I tell entering graduate students that the first thing an aspiring historian should do is “Make friends; you will need them.” The friends who advised, corrected, and encouraged me during this project (in addition to those already mentioned) include Colin Calloway, Claudio Saunt, Patrick Wolfe, Paul Rosier, Harvey Markowitz, Theda Perdue, R. David Edmunds, David Wilkins, David Beck, and Peter Nabokov. Two others—Alexandra “Sasha” Harmon at the University of Washington and Christian McMillen at the University of Virginia—deserve special thanks for reading and offering trenchant criticisms of the entire manuscript. Finally, I am grateful to James Merrell, who encouraged me to write a “big book” about American Indian political activists, and to Laura Stickney and Scott Moyers, my editors at Penguin Press, who have prodded me to enliven my prose. They and the tireless Emily Graff shepherded the project through the many steps leading to final publication. In addition, Rolly Woodyatt supplied expert proofreading. Despite all this terrific advice, I alone am responsible for the final product, including any errors it might contain.
My wife, Holly, has listened to the ideas embedded in this book for many years. She has never failed to identify the false notes and windy asides. She has always had a keen eye for the central story. If the story here makes sense and seems important, it is because Holly has long been my guide in the task of separating the significant from the insignificant, a skill she brings to our life together every day. This book is dedicated to our four sons in gratitude for the many years when they have been my favorite audience, my best fans, and my loving companions; my peeps. Thanks, boys.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Tee-Hit Ton Indians v. U.S., 348 U.S. 272 (1955), 289.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Richard Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper, 1965). Leonard J. Sadosky places this moment in the broader history of diplomacy both in and about North America in Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). For a popular recounting of these events, see also Thomas Fleming, The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival After Yorktown (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
2. J. Leitch Wright, Britain and the American Frontier, 1783–1815 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 2.
3. Colin G. Calloway, The Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3.
4. Speech of Major Walls to the Shawnees, July 7, 1783, Frederick Haldimand Papers, 21779:117, Reel 54. See also Colin G. Calloway, “Suspicion and Self Interest: The British Indian Alliance and the Peace of Paris,” Historian v. 48, n. 1 (November 1985), 41–60, especially 49–52.
5. Brant used this expression in a letter to the British Indian agent John Johnson at the end of 1781. See Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant (1743–1807): A Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 336.
6. Assembly and Brant quoted in Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground (New York: Knopf, 2006), 113; Declaration of Joseph Brant included with Allan McLean (Fort Niagara commander) to Frederick Haldimand, May 18, 1783, Frederick Haldimand Papers, 21756:138–40, Reel 39.
7. Quoted in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 340.
8. Marvin L. Brown, Jr., trans., Baroness von Riedesel and the American Revolution: Journal and Correspondence of a Tour of Duty, 1776–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 122. For a description of the Indians’ victories in the West after Yorktown, see Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 14.
9. Quoted in Kelsay, Brant, 339.
10. Frederick Haldimand to Lord North, November 27, 1783, 21717: 178, Reel 21. See also Robert Berkhofer, “Barrier to Settlement: British Indian Policy in the Old Northwest, 1783–1794,” in The Frontier in American Development, ed. David M. Ellis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 249–76.
11. Declaration of Joseph Brant.
12. Edward J. Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 71–72, 262–63.
13. Thomas Brown to Lord Sidney, May 20, 1784, Frederick Haldimand Papers, Folder 29, Gilcrease Institute.
14. Quoted in Calloway, The Revolution in Indian Country, 276.
15. McGillivray to O’Neill, March 10, 1783; O’Neill to Ezpeleta, October 19, 1873, in John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 61, 62, 63.
16. Louis Sadosky discusses the political background to this diplomatic maneuver in Revolutionary Negotiations, 93–118, though his discussion of the Paris maneuvering is quite brief: 116–18. For an English perspective on the European context for the peace negotiations, see Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (New York: Penguin, 2007).
17. For a discussion of the size of the Loyalist group, see Wright, Britain and the American Frontier, 4–5.
18. John Jay, one of the American representatives at the peace negotiations in Paris, rejected any compensation for Loyalist “cut throats.” Morris, The Peacemakers, 369.
19. Robert Rhodes Crout, “In Search of a Just and Lasting Peace: The Treaty of 1783, Louis XVI, Vergennes, and the Regeneration of the Realm,” International History Review, v. 5, n. 3 (1983), 374.
20. Vergennes to Gerard, March 29, 1778, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, ed. Francis Wharton (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), v. II, 524.
21. American Memorial to Spain, March 8, 1778; Duke de Grimaldi to Congress, March 8, 1778; Arthur Lee to Grimaldi, March 17, 1778; Benjamin Franklin to Conde de Aranda (Spanish ambassador to Paris), April 17, 1777, in Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, v. II, 282, 290, 304.
22. See John Fisher, Commercial Relations Between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778–1796 (Liverpool: Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, 1985), 9–15, 46, 47.
For more on the eighteenth-century Spanish Empire, see Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 33–47; and Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 19.
23. Fisher, Commercial Relations, 9.
24. Quoted in David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 267. For more on Spanish motives in their alliance with the Americans, see Jane M. Berry, “The Indian Policy of Spain in the Southwest, 1783–1795,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, v. 3, n. 4 (March 1917), 463. Spain’s strategic concerns only increased in 1780, when the two-year Tupac Amaru revolt began in highland Peru and Bolivia. See Adelman, Sovereignty, 50. The Spanish ambassador in Paris, who was intimately involved with the American peace negotiators in 1782, later wrote his superiors that his government had been mistaken in joining a war that was “opposed to our own interests.” Quoted in Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 346.
25. John Adams to Congress, June 2, 1780, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, v. III, 782–83.
26. Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), v. I, 5.
27. See Fleming, Perils of Peace, 134–53; North is quoted on p. 100.
28. Montmorin to Vergennes, March 30, 1782, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, v. 288.
29. Journals of the Continental Congress v. 16, 115.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 116.
32. Robert Livingston to Benjamin Franklin, January 7, 1782, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Ellen Cohen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), v. 36, 390, 394.
33. Shelburne to Franklin, April 6, 1782, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence, v. 536.
34. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), v. 37, 184–90.
35. Franklin to John Jay, April 24, 1782, Franklin Papers, v. 7, 206–7.
36. Ibid., v. 37, 186.
37. Harlow, Founding of the Second British Empire, 316–19.
38. John Jay: The Winning of the Peace: Unpublished Papers, 1708–1784, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 238.
39. “Boundary Discussions Between Jay and Aranda,” reprinted in ibid., 270, 272.
40. Ibid., 274.
41. See ibid., 275–76.
42. Rayneval to Jay, September 6, 1782; ibid., 229–30. The Rayneval memorandum is reprinted here, 330–33. See also Bemis, “The Rayneval Memo,” 15–92.
43. Quoted in Morris, The Peacemakers, 367.
44. Haldimand to John Johnson, April 12, 1784, 21723-65-66, Reel 23, Haldimand Papers. Haldimand’s support for Brant is clear in a letter to John Johnson, dated March 23, 1784, Frederick Haldimand Papers, Folder 28, Gilcrease Institute. For a description of Brant’s extensive travels during 1784 and 1785, see Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 352–78.
45. Brant’s 1785–86 visit to England is described in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 379–393; Sydney’s letter is quoted on page 392. This visit may have been the last time Brant could present himself as a spokesperson for all the crown’s Indian allies. Soon after his return to Canada, an attack by Kentucky militia on Shawnee villages in Ohio caused the local confederacy to relocate its headquarters at Brownstown, near Detroit. By 1787 British commanders were dealing directly with these western tribes, bypassing Brant. See Willig, Restoring, 18–30.
46. Because of the American-Spanish alliance, the Mississippi had been open to American shipping during the war. See Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Spanish American Frontier, 1783–1795 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 8, 10–12, 68–69.
47. McGillivray to O’Neil, January 1, 1784, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 64–66. See O’Neil to Miró, February 17, 1784, ibid., 71.
48. The text of the treaty is reprinted in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 75–76, and Miró’s appointment letter, dated June 7, 1784, is at page 77. McGillivray’s central role in immediate postwar politics along the southern frontier is discussed in Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review, v. 112, n. 3 (June 2007), 778–79.
49. The bloody massacre of Christian Delawares in Ohio in the spring of 1783 was a harbinger of the bloodshed and invasion American settlers were soon to unleash on the Indian communities on their borders. For a discussion of this event and its significance, see Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008), 263–91.
50. Haldimand to John Johnson, April 12, 1784.
CHAPTER TWO
1. For the American defeat in Ohio, see Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). Despite the high-profile ceremonies accompanying it, the Treaty of New York was controversial in Creek country. See Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An excellent overview of this complex landscape can be found in David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
2. The frontier dwellers’ animosity is well described in Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2007).
3. Jefferson quoted in Anthony F. C. Wallace, Thomas Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78. For an overview of the Americans’ motives for the conciliatory diplomacy of the 1790s, see Leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 157–63. For an overview of Indian policy in the early years of the American Republic, see also Reginald Horsman, “The Indian Policy of an ‘Empire of Liberty,’” in Native Americans in the Early Republic, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 37–53.
4. For a discussion of intermarriage between white traders and Indian women, see Theda Perdue, “A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary: Intermarriage Between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth Century South,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Etheridge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 165–78. For McLean, see Francis P. Weisenburger, The Life of John McLean: A Politician on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ohio State University Studies, Contributions in History and Political Science, no. 15 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1937).
5. James McDonald to Thomas L. McKenney, April 25, 1826, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881 (hereafter LR-OIA), Reel 169.
6. Greg O’Brien estimates that there were fifteen to twenty thousand Choctaws living in three communities in what is now Mississippi at the close of the American Revolution. See Greg O’Brien, ed., Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 126. Theda Perdue and Michael Green estimate the Cherokee population at the time of removal to have been “approximately 17,000.” See The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Penguin, 2007), 119.
7. For a description of Choctaw and southeastern Indian diplomacy and treaty making in the late eighteenth century, see Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boufouka, Nogales and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791–1795 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), especially chapter 3, “Forging Diplomatic Paths,” 25–44. The events at Hopewell have also been described by Greg O’Brien in “The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries on the Post-revolutionary Southern Frontier,” Pre-removal Choctaw History, 148–82; and David Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages, 50–52.
8. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 118, 123.
9. For an overview of late-eighteenth-century diplomacy in the Southeast from the perspective of the Spanish Empire, see David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 214–17. In 1787 Taboca visited Philadelphia, where he met George Washington and other American leaders. See O’Brien, Pre-removal Choctaw History, 169. See also Galloway, “The Chief Who Is Your Father,” 272.
10. See O’Brien, Pre-removal Choctaw History, 58, for a description of the closing ceremony. See also “Choctaw Negotiations with the United States at Hopewell, South Carolina, 1785–1786, Journal Kept by General Joseph Martin. . . ,” in O’Brien, Pre-removal Choctaw History, 243.
11. Treaty with the Choctaw, January 3, 1785, 7 Stat., 21.
12. “Report on the Northwestern Indians, June 15, 1789,” in Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed., ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 12.
13. North Callahan, Henry Knox: General Washington’s General (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 330–35. See also Whitaker, The Spanish-American Frontier, 138; and Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages, 106–12, 118–24.
14. Article IV, Treaty of Greenville, 7 Stat 49, August 3, 1795. The retreat of British forces in Ohio had been made clear to the region’s Indian leaders the previous summer, when the crown refused to resupply their forces after they had been driven from the field at the battle of Fallen Timbers. For a summary of the Greenville negotiations, see Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages, 171–76.
&
nbsp; 15. While the Louisiana Purchase had a dramatic impact on western settlement, tensions in the region had eased considerably eight years earlier, when the United States and Spain negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo. That agreement ended the dispute over West Florida’s northern boundary and guaranteed Americans the right to “deposit” their goods in New Orleans.
16. See Jefferson to the Senate of the United States, January 15, 1808; and Treaty of Limits Between the United States of America and the Choctaw Nation of Indians, November 16, 1805. American State Papers (Washington, D.C.: Gale and Seator, 1832), 748–49 (hereafter ASP). The complex story behind this agreement is told in Anna Lewis, Chief Pushmataha, American Patriot (New York: Exposition Press, 1959), 51–56. On Jefferson’s departure from his predecessors on the issue of Indian land tenure, see Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages, 191–202.
17. Thomas L. McKenney, Memoirs: Official and Personal (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 110. See Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974), 40–41.
18. Quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 41.
19. Ibid., 44.
20. John C. Calhoun to Henry Clay, Niles Weekly Register (hereafter NWR), January 22, 1820.
21. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 44, 45; McKenney, Memoirs, 110–11. For more on Carnahan, see Frederick Webb Hodge, “Indtroduction,” in Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, Indian Tribes of North America (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1933-34).
22. McKenney, Memoirs, 115–16. It is difficult to credit all the details of McKenney’s retrospective account of McDonald’s Washington years. I have relied on Herman Viola’s analysis of McKenney’s account and have tried to use McDonald’s own words whenever possible rather than statements attributed to him by self-interested third parties. It is also clear that McDonald did not “qualify for the bar” when he left Ohio in 1823; he returned there four years later to complete his studies.
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