16. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 6.
17. Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers: Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), 9.
18. Quoted in Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), 21.
19. The Journal of Major George Washington: An Account of his First Official Mission, Made as Emissary from the Governor of Virginia to the Commandant of the French Forces on the Ohio, October 1753–January 1754, facsimile ed. (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1959), v.
20. Charles H. Ambler, George Washington and the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 86.
21. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
22. Warren R. Hofstra, ed., George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 81, 87.
23. Dorothy Twohig, “The Making of George Washington,” in Hofstra, ed., George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 32, n. 41.
24. Edward Redmond, “George Washington: Surveyor and Mapmaker,” https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/george-washington-survey-and-mapmaker/; W. W. Abbot, “George Washington, the West, and the Union,” in George Washington Reconsidered, ed. Don Higginbotham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 198–211.
25. Abbot, “George Washington, the West, and the Union,” quotes at 211; “more than anything else” quoted in Don Higginbotham, George Washington: Uniting a Nation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 63.
26. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 194; Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 268; Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington, 1-vol. abridgement by Richard Harwell of the 7-vol. George Washington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 601. See, for example, Hamilton’s estimate of expenses for 1790 and 1791; Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961–87), 9:471–74.
27. St. Clair Papers 2:50.
28. Jeff W. Dennis, Patriots and Indians: Shaping Identity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017).
29. Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Charles Thomson: A Patriot’s Pursuit (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), ch. 2 (immersed at 35; adopted at 42); Boyd Stanley Schlenther, “Training for Resistance: Charles Thomson and Indian Affairs in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 50 (1983): 185–217; EAID 3:194, 256–57; [Charles Thomson], An Enquiry into the Causes of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawanese Indians from the British Interest, and into the Measures taken for recovering their Friendship (London: Printed for J. Wilkie, 1759), esp. 80–81; Bouquet Papers 2:195n (adopted).
30. Lee claimed to have married Bright Lightning, daughter of a Seneca named Kaghswaghtaniunut, a.k.a. Belt of Wampum, who accompanied Washington on his mission in the Ohio country in 1753 and served as one of Braddock’s scouts at Fort Cumberland. David L. Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 109, 381n; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 108.
31. Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 32–68.
32. Ablavasky, “Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause.”
33. PTJ 29:64, 172, 295, 525.
34. Janet Catherine Berlo, “Men of the Middle Ground: The Visual Culture of Native-White Diplomacy in Eighteenth-Century North America,” in American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, ed. Emily Ballew Neff and Kailyn H. Weber (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2013), 104–15; James F. O’Neill, Their Bearing Is Noble and Proud: A Collection of Narratives regarding the Appearance of Native Americans from 1740–1815 (Dayton, OH: J.T.G.S. Publishing, 1995); Timothy Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 13–42.
35. Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 122; Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 179.
36. Carolyn Raine, A Woodland Feast: Native American Foodways of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Huber Heights, OH: Penobscot Press, 1997).
37. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924), 121.
38. Journal of Captain Thomas Morris from Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London, 1791; n.p.: Readex Microprint, 1966), 11, 17.
39. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 157–58.
40. Calloway, New Worlds for All, 29; John C. Fitzpatrick, George Washington, Colonial Traveller, 1732–1775 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927). Manasseh Cutler, a Massachusetts clergyman, fellow land speculator, and practicing physician whom Washington knew, compiled a list of more than 350 indigenous medicinal plants and credited Indians for many of them.
41. Celia Barnes, Native American Power in the United States, 1783–1795 (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
42. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 260–70; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 413. For earlier manifestations of anti-Indian identity, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity ((New York: Knopf, 1998); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008); David J. Silverman, “Racial Walls: Race and the Emergence of American White Nationalism,” in Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 181–204; Parkinson, Common Cause.
43. James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 280.
44. PGW, Col. 1:236–40.
45. As will become clear in the pages that follow, I find little to admire in the young Washington except his courage, plenty to admire in the older man. Douglas Southall Freeman, who wrote a seven-volume, Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, acknowledged that Washington was “not a likeable young man,” too much of a careerist. “Those who liked him did not know him fully,” he wrote to the historian Allan Nevins in 1948, but “the great fact is that Washington grew.” Michael Kammen, introduction to Freeman, Washington, xviii.
46. Kammen, introduction, xx.
47. David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Chapter 1: Virginia’s Indian Country
1. Stephen R. Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 20–24; James D. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 130–34; EAID 4:xxii.
2. Davi
d Waldstreicher, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 142–52; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
3. EAID 4:xxii, 5:xix (“umbrage”), 1; 15: ch. 1 (laws).
4. EAID 4:268, 5:1.
5. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
6. EAID 15:1.
7. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Susan Scott Parrish (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 107–10, 119, 140–43.
8. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), ch. 1; Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), ch. 4.
9. Kristalyn Marie Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 10; EAID 4:1, 3.
10. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 3.
11. Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:247, 2:175.
12. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 53–56, 113–21; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), ch. 7.
13. Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), population figures at 68–70; Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 73 (planting tobacco, not corn).
14. Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004); Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia; Alfred A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011); Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
15. Rountree, Pocanhontas’s People, 78–79.
16. J. Frederick Fausz, “ ‘Engaged in Enterprises Pregnant with Terror’: George Washington’s Formative Years among the Indians,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 116–17.
17. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1810–23), 1:322–26; David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 71, 78; EAID 4:65–70 (“Geese” at 68); Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia, 18.
18. Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia.
19. Fausz, “ ‘Engaged in Enterprises Pregnant with Terror,’ ” 118; Mary Thompson memo, June 18, 2001, Iroquois Indians, vertical file, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington (“across from Mount Vernon”).
20. Matthew L. Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse: Anglo-Iroquois Politics and the Expansion of Colonial Virginia (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 25.
21. Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 59.
22. James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion in Indian Country,” Journal of American History 101 (2014): 726–50; Cave, Lethal Encounters, ch. 8.
23. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 3–6.
24. Fausz, “ ‘Engaged in Enterprises Pregnant with Terror,’ ” 120; Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 137.
25. EAID 15:88–89, 93, 104–26; Krystalyn Marie Shefveland, “The Many Faces of Native Bonded Labor in Colonial Virginia,” Native South 7 (2014): 68–91; C. S. Everett, “ ‘They shalbe slaves for their lives’: Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), ch. 2.
26. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Eric E. Bowne, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 3; David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 56–72.
27. Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685-1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 39.
28. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, chs. 6–7. James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, 2009) is the classic study of change and continuity among the Native peoples of the southern Piedmont.
29. Quoted in L. Scott Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions: Political and Cultural Expansion on an Early American Frontier (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 87.
30. Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 67–77.
31. Everett, “ ‘They shalbe slaves for their lives,’ ” 69; Shefveland, “Many Faces of Native Bonded Labor,” 81; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 871, 874.
32. Executive Journals 3:286.
33. Cave, Lethal Encounters, 171–72; Wood, “Changing Population of the Colonial South,” 38, 40–43 (fewer than 1,000).
34. Beverley, History and Present State of Virginia, 182, 214.
35. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Burnaby’s Travels through North America (New York: A. Wessels, 1904), 62.
36. Warren R. Hofstra, “ ‘A Parcel of Barbarian’s and an Uncouth Set of People’: Settlers and Settlements of the Shenandoah Valley,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 93; Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 210–15.
37. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Warren R. Hofstra, “ ‘The Extention of His Majesties Dominions’: The Virginia Backcountry and the Reconfiguration of Imperial Frontiers,” Journal of American History 84 (1998): 1281–312; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 192 (“hard neighbors”).
38. Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, 1684–1776 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 2:493.
39. Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions, xix, 22–23.
40. EAID 4:268–69; NYCD 5:670; Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse, ch. 1, esp. 41, 46.
41. Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Ma
ry Quarterly 40 (1983), 557–59; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chs. 8–10; James H. Merrell, “ ‘Their Very Bones Shall Fight’: The Catawba-Iroquois Wars,” in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, ed. Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), ch. 7.
42. Executive Journals 4:13, 15, 22–25, 225; Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia (Richmond: Virginia Surveyors Foundation and Virginia Association of Surveyors, 1979), 74; EAID 4:346–62; Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse, ch. 2; Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 188–205; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2016), 27 (Jefferson’s birthplace).
43. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 198–99; Hofstra, “ ‘A Parcel of Barbarian’s and an Uncouth Set of People,’ ” 93.
44. Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 164.
45. Silver, New Face on the Countryside, 171–85; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
46. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, chs. 5–8, figures at 405.
47. Bruce A. Ragsdale, “Young Washington’s Virginia: Opportunity in the ‘Golden Age’ of a Planter Society,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 39, 41–42.
48. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 3.
49. T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1975), ch. 4; Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 13–41.
The Indian World of George Washington Page 66