Two letters, both written on October 12, 1783, and both to Frenchmen, conveyed the westward orientation of his vision for the new nation. Following a three-week tour of the Hudson and Mohawk River corridor, Washington pored over maps and reports to get an overview of the vast inland navigation of the country and was “struck with the immense diffusion and importance of it,” he told the comte de Chastellux, a friend of Lafayette traveling in the United States; he said he would not rest until he had “explored the western country, and traversed those lines … which have given bounds to a new empire.”34 Responding the same day to a suggestion from Lafayette that he make a grand tour of European capitals as a kind of victory parade, Washington countered with a journey of the imagination—a tour of America’s “New Empire,” starting in Detroit, going down the Mississippi River, then heading back through Florida and the Carolinas.35
As a young man, Washington had seen the Virginia backcountry as terrain for attaining personal wealth and status. By the end of the Revolution, his vision of the West embraced all the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi as a national asset best developed by a strong central government.36 During the French and Indian War, he had fought to open the West to Virginia, while keeping it closed to rival Pennsylvania. But before the end of the Revolution, when Maryland would not ratify the Articles of Confederation as long as Virginia held on to so much western land, he urged his home state to relinquish its claims to the western empire he had fought to build.37 Always intent on promoting the Potomac as a way to bring trade from the West to his own part of Virginia, he now extended his interests to New York and tried, with Governor George Clinton, to buy the land around Fort Schuyler (formerly Fort Stanwix) that dominated the portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, and ultimately the link between the Hudson and Great Lakes water systems. When that failed, he bought a tract of 6,000 acres near present-day Utica in partnership with Clinton. (In 1793 he sold two-thirds of his half for £3,400).38 He supplemented his personal knowledge of the West, acquired on military expeditions and tours in the Ohio Valley and western Pennsylvania, by building an extensive network of correspondents who furnished him with news, information, and observations on land, rivers, and Indians. He was absolutely convinced of the importance of the West to the nation.39
In early May 1783, even before the Peace of Paris formally transferred the lands west of the Appalachians to the United States, Washington wrote Alexander Hamilton, as chairman of the congressional committee on establishing peace, justifying the need for a military force to secure the ceded territory. The US Army after the Revolution comprised a mere six hundred men, stationed at West Point, Fort Pitt, and the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Congress was reluctant to take measures to strengthen it. Suspicion of large standing armies as a threat to the liberties of a country went back to colonial times and to England. But Washington knew the United States needed a regular force to garrison its posts, protect its trade, and defend its frontiers. Better to create an army that would “appear respectable in the Eyes of the Indians,” and then reduce it, than to have to increase it in the wake of some disaster, he said with some prescience.40 In June, Washington wrote urging Congress to settle disbanded soldiers on the frontiers. The veterans, “a brave, a hardy and respectable Race of People,” not only would provide protection for frontier families but also, in their proximity to Indian towns, “would be the most likely means to enable us to purchase upon equitable terms of the Aborigines their right of preoccupancy; and to induce them to relinquish our Territories, and to remove into the illimitable regions of the West.”41
By September, when the Peace of Paris was finally signed, Washington had modified his views somewhat. He was influenced by General Philip Schuyler’s recommendations to Congress in the summer that, rather than pushing the Indians farther west (and potentially into the arms of the British), the United States should permit them to remain on portions of their homeland, which they would gradually cede as American settlement advanced.42 Writing to James Duane, chairman of a congressional committee charged with formulating Indian policy for the new nation, Washington laid out at considerable length his ideas on “the line of Conduct proper to be observed not only towards the Indians, but for the government of the Citizens of America, in their Settlement of the Western Country.” As a statement of his thinking on nation-building and Indian policy, it merits considerable quotation.
Formerly an accomplished land grabber himself, Washington saw the dangers of unrestrained land grabbing now that he was in a position of authority. Letting land jobbers, speculators, and monopolists, or even settlers, overrun western land was “inconsistent with that wisdom and policy which our true interest dictates, or that an enlightened People ought to adopt,” and was likely to generate disputes both with the Indians and among Americans. And for what? It would make a few avaricious men wealthy at the expense of the many, for the people who engaged in this business contributed nothing to the government and did not even abide by its laws and, unless restrained, would cause a lot of trouble and probably a lot of bloodshed. After eight years of war in which the Indians had fought alongside the British, “a less generous People than Americans” might have driven the Indians beyond the Great Lakes.
But as we prefer Peace to a state of Warfare, as we consider them as a deluded People; as we perswade ourselves that they are convinced, from experience, of their error in taking up the Hatchet against us, and that their true Interest and safety must now depend upon our friendship. As the Country, is large enough to contain us all; and as we are disposed to be kind to them and to partake of their Trade, we will from these considerations and from motives of Comp[assio]n, draw a veil over what is past and establish a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling, and within which they shall not come, but for the purposes of Trading, Treating, or other business unexceptionable in its nature.
In other words, reinstate the kind of boundary line he had opposed and ignored when the British imposed one in the 1763 proclamation.
The government must be careful “neither to yield nor to grasp at too much” in establishing this boundary, but the line would not be permanent. The Indians “will ever retreat as our Settlements advance upon them, and they will be as ready to sell, as we are to buy,” Washington reasoned, optimistically. Anyone who had experienced an Indian war, or even estimated the expense of waging one, knew that a policy of purchasing land was the wisest and cheapest way of dealing with the Indians. Unless the government adopted such measures and soon, Washington predicted, “a parcel of Banditti” would take over the western country, “bid defiance to all Authority while they are skimming and disposing of the Cream of the Country” (a phrase Washington had applied to lands he himself had skimmed), and deprive veterans of the land bounties Congress had promised them, or spark renewed hostilities with the Indians.
He unrealistically imagined that extending American settlement gradually would dispossess Indian people of their land without recourse to war. In fact, he regarded the settlement of the West and making peace with the Indians as “so analogous that there can be no definition of the one without involving considerations of the other.”
I am clear in my opinion, that policy and œconomy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return us soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape. In a word there is nothing to be obtained by an Indian War but the Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expence, and without that bloodshed, and those distresses which helpless Women and Children are made partakers of i
n all kinds of disputes with them.43
Washington’s letter to Duane also formulated a plan for forming new states in the West, envisioning two states in what became Ohio and Michigan, which later became the basis for the organization of what was then called the Northwest Territory. The committee, which also included Richard Peters of Pennsylvania, Arthur Lee of Virginia, Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina, and Daniel Carroll of Maryland, echoed many of Washington’s recommendations. Congress adopted the general plan and incorporated some of his actual words in its report of October 15, 1783, which guided American Indian policy until the last years of the Confederation government. The Indians wanted peace, said the report, but would not give up their land without a fight. Nevertheless, they were the aggressors in the war and had to make atonement, “and they possess no other means to do this act of justice than by compliance with the proposed boundaries”; in other words, by giving up their land.44 Unfortunately, the process of acquiring Indian lands would not be nearly as orderly as Washington and the committee imagined.
The United States in 1783 faced a situation not unlike the one Britain faced in 1763. It had a huge new empire on its hands yet was virtually bankrupt. The government had debts amounting to an estimated $40 million, but under the Articles of Confederation it lacked the power to impose taxes. Its only source of revenue was the land ceded by Britain. Now the states had thrown off the authority of the Crown, they were no longer bound by the Royal Proclamation and its restrictions. Nevertheless, many states continued to prohibit private purchases, and the federal government asserted its authority over Indian affairs and Indian lands for the same reasons the British government had. Concentrating land purchases in the hands of government persisted as best practice and wise policy.45
The new republic struggled with the same problem that had confounded the old empire—how to control the frontier and hold back a land rush: “Sundry persons are preparing to settle upon lands within the U.S which have not been purchased from the Indian natives,” a congressional committee reported in 1783.46 Unlike imperial officials, republican leaders were supposed to represent and respond to the will of the people, but simply opening new territory in a chaotic scramble for lands could threaten the social order of the young republic before it was properly established. Congress in 1783 prohibited people from settling or purchasing Indian lands outside states’ borders without its express authority.47 But Washington himself had set a precedent for defying a distant government and speculating in Indian lands, and Americans had few qualms about continuing the tradition.
the confusion of competitive land grabbing before the Revolution had produced a patchwork of overlapping claims. Washington’s finances were in what he called a “deranged situation” after the Revolution, and he looked to his western properties as his chief source of revenue. Expecting “something very handsome from that quarter,” he was anxious to secure his titles and have his lands start generating income, but with his papers in disarray, he worried that others might be surveying or settling lands he had claimed under Dinwiddie’s proclamation and the Royal Proclamation.48 He said he had patents signed by Dunmore for 30,000 acres, and survey rights to an additional 10,000 acres, patents for which were suspended because of the disputes with Britain. He believed his title was “indisputable.” Of the 30,000 acres, 10,000 lay on the Ohio, the rest on the Great Kanawha, all, as he repeatedly described it, “rich bottom land, beautifully situated on these rivers, & abounding plenteously in Fish, wild fowl, and Game of all kinds.” Because his lands were located on the south side of the Ohio where the Indians had no claims, settlers would be free from the disturbances that settlers north of the river were likely to experience.49 He circulated an advertisement for leasing the 30,000 acres on the Ohio and Great Kanawha in March 1784 but was unsuccessful.50 A week later he wrote to the Virginia lawyer Edmund Randolph explaining the losses he had sustained on his lands acquired under Dinwiddie’s grant because of Indian hostilities and asked him to do what he could on his behalf.51
In September 1784, accompanied by Dr. Craik and his son, his nephew Bushrod Washington, and their slaves, Washington set out to tour his western land and visit the Kanawha if it was safe to do so. He was not going to explore the country or search out new lands “but to secure what I have,” he told Craik, who had lands close to his.52 In other words, he was going to inspect his bounty lands on the Ohio and Kanawha to keep them out of the hands of speculators and retrieve lost rents. Tenants had fallen behind on payments during the war, and squatters had occupied some of his lands; as Ron Chernow put it, “the American Cincinnatus, badly strapped for cash, was reduced to a bill collector.”53 Eager to obtain information about the best routes connecting eastern and western rivers and to facilitate the inland navigation of the Potomac, he also discussed the prospects with Daniel Morgan and “many other Gentlemen” during his tour.54
It was a difficult trip. His route took him via Fort Cumberland, Braddock’s Road, and Great Meadows, the site of Fort Necessity, although he made no comment about his past experiences at these places. Worse, a land rush was under way: Indians that summer told the Spanish governor of St. Louis that Americans were spreading “like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River.”55 The great land speculator was feeling the heat of the competition. The “rage for speculating” in the lands beyond the Ohio left hardly a valuable spot without a claimant, he complained. “Men in these times, talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, or even 500,000 Acres as a Gentleman formerly would do of 1,000 acres.” Defying Congress’s proclamation, “they roam over the Country on the Indian side of the Ohio, mark out Lands, Survey, and even Settle them.” Unless timely measures were taken, Washington predicted, it would “inevitably produce a war with the western Tribes.”56
Washington also checked up on Gilbert Simpson, with whom he had contracted before the Revolution to improve his land and manage his mill on a branch of the Youghiogheny River (called Washington’s Bottom; now, more decorously, Washington’s Run). Ill health and other issues had hampered Simpson, and Washington had demanded a full accounting of his operations. Finding his mill in disrepair and unrented, he terminated the partnership. He appointed Major Thomas Freeman of Redstone, Pennsylvania, to oversee his western affairs, settle tenants on his lands, collect rents, and “in all cases by fair and lawful means to promote my interest in this country.” He would not lease to people who did not intend to reside there; he wanted, he told another of his agents, to rent to “an industrious class of reputable people” who would improve his lands.57 He was willing to sell some lands if the terms were right, but knowing his carefully selected tracts would increase in value, he preferred to lease them and was not inclined to compromise on his terms.58
In western Pennsylvania, in the area the state had named Washington County, he found several families squatting on his 2,813-acre tract at Miller’s Run. They were Scotch-Irish Calvinists, and they were angry and defiant. They felt they had earned the right to settle there and challenged the legality of Washington’s title. Washington called them “willful and obstinate Sinners” and hired a lawyer to sue
them for trespass and have them evicted unless they paid him rent. He was determined to obtain “full justice.” The case dragged on for two years, as Joseph Ellis says, “pitting the most powerful figure in the nation against a feisty delegation of impoverished farmers.” Washington won his case, but the squatters moved away rather than pay him rent.59 Learning that some of his lands were being offered for sale in Philadelphia and Europe, Washington intended, with no sense of irony, to rescue them “from the hands of Land Jobbers & Speculators.”60
In 1787 he appointed Colonel Thomas Lewis, surveyor for Augusta County, to manage his lands on the Ohio and Great Kanawha. Promoting his lands to prospective settlers—this time farmers from Scotland—Washington emphasized again their fertility and safety from Indian attack (though he was eager for a treaty that would provide an additional buffer by opening the other side of the river
to settlement).61 Whereas Jefferson envisioned an “empire of liberty” in the West, where independent yeoman farmers would work their own property in a land-owning democracy, on Washington’s western lands tenant farmers would pay rent to an absentee landlord.62 Washington was not alone. In Kentucky the practices of wealthy investors and the land policies that favored them ensured that most frontier settlers remained landless tenant farmers instead of becoming independent property owners, who were supposed to provide the backbone of the Republic. When Kentucky became a state in 1792, two-thirds of adult white male residents owned no land; they lived as tenants on enormous landholdings belonging to distant landlords, or they squatted on lands, “not knowing or caring who claimed to own them.”63
Despite Washington’s confidence that his lands were safe, rumors of Indian hostilities kept him from visiting his lands on the Great Kanahwa. The Indians were angry that settlers were invading their lands and the government had not yet held a treaty, which they interpreted as evidence of hostile intentions on the part of the United States.64 As a result, his western tour “was less extensive” than he intended.65 In Joel Achenbach’s words, Washington’s “Grand Tour of America had been downsized into a mere business trip to his western properties, and now even that was turning into a bust.”66 Washington returned to Mount Vernon by a more southerly route and reached home before sunset on October 4. The 680-mile trip was his last visit to the Ohio country.67
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