The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Although Washington may have been relatively humane in his treatment of his slaves, he nonetheless subjected them to an inhumane system, and they reacted accordingly. Between 1760 and his death in 1799, at least forty-seven of his and his wife’s slaves—perhaps 7 percent of the slaves he owned and managed during his lifetime, ran away.34 Writing to Lawrence Lewis in the summer of 1797, Washington confided: “I wish from my Soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual abolition of Slavery; It might prev[en]t much future mischief.”35 He knew posterity would judge him and his generation, but he never spoke out or advocated any measures against the institution. As Joseph Ellis points out, slavery and Indian policy are conspicuously absent from Washington’s Farewell Address, crafted in five months of collaborative correspondence with Alexander Hamilton, who put the president’s ideas into prose. Both slavery and Indian policy were controversial and divisive issues, and the president wanted to leave on a unifying note. To do anything about slavery at the present time, Washington feared, would jeopardize the unity of the nation. That debate was best left to a future generation.36

  There were more than three hundred slaves at Mount Vernon in 1799. Some Washington owned outright, some he controlled as part of Martha’s dowry, some he rented by contract, and some he hired for a time because of their artisanal skills.37 He had too many “working Negroes” by half for effective employment, he told Robert Lewis, “and I shall never turn Planter thereon.” He was caught in a labor system that was both inhumane and inefficient:

  To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind off traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad, because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse the families I have an aversion. What then is to be done? Something must, or I shall be ruined; for all the money (in addition to what I raise by Crops and rents) that have been received for Lands sold within the last four years, to the amount of Fifty thousand dollars, has scarcely been able to keep me a float.38

  He had come to regard slavery as immoral and impractical and wanted to free his slaves, but only after his death did he publicly express his will, in his will.39 By then it was clear that setting the nation on a path of expansion had also opened the way for slavery to move west.

  On December 12, 1799, Washington was caught outdoors in snow, sleet, and rain; he woke with a sore throat the next morning, and by the morning of the fourteenth he was desperately ill. His old friend Dr. Craik was sent for, but doctors could do little to ease his pain and suffering—he had a streptococcus infection that produced such severe swelling around the glottis that he was scarcely able to breathe. He died about ten thirty that night. He was sixty-seven.

  His death prompted an outpouring of grief and veneration for the man who had led and saved the Revolution. But, as his Farewell Address had testified, he had not yet secured the political stability and future of the nation he had helped to create, and now the repercussions of new revolutions, in France and Haiti, were shaking the Atlantic world. As François Furstenberg shows, much of the response “had more to do with the state of the nation than it did with Washington.”40

  in the course of almost fifty years, Washington grew from a young man out of his depth in the cultural practices, foreign policies, and geopolitical strategies of Indian country to the most powerful man on the continent, whose policies and precedents affected the lives and futures of thousands of Indian people. He had spent his life grasping for Indian land, although he never called it that. He had fought alongside Indian allies, and he had waged war against Indian people, Indian towns, and Indian crops. He had learned and practiced the essentials of Indian diplomacy, employed treaties as the primary means of obtaining Indian land, and insisted that the government accord those treaties the same respect as it did treaties with other nations. When he entered Indian country as a young man, he addressed Indians as brothers and negotiated the terms of his relationship with them; as president, he addressed them as children and mandated policies for them. The settler colonial society he represented grew from one held back by Indian power and anxious for Indian allies to an imperial republic that was on the move, dismantling Indian country to create American property, and dismantling Indian ways of life to make way for American civilization. His insistence that the federal government exercise exclusive responsibility for Indian affairs asserted national authority over Indian tribes and over individual states and prepared the way for the role of “big government” in western expansion and Indian affairs in the nineteenth century. The Indian wars and diplomacy that secured the West for the nation also increased the power of the federal government and its army as the instrument of western expansion. He had set in motion campaigns and policies that brought the federal government and its agents into almost every aspect of Indian life, from waging war and negotiating land sales to planting crops and reordering gender relations.41

  The expansionist forces Washington unleashed and directed were part of an explosion of English-speaking settler societies that produced new and more enduring forms of empire in large areas of the world. Indigenous peoples elsewhere and later fared little better at the hands of the British Empire than did Native Americans in Washington’s settler republic.42 Nevertheless, the first president initiated policies that committed the United States to an imperial path and a colonial relationship that plagued Indian people for generations to come, and he set precedents that established the framework for determining what place Indian tribes would occupy in the new nation. Washington never questioned that Indians must and would relinquish their lands to the growing republic, but the power and presence of Indian nations and the foreign policies pursued by Indian leaders pressured his administration to turn from claiming Indian lands by right of conquest and instead base its Indian relations on law and restraint. Washington and Knox endeavored to establish a place for Indians within the constitutional framework and to establish treaty-based relationships with the tribes within the framework of the law of nations. As Knox recommended, the Washington administration drew on the international law concept of sovereignty to determine Native status and recognized Indian tribes as separate nations, and in doing so helped to establish sovereignty as a central issue in Indian law. At the same time, it asserted ultimate sovereignty over the territory of the United States and insisted that this sovereignty limited Indians’ freedom to make alliances with foreign nations or sell land to anyone except the United States. It did not claim or exercise the unbridled power of later years; nevertheless, it laid the groundwork for more aggressive assertions of federal authority after Indian autonomy waned significantly in the late eighteenth century and then declined rapidly in the nineteenth century. From not recognizing Native nations as nations like the United States or France, it was a short step to treating Indians as “domestic dependent nations”; from extending US sovereignty over Indians and denying Indian nations equal sovereignty, it was a short step to asserting plenary power over them and denying their sovereignty.43 From the Washington-Pickering model of educating Indians in the useful arts and agriculture rather than as scholars, it was just a step to educating Indian students to become members of the underclass, as occurred in nineteenth-century boarding schools.

  By some definitions of the term, Washington’s civilization program constituted genocide by another name. But Washington saw his policies as setting Indians on the road to survival, not destruction, giving them the opportunity to remake themselves as American citizens. Inclusion in American society, as understood by Washington and subsequent makers of Indian policy, required Indian people to cease being Indian; in effect, their survival, paradoxically, required their “disappearance.” When Thomas Jefferson became president he continued Indian policies that, as a member of Washington’s cabinet, he had help to develop: dealing with tribes as sovereign nations, acquiring land by treaty rather than by war, and promoting a program of civilization. Jefferson pushed things further. Washington’s policy of assimila
ting Indians as their best chance of survival became in Jefferson’s mind a simple choice between assimilation and extinction, either of which would free their land; “by mourning the passing of the Indians into oblivion or civilized invisibility,” wrote the historian Anthony Wallace, Jefferson “gave moral justification to the seizure of lands he said they no longer needed.”44 As envisioned by Washington, the government factories or trading posts would not extend credit to Indians: the goal was to make them economically independent producers who purchased goods with cash, not to sink them in debt. But even before Washington died, the factories were beginning to lure Indians into debt, and Jefferson made it a central, albeit covert, component of his policy of Indian dispossession.45

  Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 gave the United States another outlet for dispossession, a third option between assimilation and extinction.46 But the process of dispossession continued along paths well worn during Washington’s presidency. Washington had tried to establish federal control over the conduct of Indian affairs, but tensions with the states continued to complicate US Indian policy to the detriment of Indian people. Appalled by what he saw during his visit to America in the 1830s as policies of Indian removal were being implemented east of the Mississippi, Alexis de Tocqueville recalled Washington’s declaration to Congress that the United States as “more enlightened and more powerful than the Indian nations” was honor-bound to treat them with kindness and even generosity. But this “virtuous and high-minded policy” had not been followed. The Union treated the Indians with less cupidity and violence than the several states, but in Tocqueville’s view the two governments were equally lacking in good faith. “The states’ tyranny forces the savages to flee, and the Union’s promises make flight easy. Both are means to the same end.”47

  Indians had given Washington hard lessons in war and diplomacy. Their lands had fueled but never satisfied his hunger for a personal fortune in the West and provided the foundation for building an imperial republic. Indian power had frustrated the ambitions of the empire he served, stalled the expansion of the nation he led, and compelled him to do business with tribal leaders. Their victories had prompted him to rethink how Americans raised, trained, and funded their armies and how they fought their wars. Their presence on the land, and his insistence that they be expelled from their lands, presented him with philosophical and political dilemmas as he wrestled to combine expansion with honor, dispossession with justice. He expended prodigious amounts of attention, energy, money, and ink formulating and implementing his Indian policies. He achieved his goal of acquiring Indian land and achieved his vision of an expansive republic, but he failed to balance expansion onto Indian lands with justice to Indian people.

  The rapid migration of a vibrant population that Washington celebrated in his message to Congress in December 1795 ensured that the Washington-Knox vision of expansion with honor remained a chimera. As the president acknowledged in that same message, there could never be peace as long as frontier settlers murdered Indians with impunity. Neither Washington nor any of his successors resolved the problem he articulated: “To enforce upon the Indians the observance of justice, it is indispensable that there shall be competent means of rendering Justice to them.” Although Washington did not mention Indians in his Farewell Address, he urged Americans to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” and “give mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”48 Indians, unmentioned, surely inhabited the retiring president’s vision of a just and harmonious future, but he also surely realized that including them in that vision was a vain hope. He had seen too much evidence to the contrary to believe that the better angels of Americans’ nature could prevail when Indian land was at stake.

  History seemed to show that an expansive territory was lethal to republics. Washington believed that an expansive, indeed expanding, territory, properly managed by a strong and enlightened central government, was the salvation and future hope of his republic. He recognized and worried that this meant the dispossession and possible destruction of Indian peoples, and their “plight” as his American empire advanced elicited his sympathy and his concern for the nation’s honor. But he did not let his concerns divert him from his primary purpose of building a nation. Instead, to do Indians justice and offer them a future, he implemented programs to transform their lives and save them from themselves.

  The year after his death, Washington achieved his vision of a capital on the Potomac. Indian delegates continued for generations to visit the seat of government named after the first “Great Father,” and many recalled his promises as they asked for justice. but as the historical geographer D. W. Meinig observed, they too often found that “the new city of Washington was what St. Petersburg was for the Finns, Peking for the Miao, or Constantinople for the Serbs: the seat of a capricious, tyrannical power.”49

  Despite the assaults that Town Destroyer launched on Indian country and Indian cultures, however, some Native Americans joined other Americans in mourning Washington’s passing (see plate 13). On the national day of mourning, February 22, 1800, in Knoxville, Tennessee, nine Cherokee chiefs and many “common Indians” marched in a military funeral procession along with Governor John Sevier (whom Washington had dubbed an Indian killer) and other prominent citizens to mark “the loss of their great father Washington.”50 Indian speakers invoked his memories, words, and promises, like Efau Hadjo, who spoke of “our old friend, General Washington, who gave us the good talks for our land,” and held up the first president’s policies and practices as the standard for assessing subsequent relations.51 Although Cornplanter complained about the loss of Seneca lands, toward the end of his life he “praised George Washington” and showed visitors three documents signed by the first president, “which he kept wrapped in a linen cloth in a valise.” Writing early in the twentieth century, the Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker said Iroquois people remembered with gratitude Washington’s magnanimity and his attempts to do them justice and mentioned him “with reverence in their native feasts.”52

  Much of this, of course, was the rhetoric and strategy of diplomacy: Indian leaders knew they could leverage Washington’s image and reputation among Americans to help secure Indian goals. Chief John Ross regularly invoked his memory as his Cherokee people resisted efforts in the 1820s and ’30s to relocate them west of the Mississippi. Another Cherokee chief, Bloody Fellow, had called Washington a liar in 1792, but now that the government was riding roughshod over treaties that guaranteed the Cherokees possession of their remaining lands, Ross honored the first president for acting with justice and upholding the treaties he made. Time and again, he referred to him as “the Great Washington,” “the illustrious Washington,” “the venerated Washington.” From where Ross stood, Washington’s presidency looked like a golden age.53 Washington’s efforts to reconcile the competing aspects of his Indian policies seem hypocritical, knowing what we know now, but he devoted more time, thought, and ink to the problem than did most of his contemporaries, and most other presidents. Some, perhaps many, Native Americans revered his memory as they looked back from a time when US Indian policy veered from assimilation in the name of “civilization” to ethnic cleansing under the name of removal.

  six months before washington died, a Seneca named Handsome Lake fell into a dead sleep. A brother of Cornplanter, Handsome Lake had fought against the British at Devil’s Hole in 1763 and against the Americans during the Revolution. He had also participated in the post-Revolutionary treaty councils that had dismantled Iroquois land and unity. Like his people, he felt the loss of military and political power, endured poverty and cultural assault, and faced a bleak future dictated by former enemies. At first it seemed that Handsome Lake was just another hard-drinking Indian who had lost his life to alcohol, another individual who had followed the tragic path prescribed for his people. Unlike those of Washington’s death, however, reports of Handsome Lake’s demise
proved to be premature. He awakened and reported having had a vision in which he journeyed to heaven and also saw the torments of hell. Other visions followed. In Handsome Lake’s near-death experience, the Creator had given him a new gospel and a message of rebirth for his people.54

  Handsome Lake offered Haudenosaunee people a way to live a good life based on traditional values even as American society threatened to engulf them. By 1799 the Iroquois who had once dominated the northeastern United States were confined to reservations in small areas of their traditional homelands or lived in exile in Canada. The Senecas who remained in western New York had once held some 4 million acres; now they lived on fewer than 200,000 acres divided into eleven separate tracts.55 They rebuilt their communities but were under pressure from missionaries, land speculators, settlers, and the state and federal governments. Renouncing his former life of drunkenness, Handsome Lake embarked on a mission to bring the Gaiwiio, “the Good Message,” to his people. His teachings combined traditional beliefs and elements of the Great Law of Peace with some Christian additions adopted from Quaker missionaries. He preached that people should live in peace with the United States and with one another. He denounced alcohol, factionalism, and the breakdown of family life, and he emphasized the importance of education and farming. In place of a society based on matrilineal, extended families that traditionally inhabited the clan mothers’ longhouses, and in which women were allowed to divorce their husbands simply by excluding them from their houses, Handsome Lake espoused a new social gospel in which men now did the farming, and husbands headed the nuclear family. He urged people to adopt plows, spinning wheels, frame houses, reading and writing English, and schooling. At the same time, his teachings incorporated thanksgiving festivals and other ceremonies from the old religion and denounced the sale of lands. The Longhouse Religion that developed based on his teachings met opposition from both traditionalists and Christians, but by reviving and reshaping traditional morality and values, Handsome Lake offered hope in a time of spiritual crisis and staggering transformations, and a way for Senecas to preserve their identity, autonomy, and lands through resilience and adaptation rather than outright resistance. The Longhouse Religion and the code of values Handsome Lake preached became a source of endurance, and it had enduring appeal.