’s program would provide the financial muscle to thwart British and Spanish ambitions, dispossess the Indians, and open new frontiers. Only a strong union with a strong army could win the West.24

  It was clear the nation would continue to advance across Indian country; it had little choice. The government remained dependent on the acquisition and sale of western land to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, fund its operations, provide property for its citizens, and essentially hold things together. Without territorial expansion, writes the historian Alan Taylor, “American leaders dreaded that some medley of class or civil war and foreign intervention would destroy their risky experiment in American independence, republican government, and federal union. Only the continued consumption of Indian land to make private property could sustain the American social order that combined inequality with opportunity.”25 The citizens of the new republic shared their president’s obsession: “It would be a difficult matter to find a man of property in the country, who is not concerned in the buying or selling of land, which may be considered in America as an article of trade,” a visiting Englishman observed in the 1790s.26

  The Confederation Congress in its last months had authorized Governor Arthur St. Clair to make a general treaty with the tribes in the Northwest Territory to confirm their earlier land cessions, instructing him not to depart from the treaties that had already been made unless he could obtain “a change of boundary beneficial to the United States.” Purchasing Indian land was not the primary goal, but he should seize “any opportunity that may offer of extinguishing Indian rights to the westward, as far as the river Mississippi.”27 Knox recommended modifying the instructions to authorize paying for the lands acquired in earlier treaties based on the right of conquest. The Indians so resented those treaties that rather than submit to them they would prefer continual war, and in the present political crisis and with an exhausted treasury, Knox warned, that would be “an event pregnant with unlimited evil.” Congress appropriated an additional $20,000.28 If St. Clair failed to secure peace and war was inevitable, Knox told him, he should wage it vigorously and end it quickly, “for a protracted Indian war, would be destruction to the republic, under its present circumstance.”29

  In January 1789 St. Clair made two treaties at Fort Harmar, the main garrison in the Ohio country. One was with Cornplanter, Guyasuta, and other representatives of the Six Nations; the other with Wyandots, Delawares (including Captain Pipe and Wingenund), and some Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis. The Indians confirmed earlier land cessions, but St. Clair’s tone—he told Washington he found the negotiations “tedious and troublesome”—did little to convince the Indians of “the Justice and humanity as well as the power of the United States.”30 Most Indians stayed away, and many of those who attended the treaty disavowed it later. But a treaty was a treaty, and if the Indians broke this one they could, in the Washington-Knox construction of a just Indian policy, be “extirpated.” Like Washington, St. Clair worried that westward migration might depopulate the eastern states. Emigrants were already flooding down the Ohio and pushing on to the rich lands beyond, he informed Washington in August. “The Spirit however has gone forth, and cannot now be restrained.”31 The Indian nations who boycotted the Fort Harmar Treaty announced their determination to fight, sent war pipes to the various tribes, and sent a delegation to Detroit to ask the British for ammunition.32

  Meanwhile, Indians continued to raid across the Ohio, and Kentuckians continued to retaliate against any and all Indians.33 Colonel John Hardin and the Kentucky militia launched an attack on Wea villages on the Wabash in the spring of 1789 that killed and scalped a dozen men, women, and children, including, Knox informed Washington, “a number of peaceable Piankeshaws, who prided themselves in their attachment to the United States.”34 Such indiscriminate killings undermined Washington’s efforts to avoid conflict with the Wabash Indians and to wage just wars. In his view the United States must adopt more diplomatic means of dealing with the tribes, at least as a first step. Then, “if after manifesting clearly to the Indians the dispositions of the General Government for the preservation of peace, and the extension of a just protection to the said Indians, they should continue their incursions, the United States will be constrained to punish them with severity.”35

  Washington wanted Indian relations in the United States to demonstrate to the world that his nation was the equal of European nations in humanitarianism and waging civilized war.36 Knox agreed with him on the need to inject greater morality into the conduct of Indian affairs: “Indians possess the natural rights of man” and should be treated with “justice and humanity,” he wrote the president.37 How the United States treated Indians would affect how other nations viewed American democracy.

  Washington’s thinking, and his conflicting commitments, reflected the dilemmas and ambiguities of the nation’s Indian policies. Convinced that both his personal fortune and the nation should be built on Indian lands, Washington had few qualms about separating Native peoples from their homelands and hunting territorie
s. He envisioned, developed, and implemented policies that would do just that. At the same time, he hoped to make dispossession a peaceful process, deal with Indian tribes as sovereign nations, and treat them with justice and humanity. George Thatcher, representing the Maine district of Massachusetts in Congress, reduced the complexities and challenges of forging Indian policy to a simple option: either exterminate the Indians or abandon settlement of the western country. “There is no other alternative,” he said; “Indians & white people cannot live in the same neighborhood of each other.”38 Washington tried to find a third path that would allow the United States to deprive Indians of their land with minimal bloodshed.

  As an individual and as president he struggled to reconcile the contradictions of an Indian policy that tried to combine expansion with honor.39 In practice, that often meant making treaties with Indians to secure peace and land, and waging war against Indians who refused and resisted. For frontier settlers, it usually meant nothing. Men like George Rogers Clark thought that war was the only way to deal with Indians and that treaties were an absurdity without it.40 Frontier settlers thought that treaties protected Indians and left innocent citizens exposed to the horrors of Indian war.41 They ignored government restraints, broke treaties, and preferred to expel Indians from their lands by killing them.