It could not postpone dealing with issues that divided East and West. The national government’s inability to defeat the Indians and secure free navigation of the Mississippi disgruntled western settlers; its tax on whiskey infuriated them. Distilling corn and grain into whiskey for easier transportation, sale, and bartering was an important component of western farmers’ economy. The whiskey excise aggravated existing divisions that pitched East against West, city against country, mercantile against agricultural interests. Eventually, faced with a tax rebellion on the frontier, the first president would have to quell resistance among his own citizens as well as among the Indians.
The Cherokees felt the effects of the contradictions and limitations in federal Indian policy as they struggled to recover after the Revolution. Hundreds of settlers from North Carolina breached and ignored the boundaries established at the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785. General Joseph Martin warned Knox there was such “a thirst” for Cherokee lands that some people would do everything they could to prevent a treaty.66 In May 1789 twenty-four Cherokee chiefs and warriors in council at Chota drew up a talk to send to “our elder brother General Washington, and the Great Council of the United States.” They had heard that Congress now had the power to carry out its commitments, and they asked it to remember the Treaty of Hopewell, where they had given up all the land they could spare, and stop the invasion of what lands they had left. “We are neither Birds nor Fish,” they said; “we can neither fly in the air nor live under the water, therefore we hope pity will be extended towards us: We are made by the same hand and in the same shape with your selves.” They wanted to live in peace and friendship with the United States and asked Washington to send them an agent. “Let us have a man that dont speak with two tongues, nor one that will encourage mischief or blood to be split. Let there be a good man appointed, and war will never happen between us. Such a one we will listen to; but such as have been sent among us, we shall not hear, as they have already caused our nation to be ruined and come almost to nothing.”67
The talk was carried north by a delegation that included their current agent, Bennett Ballew, who was the son of a white father and a Cherokee mother, and an elderly chief named Keehteetah or Keenettehet, also known as Rising Fawn. Rising Fawn found the journey too much for him; after traveling more than a hundred miles he turned back. He sent Washington a letter, signed with his mark. “Greate & Beloved Brother,” he wrote, “I have thought the Day Long to See you, Since I heare So much good of you, I think you are the man that can Settle our Land in Peace.” He hoped “the greate Spirit above will Put it into your hearte to Do us all the good you can.”68
The delegation arrived in New York in mid-August, and Ballew presented the Cherokees’ grievances to “the beloved President.” They had hoped to live quietly on their lands within the boundary lines established at Hopewell, but as many as three thousand families had crossed the treaty lines. A few young warriors had retaliated against repeated injuries and killed one of those families, which brought dreadful vengeance down on the Cherokee people. Their cornfields were laid waste, “some of their wives & children were burnt alive in their town houses,” and some of their chiefs had been killed in cold blood under a flag of truce. Tennessee militia in 1788 had murdered Corn Tassel and his son, “who were characterised by their kind offices to the white people, & veneration for the American flag, insomuch that for many years, it was constantly flying at their door.”69
What Knox called the “disgraceful violation” of the Treaty of Hopewell demanded Washington’s attention. It threatened to undermine the government’s efforts to chart a just Indian policy and assert its authority over its own citizens. If the United States permitted such a blatant demonstration of contempt for its authority, it would be futile to try to extend the arm of government to the frontiers, Knox advised him. “The Indian tribes can have no faith in such imbecile promises, and the lawless whites will ridicule a Government which shall on paper only, make Indian treaties and regulate Indian boundaries.”70 Washington shared Knox’s fear that the powerful tribes of the South, with as many as fourteen thousand warriors, might form a confederation against the United States. Far better to have them form a barrier against the colonies of Spain. “The fate of the southern States,” he had informed the Senate in August 1789, “may principally depend on the present measures of the Union towards the southern Indians.” He blamed the treaty violations entirely on disorderly white people inhabiting the frontiers of North Carolina, but since North Carolina was not yet a member of the Union (it entered in November), there was little the federal government could do for the moment.71 Lacking the power to remove the trespassers, it could only negotiate a new boundary. Washington instructed the commissioners sent to do so to explain to the Cherokees the difficulties arising from North Carolina’s claims and to assure them the United States had not forgotten the Hopewell Treaty. As soon as those difficulties were removed, the United States would do justice to the Cherokees.72
Washington’s assurances of future justice and protection of Indian lands likely rang hollow. In May 1790, after North Carolina ceded its Tennessee Valley lands to the federal government, Congress established the Territory South of the Ohio River (the Southwest Territory). The United States became a political presence in the region, and the authority of the federal government came into direct contact with the Cherokees and Chickasaws. Many people living south of the Ohio River welcomed the assertion of federal authority in the area, but the honeymoon period was short-lived. Frontier settlers and land speculators expected the federal government to assist their economic progress and provide protection against Indian attacks. Washington and his administration needed to curtail speculation that cost the government millions of dollars in revenue, curb encroachments on tribal lands that provoked the Indian attacks, and avoid getting involved in an Indian war.73
Washington set foxes to guard the chicken coop. In August he appointed North Carolina commissioner William Blount as governor of the new territory; he was also appointed superintendent of Indian affairs.74 The next month, Blount visited the president at Mount Vernon (and described him in a letter to his brother as “great and amiable,” but as awesome “as a God”!)75 Two months later Blount fretted he had not yet received any instructions on Indian affairs and feared lest the letters had fallen into the hands “of some unfriendly Land Speculator.”76 He knew how such men operated. Blount was himself a notorious land speculator who owned more than a million acres of Tennessee land. Indians called him “the dirt king.” True to form, in his new office he was more interested in land than in peace.77 He appointed fellow land speculators to territorial offices and made John Sevier brigadier general of the militia. Sevier, former governor of Franklin and future governor of Tennessee, was a well-known Indian fighter; Washington later said he “never was celebrated for any thing … except the murder of Indians.”78 Washington repeated his assurances that the federal government would respect the Treaty of Hopewell in a message to the Chickasaws in December 1790, and went so far as to declare: “The United States do not want any of your lands, if any bad people tell you otherwise they deceive you, and are your enemies and the enemies of the United States.”79 The Chickasaws must have found it difficult to put much faith in the declaration.
in trying to apply a comprehensive policy for the whole frontier and attempting to negotiate and enforce fair treaties, Washington found himself in the same position as the Crown before the Revolution.80 The Trade and Intercourse Act, first passed by Congress in July 1790 and subsequently strengthened, embodied Washington and Knox’s principles. It also bore striking similarities to the Proclamation of 1763 that Washington had railed against, evaded, and undermined. The act stipulated that traders in Indian country must be licensed by Congress and no sales of lands by Indians “shall be valid to any person or persons, or to any state, whether having the right of pre-emption to such lands or not, unless the same shall be made and duly executed at some public treaty, held under the authorit
y of the United States.” Like the proclamation, the act sought to minimize frontier conflict by centralizing land transactions and declared invalid any land deals not approved by Congress.81 It provided the kind of federal regulation of Indian affairs that Washington wanted.
In October 1791 Washington asked Attorney General Edmund Randolph to examine the laws of the federal government relating to Indian affairs, in particular those that provided protections for the Indians’ lands, restrained states or individuals from buying them, and prohibited unauthorized trade. Randolph was also to suggest auxiliary laws to deal with any defects in the existing laws, so that the executive could enforce them. Unless the government took such measures and imposed adequate penalties to “check the spirit of speculation in lands,” the nation would be constantly embroiled in conflict and “appear faithless in the eyes not only of the Indians but of the neighboring powers also.” Agents of the Tennessee Yazoo Company were at that moment advertising land for settlement in the Muscle Shoals region in the great bend of the Tennessee River, despite disapproval of the Creeks and Cherokees, and probably the Choctaws and Chickasaws as well.82 Blount and Sevier were both part of the Tennessee Yazoo Company.83
In his annual message to Congress, delivered on October 25, 1791, Washington laid out six basic principles that should govern United States Indian policy:
1. An “impartial dispensation of justice” toward Indians.
2. A “defined and regulated” method of purchasing Indian lands, since this was “the main source of discontent and war.”
3. A regulated and fair trade.
4. “Rational experiments … for imparting to them the blessings of civilization.”
5. “That the Executive of the United States should be enabled to employ the means to which the Indians have long been accustomed for uniting their immediate interests with the preservation of peace”; in other words, the president should have authority to give presents to Indians.
6. Adequate penalties should be imposed on those who infringed Indian rights, broke treaties, and thereby endangered the peace of the nation.
These principles reflected Washington’s belief that following “the mild principles of religion and philanthropy” in dealing with “an unenlightened race of men, whose happiness materially depends on the conduct of the United States,” was both the honorable thing to do and sound policy. The message was referred to a special committee in the House of Representatives, which reported a bill, but the legislation died without further action.84
In his next annual message Washington called Congress’s attention to the fact that the Trade and Intercourse Act was about to expire. He recommended appointing agents to live among the Indians and urged Congress to devise a plan “for promoting civilization among the friendly tribes, and for carrying on trade with them, upon a scale equal to their wants.”85 Congress responded by passing a revised and more robust Trade and Intercourse Act in 1793 that incorporated much of Washington’s six-point program. It authorized the president to appoint Indian agents and included a new clause that provided for an annual appropriation of $20,000 to be used at the president’s discretion for promoting agriculture and the “civilized arts” among the tribes.86
Indian people differed over whether and at what rate they wanted to accept the new programs. The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder had reported in 1788 that Cornplanter, Half Town, and other Seneca chiefs said they wanted teachers, but an old Seneca got up and said “he did not need a teacher, because he was already too old to learn anything new. Such people had better keep away.” An Oneida said: “If you are looking for a preacher, you had better choose a better one than we have because ours preaches what he does not practice.”87
From colonial times, those who sought to improve Indian lives had put their faith in a Christian education. Unfortunately, young Indians placed in the white man’s educational institutions commonly experienced disorientation, hardship, and sometimes tragedy.88 The three Delaware boys who had enrolled in the College of New Jersey in 1779 were no exceptions. Placed under the care of George Morgan, who secured quarters for them, and supported by congressional funding, they each ran into trouble. The oldest, Thomas Killbuck, was homesick and became addicted, it was said, to “Liquor & to Lying.” His half brother, John Killbuck, two years his junior, got one of Morgan’s maids pregnant, and she gave birth to his child. Thomas and John both asked to return to their people. A congressional committee in 1785 reported they had not been attentive to their studies for some time, “but either have been wholly Idle, or Employed in some branches of Mechanic Arts, which can avail them little on their return among their Countrymen.” Congress gave permission for them to go home, and John’s wife and child went with him to Ohio. George Morgan White Eyes, the son of the murdered chief, who was seven or eight years old when he started school, did better. He won a prize at his grammar school commencement and described his time at the college as his “happiest moments.” He lived for a time at Morgan’s home, but when Morgan had to travel west on business for two or three months, he requested the Board of Treasury to assume responsibility for White Eyes, which it could not do without congressional approval. He sent White Eyes to live in New York, where he evidently neglected his studies. The Board of Treasury dragged its feet and objected to certain expenses. In June 1789, “reduced at last to the disagreeable Necessity of applying for relief,” White Eyes wrote directly to Washington. He was dependent on Morgan’s charity for food and clothing and complained of “cruel Usage.” Better that Congress had left him in the wilds of his Native country, he said, than “to experience the heart breaking Sensations I now feel.” He hoped the president might find him some kind of employment to support him. A month later, he asked Washington for assistance in returning home to see his mother and friends “as I have no other person to apply to.” In August, White Eyes wrote again: “I am very sorry that the Education you have given & Views that you must have had when you took me into your Possession, & the Friendship which my Father had for the United States (which I suppose is the chief Cause) are not sufficient Inducements, to your further providing for me.” Washington’s private secretary, Tobias Lear, recorded charges for clothes furnished “for Geo. M. White Eyes by direction of the President of the U. S.” in September, and reimbursement of those funds by the secretary of war in December. Congress was still providing funds for White Eyes in June 1790, but he subsequently sold what belongings he had, moved to Ohio, and rejoined the Delawares. In the winter of 1795 White Eyes was employed by General Anthony Wayne, the commander of the American army, as an emissary to the western tribes, and a British Indian agent reported him “working mischief as fast as he can.” According to one account he was killed in a drunken brawl in 1798; another account includes a George White Eyes among a group of Delawares killed by an Osage war party in 1826.89
Rev. Samuel Kirkland sent Washington his plans for educating Indians, which combined both Christian and agrarian goals.90 Washington gave appropriate vocal support to both, but he put his faith in agriculture rather than in missionaries and colleges.91 He surely had George White Eyes in mind when he wrote that the kind of education given “to those young Indians who have been sent to our Colleges” was not “productive of any good to their nations” and was even, “perhaps, productive of evil.” Instead, Washington believed, “humanity and good policy must make it the wish of every good citizen of the Unites States, that husbandry, and consequently civilization should be introduced among the Indians.”92
In this, as in other elements of his Indian policy, Washington appears to have been influenced by Timothy Pickering; at least the two men agreed on the fundamentals. Pickering was a Continental Army veteran who had settled in the Susquehanna Valley in northern Pennsylvania and served in Washington’s administration as postmaster general, federal Indian commissioner, and secretary of war after Henry Knox. “In many ways,” writes the historian David McCullough, “Pickering might have served as the model New Englander for those who disl
iked the type. Tall, lean, and severe-looking, with a lantern jaw and hard blue eyes, he was a Harvard graduate … proud, opinionated, self-righteous, and utterly humorless” (see plate 10).93
Like Washington, Pickering believed the federal government needed to restrain lawless settlers and carry out settlement in an orderly manner; like Washington, he had a personal stake in acquiring land. In line with Enlightenment thinking about human and societal development, Pickering attributed the Indians’ “savage” state to environment and experience, not to racial characteristics: like other peoples, Indians could achieve a level of civilization if they learned and practiced the arts of civil life. “I cannot admit the idea,” he told Washington, “that their minds are cast in a mould so different from that of the rest of their species as to be incapable of improvement.” Vocational education was the key. Many people, perhaps most, thought that civilizing Indians was a utopian dream and pointed to those Indian youths who, after several years in school or college, returned to their own country and “again become mere savages.” But it was not the Indian students that were the problem, Pickering explained; it was the kind of education they received. Harvard in the seventeenth century, and Eleazar Wheelock’s school in the eighteenth century, taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and other classical subjects to Indian students they identified as future leaders or potential missionaries, but this was the wrong track, thought Pickering: “We spare no pains or expence to give them what is called Learning: but never teach them a single art by which they may get a subsistence.” When they returned to their tribes, they had to eat; not knowing how to farm, they became hunters, and “being hunters, they soon become savages; and all their civil learning is lost upon them.” Instead of educating Indians like the sons of men of independent fortunes, what they needed, Pickering thought, was the same education that the sons of common farmers in New England received. Teach them only reading, writing, and arithmetic, “and while they are acquiring these arts, let them practically learn the art of husbandry.” Give each Indian student a cow, a yoke of oxen, a plow, a cart, and other necessary domestic animals and farming implements, and they would “need no other gifts; they have land in abundance, inviting the hand of Cultivation.” Establishing what Pickering called “these schools of humanity” among the tribes would cost less than mounting a single campaign against them, and, as Washington himself argued, once Indians became farmers, “they will find their extensive hunting grounds unnecessary; and will then readily listen to a proposition to sell a part of them, for the purpose of procuring, for every family, domestic animals & instruments of husbandry.” Like Washington, Pickering took for granted the superiority of American civilization and assumed that, given the chance, Indians would strive to attain it. Like Washington and generations of American reformers to come, he sympathized with Indians but was impatient with their refusal to see the obvious benefits of civilization and their delay in taking up the new way of life being offered them, which was their only course of survival. Like Washington, Pickering condemned the encroachment of frontier settlers on Indian lands but never questioned that the United States would expand and take those lands.94 Of course, Washington’s plans and Pickering’s arguments ignored the fact that tribes like the Cherokees, Creeks, and Iroquois had been farming for centuries.95
The Indian World of George Washington Page 45