The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  In January 1792 Washington appointed as agent in Creek country James Seagrove, a Revolutionary War veteran, member of the Georgia legislature, and businessman with a mercantile store at Coleraine on the St. Marys River. “To develop Mr. McGillivray, will be a work of considerable delicacy,” Knox told Seagrove with some understatement. Despite Bowles’s presence, McGillivray was still a major player in Creek country, and until “he shall throw off the mask entirely,” the United States should treat him as a friend while at the same time keeping “an eagle’s eye” on him.154

  Seagrove sent Washington alarming accounts of developments, even as he tried to undermine McGillivray. McGillivray had been playing a double game, and so long as he had a say in the Indians’ councils, the United States had no chance of success: “He is an Enemy in his heart to our Country & measures & is now so totally under the influence & direction of Spain & Panton, that he cannot or dare not, serve the United States if he was so inclined.”155 Washington, convinced that Spain was behind his Indian troubles in the South as Britain was in the North, wanted Seagrove to counteract Spain’s “nefarious schemes.” If there was unequivocal evidence of McGillivray’s duplicity and treachery, Seagrove was to do everything he could to destroy his standing in the Creek Nation and, if he could, take his place.156 Seagrove was certain the Spaniards had left no stone unturned to set the Indians against the United States. They had McGillivray on their side, and the agent feared they intended to employ Bowles as well.157

  Washington may have been somewhat relieved, therefore, to hear “that our friend McGillivray was dead—and that Bowles who was sent to Spain had been hanged.”158 Chronically ill, given to alcoholism, and physically weak, McGillivray fell ill with a fever and died in February 1793 at William Panton’s home. The Gentleman’s Magazine in London, which seven years earlier had not known who McGillivray was, noted the passing (prematurely in one instance) of “the celebrated chief of the Creek nation and an ally of the United States.”159 Bowles had not been hanged. He escaped from the Philippines, made his way via England back to Florida, and resumed his career of intrigue among the tribes, playing on their problems with Spain and the United States and trying to achieve the position he claimed for himself as the head of an Indian state under British protection. Captured again and incarcerated in a Spanish dungeon in Havana, he died in 1805.

  In September 1793 Knox urged Seagrove to bring “about a dozen of the real chiefs” of the Upper and Lower Creeks to Philadelphia in the winter and brighten the chain of friendship by meeting the president and Congress. Seagrove should avoid the same chiefs who had come in 1790 and bring instead eminent chiefs like the White Lieutenant and Mad Dog. If they agreed, it would help “to avert the impending storm.”160

  The Creek crisis was the first challenge or opportunity for a national Indian policy as envisioned by Washington and Knox, in which the federal government would attempt to achieve its goals by treaty and resort to arms as a last resort. In arranging and negotiating the Treaty of New York, Washington made his first foray into treaty-making under the Constitution, applied the new treaty-making provisions, established the procedures for sharing his responsibility with the Senate, and succeeded in bringing the leaders of a powerful Indian nation to his seat of government instead of going to theirs. As such, the treaty represented a significant beginning in presidential treaty-making and established the precedent of bringing Indian delegations to the capital.161 Five years after the Treaty of New York, Washington used the treaty-making power to enforce a policy he could not get through the House. After Georgia opened to settlement 5 million acres of Creek land protected by the Treaty of New York, the president asked Congress for a bill restraining the state. The Senate passed it, but the House voted it down. Fearing that war with the Creeks might spread to involve Britain and Spain, Washington, after Congress had adjourned, appointed a federal commission that overrode Georgia and arbitrated the dispute with the Creeks. Viewing it as a matter of foreign policy, Washington then secured the consent of the Senate after Congress reconvened.162

  The new president’s efforts to deal fairly with southern Indian nations and protect their lands stemmed from concerns of power and policy more than justice and humanity and did not extend far beyond Creek country. The Creeks in 1790 were a force to be reckoned with. The Catawbas by this time were not. In the spring of 1791, when Washington was touring the southern states, a delegation of Catawba chiefs came to see him. They were concerned, he noted in his diary, “that some attempts were making or would be made to deprive them of part of the 40,000 Acres” which had been guaranteed to them by treaty but was being impinged upon by a road on the boundary line between the two Carolinas. During the French and Indian War, the Catawbas had sent scouts and warriors to help Washington defend the Virginia frontier, although he did not like them very much or value their services highly. Now they, or their sons, came to him for help, or at least reassurance. Washington said nothing more about it in his diary. Five years later, a dozen Catawbas turned up at Mount Vernon. Washington complained to Secretary of War James McHenry: “I have already, been incommoded, at this place, by a visit of several days, from a party of a dozen Cuttawbas; & should wish while I am in this retreat, to avoid a repetition of such guests.” As historian James Merrell notes, the incident reflects how the Catawbas’ world had changed. Previously courted as allies, they were now dismissed as a nuisance. Washington, like most Americans, deemed them “hardly worth a second thought, or even a first.”163

  Chapter 16

  The Greatest Indian Victory

  In the south, washington tried to curtail the assault on Indian lands and prevent war; in the Northwest Territory, he moved quickly to acquire the Indian lands he deemed essential to the nation’s future, a move that virtually guaranteed war. He ordered Governor St. Clair to avoid war with the Indians “by all means consistently with the security of the frontier inhabitants, the security of the troops, and the national dignity,” but “to punish them with severity” if they persisted in their hostility.1 Washington’s instructions were consistent with the national Indian policy he and Knox developed: attempt to acquire Indian lands by treaty, but if the Indians broke the treaty or refused to make a treaty on reasonable terms, the United States “would be exonerated, from all imputations of injustice” and would use force to impose peace on the Indians “or to extirpate them.”2 In reality, the United States lacked the military forces or the finances to sustain a war of extermination. Washington saw his campaigns against the Indians in the Ohio country as “punitive strokes” that would force them to accept American domination. He badly miscalculated.

  Washington and Knox also underestimated the extent of Indian resistance north of the Ohio and misattributed its causes. They blamed it on recalcitrant Shawnees, renegade Cherokees, and some of the Wabash tribes; Washington called them “some bad Indians, and the outcast of several tribes who reside at the Miamiee Village.” Instead of listening to “humane invitations and overtures” from the United States, “an incorrigible banditti” of no more than two hundred warriors persisted in raiding the frontier, taking lives and captives.3

  Washington assumed British agents were at work among the tribes, which they were, but the seeds of Indian discontent lay in American land grabbing rather than foreign intrigue. Indians did not need the British to convince them that the United States was intent on their destruction.4 The policy of bringing Indian communal lands into the national domain and transforming them into private property generated recurrent and steadfast resistance among the tribes. War was preferable to a peace that depended on Indians giving up their homelands and the way of life those lands sustained.

  As was to be expected, the British took a rather different view than did the president of the United States. “The Indians in America seem to be forming a Grand League and Covenant, which promise to disturb the new Constitution of that country,” the Times of London informed its readers, “and the arguments used by the Indians in support of their taking
up arms, is founded on the true national Rights of Man.” The Americans had stolen their country from them by force of arms and without provocation, they said. John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, dismissed American rhetoric about a fair and humane Indian policy. The US government threw off “all appearance of moderation and justice in respect to the Indian Nations” as soon as the Peace of Paris was signed, he said; “the division of the Country into Provinces was among their first public Acts, the extirpation of the Indians was their Philosophical language: and the sale of their lands was held forth as the avowed foundation of their National Wealth.” It was not surprising that the Indians united to defend themselves and the result was all-out war. Instead of treating Indians with respect as independent neighboring nations, added a British traveler, frontier people stole their land and “shot them with as much concern as they would either a wolf or a bear.” Americans had no one but themselves to blame for their Indian wars.5

  The British were biased, of course, but there were those in the United States who shared their views. Benjamin Hawkins reminded Washington that during the Revolution, when the United States needed them, “we acknowledged the Indians as brothers” and “as possessors of the soil on which they lived.” But after the war, anxious to pay off veterans with land, “we seem to have forgotten altogether the rights of the Indians,” treated them as “tenants at will,” and seized their lands. This, said Hawkins, was the source of their hostility.6 Even the land speculator Rufus Putnam acknowledged that, although the British no doubt encouraged them, the real cause of the conflict was the Indians’ fear that the Americans intended to steal their lands.7

  The “Miamiee Village” Washington referred to was actually a cluster of villages, often called the seven “Miami towns” but inhabited by multiple tribes around the principal town of Kekionga on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio.8 Lieutenant Ebenezer Denny mapped and described a complex of Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware villages on both branches of the river, with hundreds of wigwams and log cabins surrounded by vast fields of corn.9 Refugees from the Ohio country and beyond had gathered there, distant from the threat of American assault and near the source of British supplies and support at Detroit. By 1790 these towns were the center of Indian resistance to American expansion and to Washington’s vision for America. “All those Scoundrels now Sir profess to hold the Americans in the most Supreme Degree of Contempt,” Winthrop Sargent, who was secretary of the Northwest Territory, wrote territorial governor Arthur St. Clair that summer. “They will they say send their Women to fight us & with Sticks instead of Guns.”10 As he had done with the Onondaga and Seneca towns in the Revolution, Washington targeted Kekionga for destruction to stamp out resistance at the source.

  The Indian confederacy he confronted was a loose and fragile alliance, built and maintained by collaborative coalition leadership, collective vision, and intertribal consensus. Rather than waging a single “Indian war,” the various tribes were fighting a coordinated set of national wars in defense of their homelands.11 Three broad tribal groupings comprised the bulk of the confederacy: the Iroquois; the Miamis, Shawnees, and Kickapoos; and the Three Fires of the Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis. After the Revolution the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant had been a forceful voice in organizing an Indian confederacy and articulating the need for a united Indian stand on land sales, but now he was prepared to negotiate a compromise and accept the Muskingum River as the boundary between Indian and American land rather than insist on the Ohio.12 The Miami war chief Little Turtle (Mishikinaakwa) (see figure 5) and the Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket (Waweyapiersenwaw) took a more militant stand. Some Wyandots and Delawares favored compromise, but the Shawnees, Miamis, and Kickapoos rejected such talk and stood firm on holding the Ohio as the boundary; Brant called them “unreasonable.”13 Warriors from the Three Fires also joined the fight, although they sometimes wavered in their commitment to fighting for a boundary at the Ohio River, a long way from their own homelands. The Ojibwas, the largest and most populous of the three tribes, were geographically scattered around the Great Lakes, occupying more than fifty villages in what is today Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and southern Ontario. Most warriors who joined the fight came from the Michigan peninsula.14

  Figure 5 The Miami war chief Mishikinaakwa or Little Turtle was a key figure in the Northwestern Confederacy that resisted American expansion beyond the Ohio. In later life, he met Washington and adopted his policies as the best path for his people’s future.

  Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection, SC 2086.

  Following Washington’s instructions, St. Clair continued to offer the Indians peace as he simultaneously prepared for war. But he had little hope or expectation that peace could be achieved.15 He agreed with Knox that it was time to launch an invasion and punish the Indians “for their hostile depredations, for their conniving at the depredations of others, and for their refusing to treat with the United States when invited thereto.” Delivering “a sudden stroke” against the Indians’ towns and crops would demonstrate the power of the United States. It would also, Knox reminded Washington, “be highly satisfactory” to the people on the frontiers.16 With Kentuckians seething at the government’s apparent neglect of their safety and their economic interests, and Hamilton’s proposed tax on whiskey before Congress, Washington was under mounting pressure to strike the Indians or risk losing the West.17

  Knox dispatched Brigadier General Josiah Harmar of Pennsylvania, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Revolutionary War, with 320 regulars and 1,133 militia from Pennsylvania and Kentucky to destroy the villages at Kekionga. Harmar left Fort Washington, present-day Cincinnati, at the end of September, confident of victory, but his confidence was misplaced, and Washington may not have shared it. Before the campaign got under way, he had Knox write confidentially to Harmar that he had heard reports the general was “too apt to indulge yourself to excess in a convivial glass” and that there must be no hint of such behavior.18 Moreover, many of the militia were old men and young boys hardly able to bear arms, with an “indifferent” assortment of muskets. Ebenezer Denny said they “were not of that kind which is calculated for Indian Expeditions; they were drafts & substitutes, many of them had never fired a rifle in their lives.”19 In the face of Indian opposition, land sales had fallen short of financing the kind of military establishment needed to win an Indian war.20

  This ragtag army, led by a general with an undistinguished war record, faced Indian warriors determined to defend their homes and families and led by a formidable trio of war chiefs.21 Little Turtle had defeated a French expedition against Detroit in 1780. Now in his forties, he was a seasoned warrior with a strong following.22 Blue Jacket had fought during the Revolution and built a reputation as the premier war chief of the Shawnees. Oliver Spencer, a white captive, said he was “one of the most brave and most accomplished of the Indian chiefs.” Although Blue Jacket was nearing fifty years of age, Spencer described him as a muscular six-footer with an open and intelligent countenance, “the most noble in appearance of any Indian I ever saw.” On the day Spencer saw him, Blue Jacket was wearing a scarlet frock coat laced with gold and with gold epaulets on the shoulders, a colored sash around his waist, red leggings, and moccasins ornamented with quill- or beadwork. He had silver bands on his arms, and a large silver gorget and medal of King George III hung from his neck.23 The Delaware war chief Buckongahelas or Pachgantschihilas, whom Moravian missionaries knew as a mild-mannered, friendly, humane, “gallant and generous” man, had few illusions about the Americans. Prior to the massacre at Gnadenhütten, he had warned the inhabitants not to trust “the long knives” who “will in their usual way, speak fine words to you, and at the same time murder you!” “I admit that there are good white men, but they bear no proportion to the bad,” the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder heard him say. “They enslave those who are not of their colour, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as they
cannot do it, they kill us. There is no faith to be placed in their words.” Buckongahelas was committed to the confederacy. Delawares said he was “such a man among them as General Washington was among the white people.”24

  To avoid an unintended international incident, Knox ordered St. Clair to inform the British commander at Detroit that the campaign was directed only against hostile Indians, not the British posts. Evidently, Alexander Hamilton had already conveyed much the same information to the unofficial British envoy, George Beckwith. Major Patrick Murray, the post commander, replied that Britain was unconcerned, and promptly sent messages to warn British traders in the Miami villages. The British Indian Department observed and encouraged the Indians’ preparations.25

  While Harmar invaded in the East, Major John Francis Hamtramck invaded in the West. Leaving Vincennes on the lower Wabash with three hundred regulars and three hundred Kentucky militia, he burned an abandoned Piankashaw village at the mouth of the Vermilion and then headed for home. Harmar also burned abandoned villages. The Indians were accustomed to burying grain to conceal it from enemies, and as Harmar’s forces approached they evacuated their towns, hid as much corn as they could, and moved their women and children out of harm’s way.26 Kekionga was empty when Harmar reached it on October 17. His men burned everything they could. The next day at Chillicothe, a neighboring Shawnee town, they destroyed about eighty cabins and wigwams and “a vast quantity” of corn and vegetables. On the nineteenth, Colonel John Hardin and three hundred men went in pursuit of Indians and fell into an ambush. The militia fled, and the regulars had to cover the retreat back to the main body. On October 21, after Harmar’s column had burned Kekionga and five other villages and destroyed twenty thousand bushels of corn, the army began its march back to Fort Washington.27