Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Just as gentry up and down the continent sought in the Constitution of 1787 a remedy for localist democratic excesses in the states, so too did gentry in the Congress seek some sort of solution for the localist democratic excesses in the West. As Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian much involved with congressional plans for the West, pointed out, something had to be done “for the security of property” in the West because “the greater part of those who go there” were “uninformed and perhaps licentious people.”54

  In 1787 the Confederation Congress concluded, first, that the number of states to be carved out of the Northwest would have to be reduced to not more than five but not fewer than three, which inevitably meant that each state would be larger than those Jefferson had proposed in 1784. But, more important, Congress realized that it would have to create what one congressman called “a strong-toned government” to discipline the disorderly populace of the West. At the same time, it would have to provide for a gradual process by which settlements could grow into states. The result was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

  Apart from winning the War of Independence, this ordinance was the greatest accomplishment of the Confederation Congress. It created an entirely new notion of empire and at a stroke solved the problem of relating colonial dependencies to the central authority that Great Britain had been unable to solve in the 1760s and 1770s.

  When the monarchies of early modern Europe claimed new dominions by conquest or colonization, they inevitably considered their new provincial additions as permanently peripheral and inferior to the metropolitan center of the realm. But the Northwest Ordinance, which became the model for the development of much of the Southwest, promised an end to such permanent second-class colonies. It guaranteed to the settlers basic legal and political rights and set forth the unprecedented principle that new states of the American empire settled in the West would enter the Union “on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatsoever.” Settlers could leave the older states with the assurances that they were not losing their political liberties and that they would be allowed eventually to form new republics as sovereign and independent as the other older states of the Union. With such a principle there was presumably no limit to the westward expansion of the empire of the United States.55

  Of course, this empire had little or no place for the Indian. Although Congress promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, [and that] their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent,” the ordinance itself took for granted that the destiny of the Northwest belonged with white American settlers.

  These new Western settlements, the congressional leaders believed, would have to be prepared for eventual statehood in stages. In the initial stage of settlement each of the territories was to be governed dictatorially by a federally appointed governor, a secretary, and three judges. Only when the population of the territory reached five thousand would a representative assembly with a very restricted suffrage be permitted. Even then the governor was given an absolute veto over legislation and could prorogue or dissolve the assembly at will. Only when a territory attained a population of sixty thousand could it be admitted to statehood.

  Despite its progressive promises, the Northwest Ordinance was actually quite reactionary and anti-populist. Its proposal for garrison governments with authoritarian leadership for the new Western colonies resembled nothing so much as those failed seventeenth-century English efforts at establishing military governments over the obstreperous colonists. The ordinance was in fact an indication of just how much of a problem democracy had become in the 1780s and how fearful Eastern leaders had become of the unruly Westerners.

  THE NEARLY ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND Indians who occupied the trans-Appalachian West had very different ideas from the white Americans about how the land ought to be used.56 Nothing preoccupied the Federalist administration more than having to deal with these native peoples.

  At the end of the seventeenth century perhaps as many as 1.4 million Indians had inhabited the North American continent, with a quarter of a million or so occupying the territory east of the Mississippi; but since that time disease and warfare had drastically reduced their numbers.57 By the end of the eighteenth century most of the Indians in New England seemed to have vanished; many had intermarried with whites or blacks and had lost much of their tribal identity. In New York many Indians had migrated into Canada, and only remnants were left in the state from the once formidable Six Nations of the Iroquois.58 But in the Northwest there remained a variety of native peoples who were willing to fight to preserve their hunting grounds and their way of life. These included Delawares and Wyandots in what is now eastern and central Ohio, Shawnees in western Ohio and northern Indiana, Mingos, who had villages at Sandusky, and the great northern tribes of Ottawa and Chippewa, some of whom hunted south of Lake Erie. Farther west along the Wabash River were Miami bands of Wea and Piankashaw, and, finally, there were various tribes of the Illinois in Indiana. On the Southern frontiers the Indian presence was even more formidable. From the Carolinas to the Yazoo River were some fourteen thousand warriors, mainly Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws.

  For decades the colonists had continually tried to draw lines between themselves and the Indians, offering them bribes to surrender more and more of their lands as they relentlessly pushed them westward. Many of these native peoples believed that they could move no further and were increasingly determined to fight to protect their dwindling hunting grounds. Over the succeeding decades the Indians, with the support of the borderland European powers of Great Britain and Spain, sought to resist the persistent expansion westward of white Americans.59

  Although many whites admired the Indians for their freedom, the Anglo-American idea of liberty and independence was very different from theirs. Where ordinary white American men conceived of freedom in terms of owning their own plot of cultivated agricultural land, Indian males saw liberty in terms of their ability to roam and hunt at will. Like many American gentry, these Indian warriors did not believe they should actually work tilling fields. They thought, as one missionary to the Oneida reported in 1796, that “to labour in cultivating the Earth is degrading to the character of Man ‘who (they say) was made for War & hunting & holding councils & that Squaws & hedge-hogs are made to scratch the ground.’ “Native women in fact performed a wide variety of tasks. They grew vegetables, gathered nuts and berries, prepared meat, cut firewood, carried water, made shoes and clothing, and often erected and furnished their houses. So backbreaking was the labor the native women performed for their families that white Americans could only conclude that Indian women were virtual slaves. Indeed, the notion of women farming seemed so unnatural to many European Americans that Northerners at least had a hard time acknowledging that the Indians practiced any agriculture at all.60

  Ultimately, this denial that the Indians actually cultivated the land became the white Americans’ justification for taking it from them. Drawing from the legal thinking of the sixteenth-century theorist Emmerich de Vattel, political leaders maintained that no people had a right to land that they did not farm. This was one of the most important of the cultural misunderstandings that divided white Americans from the native peoples. Whites expected Indians to become farmers, that is, to move to another stage in the process of social development and become civilized, or to get out of the way of the white settlers.61

  The achievement of American independence from Great Britain had been a disaster for the Indians. Many of the tribes in the Northwest and Southwest had allied with the British, and with the peace treaty they discovered that Great Britain had ceded sovereignty over their land to the United States. As one Wea speaker complained to their British ally upon learning of the treaty, “In endeavouring to assist you, it seems we have wrought our own ruin.”62 Because so many of the Indians had fought on the side of the British, Americans tended to regard as enemies even those Indians who had been their allies during the Revo
lution. By the 1780s many Western Americans shared the expectation of the Indian fighter George Rogers Clark that all the Indians would eventually be eliminated. A common view was, as one military toast on the frontier put it, “Civilization or death to all American savages.”63

  Conceiving itself as a composite of different peoples, the British Empire could somehow accommodate the existence of the Indians within its territory. But the new American Republic was different: it contained only citizens who presumably were all equal to one another. Since the United States could scarcely imagine the Indians as citizens equal to all other American citizens, it had to regard the various Indian peoples as members of foreign nations with which treaties had to be negotiated. Of course, most of the Indians themselves had no desire to become citizens of the American Republic.

  In the 1780s the Confederation government had sought to assume control of Indian affairs and to establish peaceful relations with the Indians. Although the Confederation Congress repeatedly spoke of its desire to be just and fair with the Indians, it considered them as conquered nations. In several treaties between the Confederation government and some of the various nations or tribes in the mid-1780s, the United States attempted to establish more or less fixed boundary lines between whites and Indians in return for Indian cessions of rights to land. In the Southwest in a series of treaties with the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws at Hopewell, South Carolina, in 1785–1786, the Confederation attempted to fix boundaries in order to head off hostilities between the Indians and the states of North Carolina and Georgia. In treaties dealing with the Northwest Territory the Indians abandoned their rights to what is now eastern and southern Ohio. In the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 spokesmen for the Six Nations ceded all their claims to land west of Niagara. At Fort McIntosh on the Ohio in 1785 delegates from the Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Ottawa agreed to be confined north of the Ohio River. And at Fort Finney in 1786 representatives of the Shawnee ceded their rights to lands east of the Great Miami River. Believing that America owned the lands by right of conquest, the United States offered the Indians no compensation for the ceded lands.

  The Confederation government, however, was weak, and the states could ignore its treaties. Not only did the states go ahead and make their own agreements with the Indians, but white settlers and squatters continued to move onto lands presumably reserved for the native peoples. By 1787 many of the Indians had repudiated the treaties some of their members had been compelled to sign and attempted to form loose confederations in order to resist the white advance. At the same time, they continued to raid white settlements up and down the frontier.

  With the creation of the new federal government in 1789 President Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox were determined to change the government’s policy in the West. Not only were growing numbers of scattered squatter communities north of the Ohio undermining the government’s plans for gradual and well-regulated settlement of the West, but they were also stirring up warfare with the Indians into which the federal government would inevitably be drawn. And a general war with the Indians would be both inhumane and costly.

  As early as 1783 Washington had noted that there was “nothing to be obtained by an Indian War but the soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expense.”64 Since peace in the West seemed essential to getting the new nation on its feet, the Washington administration aimed to return to the colonial practice of purchasing the Indians’ land instead of claiming it by right of conquest. At the same time, the administration sought to save the Indians in the West from the kind of extinction that seemed to have occurred with most Indians in the East.

  The administration’s intentions could scarcely have been more enlightened—at least for the enlightened eighteenth century. “The Indians being the prior occupants possess the right of the Soil,” declared Knox, who assumed responsibility for Indian affairs because Secretary of State Jefferson had not yet arrived from Paris. “It cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by the right of Conquest in case of a just War—To dispossess them on any other principle would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a nation.” Outright coercion and the elimination of the natives by war, said Knox, would be prohibitively expensive, and “the blood and injustice” involved “would stain the character of the nation.” Thus, he concluded, “both policy and justice unite” in dictating negotiation, not war, between the United States and the Indians.65 The various tribes should be treated as foreign nations, and not as subjects of any particular state. The states, said Knox, had rights to land within their existing boundaries, but only the federal government could acquire the land of the Western territories and negotiate “treaties on the execution or violation of which depend peace or war.” With such treaties the United States could both compensate the Indians for the lands they gave up and protect them in the lands they still retained.66

  But the administration aimed to do more. Knox proposed a radical policy, which he hoped would prevent the Western Indians from vanishing. “How different would be the sensations of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population,” the American colonists had behaved differently. If only we white Americans “had imparted our Knowledge of cultivation, and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country,” then the “future life and happiness” of the Indians might have been “preserved and extended.” But in the past we thought it “impracticable to civilize the Indians of North America,” an opinion, Knox added, “probably more convenient than just.” Americans now lived in an enlightened age, however, and “the civilization of the Indians,” though difficult, could be achieved. To deny the possibility, said Knox, was to suppose that the Indians’ character was incapable of amelioration—” a supposition entirely contradicted by the progress of society from the barbarous ages to its present degree of perfection.”67

  In other words, the Indians could save themselves by giving up their culture and becoming farmers like the whites. The progress of history, moving to a higher stage of civilization, demanded it. You can be taught, Knox informed the Indians, “to cultivate the earth, and raise corn; to raise oxen, sheep, and other domestic animals; to build comfortable houses, and to educate your children.” Thus the “savages” might be able to leap right into the third stage of social development. If they did not abandon hunting and gathering and become civilized, explained General Benjamin Lincoln of Massachusetts, they would “dwindle and moulder away, from causes perhaps imperceptible to us, until the whole race shall become extinct.” American civilization “from its very nature must operate to the extirpation of barbarism. . . . Civilized and uncivilized people cannot live in the same territory, or even in the same neighborhood.”68

  Although by today’s standards it was a perverse and ethnocentric policy, by the most liberal standards of the eighteenth century it was the only realistic alternative to the Indians’ outright removal or destruction. For better or for worse, this was the policy that governed the best and most philanthropic of American thinking about the Indians for the next generation.

  The first Indian treaty to be ratified by the U.S. Senate was negotiated with a Creek chief named Alexander McGillivray, an educated “half-breed” who was as worldly and wily as anyone on the frontier. When McGillivray and twenty-six chiefs arrived in New York in the summer of 1790 they were greeted with the largest crowd since the president’s inauguration. Weeks of official dinners and ceremonies more lavish than anything European diplomats ever received were followed by an elaborate signing ceremony. According to an account kept by the feminist writer Judith Sargent Murray, the Creek chiefs, who had entered Federal Hall with “shrieks and yells, . . . ardently expressed their satisfaction” with the treaty by seizing the elbow of the president, who was dressed “in rich vestments of purple satin,” and entwining their arms with his.

  In the treaty the Creeks ceded two-thirds of the land cl
aimed by Georgia but received in return a federal guarantee of sovereign control of the rest. In secret clauses of the treaty McGillivray received a trade monopoly and a position as agent of the United States with the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army and an annual salary of $1,200. Washington backed up the treaty with a proclamation forbidding any encroachment on the Creeks’ territory. But a corrupt Georgia legislature undid both the president’s proclamation and the Treaty of New York. As early as January 1790, six months before the treaty was signed, it had announced the sale to speculators, calling themselves the Yazoo companies, of over fifteen million acres of land belonging to the Creeks. Before the bribed Georgia legislators were done doling out many more millions of acres, which included most of presentday Alabama and Mississippi, they had created the greatest real estate scandal in American history. The consequences of this outrageous land deal reverberated through the next three presidential administrations.69

  The Yazoo land sale was a barefaced assertion of state sovereignty that undermined both the treaty with the Creeks and the federal government’s claim to exercise sole authority over Indian affairs. Indeed, the administration’s high-minded Indian policy was in shambles. Although the policy had the advantage of easing the consciences of those who supported it, it was totally out of touch with the realities on the Western frontier. White settlers in the West had no intention of accommodating the Indians, and they continued to push westward by the tens of thousands. As hostilities with the native peoples became increasingly fierce, the settlers called on the federal government for protection. Washington realized that unless the government stepped in with military force to stop the indiscriminate raiding and counter-raiding by whites and Indians, the entire West, especially the Northwest, would erupt in a general Indian war.