The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Washington attempted to leaven national land grabbing with sprinklings of humanitarianism. Thirty or forty years later, US Indian policy as articulated by Andrew Jackson justified dispossessing and removing Indians on the racist assumption that they were incapable of change and would always be “savages.” Washington and other founding fathers tended to subscribe to Scottish Enlightenment teachings that explained human difference as the product of environment and experience. “Savages we call them,” wrote Franklin, albeit in an attempt to poke fun at European pretensions, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.”42 With education and assistance, “savages” could become “civilized.” In other words, with proper social engineering on the part of government, Indians could overcome their disadvantages and learn to live, dress, farm, believe, and behave like Americans.43 Reading the words of Washington, Knox, and Jefferson as they formulated policies to dismantle Indian lands and cultures and justified those policies as serving the Indians’ best interests, one cannot help but see hypocrisy, arrogance, and deceit. Certainly, Washington, Knox, and Jefferson never doubted they would take away the Indians’ lands. However, they also spent much time, energy, and ink devising policies that would give Indian people something in return. The formula they developed—land for civilization—became a strategy for American expansion and a hallmark of US Indian policy for one hundred years. So did the readiness to wage war on Indians who refused the deal.

  The humanitarian challenge was there from the start. Even before the Peace of Paris, the Countess of Huntingdon, a reform-minded religious leader prominent in the Methodist movement in England, tried to enlist Washington’s support in helping the Indians. In 1784 she circulated to Washington and the governors of several states a proposal to send from Britain at her own expense pious Methodist men and women who would settle on the American frontier, convert Indians to Christianity, and serve as role models to help them improve their lives. Washington expressed support for the project and agreed with Lady Huntingdon that civilization must come before Christianity. “It has ever been my opinion,” he wrote her, “that all attempts to reclaim, & introduce any system of religion or morality among them, would prove fruitless, until they could be first brought into a state of greater civilization; at least that this attempt should accompany the other.” He forwarded the countess’s proposal to Congress. Congress rejected the plan—it could only dispose of land to secure revenue, and it opposed placing on the frontier “those religious people” who had been such bitter enemies in the Revolutionary War. Nothing came of the scheme, but the humanitarian challenge remained on Washington’s mind.44 He also took the opportunity to send Lady Huntingdon a newspaper advertisement soliciting settlers for his lands on the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers.45

  Washington and Knox worked together to develop the nation’s Indian policy. Indian affairs were conducted through the Department of War rather than the Department of State (or the Department of Foreign Affairs, as it was then called), and Secretary of War Knox pressed Washington throughout the summer of 1789 to make reform of Indian policy a priority.46 In June and July, Knox issued major statements of Indian policy, in the form of reports or memoranda to Washington. As he had before, he rejected the financial and ethical costs of going to war to acquire Indian land and argued the financial and ethical benefits of making treaties. Military operations were risky and expensive, and the nation could not afford them at present. What was more, using force would be unjust. As prior occupants, the Indians possessed rights to the soil that could only be taken from them “by their free consent, or by the right of Conquest in case of a just War.” To dispossess them on any other principle would constitute a violation of natural laws and national justice. “The principle of the Indian right to lands they possess being thus conceded,” Knox argued, “the dignity and interest of the nation will be advanced by making it the basis of the future administration of justice towards the Indian tribes.” The United States should follow the British model of dealing with the tribes. Indians should be considered as foreign nations, not as subjects of the states; land transactions should be carried out by treaties; and treaties should be conducted, sanctioned, and honored by the federal government. Treaties would enable the United States to expand in an orderly and peaceful manner because Indians who saw their game diminish as American settlement increased would sell their hunting territories cheaply. Expansion was inevitable, but the destruction of Indian people was not, if they could be civilized and incorporated into American society. “How different would be the sensation of the philosophic mind to reflect,” Knox asked rhetorically, if “instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population we had persevered through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivation and the arts to the Aboriginals of the Country, by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended.”47

  Extending the blessings of civilization to Indians would cushion their inevitable dispossession and ensure that the nation acquired their lands by commendable means. Since civilization meant farming, not hunting, Indians, of course, would need much less land. The idea that Indians would give up their lands in exchange for civilization had been suggested during the Confederation period, but under Washington it became both a fundamental component and a central justification of United States Indian policy.48

  To symbolize these good intentions, Knox recommended following the practice, used by Britain, Spain, and France for decades, of presenting Indian chiefs with silver medals. These peace medals, as they came to be known, served as marks of distinction, badges of allegiance, and symbols of the wearer’s willingness to follow the path of progress offered by the government. The first American peace medal was struck in 1789; others, with slight changes in design, were adopted during Washington’s presidency (see figure 3). Washington’s medals typically were large, oval, silver discs bearing an engraving. On the obverse, the president, wearing a uniform and with a sword by his side, stands at the right gesturing toward an Indian on the left who smokes a peace pipe. The Indian’s tomahawk lies at his feet. In the background a man plows a field behind a team of oxen, and a house sits in the distance. The message was that Indians could attain peace and progress by giving up their weapons and their way of life. The arms of the United States are displayed on the reverse. Later medals often bore a president’s head in profile on the obverse and hands clasped in friendship on the reverse. Almost every American president from Washington in 1789 to Benjamin Harrison in 1889 (the exceptions being John Adams and the short-lived William Henry Harrison) had peace medals made and presented to Indian leaders.49

  Figure 3 Drawing of the engraved silver medal like the one Washington presented to Red Jacket, and which Red Jacket wears in his portrait (see plate 12). The medal depicted a peaceful and prosperous future for Indian people who accepted the first president’s offer of friendship and his “civilization” program.

  Washington flagged the new Indian policy in a message to Congress on August 7, 1789. The government should, of course, protect its citizens from attack, but “a due regard should be extended to those Indian tribes whose happiness in the course of events so materially depends on the national justice and humanity of the United States.”50 Washington’s government-controlled Indian policy—acquire land by purchase, establish and maintain clear boundaries, regulate commerce, introduce agriculture and other aspects of American civilization, and resort to just war only if and when the Indians refused such reasonable offers—would secure the nation’s expansionist goals and at the same time reflect honor on the United States in the eyes of the world.

  In another message to the Senate the next month, Washington addressed the status of Indian treaties. Like all other treaties and compacts made by the United States, they “should be made with caution and executed with fidelity.” Nations generally did not consider any treaty negotiated by ministers or commissioners to be final and conclusive �
��until ratified by the sovereign or government from whom they derive their powers,” he advised the Senate. The United States had adopted this practice in making treaties with European nations, “and I am inclined to think it would be adviseable to observe it in the conduct of our treaties with the Indians.”51 Consistent with the international treaty provisions outlined in the Constitution, treaties with Indian nations came to be ratified by a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate.

  In the first annual presidential address to Congress—what is now the State of the Union Address—delivered in person in the Senate Chamber in Federal Hall on January 8, 1790, at the beginning of the second session, Washington assessed the nation’s prospects looking forward and the challenges facing the new government. National defense was first on the list. Congress must take steps to establish the necessary armed forces, for “to be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” He had hoped that adopting “pacific measures” toward hostile tribes would have relieved the inhabitants on the southern and western frontiers from their attacks, but since that was not the case the government must be prepared to afford protection to those areas and, if necessary, punish aggressors. Wrapping up this first State of the Union Address, the president looked forward to working with Congress in “ensuring to our fellow Citizens the blessings, which they have a right to expect, from a free, efficient and equal Government.”52 High on the list of expectations for many citizens was access to Indian land. “Pacific measures” on the part of the United States depended on Indians giving up their land.

  in addition to dealing with Indian nations and with foreign powers exerting their influence in Indian country, Washington had to deal with states that resented and resisted the federal government’s application of its new authority in dealing with “their” Indians, and settlers who rejected the federal government’s efforts to curb their land grabbing. Unbridled expansion could (as Knox fretted) depopulate eastern states, depreciate eastern land values, and sever ties between East and West in the embryonic union; western expansion must be orderly and ordered. Peace between the Indians and the frontiersmen was necessary before western lands could be surveyed, sold, and settled. Bringing order to the West, protecting its citizens against the Indians (and the British), securing access to the Mississippi, and integrating the region into the new nation were major tests of the new government and the new president.

  Knox had recommended treating tribes like foreign nations, not as subjects of individual states, and he insisted that under the Constitution the United States had “the sole regulation of Indian affairs, in all matters whatsoever.” Washington informed Governor Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania that the United States possessed “the only authority” to regulate intercourse with the Indians and redress their grievances. The administration endeavored to prohibit state governments, in Edmund Randolph’s words, “from intermedddling with the Indian tribes, to the utmost limit of the constitution,” but it was an uphill battle.53

  Washington knew that encroachments on Indian lands were the root cause of most conflicts. He placed much of the blame on squatters. Eastern elites looked askance at frontier settlers who seemed almost as savage as the Indians, and many members of government attributed to them the violence and disorder on the frontier. They shared much in common with older Indian chiefs who struggled to restrain their own warriors.54 Whereas the federal government treated the Indians as neighbors whose rights should be respected, the French diplomat Louis Guillaume Otto explained to his minister for foreign affairs, “It is generally agreed here that the American emigrants established on the frontiers are the scum of mankind and infinitely more ferocious, more perfidious and more intractable than the savages themselves.”55 Ironically, given his own past and even present interests, Washington also blamed land speculators, who, to justify their purchases of Indian land, often denied the government’s right of preemption and claimed that Indians possessed absolute title, and the right to sell their land to whomever they wished. “It will be fortunate for the American public if private Speculations in the lands, still claimed by the Aborigines, do not aggrevate those differences, which policy, humanity, and justice concur to deprecate,” he wrote Jefferson.56

  The tension between a central government seeking to impose order and groups of frontier citizens generating disorder became an enduring feature of American expansion.57 But Washington also knew that destabilizing Indian societies advanced the national project, pushing Indian peoples to a point where they gave up their land. Frontiersmen did much of the dirty work of expansion. The federal government deplored their actions as contrary to its declared policies but did little to stop them. Even imposing what little control it could on the frontier risked losing westerners’ loyalties and votes.

  Western expansion could unify the nation, but establishing the institutions necessary to carry it out risked widening existing divisions. The government had to maintain peace and protect prospective settlers from Indian raids if it hoped to generate revenue by selling western lands. That required strong government and a strong military. “The angry passions of the frontier Indians and whites are too easily inflamed by reciprocal injuries, and are too violent to be controuled by the feeble authority of the civil power,” Knox warned Washington. There could be no justice or observance of treaties where every man avenged his own supposed wrongs. Only a federal army, “the sword of the Republic,” could administer justice and preserve peace. Raising revenue therefore depended on raising and funding an army, and the new nation—a nation born in war—debated what kind of military force a republican government should be able to call upon.58

  Many Americans deemed a “well-regulated militia,” as the Second Amendment to the Constitution termed it, the best defense against both aggression from without and tyranny within, but Washington knew a national government required a national military. Responding to a proposal in the Constitutional Convention to limit a standing army to three thousand men, he reputedly countered with a proposal that no foreign enemy should invade the United States with more than three thousand troops.59 Knox felt that “a small corps of well-disciplined and well-informed artillerists and engineers, and a legion for the protection of the frontiers and the magazines and arsenals” were all the military forces the United States required for the moment, and he advised Congress to reject a standing army in favor of a “well-constituted militia.” However, Knox knew all too well that the nation’s armed forces were inadequate if the general Indian war he feared became a reality. In the end, the federal government exercised its authority under the Constitution to raise a national army, and the states retained their own militias. In April 1790 Congress authorized a further increase in the regular army to 1,273 officers and men for a term of three years and added four more companies of infantry. Privates’ pay was three dollars per month, minus one dollar for clothing and medical expenses.60

  The new nation had to finance its military and other institutions. It fell to Alexander Hamilton, the head of the new Treasury Department, to put the nation’s finances in order and map out its future prosperity. He tackled the national debt first. The foreign debt—the amount owed to France, Spain, and Dutch bankers—amounted to $12 million; the domestic debt—the amount owed by the federal and state governments to their own citizens—was about $42 million and $25 million, respectively. Five months after taking office, Hamilton in January 1790 presented Congress with a forty-thousand-word Report on Public Credit, laying out his proposals for paying off the debt. They included the controversial plan for the federal government to fund at their full face value the promissory notes it had issued to soldiers during the Revolution and assume the war debts of the individual states. Consolidating the states’ debts into a national debt would relieve states of the need to raise taxes, give investors a stake in the new government, and bind states and citizens to the national government. In May 1790, as part of his plans for centralizing public finances, Hamilton introduced to Congress a proposed tax on whiskey, th
e first federal tax on an American product (it was passed the following March). In December 1790 he issued a second report, outlining his plans for a national bank, modeled in part on the Bank of England that had proved an effective engine of national growth. For Hamilton and Washington, centralized financial institutions and economic policy were essential to the nation’s stability and future.61 Jefferson feared that such measures threatened the gains of the Revolution and the principles on which the Republic was founded.

  Hamilton’s plans threatened to divide rather than cement the new union. Many veterans had sold their promissory notes at a fraction of their face value; wealthy investors who had snapped them up at cents on the dollar stood to make a killing if Hamilton’s proposal went into effect. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who saw it as a scheme “to make immense fortunes to the Speculators who have amassed vast quantities of Certificates for little or nothing,” was amazed “that mankind could be so easily duped.”62 Three states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina—owed nearly half the total state debts and were eager for the federal government to assume those debts. Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia, on the other hand, had paid off much of their debt and were not anxious to pay federal taxes to help retire the debts of those states that had not. Congress became deadlocked on the issue until, at a dinner arranged by Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison agreed to a compromise: southern states would accept the national assumption of state debts in return for moving the capital to the Potomac after it had been at Philadelphia for ten years. (The capital moved to Philadelphia in August 1790.)63 Hamilton’s plan to charter a national bank further divided the regions: southern agriculturalists saw no need for it and feared it was an instrument for northern merchants and speculators. After its difficult passage through Congress early the next year, Washington signed the bank bill into law.64 Congress postponed tackling an even more divisive issue between North and South by resolving that it had no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves.65 In doing so, it left southern Indian country open to invasion by cotton planters and their slaves.