American officials on the ground pretty much agreed with Gayoso. “To speak of peace with the Creeks, is a crime not to be forgiven, by a very great proportion of the people in this country,” Seagrove told Knox, while Daniel Smith feared that the “Spirit for war against Indians pervades people of all Ranks so far that no order of Government can stop them.”34 Georgians continued to encroach on Creek lands, frontier killings escalated, and war with the Creeks looked increasingly inevitable. In 1793 ten delegates from the Northwestern Confederacy traveled through the South, calling on the Creeks to take up arms and join them.35 Blount argued that the only way to make “our perfidious Yellow Brethren to the South” behave was to wage “vigorous national war” against them.36 Creek chiefs sent “our friend and father General Washington” a message asking if Blount and the settlers on the Cumberland were under his government or not. If the president wanted peace with the Indians, he must restrain his own people.37
In fact, pressured by Georgia and South Carolina, Washington was considering a military solution. He read reports from the Creek agent James Seagrove and alarmed Georgia citizens. He consulted with Knox, and with General Andrew Pickens of South Carolina and Blount, who were both in Philadelphia at the time.38 Pickens, like Washington (and unlike Blount), was concerned with his own and his country’s reputation in dealing with the Indians but also, like Washington, committed to national expansion on Indian lands.39 Blount and Pickens urged assisting the Chickasaws in their war against the Creeks and also embroiling the Choctaws in the conflict: “It certainly would be good Policy to use Savages against Savages,” they told Knox.40 Marinus Willett, however, warned the president that “the leading men of Georgia” would stop at nothing to get hold of Creek lands and cautioned him to investigate matters thoroughly before launching an offensive.41 Washington did just that. He gave the question a lot of thought and discussed it with his cabinet, which split over whether to secretly engage the Choctaws to support the Chickasaws. Jefferson and Knox were in favor; Hamilton and Randolph opposed. Washington, like Randolph, approved “of the general policy of employing Indians against Indians” but feared it might entangle the United States in conflict with Spain, and it was neither ethically defensible nor good policy to involve the Choctaws in war without a clear exit strategy, as we might term it today.42 In the end, the president and his cabinet decided against military action: the ongoing war with the Northwestern Confederacy and the tumultuous state of affairs in Europe would make a war with the Creeks “extremely disagreeable.”43 Spanish efforts to prevent a Creek-Chickasaw war proved effective, and both nations joined the Spanish-backed alliance at the Treaty of Nogales in October 1793.44
In the spring of 1794 Knox invited another Cherokee delegation to Philadelphia. About twenty chiefs, including Nontuaka, Tekakiska, Doublehead, and Keenaguna (Lying Fawn), arrived by boat from Charleston in early June. Washington met with them in his house on Market Street on June 14, along with Knox, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Pickering. He told them they must stop their young men stealing horses and murdering settlers and promised his government would try to keep its young men from doing Cherokees harm. As for the Cherokees’ concerns about lands on the Cumberland, the cessions had been confirmed by the Hopewell and Holston Treaties, and more than ten thousand people were now settled there. The treaties that had been made could not be altered. However, he did promise to increase their annuity from $1,500 to $5,000. “The great pipe was smoaked by all,” Washington recorded in his journal. “Delivered a speech to them in writing. Several of them spoke & after having eaten & drank plentifully of Cake & wine, they departed seemingly well pleased.” Twelve days later thirteen chiefs reaffirmed the Treaty of Holston in return for increased annuities and supplemental articles that clarified misunderstandings arising from the treaty.45
Blount would have preferred the president to make the Cherokees “feel the Horrors of War.” While Doublehead “and his sanguinary Brothers are received and caressed at Philadelphia,” Blount’s frontier constituents were “daily Suffering at the Hands of their Associates in Iniquity.” Only the restraining hand of government would stop them from killing and stealing, said Blount, sounding like Creek and Cherokee chiefs in their talks to Washington.46 But Washington’s policies withheld that restraining hand and restricted Blount to defensive measures. Instead, Blount looked the other way as territorial militia took the offensive. In September 1794 Major James Ore and a force of five hundred Kentucky and Tennessee militia attacked the Chickamauga towns on the Tennessee River. They burned the towns at Nickajack and Running Water and killed “upwards of fifty.”47 (Ore could not be sure because many were shot in the river.) Blount’s report of the victory reached Washington at the end of October.48 Blount followed up on the blow by warning the Cherokees that war with the United States would destroy them as a people.49 In November he met with Hanging Maw, John Watts, Bloody Fellow, and other Cherokee leaders at Tellico Blockhouse on the Little Tennessee River, where they, too, agreed to accept the land cession made at the Treaty of Holston.50
The land-grabbing Blount was not the man to bring peace and harmony to Indian relations. His meddling in intertribal affairs and readiness to resort to war worried Washington. “Upon the whole, Sir,” the new secretary of war, Timothy Pickering (Knox had retired in December), wrote Blount in March 1795, “I cannot refrain from saying that the complexion of some of the Transactions in the South western territory appears unfavourable to the public interests.” The president had promised peace and protection to the Cherokee chiefs in Philadelphia the previous summer and was determined to avoid a war with the Creeks if possible. Peace on the frontiers could not be expected so long as state and territorial officials allowed American citizens to steal Indian land and turned a blind eye to unauthorized campaigns. Since Congress alone had authority to decide upon an offensive war, and Congress had not seen fit to do so, the secretary reminded the governor, Blount should forget any plans for offensive operations and cultivate peace with the tribes.51
Chickasaw-Creek relations remained volatile, and Chickasaw delegates returned to Philadelphia in 1795 seeking support. Washington had planned to head home to Mount Vernon before the middle of July, but hearing a delegation of Chickasaw and Choctaw chiefs was on the way to see him on official business, he delayed his departure. Three Chickasaw and five Choctaw chiefs and their interpreters arrived in Philadelphia on July 3 and returned home after an audience with the president. Washington and his family left the city on July 15, but he was back in late August when a second group of Chickasaws arrived: William Colbert (Cooshemataha), William McGillivray (Coahama or Red Cat), and John Brown. Washington referred them to the talk he had given to the previous delegation and again declined their requests for assistance against the Creeks. “It was never the design of the United States to interfere in the disputes of the Indian Nations among one another unless as friends to both parties, to reconcile them,” he explained, which was not true but expressed his position in this case. Assisting the Chickasaws would involve the United States in open war with the Creeks, and only Congress, “the Great Council of the United States,” had the power to declare war. “I have no authority to begin such a war without their consent.” However, he would send provisions to alleviate the Chickasaws’ suffering after a drought in their country, and he promised to work through diplomatic channels to induce Spain to remove the post they had built at Chickasaw Bluff, “an unwarrantable aggression as well against the United States, as the Chickasaws, to whom the land there belongs.”52 The Spaniards, with the support of Ugulayacabe and his faction, had built the post of San Fernando de las Barrancas on bluffs along the east bank of the Mississippi in the spring.
Washington was actually trying to arrange peace between the Creeks and Chickasaws as soon as possible; he wanted to be able to tell Congress in his address that the government was at peace with all the Indian nations and had also settled differences between the two tribes.53 The Creeks and Chickasaws made peace in late 1795. (The Spani
ards urged them to do so in order to present a united front to American aggression.)54
Peace between the Creeks and Georgia remained elusive, however. The aggressions of Georgia settlers, grants of millions of acres by Georgia’s legislature to land companies, the state’s insistence on its right to deal with Indians and buy Indian lands, Spanish intrigue and influence, the ambitions and activities of individual adventurers, divisions in the Creek confederacy, and the inabilities of leaders, whether Indian or white, to control their warriors all kept the region in continual turmoil.55 In 1794 the former militia commander Elijah Clarke and a group of Georgians who planned to set up an independent republic in Creek country built a string of forts between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers in flagrant violation of the Treaty of New York; Knox had to order the governor of Georgia to call the state militia into federal service and remove them.56 In December 1794 the Georgia legislature appropriated lands to pay state troops from territory guaranteed to the Creeks by the Treaty of New York. Speculators in the Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia Yazoo Companies greased the palms of members of the Georgia legislature, which sold them 35 million acres of fertile land stretching from Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River to the mouth of the Yazoo River near present-day Vicksburg for $500,000 and passed laws promising to extinguish Indian claims. This second Yazoo land fraud was so egregious that even the citizens of Georgia revolted against it. The Assembly repealed the act, and the new state constitution in 1798 prohibited land sales to monopolies. However, Georgia’s insistence that citizens, not monopolies, should reap the benefits of acquiring Indian lands brought little relief for the Creeks.57
The best Washington could do was to try to keep the toxic mixture from exploding into an all-out war. He withheld approval of the Georgia legislature’s sale of the state’s territorial claims to private land companies. In an effort to settle the question of a boundary line, he inserted the federal government in a treaty negotiation between Georgia and the Creeks over land that both claimed. He nominated Benjamin Hawkins, George Clymer of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Pickens as commissioners.58 At Coleraine on the St Marys River on the southern border of Georgia, the federal commissioners, three Georgia commissioners, and more than four hundred Creeks spent a month trying to settle their differences. The Creeks looked to the federal government. “As soon as I saw the establishment of the forts made by Clarke, broken up by Washington’s warriors, it was a satisfactory demonstration that General Washington meant nothing but [our] good: and consequently, we have all determined to confide in him,” said Fusatchee Mico (White Bird King). They would listen to the talks of his agent as if “they were the words of Washington himself.” The Georgia commissioners protested against the conduct of the treaty and the assertion of federal authority, but the resulting agreement, at the end of June 1796, confirmed the cession of lands between the Ogeechee and Oconee Rivers made in the Treaty of New York six years earlier, made provision for running a temporary boundary with Georgia, increased the annual Creek subsidy to $6,000, and provided for the establishment of a second government trading post in Creek country. It marked the beginning of a brief period of relative peace, although Hawkins was kept busy trying to run a workable boundary line with the southern nations until 1798.59 Peace sent land prices soaring and surveyors scrambling.60 Demand for Creek lands would only escalate.
washington succeeded in avoiding all-out war in the South. That was not the case in the North, and perhaps it was never really the intention. While peace initiatives with the Northwestern Confederacy were getting nowhere, the United States rebuilt its forces; indeed, it built the kind of national army Washington had wanted all along. Following Knox’s plan, Congress in March 1792 passed legislation that made “more effectual Provision for the Protection of the Frontiers” and overhauled the US Army. The two infantry regiments and the artillery battalion then in existence were to be completed to full strength. Three additional regiments of 960 men each were authorized, to be enlisted for a term not exceeding three years and to be discharged as soon as the United States secured peace with the Indian tribes. Instead of a regimental structure with the infantry, cavalry, and artillery in distinct units, Washington and Knox divided the 5,120 men into four sublegions, each of 1,280 men, commanded by brigadier generals. Each sublegion was organized into two battalions (eight companies) of infantry, one battalion (four companies) of riflemen, one company of artillery, and one troop of dragoons. Washington was not willing to abandon combined regular-militia operations, and the act also authorized the president to call militia cavalry into service and employ Indian scouts as he saw fit. Nevertheless, the burden of fighting the war shifted from irregular soldiers to a new and more professional military. The government appropriated $1 million to fund the new army, which received more supplies and better training than either Harmar or St. Clair’s armies.61
In the spring of 1792, despite misgivings about the value of militia, Congress had responded to St. Clair’s defeat and the threat of Indian attacks on the frontiers by passing two militia acts. The first authorized the president to draft state militias into a federal force “whenever the United States shall be invaded, or be in imminent danger of invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe,” and when necessary to ensure that the laws of the United States were “faithfully executed,” as prescribed in the Constitution. The second provided for the organization of state militias, requiring every able-bodied free white male citizen of the states between ages eighteen and forty-five to enroll and arm himself with a musket or firelock, bayonet and belt, spare flints, knapsack, pouch, and cartridge box with no fewer than twenty-four cartridges. Although the Militia Act initially required consent of a federal judge, Congress later removed that restriction, giving the president “all-but-unfettered powers” to raise troops and send them into combat without a declaration of war by Congress.62
Washington’s two previous appointments of commanders to lead expeditions into the Ohio country had proved disastrous. He had to get this one right. He drew up a memorandum describing the strengths and weaknesses of the available options to head the new army and then discussed them with his department heads. Benjamin Lincoln, Lachlan McIntosh, Edward Hand, Daniel Morgan, Rufus Putnam, Charles Pinckney, Charles Scott, James Wilkinson (who, unknown to the president, was on Spain’s payroll as a spy and exploring the possibility of adding Kentucky to Spanish territory!), and Anthony Wayne were all on the list. Washington chose Wayne, whom he described as “more active & enterprising than judicious & cautious … Open to flattery—vain—easily imposed upon—and liable to be drawn into scrapes. … Whether sober—or a little addicted to the bottle, I know not.” Jefferson’s notes of the meeting were more succinct: “Wayne. Brave and nothing else.” He deserved credit for the battle at Stony Point during the Revolution, “but on another occasion run his head against a wall where success was both impossible and useless.”63 George Hammond, the British minister in Philadelphia, told Lieutenant Governor Simcoe that Wayne was the most active, vigilant, and enterprising officer the Americans had and would make every exertion “to efface the Stain, which the late defeat has cast upon the American Arms.” He added that Wayne’s talents were “purely Military,” and should he defeat the Indians, he was rash enough to try and seize the British posts.64 Wayne had made it known several years before that there could be no lasting peace with the Creeks until they experienced the military superiority of the United States and that, given the proper authority and means, he could “organize & discipline A Legionary Corps” and get the job done in short order.65 Now he was to get his chance against the northern tribes. Nevertheless, he made it clear he would accept the appointment only if the army was his to command as he saw fit, subject to supervision only by the secretary of war and the president.66
Washington also offered an appointment as brigadier general to Marinus Willett, his intermediary with Alexander McGillivray. Willett declined on principle. He had always believed that the best policy was to avoid an Indian
war, and he had never been convinced by the reasons given for this one, he wrote Washington. He knew from experience it was not difficult to preserve peace with Indians, and although he believed he knew how to defeat them, fighting them “would be the last choice of my mind.” The kind treatment they had shown him made him their advocate rather than their enemy. He expressed his hope to the president “that the Gentleman who is going out against the Indians” would have “as pasific a disposition” as was possible in the circumstances and be “the happy instrument” of achieving peace.67
The fact that the gentleman in question had earned the nickname “Mad Anthony” during the Revolution suggested that a pacific disposition was unlikely. Wayne operated on the conviction that there could never be lasting peace until the Indians were defeated in battle. Despite his nickname, he set about the task of molding his army with methodical determination. Knox warned him to avoid at all costs pitting raw recruits against Indians, and the new general was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Having seen what had happened to St. Clair, he refused to march until his army was fully prepared. He trained his soldiers to be an effective fighting force in Indian country, a process that involved, among other things, staging war games and sham Indian attacks.68 He intended to screen his march with Indian guides, scouts, spies, and cavalry, and to attack, not be attacked.69 He was confident the military improvements he implemented and the force he put into the field would demonstrate “not only to the savages, but to the World, that the U S of America are not to be insulted with impunity.” Bombast aside, Wayne was out to teach the Indians a lesson.70
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