Washington knew nothing of this, but the slaughter going on offstage, as it were, during the Revolution had significant consequences for the nation he was building. Images of Washington crossing the Delaware or presiding over the British surrender at Yorktown depict the United States winning independence from an empire in the East; images of Plains Indian villages laid waste by smallpox help explain how the United States subsequently built its own empire in the West.
Chapter 13
Building a Nation on Indian Land
There were no Indians at the Peace of Paris in 1783 when Britain handed over their lands to the United States and the new republic acquired an empire. The lands that Washington and others had explored and surveyed, as well as lobbied, connived, and fought for, were now there for the taking. The Continental Congress had kept the war effort afloat on the expectation of such an outcome, issuing land bounties to recruit soldiers and borrowing money from France and the Netherlands in anticipation of future land sales. Now the new nation stood poised at the brink of one of the greatest land rushes in history. It also faced enormous challenges in securing those lands.
With an estimated population of 150,000,1 Indians remained the dominant power in the trans-Appalachian West, and Washington knew they would not let their country be wrested from them without another fight.2 When they got wind of the peace treaty in Paris, Indians at Fort Niagara told Brigadier General Maclean they “could never believe that our king could pretend to cede to America what was not his own to give, or that the Americans would accept from Him what he had no right to grant.” They were not going to take it lying down.3
The thirteen states had achieved independence but did not yet constitute a nation, let alone an imperial republic with a manifest destiny to occupy the continent. A more likely prospect in 1783 was that North America would continue to be divided among several empires, Indian confederacies, and multiple sovereignties that might include more than one American republic if individual states and settlements of Americans “who imagined futures outside the United States” went their separate ways.4 The Appalachian Mountains loomed as a barrier that threatened to keep East and West apart. American frontier settlers with few feelings of national loyalty often looked southward down waterways that connected them to New Orleans rather than eastward over mountains that separated them from Philadelphia or New York. Could the infant nation resist these powerful centrifugal tendencies? Could it survive as a line of states along the Atlantic coast hemmed in by the Appalachians, or could it, as Washington envisioned, build a democratic federal republic spanning half a continent? To achieve the latter, the government had to secure the loyalties of western settlers, manage the land rush, and acquire the land from the Indians. It had to measure, divide, and use the land to pay the nation’s debts, reward veterans, satisfy land companies, and create new states. How it did so not only shaped the American landscape, it also established the territorial foundation and the territorial system of the United States and in large measure determined the relationship of the central government to the states.5
The last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence asserted “that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” When it came to levying war, concluding peace, contracting alliances, and establishing commerce with Indians, it was not entirely clear who “they” were—only the confederation of states, or could individual states do so as well? The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 but not in effect until 1781, gave Congress “the sole and exclusive right and power” of regulating the Indian trade and managing Indian affairs, “provided that the legislative right of any state within its own limits be not infringed or violated.”6 This rather ambiguous statement of central authority over Indian affairs contributed to confusion in national and state relations with the tribes.
Following British precedent, the Confederation Congress planned initially to establish an Indian boundary line that could be renegotiated as the tide of settlement pushed westward. But the US government was no better able than the imperial government to maintain such a boundary and was not the only player in the game. Individual states made their own treaties with Indians, often in defiance of federal wishes, and sometimes challenged the authority of the federal government to conduct Indian affairs. Between 1783 and 1786 twenty-one major treaties were signed, but Congress negotiated only six of them; Spain made four, Britain one, individual states seven, and private interest groups three.7 The northern states and Virginia ceded their claims to land north of the Ohio to the federal government, but south of the Ohio, Virginia retained its claims to Kentucky; North Carolina did not cede Tennessee until 1789; and Georgia claimed Alabama and Mississippi until 1802. The founding generation had to create a national government from the top down at a time when the idea of a national government was unpopular. They had to create a cohesive national identity that would bind together diverse citizens in disparate regions at a time when, as Joseph Ellis put it, “the vast majority of American citizens had no interest in American nationhood.”8 They had to defy predictions that, having thrown off the political stability provided by Crown and empire, the new republic would degenerate into tyranny or anarchy.
Indian land played a crucial role in constructing the American nation-state, providing a source of revenue and room for growth. It also contributed to the formation of a shared national identity. Before the Revolution, the fears and realities of Indian warfare contributed to the development of a white racial consciousness, in which disparate groups of European colonists shared pervasive anti-Indian sentiments.9 During the Revolution, the fears and realities of Indian warfare contributed to the development of an American racial consciousness.10 After the Revolution, westward expansion contributed to the development of a white American consciousness.11 Various individuals and groups had different ideas about who should acquire Indian lands and how those lands should be allocated. Political leaders were not unanimous in their support for territorial expansion; some feared that contests for Indian land might increase divisions and exacerbate centrifugal tendencies, and some antifederalists warned that expansion would dismember the fragile union.12 Settler colonists, states, and the federal government competed for rights and authority in western lands. Nevertheless, Washington’s America built a nation on Indian lands and built an identity in the collective process of acquiring those lands.
Having won independence from the British Empire, the United States created a different kind of empire and governed its own colonial territories. A postcolonial republic became simultaneously a settler empire, but imperialism and republicanism could be deemed compatible if the lands into which the nation expanded were “vacant” and “domestic space.” The federal government might disparage the treaty-breaking assaults of settler colonists on Indian lives and lands—and Washington decried their lawless occupation of lands to which he claimed title—but nation-building and settler colonialism went hand in hand. As the late Patrick Wolfe explained, settler colonialism operated on the “logic of elimination,” removing or destroying indigenous people to make their land available. The US government absorbed frontier settlers’ takeovers of Indian land; sanctioned, turned a blind eye to, or lamented their killing of Indian people; and invoked on-the-ground “settler sovereignty” to exert jurisdiction and control over Indian country.13
American territorial expansion also contributed to an emerging Indian identity. Colonial policies fomented and fueled recurrent divisions among and within tribes, and Indian leaders were not unanimous in opposition, but multiple tribes united to resist the assault on their homelands. When Washington and his peers talked about Indian land, they called it “hunting territory,” which implied a more transient occupancy and a lesser value than farming land; with no deep attachment to the land, Indian hunters could, as Benjamin Franklin said, be easily persuaded to give it up as game diminished.14 In fact, Indian
s clung tenaciously to their land even as the game diminished. Washington viewed land as a commodity to be surveyed and measured, bought and sold, and accumulated. Tied to their homelands by cycles of life and death, kinship, ceremony, and subsistence, Indian peoples viewed them as sites of tribal creation and sources of tribal identity. As American demographic and military assaults intensified, diverse Indian peoples found common cause in defending all Indian lands. As American agents pressured them to adopt new ways of living and believing, many Indian people who fought for their lands also fought to be Indian.15
In doing so, some said, Indians were not only resisting American expansion and settlement but were also defying God’s will. In May 1783, as Americans waited for news of the peace being negotiated in Paris, Ezra Stiles, a Congregationalist minister and president of Yale, delivered a sermon to the Connecticut Assembly entitled “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor.” Stiles predicted that the states would “prosper and flourish into a great American Republic; and ascend into high and distinguished honor among the nations of the earth.” If population continued to grow at present rates, he predicted, Americans in two to three centuries would number two or three hundred million people. Indian populations, on the other hand, were plummeting. A numerous population was necessary to give value to the land. The Indians must give way to the rising nation. Stiles likened them to the “Caananites of the expulsion of Joshua” and called Washington the “American Joshua … raised up by God.” When Joshua and the Israelites attacked Canaan and took Jericho, according to the Bible, “they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” In some instances, Stiles argued, war was “authorized by heaven,” and “the extirpation of the Cannanites by Joshua” was one such instance. In building the new American Israel, the extirpation of Indians by the American Joshua was clearly another.16
Washington invoked no Old Testament God to justify genocide. He shared Franklin’s belief that as a matter of both justice and policy Indians should have the opportunity to give up their lands by consent in treaties, and he hoped the process could be carried out with a minimum of bloodletting.17 He was also deeply concerned with how the international community and posterity would judge his nation’s treatment of its Native people. But he shared Stiles’s vision of a rising nation. Indian land was the best resource and hope for the future and the basis of the new empire he had helped to create.18
In the words of one biographer, Washington in the run-up to the Revolution “had become an American nationalist before there was an American nation.” With the Revolution won, before he resigned his command, from his headquarters in Newburgh on June 8, Washington sent circular letters to the state governments, calling for national unity and laying out his vision for a great continental republic.
The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now, by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency; They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be particularly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.
The Republic was at a critical juncture; the states must decide between a strong and a weak national government. “This is the time of their political probation, this is the moment when the eyes of the whole World are turned upon them, this is the moment to establish or ruin their national Character forever.” They could give the federal government the authority it needed to govern effectively and secure the fruits of the Revolution, or they could relax the powers of the Union, leaving the separate states “to become the sport of European politics.” The United States must present a united face to the world if its treaties and foreign policies were to be taken seriously. The choice, in Washington’s view, was whether the new nation would be “respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable.”19
Ordinary citizens beset by heavy taxes at the end of a long war faced real hardships and had legitimate grievances, but when Daniel Shay and disgruntled farmers in western Massachusetts rebelled against taxation in 1786, Washington saw it as “melancholy proof … that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government.”20 The rebellion also aggravated fears that the Republic would not survive its infancy. Washington fully expected the British to interfere: they were already stirring up trouble among the Indian tribes on the frontier and were sure to make the most of any opportunity “to foment the spirit of turbulence within the bowels of the United States.”21 The British were equally apprehensive of American intrigues among their Indians. “I do not believe the World ever produced a more deceitful, or dangerous set of Men, than the Americans,” wrote Allan Maclean; “they are become such Arch-Politicians by eight years of practice, that were old Matchiavell [sic] alive, he might go to School to learn Politics more crooked than his own; we therefore cannot be too cautious.”22
Washington thought the precarious republic’s security, prosperity, and future depended upon creating a strong government, creating a national market in Indian lands, and turning hunting territories over to commercial agriculture and economic development. Converting Indian homelands into American real estate would provide homes for citizens, fill the empty treasury, and ensure the nation’s survival and growth. He realized that his vision for the United States meant prying the continent away from the peoples who inhabited it, but he hoped it could be done with a minimum of bloodshed. He would only “extirpate” them if they refused to give up their land and left him no choice.23
In the French and Indian War, Washington had tried to build his reputation by grasping after power; at the end of the Revolution, he secured his legacy by declining power.24 Two days before Christmas 1783, he formally and famously resigned his commission as commander in chief, handed back his authority to Congress, and retired to Mount Vernon. Washington’s act demonstrated the insight, in Abigail Adams’s assessment, “that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world he might be a very dangerous one.” It marked Washington for greatness. “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish,” said Thomas Jefferson.25 Contemporaries and historians likened him to Cincinnatus, who defeated Rome’s enemies and then gave up his power and returned to his plow. They could have found parallels closer to home in Indian war chiefs, who, before escalating conflict and the intrusion of colonial rivals undermined traditional patterns of balance and behavior, were accustomed to relinquishing their temporary leadership upon returning home to villages where the guidance of older civil chiefs prevailed. Eighteenth-century Indian people would have seen little remarkable in Washington’s action.
Washington turned his attention to his personal affairs that had been neglected during nine years of military service.26 Having won a war for American freedom, he returned to running a plantation based on African slave labor.27 He even let himself relax: a visitor to Mount Vernon in 1785 said the general passed the bottle around “pretty freely” at dinner and “got quite merry” drinking champagne.28 He focused much of his energy on completing reconstruction of Mount Vernon. He bought additional adjacent or neighboring property, and he looked again to his western lands. At the close of the Revolution, Washington owned approximately 58,000 acres west of the Alleghenies: 4,695 acres in southwestern Pennsylvania, 9,744 along the Ohio River, and 43,466 along the Great Kanawha.29 Now independence was won, there was nothing to dispute his right to the lands he had accumulated. He had yet to realize any profit from them, but settlers moving west as the nation grew would surely change all that.30 As he watched over the nation’s growth, he managed to weave together national agenda and private interests. “Few public f
igures in American history could match Washington’s record of virtuous and selfless service, but even he stumbled when the vast potential of the frontier West was at stake,” notes his biographer John Ferling. “As always, he convinced himself that the nation was the chief beneficiary of his actions.”31
Washington did not, and could not, retire from charting the direction of the new nation. He had fought and resigned to save the Republic, and he remained deeply invested in ensuring its survival and its expansion. “Retired as I am from the world, I frankly acknowledge I cannot feel myself an unconcerned spectator,” he told John Jay in 1786.32 As the Confederation government stumbled along, Washington led efforts to reform and strengthen the central government and to forge the thirteen states into a united and expanding nation. Doing so required linking the East to the emerging regions of the West by creating a national navigable water route, developing a national land policy, and building a national army to defeat Indian resistance.33
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