The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Washington is the “father of the nation,” and he assumed the role of “great father” to Indian people as well. Yet the Iroquois called him “Town Destroyer,” and with justification. This book acknowledges these contradictions, but its goal is neither to demonize Washington nor to debunk him as an icon of republican virtue.45 Washington’s dealings with Indian people and their land do him little credit, but on the other hand his achievement in creating a nation from a fragile union of states is more impressive when we appreciate the power and challenges his Indian world presented. The purpose is to show how Washington’s life, like the lives of so many of his contemporaries, was inextricably linked to Native America, a reality we have forgotten as our historical hindsight has separated Indians and early Americans so sharply, and prematurely, into winners and losers.

  George Washington dominates the formative events of American nation-building like no one else. He commanded the Continental Army that secured American independence, he presided over the convention that framed the Constitution of the United States, and he was the nation’s first president, serving two terms and setting the bar by which all subsequent presidents have been measured in terms of moral character and political wisdom.46 Ignoring or excluding Native America from Washington’s life, like excluding it from the early history of the nation, contributes to the erasure of Indians from America’s past and America’s memory. It also diminishes our understanding of Washington and his world. Restoring Indian people and Indian lands to the story of Washington goes a long way toward restoring them to their proper place in America’s story.

  With the exception of his expeditions in the Ohio Valley during the French and Indian War, the key events of Washington’s life occur in the East—Mount Vernon, Philadelphia, Yorktown. But Washington’s involvement with the West was lifelong, and he consistently looked to western land for his own personal fortune and for the nation’s future. Securing Indian country as a national resource was essential to national consolidation and expansion, and few people knew more about securing Indian land than he did.

  In one of the most iconic images in American history, Washington stands resolutely in the prow of a boat facing east. Emanuel Leutze’s epic 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, captures a pivotal moment during the War of Independence. After a string of demoralizing defeats and with the rebel army on the verge of disintegration, the Revolution faced its darkest hour. Then, on Christmas night 1776, Washington led what was left of his army in a daring and desperate attack. In the teeth of a storm, they crossed the ice-clogged Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and roundly defeated a garrison of Hessian soldiers at Trenton. A week later, they defeated a British force at Princeton. The Revolution, for the moment, was saved, and the twin victories breathed life into a cause that had seemed lost.47 After he died, Washington achieved almost godlike status as the savior of the Revolution and the father of the Republic.

  But the Revolution was not only a war for independence and a new political order; it was also a war for the North American continent. Washington and the emerging nation faced west as well as east. If Washington did resemble a god, he perhaps most resembled the Roman Janus. Depicted with two faces, looking in opposite directions, Janus was not “two-faced” in the modern, negative sense of the term as duplicitous. As the god of passages and transitions, beginnings and endings, he looked simultaneously to the past and to the future. As America’s god of the passage from colony to nation, Washington looked east to the past and west to the future. And when he faced west, he faced Indian country.

  This is not another biography of Washington, but it employs a biographical framework to show how Native America shaped the life of the man who shaped the nation. Tracing Washington’s life through the Indian world of his time, and revealing the multiple points where his life intersected with, affected, and was affected by Indian people, Indian lands, and Indian affairs, offers an unfamiliar but more complete telling of what some would say is the American story.

  PART ONE

  Learning Curves

  Chapter 1

  Virginia’s Indian Country

  In notes on the state of virginia, published in 1787, Thomas Jefferson portrayed the colony at the time of first English settlement 180 years before as a country full of Indians. About forty different tribes occupied the region, the most powerful being the Powhatans, Mannahoacs, and Monacans. The Powhatan chiefdom south of the Potomac River consisted of at least thirty tribes and covered about eight thousand square miles. Jefferson calculated their population to have been about 8,000 people, of whom 2,400 were warriors. In characteristic Jefferson fashion, he listed the various tribes in a table, arranged by confederacy and geographic region. He provided population estimates when the English first arrived and again in 1669, when the Virginia Assembly attempted a head count. By then “spirituous liquors, the small pox, war, and an abridgment of territory … had committed terrible havoc among them,” cutting their numbers by two-thirds. (Other estimates suggest that war, diseases, and migrations produced population collapses of 80 percent in some areas, from perhaps 20,000 to about 1,800.1) Their subsequent history was one of further rapid declension, as Chickahominies, Mattaponis, Pamunkeys, Nottaways, and other peoples were reduced to handfuls or migrated to the Susquehanna Valley or southern Piedmont.2 For Jefferson, who was primarily interested in Indian land, languages, and antiquities, the indigenous inhabitants of Virginia were a memory, Virginia’s Indian country a thing of the past.

  In fact, there were multiple dimensions to Virginia’s Indian world. By the time Washington was born in 1732, the colony recognized and dealt with three broad categories of Indian people. The first comprised Indians in the Tidewater region, who were few in number, no longer lived in tribal communities, and were increasingly swallowed up in the sea of black faces that constituted the lowest echelon of Virginian society. They lived and worked in colonial society as servants, slaves, or free persons, and came under the colony’s jurisdiction often without being specifically identified as Indians. Surviving enclaves of tribes that had been defeated in the wars of the previous century constituted a second category of “tributary Indians” living under colonial jurisdiction. They made annual tributes of furs and skins, while the colony appointed their leaders and passed laws that curtailed their lives and defined their status, sometimes lumping them together with blacks and mulattoes. These tributary groups, said the governor of Virginia half a dozen years before Washington was born, were “inconsiderable, and withal so divided among themselves that they seem rather to want our protection, than to seek to give us any umbrage.”3

  That was not the case with the more distant groups, a third category Virginians called “foreign Indians.”4 Virginians who pushed beyond the Appalachian Mountains entered an Indian world where the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, and others presented a varied and formidable array of indigenous power. Virginia by 1732 had defeated and dispossessed the Indian inhabitants to secure its hold on the Tidewater region, but like other European colonies it existed on the outskirts of a vast Indian continent. It would take most of Washington’s lifetime for Virginia and then the United States to secure the western territories Virginia claimed by virtue of its colonial charter. The still-powerful “foreign nations” were the Indian peoples who most affected Washington’s life.

  like other english colonies in North America, Virginia was established and built on Indian land. Simply put, the king of England claimed the land by right of discovery and granted an enormous swath of territory to the colony—actually as far as the “California Sea,” although no one quite knew where that was. The colonial government then doled out grants of land, which speculators, surveyors, and settlers divided into parcels and property. Indian people were dispossessed and their rights of occupancy extinguished by war, deeds, and treaties.5 The process of converting Indian homelands into Virginian real estate was well under way by the time of Washington’s birth.

  In 1607 the Virginia Com
pany, a private enterprise chartered by King James I to establish “a Colonie of sondrie of our people into that parte of America commonly called Virginia,” built a small outpost on the James River, then known as the Powhatan River.6 The company expected to generate profits for its investors, but the colonists, arriving in a period of severe drought, suffered from hunger, malnutrition, and typhus. Half died in the first winter, about 80 percent in the next winter; some of those who survived, we now know, did so by resorting to cannibalism. The rest depended on the local Indians and their food. In The History and Present State of Virginia, printed in 1705, the historian Robert Beverley described the bounty of resources the Indian inhabitants enjoyed “without the Curse of Industry” before English settlement diminished their land and restricted their subsistence. They hunted deer, elk, buffalo, turkeys, ducks, and other fowl; gathered fruits and nuts; harvested vast quantities of fish with ease; and grew watermelons, pumpkins, winter and summer squash, gourds, peas, beans, potatoes (which were “nothing like” English and Irish potatoes in shape, color, or taste), tobacco, and corn. “This Indian Corn was the Staff of Food, upon which the Indians did ever depend.”7 English colonists came to depend on it as well.

  The tiny English settlement nestled on the edge of an Indian world. The Algonquian-speaking Powhatans dominated the coastal plain south of the Potomac River. A dozen or more Indian nations, perhaps five thousand to seven thousand people, lined the banks of the Potomac and its tributaries, and the area from the Potomac to the Rappahannock—what became known later as the Northern Neck of Virginia—was the most heavily populated area of the Chesapeake Bay. North of the Potomac lived the Piscataways and other Alqonquian peoples; at the head of Chesapeake Bay and in the Susquehanna Valley lived the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks. The Indian world shaped the colonial Virginia world that replaced it. The English settled where Indians had settled, operated along existing patterns of exchange, and followed indigenous routes in making connections with other parts of America.8

  At first the Powhatans watched the English and waited. Despite their firearms and metal weapons, the strangers were clearly inept in their new environment and seemed to pose little threat. The paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, whom the English called Powhatan, presided over thirty-two lesser chiefdoms, about 150 towns, and a population of some fourteen thousand.9 He commanded tribute from subordinate tribes, controlled the distribution of sources, conducted foreign policy, and enjoyed revered status as an intermediary with the spirit world. Powhatan saw the newcomers as potential allies and extended gifts of corn to them. He appears to have attempted to bring the English leader Captain John Smith under his wing as another werowance (subordinate chieftain), even as Smith presumed to make Powhatan a subject of King James I. During the early years of the colony, the Powhatans and the English adjusted to each other’s presence, and each made efforts to impose their ways on the other.10 Tensions increased as the colonists secured their toehold and flexed their muscles. Sporadic fighting broke out when the English began to push up the James River, took hostages, and seized supplies of corn. Some Indians believed they were “a people come from under the world to take their world from them,” one chief told Smith. “We perceive and well know that you intend to destroy us.”11

  Conflict between Europeans and Indians is often depicted as a clash between farmers and hunters, but in the Potomac Valley, as in many other areas, it was a clash between farmers and farmers. The English grew many of the same crops as their Indian neighbors, adopted similar agricultural techniques, preferred the same soils, and grazed their livestock where Indians hunted deer and other game. But, unlike Indians, English farmers sought to transform the environment into a world of fields and fences.12 It was a transformation that left little space for Indian subsistence cycles and seasonal mobility or, ultimately, for Indian people. The intermediary efforts of Powhatan’s famous daughter, Pocahontas—who married the colonist John Rolfe and traveled to England, where she died in 1617—could not avert a collision between two cultures competing for the same fertile lands. In 1618 there were 400 English people in Virginia; four years later there were about 1,240. They needed the Indians’ lands, and, since most opted to plant tobacco for profit rather than plant enough corn for food, they continued to depend on Indians’ corn, acquired through trade or force if necessary.13 As Englishmen endeavored to establish dominion in Virginia, they not only claimed Indian lands for the Crown but also attempted to impose their Christianity and forms of property, gender, and social organization on Indian peoples. They invoked the Indians’ cultural resistance as justification for dispossession: people who refused religion and civilization had no right to the land.14 It was a policy and a mindset not unlike that which a future first president and a new nation would adopt.

  Powhatan died in 1618. In 1622 his brother Opechancanough led a brutal war against the aggressive infant colony. Early one spring morning, Indians attacked English settlements along the banks of the James River, killing people, burning houses, and destroying livestock. At least a quarter of the English colonists died. The colonists responded with scorched-earth tactics, and the conflict dragged on for years. But whereas Virginia became a royal colony and continued to grow in the 1620s and 1630s, war and disease took their toll on the Indians. By 1640 the English population had passed eight thousand; the Indian population had probably dropped below five thousand.15

  After the war of 1622, a new class of leaders came to dominate the colony. Under Governor Sir Francis Wyatt, they dominated the Council of State at Jamestown, replaced the stockholders of the Virginia Company as the major policy makers, and developed aggressive new policies for dealing with Indians, warring against those they perceived as enemies, trading with those they saw as allies. “In so doing,” observes the historian J. Frederick Fausz with a glance ahead to George Washington’s eventual leadership style, “they established the earliest model of the frontier elite—high status gentlemen who combined military, political, social, and economic leadership, merged public service with profitable private interests, and integrated aristocratic formality with popular familiarity.” And their brutal campaigns against Indians earned them respect and following among the “lower-born.” After the founding of Maryland in 1634, Virginians competed with their colonial rivals to the north for control of the Indian trade, and some of the first men to settle along the Northern Neck of Virginia did so in order to trade with the Susquehannock Indians.16

  The Powhatans lost territory steadily. Opechancanough’s second assault on Virginia in 1644 killed more than four hundred colonists, but it was a final act of defiant desperation. The English regrouped and retaliated. The aged and feeble Opechancanough was taken as a prisoner to Jamestown, where an English soldier killed him. The Indians sued for peace in 1646, and the subsequent treaty reduced the surviving members of the Powhatan chiefdom to tributary status. They agreed to pay the governor “twenty beaver skins att the going away of Geese yearly” as tribute. Their leaders had to be approved by English officials, and they were to serve as scouts and allies if needed. Now firmly in possession of coastal Virginia, the English expelled Indians from colonial settlements. They established a boundary around the perimeter of the colonies that Indians were forbidden to cross unless they wore passport badges or special striped clothing to identify them as messengers. In a pattern Washington would see repeated many times, however, colonial settlers crossed boundary lines and moved onto Indian lands.17 Small reservations—the first in the country—were established at Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and other places. Scores of Indian captives were enslaved.

  After the final defeat of the Powhatan chiefdom, Virginians began shifting from an economy based on frontier trade to one dependent on agriculture, while at the same time they now had access to the extensive trade of the interior, a trade in both skins and slaves that would play a key part in Virginia’s economy and in building the fortunes of families like the Byrds of Westover.18 John Washington, the future president’s great-grandfather, entered t
his world in 1657. Sailing from England, he settled near the Potomac River and made a place for himself in the rough-and-tumble of his new environment, fighting Indians and acquiring land. In 1674 he patented 5,000 acres in what was the traditional homeland of the Doeg Indians. But conflicts between colonists and Doegs threatened his grant: he risked forfeiture if he did not plant and settle it within two years. Like his great-grandson, Washington, a colonel in the Westmoreland County militia, went to war to defend his country and advance his own interests. He was joined by other Virginian militia units under Colonel George Mason, Major Isaac Allerton, Major Richard Lee, and Captain Giles Brent (who was part Indian)—founders of Northern Neck dynasties—and by Maryland troops under Major Thomas Truman. This intercolonial force turned from hunting down Doeg Indians and laid siege to a town of friendly Susquehannock Indians on Piscataway Creek in Maryland, roughly across the Potomac from the land that would later become the Mount Vernon estate. When five Susquehannock chiefs emerged to parley, the militia commanders had them seized, bound, and murdered. Maryland officials later impeached and fined Truman for this “barbarous cruelty”; Governor William Berkeley of Virginia gave Washington a stiff rebuke. The Susquehannocks began calling Washington Conotocarious, meaning “Devourer of Villages” in their Iroquoian language. It was a name his great-grandson would inherit—or at least claim—and then earn in his own right.19