Inscribed on the flyleaf of his diary for 1773 was a doctored copy of a legal opinion issued sixteen years before, pertaining to a different continent. In 1757 England’s attorney general, Charles Pratt, and solicitor general, Charles Yorke, in response to a petition from the East India Company, had issued an official opinion that a grant from the Crown was not required to obtain valid title to land in India: it could be purchased directly from “any of the Indian Princes, or Governments.” Someone transcribed and edited a version of the opinion to make it read as if it referred to Indian princes and governments in North America rather than in India. Although, or more likely because, the doctored version was clearly at variance with the 1763 Royal Proclamation, American speculators seized on it to justify their illegal activities.67
Washington jealously guarded every tract of land, meticulously planned ways to make them turn a profit, monitored how his agents carried out their duties, and kept a tight grip on the purse strings. One student of his land businesses describes him as “a practical, calculating schemer with an expansive dream.”68 He needed tenants to occupy his lands against rival claimants and to turn his thousands of acres of western lands into a lucrative investment. In July 1773 he advertised his lands on the banks of the Ohio and Kanawha for lease to settlers. The lands were among the first surveyed in that part of the country, the printed broadsheet declared, and were unequaled in “luxuriancy of soil, or convenience of situation.” All were riverfront lots, abounding in fish and wildfowl, and with excellent meadows “almost fit for the scythe.” River transportation offered easy communication with Fort Pitt and access to market, and settlers could expect to “cultivate and enjoy the land in peace and safety.”69 He also contemplated attracting Palatinate German emigrants as well as Scots and Irish settlers to his western lands, but those schemes did not pan out. He remained on the verge of making his fortune in the West.
events unfolding in london, new england, and Shawnee country in 1774 determined whether Washington’s schemes succeeded or failed. After colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, Britain responded with a series of punitive measures that included placing Massachusetts under military government, closing the port of Boston until reparations were paid for the destroyed tea, and asserting the right to quarter British troops in unoccupied buildings. Outraged colonists denounced the measures as the “Intolerable Acts.”
The government also took steps that infuriated Washington. Dunmore told him that if Crawford was found to be unqualified as a surveyor, the patents granted for land under the proclamation would be declared null and void. Lord Hillsborough, as secretary of state for the American colonies, had declared that American veterans had no rights to bounty land—the land grants promised in the proclamation were restricted to British regular officers. The new colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, agreed with Hillsborough and in 1774 informed Dunmore that Virginia veterans were not entitled to bounty lands. The ruling rendered illegal Washington’s claims to thousands of acres. Washington was apoplectic. He accused Hillsborough of a “malignant disposition” toward Americans. All officers, Americans and British, provincial as well as regular, should share equally in the land bounties, he argued; there was no reason why Americans who had served the king as faithfully and as well as his British troops should be discriminated against. The decision was based on “Malice, absurdity, & error.” As Woody Holton notes, “Hillsborough’s declaration fueled Washington’s patriotism.”70 “As far as the American west was concerned,” comments Joseph Ellis, “Washington was already declaring his independence.”71 By September 1774 he was in Philadelphia as a delegate to the First Continental Congress.
Meanwhile Dunmore and Virginia’s land-dealing gentry stepped up their efforts to obtain the Ohio Valley. In the wake of the Fort Stanwix Treaty, tensions and killings increased as immigrants invaded Shawnee lands. Then the British army abandoned Fort Pitt in 1772, withdrawing what little protection it had offered Indians. Settlers, speculators, and Dunmore himself seized the opportunity that opened when governmental authority in the area crumbled. Only the Indians stood in their way.72
Often portrayed as nomads with no fixed attachment to the land, Indian people faced a flood of true nomads. Explaining his conduct to the home government, Dunmore said no policy could curb “the emigrating Spirit of the Americans” on the frontiers. Mainly Scotch-Irish and Germans, they “remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature,” ever imagining that “Lands further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled.” Americans, Dunmore explained, could not conceive that government had any right to stop them taking possession of territory that was uninhabited or occupied only by a few scattered tribes of Indians, or that they needed to respect treaty pledges made to people they considered “little removed from the brute Creation.”73
Washington’s old acquaintance Guyasuta helped contain the escalating conflict. The Seneca chief kept the British Indian Department informed of developments in Indian country and regularly operated as a messenger. In the fall of 1772 he arrived at Johnson Hall, having traveled from the Ohio country via Philadelphia. Sir William Johnson regarded him as “a great Chief of much Capacity and vast Influence amongst all the Nations.”74 He told Johnson in January 1774 that the Shawnees were sure the white people were about to try to take all their country from them. Many Shawnees, especially from the Kispoko and Piqua divisions, harvested their corn, packed up, and moved west from the Scioto Valley rather than “be Hemmed in on all Sides by the White People, and then be at their Mercy.”75 Shawnee chiefs did their best to keep their young men in line, but they could not prevent conflict.
In the spring, Michael Cresap, the son of Thomas Cresap and a frontier trader, land developer, and Indian fighter in his own right, together with a posse of frontier militia, murdered some Indians. Then, at the mouth of Yellow Creek, Daniel Greathouse and another group of thugs murdered thirteen women and children, the family of a Mingo chief, Tachnechdorus, also known as John Logan. The victims included Logan’s Shawnee wife and his pregnant sister, Koonay, the wife of Pittsburgh trader John Gibson. The killers strung Koonay up by the wrists and sliced her open, impaling the unborn baby on a stake, but spared her two-month-old daughter.76 Crawford took the child “from a woman that it had bin given to” and she was now at his house, he informed Washington. She was eventually returned to Gibson. Logan’s grief became immortalized in various versions of a speech attributed to him, especially the one recorded by Thomas Jefferson in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. Recruiting Shawnee and Mingo warriors, Logan vowed to exact vengeance. Crawford kept Washington apprised of events that could torpedo his land schemes on the south bank of the Ohio. Hundreds of settlers fled back across the mountains, “and the hole Country Avackquated as far as monogahelia,” Crawford wrote as he hurried off to a council with the Indians at Fort Pitt; “a war is every momint Expected.” The Shawnees were aggrieved that they still had not been paid anything for the lands the Iroquois had sold. Crawford feared war was unavoidable.77
The trader Richard Butler declared in an affidavit that, whatever their intentions for the future, the Shawnees did not want war at the time, but the cold-blooded murders were “sufficient to bring on a war with a Christian instead of a Savage People.” He feared the actions and prejudices of the common people would cause a general Indian war because there was little effort to restrain them.78 When the British Indian agent Alexander McKee heard of the murders, he immediately called a meeting with Guyasuta and other Six Nations chiefs to assure them that rash people were responsible and the governor of Virginia would be sure to give the Indians satisfaction.79 Guyasuta said the Six Nations would not make common cause with the Shawnees, and neither would other tribes, and “the Shawanese by themselves can’t do much Mischief.”80 He worked with the British Indian Department to prevent the war from spreading, went as an emissary to several tribes to i
solate the Shawnees, and continued his diplomatic travels through the end of the conflict. On October 15, while a delegate to the Continental Congress, Washington recorded in his diary that he gave Guyasuta £1 14s, although he did not record what for. The chief was passing through Philadelphia on a mission from the tribes in the Illinois and Ohio country to Guy Johnson, who had taken over as superintendent of Indian affairs on the death of his uncle and father-in-law, Sir William, in July.81
Dunmore, meanwhile, had no intention of giving the Indians satisfaction. The murders served his interests in sparking a war that opened Shawnee lands for the taking. Pennsylvanians accused “the scheming party in Virginia” of instigating the war as a way to assert Virginia’s claims on the Ohio against both Pennsylvania and the Vandalia scheme. An Indian war not only provided justification for grabbing Indian land but would also send squatters scurrying east to safety, leaving the field open for wealthy speculators to amass large holdings, which they could rent to settlers once the war was over. Whether or not Dunmore and Virginia land speculators manufactured the war, as argued by Pennsylvanians then and many historians since, they seized the opportunity to punish and dispossess the Shawnees.82
Logan took his revenge by killing settlers, then declared his vengeance satisfied. But many Virginians had been waiting for a chance like this. Connolly told Washington the Shawnees were “a haughty, violent & unthinking tribe” who “constantly shook the Tomahawk over our Heads” and threatened anyone who ventured beyond the Kanawha River. It was time to teach them a lesson and no time for half measures.83 In a circular letter calling for volunteers, Colonel William Preston urged men to rally to the defense of their lives and properties. Virginians might never again have such a good opportunity to drive their “old Inveterate Enemies” from their country, plunder and burn their towns, destroy their cornfields, and “prevent them from giving us any future Trouble.” There were other incentives as well; there would be valuable plunder, and “it is said the Shawnese have a great Stock of Horses.” Preston was also a surveyor and land speculator.84
The impending war disrupted Washington’s operations. Fearful of squatters, Washington tried to beat them at their own game and strengthen his claim to land on the basis of occupancy.85 In the spring of 1774 he engaged Valentine Crawford, William’s brother, to head down the Ohio with carpenters, slaves, and supplies and construct buildings on his land. Then news of the killings broke, and the “Alarming Surcomstances” made it impossible for Valentine to carry out Washington’s plans.86 As settlers streamed back across the mountains in fear of Indian attack, he and others in the area built blockhouses, and Crawford enrolled Washington’s men as militia. By summer work was progressing on building a mill, but, Crawford warned, their ability to hold their ground would depend on getting assistance or the Virginian army defeating the Indians. Washington had wanted Crawford to sell his slaves, but that was impossible: “Out here, we have one day peace, and the next day war. It is hard to know how to act, even if you were here yourself.” Washington was impatient and critical. “You Seeme to Scencer Me hard in My Condoct of your bisness,” Crawford wrote, “but times has been in great Confusion here with us and som of the people I had to deale with was vere grate vilons and tuck great advantages of the times.”87
In June, Dunmore called out the Virginia militia.88 By then, Washington wrote to George William Fairfax, the British government had closed the port of Boston and was “endeavouring by every piece of Art & despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us;” a confederacy of western and southern tribes seemed to be forming against Virginia, and a general Indian war looked inevitable. On top of that, crops were poor after severe frosts in the winter followed by a cruel drought. Never since the first settlement of the colony had the minds of the inhabitants been “more disturbed or our situation so critical,” Washington thought. “God only knows what is to become of us.”89
The war against the Shawnees was soon under way. William Crawford was commissioned a major by Dunmore and led five hundred men in the regiment now commanded by Colonel Adam Stephen. He accompanied Dunmore’s army when it moved down the Ohio to attack the Shawnee towns in the Scioto Valley, an area Crawford knew well.90 Colonel Andrew Lewis with another force descended the Kanawha. Chief Cornstalk and some six hundred Shawnees set out to do battle. The Delawares and Wyandots sent runners to try to deter them, but the Shawnees would not be stopped. “They talked big and said they did not care”; better to be wiped off the face of the earth than have the Virginians live so close to them.91 They made their stand against Lewis’s army at the junction of the Great Kanawha and Ohio Rivers, the area where Washington intended to plant his settlements. At the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, the Shawnees inflicted more casualties than they sustained but, outnumbered and outgunned, were forced from the field after a hard-fought, daylong struggle.92 Cornstalk and his chiefs grudgingly accepted Dunmore’s peace terms at Camp Charlotte nine days later, giving up their lands south of the Ohio and sending four hostages to Williamsburg as a guarantee of future good conduct. Crawford was not at the battle, but afterward he led 240 men up the Scioto River and destroyed a Mingo village called Salt Lick Town, near present-day Columbus, where they killed five people and took fourteen prisoners, “chiefly Women & Children.” As soon as Crawford got home to Stewart’s Crossing he wrote to tell Washington that the expedition against the Shawnees was a great success, resulting in what he hoped would be a lasting peace. Even while on campaign, he added, he had not forgotten Washington’s lands and plans: he had taken the opportunity to press his claims with the governor and had a house built on Washington’s land opposite the mouth of the Hockhocking.93
Washington too thought Dunmore’s peace with the Shawnees would last.94 However, the Shawnee cession really only confirmed what the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had already done, and it was little use to Virginia’s land-dealing gentry unless the Privy Council repealed the 1763 proclamation. Instead, in June 1774, in a further move to restrict settlement from the seaboard colonies, Parliament had passed the Quebec Act, transferring jurisdiction over the territory between the Ohio and the Mississippi to Quebec, in effect making it part of Canada. The British government did what it had fought to prevent France from doing. Washington and other Virginia gentry had viewed the Ohio as their river of fortune; the British had turned it into a barrier instead.95
As tension escalated between the imperial government and the Virginia elites, Dunmore had to choose where his true allegiance, or his best interests, lay. He chose the empire. In the early spring of 1775, claiming that Crawford was improperly qualified to survey the lands granted under Dinwiddie’s proclamation (which he was; he had failed to take the oath of office required of official surveyors of Crown lands), Dunmore planned to annul the land patents Washington had received, a decision that would strip Washington of 23,000 acres. Washington was livid, pointing out the time and expense involved in the surveys, and told Dunmore he found his decision “incredible.”96 Before the end of the year, Dunmore was calling on slaves to help suppress the Revolution, and Washington was calling him “that Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity.”97
Washington emerged from the tangle of intercolonial, interpersonal, and intercompany rivalries as the owner of several potential estates, with thousands of acres scattered across southwestern Pennsylvania and along the Ohio and Great Kanawha Rivers.98 And he wanted more. But there would be no unrestricted access to Indian land under the British Empire. Washington had hoped the proclamation would be a temporary expedient, soon repealed. He had hoped his Mississippi Company would acquire 2.5 million acres of Indian land but wrote off his investment when he realized the futility of competing with the conflicting claims of powerful investors in London. He had bought up veterans’ claims to thousands of acres of bounty lands, but Lord Dartmouth denied the claims. Finally, the Quebec Act killed prospects beyond the Ohio. By 1775, in Woody Holton’s words, the total yield of the land rush set off by the Fort Stanwix Treaty amounted to “a
pile of rejected land petitions and worthless surveys.”99
Virginians declared independence from Britain in 1776 and immediately adopted a state constitution that nullified both the proclamation and the Quebec Act. Confronted with the extensive claims of the great land companies, settlers pressured the Virginia Convention to pass a resolution in May 1776 promising preemption rights to actual settlers when lands came on the market. Four hundred acres was fixed as the maximum amount such settlers could claim; speculators, of course, had legal rights to much larger claims. The Virginia legislature in December 1776 created the “County of Kentucky,” securing the region speculators had coveted for decades. In 1778 it passed an act providing that the officers and soldiers who claimed land under Dinwiddie’s proclamation and had submitted surveys would be entitled to the grants; the questionable patents issued to Washington on the basis of Crawford’s surveys would be validated if Virginia won its independence. The next year, the Virginia Land Law opened Kentucky to settlement. Freed from the tyranny of imperial restraints, Virginian gentry could get back to the business of leasing and selling Indian land to yeoman farmers.100
in his study of western lands in the coming of the American Revolution, written more than sixty years ago, Thomas Perkins Abernethy concluded that it did not really matter exactly how many acres various individuals and companies acquired or tried to acquire; what mattered was “that usually the most successful speculators and traders were those who betrayed public trust and used official position to bilk the people.” Britain’s shifting policies and the unwise legislation of the new states resulted in most lands falling into the hands of speculators and absentee proprietors who made their money exploiting the ordinary people who actually settled and sometimes defended their lands. The scramble for land generated layer upon layer of competing and overlapping claims—spurious grants, dubious titles, military warrants, settlers’ “tomahawk rights” and squatters’ rights—that covered the West “like shingles on a roof.”101
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