The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  15. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

  16. Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor (New Haven, Ct: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1783), quotes at 8–9, 10, 16, 36–37; Joshua 6:1–27 (quote at verse 21). I am grateful to Catherine Brekus of Harvard Divinity School for pointing me to this depiction of Washington as genocidal Joshua.

  17. Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire, 172–75.

  18. PGW, Confed. 1:199.

  19. John Rhodehamel, George Washington: The Wonder of the Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 2017), 170 (quote), 189–90; “Circular to the States,” June 8, 1783, in Writings of Washington 26:483–96; Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 102, 123–28.

  20. Terry Bouton, “The Trials of the Confederation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 20; PGW, Confed. 4:318–19.

  21. PGW, Confed. 4:483.

  22. Haldimand Papers 21763:168, 179.

  23. Cf. Jeffrey Ostler, “ ‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 72 (2015): 621; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 89–90.

  24. David S. Shields, “George Washington: Publicity, Probity, and Power,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 151.

  25. Adams quoted in David O. Stewart, Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 75; Jefferson quoted in James Thomas Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 86.

  26. Rick Willard Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden: George Washington’s Frontier Land Interests” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), ch. 5.

  27. Edward J. Larson, The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783–1789 (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 33.

  28. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., Quebec to Carolina in 1785–86: Being the Travel Diary and Observations of Robert Hunter, Jr., a Young Merchant of London (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1943), 193–94.

  29. Charles H. Ambler, George Washington and the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 173; PGW, Confed. 1:93n–95n.

  30. John Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 335.

  31. Ferling, The First of Men, 398.

  32. PGW, Confed. 4:213.

  33. Larson, Return of George Washington; Edward J. Larson, George Washington, Nationalist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), chs. 3–4.

  34. Quoted in Barnet Schecter, George Washington’s America: A Biography through His Maps (New York: Walker, 2010), 200.

  35. Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Vintage, 2005), 145; Writings of Washington 27:185–90.

  36. Philander D. Chase, “A Stake in the West: George Washington as Backcountry Surveyor and Landholder,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 184–85.

  37. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 422–23.

  38. Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 518; Roy Bird Cook, Washington’s Western Lands (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930), 139 (6,000 acres and 1793 sale).

  39. Dorothy Twohig, “The Making of George Washington,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 32n41.

  40. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 2–6; Writings of Washington 26:376; James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006), 201–3.

  41. Writings of Washington 27:17–18.

  42. Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 6–7.

  43. Writings of Washington 27:133–140; GW to Duane, Sept. 7, 1783, GWPLC.

  44. Ambler, Washington and the West, 172–73; Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 10–12. The committee’s report is in JCC 25:680–95 and Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 10:119–25.

  45. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 118

  46. JCC 24:503.

  47. JCC 25:602.

  48. PGW, Confed. 1:91–92, 95–97, 107–9 (“deranged”), 117 (“handsome”), 123–24, 141, 153–54, 312–314, 2:340.

  49. Consul W. Butterfield, ed., The Washington-Crawford Letters: Being the Correspondence between George Washington and William Crawford, from 1767 to 1781, concerning Western Lands (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1877), 77–78; PGW, Confed. 1:197–98.

  50. PGW, Confed. 1:201–4n; Cook, Washington’s Western Lands, 123.

  51. PGW, Confed. 1:225.

  52. PGW, Confed. 1:492.

  53. Diaries of GW 4:2–3, 14–15; Cook, Washington’s Western Lands, 69; Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 479.

  54. Diaries of GW 4:4, 6, 54–55.

  55. Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794: Translations of Materials from the Spanish Archives in the Bancroft Library, 3 pts., vols. 2–4 of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1945, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946–49), vol. 3, pt. 2, 117.

  56. PGW, Confed. 2:119–20; Writings of Washington 27:486.

  57. Diaries of GW 4:25, 32–33; PGW, Confed. 1:117–18, 315–17, 2:68 (“respectable people”), 78–80 (instructions to Freeman), 489, 3:43–45, 158, 308–10; Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 79–81.

  58. PGW, Confed. 3:127, 4:63–66, 5:446–47, 6:41–44.

  59. Diaries of GW 4:21–31; PGW, Confed. 2:340–56, 442–46, 3:121–25, 245–46, 365–69, 438–39 (“Sinners”), 4:172–73, 255–61, 339–43, 405–7, 5:39–41, 327–28, 472; 6:91–92; Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 57–62; Ellis, His Excellency, 156–57; John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 249; Chernow, Washington, 480–81.

  60. Diaries of GW 4:57.

  61. PGW, Confed. 5:505–8; PGW, Pres. 1:15–16, 110–11, 133, 168.

  62. Warren R. Hofstra, “ ‘And Die by Inches’: George Washington and the Encounter of Cultures on the Southern Colonial Frontier,” in Harvey and O’Brien, George Washington’s South, 83.

  63. Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 32, 37–38, 43–45, 75–78; Daniel Blake Smith, “ ‘This Idea in Heaven’: Image and Reality on the Kentucky Frontier,” in The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), 77–98; Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 79 (two-thirds and quote).

  64. Diaries of GW 4:19, 21; PGW, Confed. 2:116, 119–20, 170.

  65. Writings of Washington 27:485.

  66. Joel Achenbach, The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 202.

  67. Diaries of GW 4:57.

  68. Larson, Return of George Washington, quotes at 39, 47.

  69. Diaries of GW 4:58–68 (quotes at 58, 59), 670; PGW, Confed. 2:8
6–99, 102–3, 106–9, 122, 126–33, 282–84; Achenbach, Grand Idea; Robert J. Kapsch, The Potomac Canal: George Washington and the Waterway West (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007); Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” chs. 4, 6–7; Charles Royster, The Fabulous Story of the Dismal Swamp Company (New York: Vintage, 2000) 294–95; Schecter, George Washington’s America, 16, 65; Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 250–55.

  70. Stewart, Madison’s Gift, 78–79.

  71. PGW, Confed. 1:176, 215–18, 237–40; PGW, Pres. 2:258.

  72. L. Scott Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions: Political and Cultural Expansion on an Early American Frontier (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 113–14.

  73. Diaries of GW 4:66–67; PGW, Confed. 2:92.

  74. Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 127–33, 140–41 (Washington quoted at 141); Sachs, Home Rule; David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 155–58; Aron, How the West Was Lost.

  75. Samuel Cole Williams, History of the Lost State of Franklin, rev. ed. (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1933); Kevin Barksdale, The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Kristofer Ray, “Leadership, Loyalty, and Sovereignty in the Revolutionary American Southwest: The State of Franklin as a Test Case,” North Carolina Historical Review 92 (2015): 123–44 (Martin quoted at 137); Kristofer Ray, Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), ch. 1; William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–91), 10:271 (Stephen quote).

  76. PGW, Confed. 6:491.

  77. Ellis, His Excellency, 54.

  78. Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), chs. 1–2; Frymer, Building an American Empire, ch. 2.

  79. Haldimand Papers 21779:147–48.

  80. JCC 25:68–84, 27:456.

  81. A Council with the Chiefs and Warriors of the Six Nations, July 2, 1783, NYPL, Schuyler Papers, reel 7, box 14.

  82. Haldimand Papers 21772:223–24.

  83. David Lehman, “The End of the Iroquois Mystique: The Oneida Land Cession Treaties of the 1780s,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 529–30, 540–41.

  84. EAID 18:301; Michael Leroy Oberg, Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29–30.

  85. EAID 18:299–301.

  86. EAID 18:301–12; James Austin Holden et al., eds., Public Papers of George Clinton, First Governor of New York, 1777–1795, 1801–1804, 10 vols. (New York and Albany: State Printers, 1889–1914), 8:349–78.

  87. EAID 18:308.

  88. EAID 18:313–27.

  89. PGW, Confed. 2:181–83.

  90. St. Clair Papers 2:7; Consul W. Butterfield, ed., Journal of Captain Jonathan Heart … to which is added the Dickinson-Harmar Correspondence of 1785–86 (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1885), 77–78.

  91. PGW, Confed. 2:36.

  92. Saler, Settlers’ Empire, 13; Hutchinson et al., Papers of James Madison 8:119–20, 140, 156–57; Jacob T. Levy, “Indians in Madison’s Constitutional Order,” in James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, ed. John Samples (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002), 121–33 (quotes at 124).

  93. Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 24 (“very spot”); Lehman, “End of the Iroquois Mystique,” 528; Hutchinson et al., Papers of James Madison 8:497; Dean R. Snow, Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 305, 319 (“most fertile on our globe”).

  94. PGW, Confed. 2:171–72 (GW to Knox), 181, 301–2 (Knox quotes), 3:198 (GW to McHenry).

  95. JCC 24:491–91; IALT, 5.

  96. Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), ch. 13; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), ch. 5; Lehman, “End of the Iroquois Mystique,” 523–47; Franklin B. Hough, ed., Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs appointed by law for the Extinguishment of Indian Titles in the State of New York, 2 vols. (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1861), 1:84–108 (Herkimer Treaty), 122–24 (Livingston lease), 241–46 (Fort Schuyler Treaty); EAID 18:332–38, 472–74.

  97. EAID 18:468–70, 472–74, 500–503; Francis G. Hutchins, Tribes and the American Constitution (Brookline, MA: Amarta Press, 2000), 112–13, 158.

  98. Pickering Papers 60:121–22.

  99. Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 310; IALT, 37–39.

  100. Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), ch. 4; Pickering Papers 62:103 (“a very trifle”).

  101. Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 2–5, 315–16; Auguste Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. Alan R. Hoffman (Manchester, NH: Lafayette Press, 2006), 482–83 (quotes).

  102. ASPIA 1:38–44; EAID 18:405–8; IALT, 8–11; DHFCC 2:169–80, 5:1072–92.

  103. ASPIA 1:44; EAID 18:402–4 (Blount), 428 (Caswell); Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1816 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 43, 45, 48.

  104. Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921–36), 8:343–44.

  105. CO 5/81:139–41 (Chickasaw message); Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 8; James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), ch. 8.

  106. CVSP 3:278–79, 297–300, 356–58.

  107. EAID 18:370–71; CVSP 3:515–17; PCC, reel 104, item 78, 24:445–49.

  108. EAID 18:374–76; CVSP 3:548.

  109. EAID 18:424; DHFFC 5:1111–16; IALT, 15–16.

  110. John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938), 239; Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, 134, 146.

  111. Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), chs. 4–5.

  112. Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), ch. 4 (“great civility” at 66); CVSP 4:268; Diary of Stephen Minor in Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791–1795 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), Washington portrait at 175.

  113. Calloway, Revolution in Indian Country, 234.

  114. ASPIA 1:43; CVSP 4:306.

  115. Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 268.

  116. Territorial Papers 2:6–9; Archer Butler Hulbert, ed., The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 2 vols. (Marietta, OH: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), 1:xvii–xviii; John R. Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 29–32; Frymer, Building an Empire (patterns of settlement).

  117. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), ch. 1; Andrew R. L. Cayt
on , “Radicals in the ‘Western World’: The Federalist Conquest of Trans-Appalachian North America,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 79–80; Van Atta, Securing the West, ch. 1; Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chs. 1–2; Timothy J. Shannon, “ ‘This Unpleasant Business’: The Transformation of Land Speculation in the Ohio Country, 1787–1820,” in The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1787–1861, ed. Jeffrey P. Brown and Andrew L. Cayton (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 20; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).

  118. Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions, 98.

  119. Linklater, Measuring America, 69–71; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), ch. 7.

  120. PGW, Confed. 2:440 (Williamson), 3:63 (Knox); Writings of Washington 28:108; also in William Parker and Julia Perkins Cutler, eds., Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D., 2 vols (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1888), 1:131–32.

  121. Larson, Return of George Washington, 49.

  122. “Land Ordinance of 1785,” in Territorial Papers 2:12–18; Linklater, Measuring America; Onuf, Statehood and Union, ch. 2.

  123. PGW, Confed. 3:69–70.

  124. PGW, Confed. 3:152–53.

  125. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 144–48.

  126. Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 20.

  127. GWP, Confed. 2:437.

  128. A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin (New York: Penguin/Signet Classics, 2010), 118.

  129. The negotiations at Fort Finney are described in The Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1859), 63ff., and “Journal of General Richard Butler at the Treaty of Fort Finney,” in The Olden Time, ed. Neville B. Craig, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: J. W. Cook, 1846–48), 2:510–31. Excerpts from Butler’s journal and the treaty itself are reprinted in EAID 18:340–51. The treaty is also in IALT, 16–18.