After Virginia did so in 1781, a number of other states had ceded much or all of their Western land claims to the federal government. As a result of congressional land ordinances in 1784 and 1785, almost everyone understood that this territory, which stretched to the Mississippi from just north of the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Canada, would spawn new states. The only questions were: How many states would there be? What form would they take? How were they to be admitted? Would they be equal partners with the existing thirteen? And, most important, whose interests would they support? Would they be planter or farmer, merchant or artisan, and, most vitally, slave states or free?
Thus, the Constitutional Convention became simply an extension of the ongoing sectional struggle, a dispute that had begun to fester in the late 1740s, when land consortiums began to lay claim to millions of acres in the West. These partnerships first petitioned the crown, and then, after independence, called on the new government to legitimize old claims or authorize new ones. The fortunes of two very different land companies, each of which called itself the Ohio Company—one slave, one free; one southern aristocrat, one northern presbyter—would be key in determining that victor.
"Map of the Western parts of the Colony of Virginia as far as the Mississippi," used in the London reprint of George Washington's "Journal to the Ohio," 1754
The first of these, the Ohio Company of Virginia, began operation in 1748. Citing the wording of the royal patent for Virginia, which granted the colony territory stretching "from sea to sea" (although no one had any idea how far that would turn out to be), Thomas Lee petitioned the acting governor, Sir William Gooch, for a grant of two hundred thousand acres in the Ohio Territory, which at the time stretched from the western boundaries of the various states—principally Pennsylvania—to the Mississippi. In return for the grant, the company promised to survey the land, build roads, and populate the terrain with two hundred settlers—who would pay for it, of course—at one thousand acres each. To protect these settlers, the company pledged to clear a road into the territory, and then build and man a fort, all at its own expense.
Lee's group consisted of wealthy planters like himself, most of whom inhabited the tidewater region of Virginia—the so-called Northern Neck—rich accessible land that began on Chesapeake Bay and ran north between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. This was Virginia's old money, families that had been in the colony for three and four generations. In addition to Thomas Lee, the group included Augustine and Lawrence Washington; William Fairfax, brother of Lord Fairfax, the largest landowner in the colony; a number of Mercers; and Robert Carter, the grandson of the legendary Robert "King" Carter, who had forged a sprawling empire of land and slaves in the early 1700s. With in two years, three of Thomas Lee's sons, including Richard Henry, and the Washington' half-brother George would join the group, as would a prosperous and ambitious young planter named George Mason IV. Mason had inherited thousands of acres and married into thousands more. He was made treasurer soon after his entry in 1750.
For the members of the Ohio Company, acquisition of new land in the West was intimately intertwined with tobacco and slavery. Tobacco, the source of the great fortunes amassed by the Virginia planters, was also their bane, a crop that was notorious for decimating the land. "The voracious plants sucked nutrients; the often violent rains gullied the bare earth around them. Three successive years in tobacco finished a field . . . its eroded subsoil, henceforth known as 'old field,' was abandoned to a straggle of scrub pine while the process was repeated in another newly opened clearing."3
Soil exhaustion could easily have been controlled by prudent land management, but allowing fields to lie fallow was not an option open to Virginia planters. They had too many slaves and, just as tobacco sucked nutrients from soil, slaves sucked capital from their owners. Slaveholders were forced to undertake a large, ongoing investment in their workforce, providing food, lodging, clothing, and even medical care from birth until death. As a slave's productivity did not really begin until young adulthood, a planter could invest upwards of ten to twelve years in a slave before a return could be expected. If slaves died or, even worse, were incapacitated before their most productive years were completed, the planter's return on investment shrank still further. On the other end, a slave's productive years ended early, so the planter's investment had to continue even after the life of the asset was exhausted.4
Oversupply was an ongoing problem. Tobacco was grown in a pleasant climate under generally tolerable working conditions, so mortality was relatively low. Unlike those who employed free labor, slaveowners did not have the option of firing unproductive workers. When planters found themselves with more slaves than they needed, the only alternative was to try to find a way to sell off the excess. But with their fellow planters just as overstocked, not much of a market existed. With unproductive slaves, there was no market at all.
Nor was redirecting capital into other ventures an alternative. Most Virginia planters did not have any excess capital anyway, nor did they have any interest in industry or commerce. The best the overstocked planter could hope for was to train slaves to perform new tasks, but even here the options were limited. "The institution of slavery caused the exportation of wealth from the prosperous districts for the purchase of recruits to the labor supply, and excluded or discouraged most of the population from sharing or endeavoring to share in large scale industrial affairs. This fixed the community in a rut, deprived it of the great benefits of industrial diversification, and kept the whole community in the state of commercial dependence on the North and Europe like that of any normal colony on the mother country."5
With so much of the available resources going to support—or control—the workforce, a more measured approach to planting was out of the question. Instead, the tobacco planters were compelled to work their land harder and harder to generate larger crops to offset costs. "Planters bought fresh lands and more slaves to make more tobacco, and with the profits they bought more and more slaves to make more tobacco with which to buy yet more land and slaves.... The process involved a heavy export of wealth in the acquisition of every new laborer . . . . [T]he southern planter, as a rule, invested all his profits in a fictitious form of wealth, and never accumulated a surplus for any other sort of investment."6
The resemblance of tobacco farming to modern strip-mining is unmistakable. "[Virginians] devastated natural vegetation to clear a patch of land, planted tobacco on the patch for six or seven years, then abandoned it unprotected to the elements while they moved on to destroy new patches."7 Gouverneur Morris was appalled during his first trip to Virginia at the vast stretches of scrub pine, all that was left of previously productive farmland.
Not surprisingly, therefore, planters looked to the fertile Ohio Territory as a solution to their problems, a "new injection of fertile land to replace the soil wasted by tobacco production."8 Although most of the Ohio Company speculators expected to turn a profit through resale of some of the land to immigrants, acquisition of the Ohio lands represented an extension—and a protection—of their way of life.
Picking just the right tract was critical and so, although he was not a Virginian, not wealthy, not a planter, and owned no slaves, Thomas "Big Spoon" Cresap was immediately offered a share by the Ohio Company. Cresap lived in Old Town, a settlement that he had personally carved out of the wilderness on the Maryland side of the Potomac, just east of the Alleghenies at the western edge of civilization. He was a renowned trader, frontiersman, and braggart, a crack shot and ferocious fighter, and perhaps the most colorful character in all of North America. He had been reviled as the "Maryland Monster" during border disputes with Pennsylvania in the 1730s, and in 1748, almost seventy years old, lived in a fortress he had built himself that doubled as a trading post. His youngest son, Michael, had built a similar structure nearby.9
Loved and feared by the local tribes, Thomas Cresap was known to every Indian and white man from Canada to the Carolinas. Cresap had acquired his nickname for the
pot of meat stew that simmered constantly on his stove for the gratification of any Native American who happened to chance by. No Virginian—not a Lee, not a Mercer, not a Washington—who ventured west did so without a stop at Old Town. No one was more suitable to help choose a spot for the Ohio Company's claim than Thomas Cresap.
Choice was vital since the land that the company had set its eyes on was not simply there for the taking. The Iroquois, Miamis, Wyandots, Cherokees, and other local tribes would have to grant approval, to say nothing of the French, who thought little of charters issued by English kings and considered the western territory theirs. The Cresaps notwithstanding, the French, who respected Native American traditions quite a bit more than the English, had generally better relations with the tribes. Still, since the costs of surveying, personnel, and construction were all to be borne by the investors—the twenty shares of the company were subscribed at a hefty £200 each—Lee and his fellows anticipated quick approval from Governor Gooch.
But Sir William turned them down. Saying that he wished to avoid trouble with the tribes and the French, he flatly rejected the company's application.
This was not a group of men accustomed to being refused anything, especially since Sir William had just granted a rival consortium, the Loyal Company, a grant of eight hundred thousand acres south of the Ohio, in what is now Kentucky. That grant was pure speculation, not even requiring any settlement or forts. To make matters more galling, the Loyal Company was largely made up of nouveaux riches like Peter Jefferson from the western end of the state. The suspicion at once arose that Sir William's interests might not be exactly arm's length, and the Ohio Company dispatched Lawrence Washington to London to have him overruled.
Washington made the rounds and, after he granted unpaid shares in the new company to men of influence such as Robert Dinwiddie and the Duke of Bedford, the king himself saw fit to grant the company's charter. The Ohio Company could claim one hundred thousand acres immediately and the second one hundred thousand after the first hundred colonists were settled and the fort was built. Also, by the time Lawrence Washington returned to Virginia, Sir William Gooch had been ordered replaced as acting governor by Thomas Lee, and Washington was made head of the Ohio Company.
In 1749, Lawrence Washington sent his half-brother, seventeen-year-old George, to Old Town to do some preliminary scouting for a suitable access route into the Ohio Territory. The younger Washington, although having spent the previous two years honing his craft surveying the millions of acres in Virginia that had been granted to Lord Fairfax, was not enough of a frontiersman to venture very far and so, the next year the company hired Christopher Gist.
Gist is one of the great forgotten figures of the American frontier, a man whose achievements rivaled those of his neighbor, Daniel Boone. Gist's job was to survey along the Ohio River from its headwaters near Shannopin's Town in Pennsylvania (now Pittsburgh) eight hundred miles into Kentucky, to current-day Louisville. In a six-month trek begun from Old Town in November 1750, he covered about two-thirds of the distance, mapping the entire Ohio countryside as he went.10 The following winter, Gist completed a similar survey on the south side of the Ohio, mapping most of what is today West Virginia. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of the landscape, Gist also traded with the indigenous tribes, thus paving the way for peaceful settlement. With Gist's surveys in hand, the Ohio Company decided to exercise its mandate in the territory near Shannopin's Town, south and east of the Ohio, an excellent tract that unfortunately was also claimed by Pennsylvania and by the French crown. The company began to clear a road north from western Virginia up toward their claim.
In February 1751, Thomas Lee died and was replaced by Robert Dinwiddie, one of the men Lawrence Washington had enticed into the Ohio Company in England. Later that same year, Lawrence Washington contracted tuberculosis. He sailed to Barbados with his half-brother to try to cure the disease, the only time in his life that George Washington would be out of North America. The trip was a disaster. George was struck with smallpox and, although he recovered, his teeth fell out and he probably lost the ability to have children. Lawrence recovered but he died in Virginia the following year. Following his death, the Ohio Company did not elect another head. Instead, most of the responsibilities fell to the recently appointed twenty-seven-year-old treasurer, George Mason.
A crisis soon developed. By this time, the road had been completed, and Gist and Cresap were spreading trinkets around in the Ohio Company's name and meeting with tribal chiefs. The French, however, had no intention of sitting passively by and allowing a swarm of Englishmen to claim their territory. By 1753, Marquis Duquesne, the French commander in Quebec, had dispatched almost two thousand experienced soldiers to post claims to the land and establish a string of forts. (Pennsylvania, none too thrilled as well, confined itself to a series of diplomatic protests.)
In November, Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie sent Gist and George Washington at the head of a delegation of six to tell the French that they were trespassing and demand that they leave immediately. The French commander at the floridly named Fort Le Boeuf received Washington politely, but after reading Dinwiddie's letter, told him to leave immediately and that he would arrest any English settlers entering the Ohio country. Washington and his party trudged back to Virginia, dodging bullets and nearly drowning in a half-frozen river.
The Ohio Company was not through, however. The following year Washington returned, this time without Gist but with a company of militia. (Officially, the militia should not have been used to support what was in fact a piece of private enterprise, but Dinwiddie was wearing two hats.) By the time Washington arrived at the forks of the Ohio, the French had almost completed a more formidable Fort Duquesne. When they heard that Englishmen were moving their way, they sent out a scouting party. Washington attacked the sleeping French on May 28,1754, killing their commander and sending the rest scurrying for the fort. Washington then decided to build a fort of his own, which he dubbed Fort Necessity. The French commander at Fort Duquesne sent out a much larger force of soldiers and Native Americans to attack Fort Necessity, where on July 3 they soundly defeated the hopelessly overmatched Washington, capturing or killing his entire force. Washington and the other survivors were paroled and once again sent slogging back to Virginia.
For most men, a minor battle in a colonial backwater would have caused less than a ripple in world politics, but George Washington was not a man destined to be involved in small things. The battle at Fort Necessity between the Ohio Company and France ignited a clash between Virginia and France, and then a full-scale colonial war between England and France. The fighting spread across Europe and Asia, through Russia, Germany, Sweden, India, and even Africa. Called the French and Indian War in America and the Seven Years War everywhere else, the conflict cost many thousands of lives, millions of pounds, brought on the Stamp Act, and shaped the future of three continents. Only twenty-two years old, George Washington had helped ignite the first world war.
For the next nine years, as France and England fought for control of North America, the Ohio Company waited, having nothing to show for its efforts except expenditures that exceeded £10,000. War in the Ohio country was particularly difficult since most of the Native Americans supported the French.11 Only after the French were defeated on the Plains of Abraham above Montreal in 1759 did the future of the Ohio Territory no longer seem in doubt. The following year, George Mason joined four other members of the Ohio Company in a letter to fellow member Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie:
As we expect a peace next winter, and have no doubt North America will be secured to the British government and liberty will then be granted to his Majesty's subjects in these colonies to settle on the lands on the Ohio, we the committee of the Ohio Company think it a proper time as soon as peace is concluded to apply for a grant of the lands intended us by his Majesty's instructions to Sir William Gooch, and have for that purpose sent over a petition to his Majesty and a large and full state of our case .
. . let us beg you will please to exert yourself in getting us a patent . . . on the best terms possible . . . for the government here . . . from jealousy or some other cause have ever sought to disappoint us in every design we could form to settle and improve the lands. We will agree to any reasonable consideration of such a deed from England."12
Also in anticipation of victory, members of the company had been buying up land as individuals, both with in the current boundaries of the colony as well as in the unsettled territory to the west. While the Ohio Company's patent never exceeded the original two hundred thousand acres, many references mdi cate that the claims were actually for five hundred thousand acres or more, encompassing the total holdings claimed by the company's membership as well as the specific patent granted to the corporation. Most of the private purchases were south of the Ohio and west of the territory to which Pennsylvania had a claim, in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. No one was more fond of buying land than George Mason. He acquired land by all means available, and, by the war's end, personally owned thousands of acres in the West.13
When the French were defeated and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 ceded all of France's North American territory east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, to England, the Ohio Company investors seemed certain to finally achieve their aims.* But the optimism of Mason and his colleagues proved premature. Fearing a swarm of English settlers now that their French allies were no longer there to prevent it, Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, led an alliance of Ohio-area tribes against the English in an uprising that became know as Pontiac's War. Although it amounted to little more than a series of skirmishes that the British would easily put down a year later, the prospect of continued troubles in the West, with its concomitant dram on a treasury already facing bankruptcy from almost a decade of world war, was not something London would risk.
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