The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  British appreciation of the pivotal power of Native allies during the war diminished once the war was won. The dying General Forbes told his friend General Jeffery Amherst that he had done everything he could to win over the Indians but that it would take a just settlement “to fix them our friends.” Forbes had grown to detest (his word) Indians, but he begged Amherst to “not think triflingly of the Indians or their friendship; … twenty Indians are capable of laying half this province waste, of which I have been an eye witness.”18 It was advice Amherst chose to ignore.

  At the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France gave up its North American empire, ceding everything east of the Mississippi to Britain. (Its territory west of the Mississippi went to Spain, to keep it out of British hands.) The West, it seemed, was finally open to British settlement. Indians thought differently. In their view the French had no right to give their country to the English. Never having been conquered by the English or the French, nor subject to their laws, they considered themselves “a free people.”19 The Delaware chief Neetotehelemy or Newcomer said he “was Struck dumb” when he first heard of the Treaty of Paris; the English had grown so powerful it seemed “they would be too Strong for God himself.”20

  British garrisons now occupied posts formerly held by the French. Fort Pitt was ten times the size of Fort Duquesne. When the Indians asked why they were building forts, the English, according to French reports, replied that the Ohio now belonged to them, an answer that caused great uneasiness among the Indians, “who, at heart, have no greater love for the English than for the French.”21 They reminded the British of their promises to bring good trade at good prices once the French were defeated; instead, “penned up like Hogs” with forts all around them, the Indians feared destruction.22 Adding insult to injury, the British terminated gift-giving to Indians—it seemed a logical and necessary way to cut costs after a global war had left the nation bankrupt. Amherst added his own spin. Now the war was over, he saw no reason to supply Indians who would not bother to support their families by hunting if they could do it by begging provisions from the British. Indian Superintendent Sir William Johnson knew it was a mistake but was unable to convince Amherst.23

  In Indian eyes such actions and attitudes constituted a declaration of hostile intentions and a breach of British assurances that they wanted to trade with Indians, not steal their land. Friends and allies gave and received gifts as testimony of their mutual need, generosity, and commitment, and to maintain and refresh good relations. Withholding gifts as colonists were clearing land and redcoats were occupying posts sent a very different message. Indians who came to Fort Pitt voiced their concerns. “All the Indian nations are very Jealous of the English,” a Shawnee chief warned; “they see you have a great many Forts in this Country, and you are not so kind to them as they expected.” The French had been generous; the English were not. Building more forts even though the French were defeated and charging high prices for goods “makes us apt to believe every bad report we hear of your intentions towards Us,” others said.24 Their suspicions were further galvanized by the teachings of a Delaware prophet named Neolin, who attributed the evil ways he saw among Indian people to European goods and religions that corrupted them while alcohol and diseases were destroying them. Neolin preached a message of spiritual and cultural revitalization, telling his followers to separate from the British and return to their own ways.25 When more than 150 people died of an epidemic at Lower Shawnee Town, some said the disease was sent by God.26 War belts circulated through Indian country.

  Washington’s old acquaintance Silver Heels was busy again, carrying messages and gathering information for the English, to whom, said the trader Kenny, he was a firm friend.27 Shingas, who five years before had terrorized the frontier, now had a reputation for treating white people with kindness and generosity, and he and Tamaqua tried to keep the peace they had made. When they were offered a war belt they refused to accept it and “threw it against ye Wall.” But the aged Pisquetomen died a year or so later; Delaware George also died, and Tamaqua returned from a mission to Philadelphia “unwell & not so Cheerful as befor[e].”28 Tamaqua and Shingas could not stop the drift to war.

  The conflict became known as Pontiac’s War, after the Ottawa war chief, but multiple Indian leaders and multiple Indian nations took up arms against the king’s men. Washington’s former guide Guyasuta played a major part, organizing resistance to the imposition of British imperial authority in Indian country.29 In 1761 he carried a red wampum belt to Detroit, where, “under the nose of the British commandant,” he exhorted the Delawares, Shawnees, Ottawas, Hurons, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis to attack British posts.30 Major Henry Gladwin, who took command at Detroit in the summer of 1762, warned Amherst that the Indians were planning to take action to recover their freedom now, rather than wait until the English were more firmly entrenched and made slaves of them.31

  In a series of devastating attacks, the Indians took nine of the fourteen British posts west of the Appalachians and laid siege to Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt; they sent settlers scrambling back east in panic, and they almost destroyed Britain’s hold on the interior of North America. The “sudden Irruption” hit the frontier inhabitants with “as rude a shock” as any they had received during the last war and generated “terrible consternation” all along the frontier, Washington wrote Richard Washington that summer; “confusion and despair prevails in every Quarter.”32 Ohio Indians raided settlements along the Potomac and Greenbrier Rivers while, in a reprise of Virginian strategy after Braddock’s defeat, Adam Stephen and Andrew Lewis commanded the small forts that attempted to protect the frontier.33

  At Fort Pitt, smallpox broke out among the garrison in June. Amherst in July infamously urged Bouquet “to try to Inoculate the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can Serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” but the deed was already done. Three weeks earlier, on June 24, two Delaware chiefs, Turtle Heart and Maumaltee, came to the walls of Fort Pitt and tried to talk the British into surrendering. The trader William Trent, back at the place where he had tried to build a fort in 1754, confided sarcastically to his diary, “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” His company then submitted an invoice for “Sundries got to Replace in kind those which were taken from people in the Hospital to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians.” Turtle Heart and Maumaltee evidently were not infected—they showed up at Fort Pitt again a month later, along with Shingas and other chiefs—but an escaped captive the following year reported that smallpox had been raging among the Indians since the previous spring.34 In August, Bouquet, leading a bedraggled force of Highland soldiers who had survived deadly and disease-ridden campaigns in Cuba and Martinique, fought off an Indian attack at Bushy Run in western Pennsylvania and made it through to relieve Fort Pitt. Like Forbes, Bouquet had learned how to conduct a march through Indian country.35 Pennsylvania resumed paying bounties on the scalps of Indians over ten years of age.36

  The war petered out in a series of agreements rather than a resounding British victory. The Indians returned forts and captives, and the British returned to gift-giving and diplomacy in dealing with the tribes. Guyasuta, Tamaqua, and other chiefs met with Bouquet in peace talks. The Delawares and Shawnees reluctantly agreed to return the white captives they had taken during the recent wars. Many of the captives were even more reluctant to return. Some never did.37

  Washington took no part in Pontiac’s War, but men he knew were in the thick of it, and its repercussions affected his life profoundly. The Indians had waged a war of independence against the British Empire. Their actions at Fort Pitt, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Niagara sent reverberations across the Atlantic and back again, setting in motion a chain of events that would thrust the colonies into another war of independence twelve years later.

  postwar depression aggravated years of falling prices in Virginia’s sole cash crop
, plunging Washington and other tobacco planters into debt. Explaining to friend-in-need Robert Stewart in April 1763 why he could not loan him £400, Washington said he had found his estate in terrible shape when he returned from the war. He had had to buy provisions and stock, build buildings, and purchase additional land and slaves, all of which “swallowed up before I knew where I was, all the money I got by the Marriage, nay more, brought me in Debt.”38 Nevertheless, Washington continued to live the extravagant lifestyle of a Tidewater planter. Sustaining that lifestyle meant selling his tobacco harvest on consignment to merchants in Britain who in turn sold it on the market, provided credit, and purchased the furnishings, clothing, foods, and wine Washington ordered from England, as well as the clothes and tools used by his slaves and other necessities for running a plantation. The London mercantile firm of Robert Cary and Company bought Washington’s goods against the expected profits from sales of his tobacco. But Washington was not the tobacco planter Daniel Parke Custis had been, the depleted soils of Mount Vernon produced poor-quality tobacco, and he was routinely disappointed in the prices his harvest brought. He constantly complained to Cary that his tobacco sold too low, and his goods cost too much, as he struggled to make ends meet as a gentleman planter. The precariousness of Virginia’s tobacco economy intensified planters’ resentment of their dependence on British merchant firms.39 In debt to his London creditors to the tune of almost £2,000, Washington hoped the Peace of Paris would bring a change of fortune and a way out of debt. The West was open, the growing population of the colonies needed land, and settlers were poised to flood across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio Valley. Washington eagerly anticipated “the profits to be made from buying good land cheap.”40

  On June 3, 1763, he joined eighteen other Virginian planters in forming the Mississippi Land Company. They included four Lee brothers, two Fitzhughs, Adam Stephen, Thomas Bullitt, and John Augustine Washington, and many of them were already members of the Ohio Company. Three months later they petitioned the Crown for 2.5 million acres of territory ceded by France at the Treaty of Paris four months earlier. The tract lay between the Ohio and Allegheny, included the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, and embraced land in the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. They asked the Crown to build a fort there to protect the settlement from Indian “insults” and requested twelve years in which to settle the lands “if not interrupted by the savages.” Washington’s timing was unfortunate. The same day he formed the Mississippi Company, Ojibwa warriors seized the British fort at Michilimackinac, setting events in motion that would halt the land sales on which he staked his future.41

  Washington and his associates were not fazed, however. Instead, they invoked the Indian war to promote, rather than postpone, their scheme. The Indians had broken the Treaty of Easton and were murdering His Majesty’s subjects and laying waste to the country. By breaking the treaty that protected their lands west of the Alleghenies, the Indians themselves had “put it in the power of the Crown consistently with Justice, to pursue the political plan of getting that country seated as quickly as possible.” Just a few years earlier Washington had warned Robert Stewart in ominous tones of the terrible consequences should the Cherokees and their neighbors unite against the colonies; now, apparently, “the mild and friendly disposition of the Southern Indians” meant that the Mississippi Company’s proposed settlement could be made sooner and more safely than one farther north, where the warlike Six Nations were certain to obstruct, and perhaps totally prevent, such a settlement for many years to come.42

  The Mississippi Company members adopted a line of argument to which Washington would adhere throughout his life: western expansion was best carried out as an orderly process by placing western land in the hands of men of property. The alternative was to leave things as they were, “when people in numbers that have no property and of bad reputation generally are bursting daily thro’ the bounds of the settled Colonies, and fixing on the Waters of the Ohio, both lawless and useless to their Country.”43 Nothing came of the Mississippi Company, however, but its claims conflicted with the claims of the Ohio Company, to which Washington and the Lees also belonged.44

  Washington had other irons in the fire. In 1763 he joined a group of ten investors, mostly members of the Virginia Assembly, who purchased 40,000 acres of swampland on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. The company proposed to drain and develop the land, and each member provided five slaves to do the work. Nothing came of this scheme either, but Washington held on to his 4,000 acres of swampland until 1795.45 He also shared and promoted “Potomac fever” and began joining organizations for improving navigation on the upper river. In addition, Washington in 1763 expected to acquire a substantial share of the 200,000 acres Dinwiddie had promised to the army that fought in the 1754 campaign, he hoped to benefit from awards of land to British veterans, and he bought into the grant of lands awarded to traders to compensate their losses in Pontiac’s War.46 His portfolio was diverse, and he had a stake in multiple ventures, but Indian actions and imperial reactions jeopardized them all.

  Before the French and Indian War, across large stretches of the frontier, Indians and colonists had rubbed elbows in their daily lives—trading, exchanging news, smoking, eating, and sometimes sleeping together. The war shattered patterns of peaceful coexistence. Now, it seemed, peace required keeping Indians and colonists apart. At a time when American colonists and land speculators like Washington were poised to reap the fruits of victory beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the British government decided to halt colonial expansion at the mountains.47 At a time when Parliament was hoping to reduce troop numbers after the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s War convinced the government that it needed to keep a standing army in America, ten thousand soldiers, almost half of them stationed on the frontier to protect colonists and Indians from each other. Some colonial merchants took advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the presence of the army, but most colonists suspected its purpose was to control rather than defend them. Britain had not maintained a standing army in America when the French threatened the colonies; why do so now when there was no French threat? Redcoats who had been less than impressive in wartime remained to threaten colonists’ property, liberty, and daughters in peacetime. Worse still, the government asked the colonists to help shoulder the hefty financial burden of maintaining the military establishment in North America. British taxpayers were staggering under the costs of a long global war, and British ministers thought it only reasonable that the American colonies should pay their share. In 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a measure that is often considered the first step in the imperial crisis that led to the American Revolution.48

  Pontiac’s War did not create the policy of restricting settlement on Indian land, but it made it urgent. Even before the Treaty of Easton, Sir William Johnson had recommended establishing “clear and fixed Boundaries between our Settlements and their Hunting Grounds.”49 In November 1761 the Board of Trade had urged George III to do something to stop colonists settling on land the Indians had not yet sold. The board called it a “most dangerous Tendency” and pointed out that drawing a western boundary and prohibiting settlement beyond it would also keep American settlers within the British commercial orbit and dependent on British manufactures. The farther west settlers migrated, the more difficult it would be for them to import British goods, and the more tenuous their ties to Britain. Better that they be diverted north to Nova Scotia or south to Florida to help develop those colonies than settle in the interior of the continent beyond the reach of the government.50 Officials in London were already studying proposals to impose a boundary when Pontiac’s War pushed the government into action. On September 16 Lord Halifax, incorporating suggestions from two proposals drafted earlier in the summer, presented his plan to the cabinet. The Earl of Hillsborough, the new president of the Board of Trade, made a few revisions, ran the document by the attorney general, and had it back to Halifax by Octo
ber 4. The Privy Council gave its pro forma approval, and on October 7 the king officially promulgated it.51 By the standards of eighteenth-century government, the Royal Proclamation was issued at breakneck speed.

  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was Britain’s first attempt to administer the new American empire it had won. Its guiding principle was to restore and maintain order on the frontier. Indian relations must be directed from London by a government with an imperial vision of American affairs, not by individual colonies pursuing local agendas. It organized the newly acquired territories into four new colonies—Quebec, East and West Florida, and Grenada—and it established the Appalachian Mountains as the boundary between Indian and colonial lands, reserving for Native peoples a vast territory stretching from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. (In its haste to issue the proclamation, the government had no time to survey the actual patterns of Indian-white settlement, which left enclaves of Indian peoples and lands east of the line and Europeans, including French settlements in the Illinois country, west of the line.) It prohibited any “private Person” from buying “any Lands reserved to the said Indians within those parts of our Colonies where We have thought proper to allow Settlement,” and it prohibited purchase or settlement west of the Appalachians. Squatters were to leave immediately. Only the Crown’s representatives acting in formal council with Indian nations could negotiate land transfers. Although the Indian trade was declared open to all British subjects, traders needed a pass from the governor or commander in chief of their colony to do business beyond the mountains. The governors of Quebec and the Floridas were authorized to grant land to help populate their new colonies and divert settler pressure to the North and South, but colonial governors could not make land grants west of the Appalachians, a restriction that nullified, or at least put on hold, Dinwiddie’s land bounties to soldiers. Intended to remove “all just Cause of Discontent, and Uneasiness” among the Indians, the measures were to remain in effect “until our future pleasure be known.” At that time, veterans of the war would be entitled to free land on a graduated scale according to rank, from 5,000 acres for field officers to 50 acres for privates.52