Finally, the western Indians assembled at Greenville. Few Shawnees showed up, but Little Turtle, Black Hoof, Blue Jacket, Buckongahelas, Painted (Red) Pole, Egushawa, and dozens of other men who had fought to defend the Ohio boundary since before the Revolution did. Guyasuta was not there. In January 1794 Cornplanter had reported: “He is alive & that is all.” He likely died in the year between Fallen Timbers and Greenville.116 One of the first Indians Washington had met in the contested Ohio country, Guyasuta did not live to see its final cession.
Wayne presented the Indians with a prepared treaty for signing. In return for $20,000 in goods, they ceded most of Ohio to the United States. The new boundary ran from present-day Cleveland sixty miles south, then due west to Fort Recovery, and then southwest until it hit the Ohio River just west of Fort Washington. The Indians also ceded sites of forts beyond the line, including Fort Defiance, Fort Wayne, and the future site of Chicago.117 Washington was there in spirit, as both sides invoked his name. Although there is no record of a meeting with the president before 1796, Little Turtle presented Wayne with “papers which have been given to me by General Washington, the great chief of the United States. He told me they should protect us in the possession of our lands, and that no white person should interrupt us in the enjoyment of our hunting grounds, or be permitted to purchase any of our towns or lands from us; that he would place traders among us, who would deal fairly.” Tarhe, the Crane, though severely wounded in the arm, was the sole survivor of four principal chiefs of the Sandusky Wyandots, the others having been killed at Fallen Timbers. He now accepted a new relationship with the United States. “Now this day the good work is completed. I inform you all, brother Indians, that we do now, and will henceforth, acknowledge the fifteen United States of America to be our father, … you must call them brothers no more.” New Corn, a Potawatomi, asked Wayne to take their old, British, medals “and supply us with General Washington’s.” Wayne handed out peace medals, which the Indians should consider “as presented by the hands of your father, the Fifteen Fires of America”; they in turn should hand the medals “down to your children’s children in commemoration of this day” when the United States received them “under the protecting wings of the eagle.” Then Wayne announced: “The great business of peace, so long and ardently wished for, by your great and good father, General Washington,” was now accomplished.118 The Indians were to find Washington a different kind of father than they were accustomed to. Fathers in Algonquian or Iroquoian society were indulgent relatives who provided protection and gave gifts; this new father would exercise his paternal authority to control and change their lives.119
Washington waited anxiously for the official report of the treaty and asked Pickering to relay the gist of it as soon as it arrived in the War Office. Was the Indian representation complete? Did Wayne meet, exceed, or fall short of his instructions, and in what instances? What were the boundaries? Did the negotiations proceed harmoniously, or were they interrupted with difficulties, and if so by whom? Finally, on September 28, Pickering sent him a copy of the treaty with the news that Wayne had “obtained more land than was expected.”120 Even so, Washington cautioned Pickering ten days later, until the final results of treaty negotiations with Britain were known, “and from the intimations of Captain Brant,” Wayne should not withdraw his garrisons, and “we ought not … build too much in the present moment, on the treaty of peace with the Western Indians.”121
agreements reached on the other side of the Atlantic helped to reinforce Wayne’s gains on the ground. Writing to John Jay in London, ten days after Fallen Timbers but still a month before he received the news of Wayne’s victory, Washington rehearsed his standard complaints that the old enemy was behind all the difficulties with the Indians and the murders of innocent women on the frontiers. The British government might disavow their actions, “but no well-informed person had any doubt” that its agents seduced Indians who were at peace and armed Indians who were hostile to the United States. There could never be peace until Britain surrendered the posts.122
In the Jay Treaty, signed in November 1794, Britain and the United States reached a conciliatory settlement. Among other provisions, the British finally gave up the posts on the northern frontier that they had held since the Peace of Paris and that Washington regarded as a source of intrigue among the Indians. But the treaty also allowed Indians continued access to British trade north of the border. It created a firestorm. Critics maligned it for doing too little, too late, making too many concessions, leaving British connections with the Indians intact, and jeopardizing American neutrality by aligning with Britain against Revolutionary France. Crowds burned copies of the treaty and effigies of Jay. Jefferson, Madison, and their Republican followers attacked the administration, and Washington received a flood of petitions denouncing the terms as surrendering to Britain. He expressed his own misgivings to Hamilton in private.123
Jay said the treaty was the best that could be achieved, and in some ways it represented a diplomatic triumph. It isolated the Ohio Valley Indians from Britain, and by defusing a crisis with Britain, it strengthened the United States’ negotiating position with Spain over its southwestern border. The Senate ratified the treaty 20–10, exactly the two-thirds majority needed, and Washington signed it. The president’s prestige helped carry the vote, but it was a costly victory. The debate over ratification—carried out in newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and town meetings as well as in government circles—reflected a shifting political landscape. Federalists and Republicans disputed the nature and meaning of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the presidency, the Constitution, and the empire they were building in the West. The one-party, deferential political culture that Washington knew was giving way to a combative two-party system and a rowdy culture of popular politics and public opinion.124
The British had to employ some nimble diplomatic footwork to assure the Indians that by giving up the posts they had not abandoned their allies again and that trade with the tribes would continue uninterrupted.125 In May 1796 a proposed visit to Philadelphia by chiefs from the Sioux, Puans (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago), and other tribes west of the Great Lakes was postponed for at least a year. Pickering advised Washington that it would be better to hold off trying to win the western tribes’ allegiance until the United States had secured possession of the western posts. He feared the British might redouble their efforts to retain the Indians’ allegiance and use it as a pretext for procrastinating on delivery of the posts.126
Ratification of Jay’s Treaty was helped by news of Thomas Pinckney’s treaty. Pinckney, who had sailed to Madrid in the spring of 1795, concluded the Treaty of San Lorenzo in the fall. Spain granted the United States free navigation of the Mississippi, right of deposit at New Orleans for three years, and a border with Spanish Florida at the 31st parallel. Spain also agreed to hand over its posts at Nogales, Natchez, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, although the transfer did not occur until 1797. As Washington observed in his notes on the treaty, each nation agreed to restrain its Indian allies from attacking the other, and trade with the Indians was “to be open, & mutually beneficial to each.”127 After the Spanish evacuation of San Fernando, the Americans established a post at Chickasaw Bluff (the future Memphis, Tennessee).
The news of the treaties with the Indians, Britain, and Spain, as well as with the Barbary powers of North Africa that had been the source of raids on American shipping, came in quick succession and generated an enthusiastic response. When Anthony Wayne returned to Philadelphia in February 1796, thousands turned out to see him, cannons were fired and bells rung in his honor, and there was a fireworks display. In January 1794, when the United States was at odds with Britain, Spain, the Indians, and the Barbary powers, John Adams had almost despaired of the situation, but May 4, 1796, as he was about to sign the bills for the various treaties to go into effect, “seemed a Day of Universal and perpetual Peace, foreign & domestic.”128
Indian people were less optimistic.
The retraction of British and Spanish support struck Indians as ominous. Although Piominko’s friendship and his opposition to a Spanish-Indian alliance had helped the United States secure access to the lower Mississippi Valley, many Choctaws and Chickasaws felt betrayed by Spain’s withdrawal across the Mississippi. Why had the Spaniards abandoned the Chickasaws to the Americans “like smaller animals to the jaws of the Tiger and the bear”? Ugulayacabe demanded. “We perceive in them the cunning of the Rattle snake who caresses the Squirrel he intends to devour.”129
it had taken washington and his government more than three years to recover from the Indian victory over St. Clair’s army. Washington said the United Sates expended “a million, or more dollars annually” on what he called “self defence against Indian tribes.”130 Between 1790 and 1796 the United States spent $5 million, almost five-sixths of the total federal expenditures for the period, fighting the war against the Northwestern Confederacy. Virginia and Pennsylvania also contributed men, money, and materiel to the war effort. But now the threats of separatist plots diminished and western land values soared. The federal government could finally generate income from sales of western land to pay down its debt.131
The United States was still a long way from consolidating its control of the trans-Appalachian West. American assertions of sovereignty in the area remained somewhat tentative. Indian nations continued to demand Washington’s attention, and threats of foreign involvement with the tribes lingered. Nevertheless, the United States began pushing into the interior of continent with what the historical geographer D. W. Meinig describes as a unique and powerful “fusion of capitalism, individualism, and nationalism.” “Never had so many people acting in their own private interest under conditions of great political freedom had access to such a large area of fertile lands, parceled by a simple efficient system into readily marketable units … and never had such a wide array of private interests been further motivated by a deeply emotional corporate interest to act as a unified body of people with a mission to expand relentlessly, subordinating any other people that stood in its way.”132 The nation was on the rise and on the move, Washington declared in his message to Congress in December 1795: “Our population advances with a celerity, which, exceeding the most sanguine calculations, proportionately augments our strength and resources, and guarantees our future security.”133
Anthony Wayne died in December 1796, mission accomplished. But the boundary he secured at Greenville was no more effective in checking American expansion than the Proclamation Line of 1763 or the Fort Stanwix boundary in 1768 had been. Washington admitted Indians had legitimate complaints against Americans who encroached on their lands and were “not to be restrained by any law now in being, or likely to be enacted.” He was not unsympathetic to the Indians’ plight, though he had done much to produce it. “They, poor wretches, have no Press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.”134
The defeat of the Northwestern Confederacy and the Treaty of Greenville opened Kentucky to a flood of migration—its population almost tripled between 1790 and 1800, reaching 220,955—and drove up land prices. Washington called the rate of increase “almost incredible.” It also brought an increased federal presence, which few Kentuckians relished, but the proximity of the federal army in the Northwest contributed to the economic boom and helped fasten the young state to the Union.135 At the same time, southerners took note that the federal government had deployed its power and resources regionally, to protect settlers, secure lands, and stimulate national growth in the Northwest Territory rather than the Southwest Territory.136 Securing the lands beyond the Ohio that were vital to the nation risked dividing the nation.
So did slavery, which was on the march in the South. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented a new kind of cotton gin that made possible efficient harvesting of the short-staple upland cotton that grew away from the coast, where long-staple Sea Island cotton grew. The new technology gave a boost to cotton production, a boost to westward expansion, and a boost to slavery. Washington predicted that the increase in cotton growing “must be of almost infinite consequence to the prosperity of the United States,” and he was right. Tobacco gave way to cotton as the primary crop of southern agriculture. In 1790 the United States produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton; in 1800 it produced 36.5 million pounds, and the numbers kept growing by leaps and bounds. Soon the South produced most of the raw cotton that fed the hungry mils of industrial Britain. Locked into a system of single-crop agriculture that depleted and eroded the soil, the southern plantation economy depended on limitless sources of cheap land and cheap labor. As cotton spread across the South, Indians were expelled from their lands to make way for African slaves. A nation built on Indian land was also built on African labor. In Sven Beckert’s words, “The peculiar combination of expropriated lands, slave labor, and the domination of a state that gave enormous latitude to slave owners over their labor was fabulously profitable for those positioned to embrace it.”137
Washington did not participate personally in the cotton boom, but he had done his share in setting Virginia, the South, and the nation on a path that was environmentally destructive and, ultimately, politically disastrous, and he avoided doing anything about slavery that might jeopardize the nation’s unity.138 He had envisioned expelling Indians from their land to make way for free white farmers, preferably tenants renting from men like himself. Instead, as the nation expanded across the South, Indians were expelled to make way for unfree black field hands and an industry that depended on the cotton mills of Lancashire and the children who labored in them. Western expansion coupled with the expansion of slavery would force the nation to confront the issue the founding generation had avoided and would tear apart the Union that Washington worked so hard to construct.
Washington’s faith in western land as key to the future of individuals as well as the nation remained strong. When Alexander Spotswood asked his advice about selling up and moving west with his family, Washington resorted to his own lifelong philosophy and practice: “It has always been my opinion that new countries (by this I mean the interior of our own) are the best to lay the foundation of wealth, in as much as lands which, comparatively speaking, are to be had there cheap, rise in a fourfold ratio to what they do in the Atlantic Sea.” Until communication between East and West improved, “the principal demand for the product of the land is to be found in the emigrants who resort to it. To this cause also is to be ascribed the rapidly increasing prices of those Lands.” Better to invest in land than in slaves, he told Spotswood.139
However, Washington struggled to sell, rent, or derive profit from his own holdings in the West. Strapped for cash, he started selling his lands. In 1791 he had sold his Ohio and Kanawha lands to a French speculator, John Joseph de Barth, but de Barth’s fortunes took a hit in the French Revolution, and Washington agreed to void the contract.140 As Wayne was advancing to his showdown with the western tribes, Washington decided to liquidate his western real estate assets.141 He made arrangements for selling the “de Barth lands” and his other western landholdings. (He even asked his secretary, Tobias Lear, then in Scotland, to talk up his lands during his travels.) His “Memorandum on Land” listed a total of 57,332 acres, with tracts in Kentucky, on the Little Miami, on the Great Kanawha, on the east side of the Ohio River, and in western Pennsylvania, as well as in the Great Dismal Swamp. His lands, as always, were “the cream of the country,” but he said repeatedly that years of experience had shown that holding property in distant land was “more productive of plague than profit.”142
Finding buyers and renters for his lands at the rates he wanted continued to occupy his attention and frustrate his expectations. In 1795 he sold most of his Pennsylvania lands to two buyers. After renting his Miller’s Run property, he finally sold it in 1796 to Colonel Matthew Ritchie for $12,000; Ritchie paid $3,000 as a down payment but was
often delinquent on subsequent payments, and after he died in 1798 his heirs were even less reliable, with the result that the property would revert to Washington’s heirs on his death. He sold his lands near the remains of Fort Necessity for $7.20 an acre. Colonel Israel Shreve offered to purchase Washington’s Bottom on the Youghiogheny River, but after making a down payment of $2,693 he proved delinquent also, prompting a series of heated letters and threats of legal action from Washington. Washington expected to receive about $22,000 from his two Pennsylvania tracts, but by the time of his death he had received little more than half that amount.143 In 1795 and 1796 he was still trying to sell his lands on the Ohio, the Kanahwa and the Little Miami and in Kentucky.144 In February 1796 he placed advertisements in newspapers in Alexandria and Philadelphia offering to lease four of his Mount Vernon farms and to sell four tracts of land along the Ohio (9,744 acres), four tracts on either bank of the Great Kanawha (23,266 acres), and three tracts on the Little Miami River (3,051 acres)—a total of 36,000 acres dating from the days when he had received bounty lands for his service in the French and Indian War.145 He asked Rufus Putnam to post notices in Marietta and elsewhere. He was, as he explained, “disposed to sell all the lands I hold on the Western Waters.”146 But he was unable to get the rates he wanted, and his lands on the Ohio and Great Kanawha remained “undisposed of ” a year later.147 He refused $8 an acre for his prime meadow lands on the banks of the Ohio and Great Kanawha, and held out for $10.148
Washington had set the nation firmly on the path of westward expansion and laid the foundations of the nation’s empire in Indian country, but he was giving up on his own quest for a private empire in the West.149
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