The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Aupaumut’s Stockbridges, like Good Peter’s Oneidas, were not only Christians; they had also served, suffered, and sacrificed alongside their American neighbors during the Revolution. Surely, Aupaumut had good reason for his optimistic vision of the future. Unfortunately, Christianity and loyalty were not enough to satisfy policies that associated civilization with property. Civil and Christian Indian communities that practiced communal values and preserved communal lands must embrace programs that would break up those values and open up those lands.

  Like most other Americans, Washington was less interested in the Indians’ religion than in their land. His benevolent policies might prove as lethal as his military assaults, and they generated mixed responses. Leaders like Aupaumut hoped for inclusion. Others, recognizing that a way of life built on buying and selling individual property threatened their communities and their existence as a people, saw separation as the key to survival, and rejection of white ways as the recipe for cultural revitalization. Others were more flexible and selective. Although he steadfastly resisted the invasion of Shawnee lands, Blue Jacket sent his son to Detroit to be educated. Two American women who had been taken captive during the Revolution recalled that Blue Jacket and his French-Shawnee wife slept in a four-poster curtained bed and ate with silver cutlery. Both women said he was kind to them: one considered herself fortunate to have been taken into Blue Jacket’s family; the other liked to visit Blue Jacket’s home, where they always offered her tea.25

  During the negotiations with General Wayne at the Treaty of Greenville, Blue Jacket, speaking on a string of blue wampum, asked if two chiefs from each nation could pay Washington a visit “and take him by the hands: for our younger brothers have a strong desire to see that great man, and to enjoy the pleasure of conversing with him.” Blue Jacket’s language suggests naïve Indian “children” calling on the Great White Father, but as his biographer John Sugden points out, Blue Jacket was a shrewd operator. The Shawnees had been engaged in almost continuous war against the Americans since 1774, and no Shawnee chief had yet visited the seat of government of the new nation. As a war chief and member of the Pekowi division, Blue Jacket now deferred to Painted Pole, a civil chief of the Mekoche division, as premier chief, but he understood that meeting Washington in Philadelphia could help maintain his own leadership status as the Shawnees entered a new era of peaceful dealings with the United States. Colonel John Francis Hamtramck observed in April 1796: “Blue Jacket is used to good company and is always treated with more attention than other Indians.”26

  In the fall of 1796, “agreeably to the Unanimous request of all the Chiefs who signed the Treaty of Greene Ville,” a delegation duly embarked from Detroit for Philadelphia to talk with their great father. In addition to the Shawnees, the delegates represented the Wyandots, Delawares, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Miamis, Potawatomis, Eel River, Weas, Piankashaws, Kickapoos, and Kaskaskias. Wayne forwarded the names of the chiefs to Secretary of War James McHenry. They included “the famous Shawanoe Chief Blue Jacket, who, it is said had the Chief Command of the Indian Army” against St. Clair, and Little Turtle, “who also claims that honor, & who is his rival for fame & power.” In fact, Little Turtle refused to travel in Blue Jacket’s company.27

  When the chiefs met with Washington in late November, Blue Jacket acknowledged that he had long been attached to the British and fought against the Americans, but now those days were over. Painted Pole presented the Wabash Indians’ complaint that the Greenville treaty line had been taken too far to the west and asked that it be modified to run down the Great Miami to the Ohio, but Washington replied that no changes could be made, as the treaty had been ratified.28 Instead, the president repeated his message of survival through cultural change and was free with his advice to his “children.” (He used the term deliberately, scoring out the word “brothers” in one draft of a speech.) The Treaty of Greenville had established peace and friendship, but it was not enough for the Indians to live in friendship with the Americans; they must learn to live like Americans.

  More than all this is required to render your Condition comfortable. Your lands are good. Upon these you may raise horses and large Flocks of Cattle, by the sale of which you may procure the conveniences and necessaries of life in greater abundance, and with less trouble than you do at present. You may also, by a little more industry raise more Corn and other Grain, as well for your families, as for the Support of your Stock in winter. I hope the Nations will maturely reflect upon this subject, and adopt what cannot fail to make them happier. When the Government shall be informed that they have taken this wise course, and are sincerely desirous to be aided in it, they may rely upon receiving all necessary assistance.

  He referred them for any further business to the secretary of war, “who will furnish such of you as have acquired the title of Chiefs or Warriors with a Testimonial of the same import as that delivered up by Blue Jacket as a proof of my Esteem and Friendship.”29

  After meeting the president, the chiefs toured Philadelphia. They were not the only Indian delegates in town. At Charles Willson Peale’s museum at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, they found themselves face-to-face with a delegation of southern Indians who were also getting the tour—not only Creeks and old allies like the Chickamauga Cherokee John Watts but also Choctaws and Chickasaws, including Piominko and George Colbert, who had assisted the Americans in the late war. After what must have been an awkward initial encounter, the delegates arranged a second meeting at the museum, and then Blue Jacket and Red Jacket asked Secretary McHenry to convene a formal peace conference on December 2.30 The multiple delegations filled the president’s calendar. He had dined with “four Setts of Indians on four several Days” the week before, John Adams told Abigail, and Adams joined him for dinner with John Watts and a large number of Cherokee chiefs and their wives on December 3.31 The visit was the last time Washington saw Piominko, who died in 1798.

  The northern delegates left with good words and commissions from Washington but no alterations in the Greenville boundary. On the way home Painted Pole grew ill at Pittsburgh and, despite the best efforts of three American doctors, died on January 28. He was buried in Trinity Church graveyard. Blue Jacket survived as the principal leader of the Shawnees as they embarked on a difficult new path, but he was almost sixty, and he was being eclipsed in American eyes by Little Turtle.32 Many Shawnees left Ohio and moved to Missouri. Most of those who stayed followed the lead of their principal chief, Black Hoof, in adapting to a changing world.33

  Anthony Wayne said Little Turtle possessed “the spirit of litigation to a high degree” and may have been “tampered with” by land speculators.34 James Wilkinson gave St. Clair’s nemesis a much more positive recommendation in the letter of introduction to Washington with which he furnished Little Turtle at Pittsburgh: “I think Sir, you will find Ideas more correct, and a mind more capacious in this Chief, than any of his race.”35 In one of his last public functions as president, Washington invited Little Turtle to his home and presented him with a ceremonial sword, a gun, and a medal displaying the likenesses of both men.36 The physician Benjamin Rush inoculated Turtle against smallpox by variolation—a process that involved infecting the patient with live smallpox matter. He was the first American Indian to receive federal inoculation, and he stayed at Rush’s home for several weeks while he recovered.37 He was also treated for gout and rheumatism at the government’s expense.38

  Little Turtle became something of a regular visitor to the nation’s capital, first at Philadelphia and then at Washington, and he met three presidents. On his visit to Philadelphia in 1798, John Adams acknowledged Little Turtle was “certainly a remarkable man.”39 Hamtramck described him to Hamilton as “the Oracle of the Indians.”40 Gilbert Stuart painted his portrait, although the original was destroyed when the British burned the White House in the War of 1812. On visits to the capital Little Turtle wore a blue suit “in the American fashion,” but he put his Native clothes back on when he returned home. He returned e
ast in 1801–2 and requested an agency and government trading post for the Miamis, in part to restrict and regulate the lethal liquor trade. Evidently Washington’s earlier promise to send fair traders had not yet been implemented. At Jefferson’s urging, Little Turtle agreed to be vaccinated and took home live vaccine with instructions on how to administer it to his people.41 Aided by his son-in-law William Wells, who became a US Indian agent, Little Turtle urged the Miamis to make the transition to a new way of life. When he died, in July 1812, the sword, gun, and medal Washington had given him were interred with him as burial goods.42

  as his presidency progressed, washington looked increasingly to the larger southern nations, particularly the Cherokees and Creeks, as test cases for the civilization programs he had developed. In February 1795 he was able to inform Congress that hostilities with the Cherokees had ceased and there was “a pleasing prospect of permanent peace with that nation.”43 The best recipe for that peace, Washington believed, was to transform Cherokee warriors into self-supporting yeoman farmers who could be integrated into American society. Even as the Treaty of Holston in 1791 affirmed boundaries separating Cherokee and American territory, it promised to lead Cherokees “to a greater degree of civilization” and furnished farming implements to make them “herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters.”44

  He feared time was running out for the Cherokees. They were a people in crisis. The warfare from 1776 to 1794 had brought defeat, division, and burned villages. In that period they had surrendered more than twenty thousand square miles of prime hunting territory, with profound impact on their economy, which depended on the deerskin trade. Game, which was once plentiful, was growing scarce in the lands they retained, and, Washington said, “you know that when you cannot find a deer or game to kill, you must remain hungry.” Cherokee society placed the highest value on harmony, yet disorder was everywhere—generations divided, towns competed, and people struggled to maintain proper relationships with other people, with the environment, and with the spirit world. According to the historian William McLoughlin, Cherokees “were no longer sure of their place in the universe” and “had lost control of their destiny as a people.” Washington offered them a path forward with the promise of equal citizenship in the United States if they would change and become herdsmen and farmers. Instead of succumbing to despair, tribal leaders looked to his civilization program “to prepare them and their children for a new Cherokee world,” and the Cherokees began a remarkable comeback.45

  In August 1796, near the end of his second term, the president published an address to the Cherokee Nation, laying out a road map for them to follow in order to coexist with Americans. Ever since white people first came to America, he said, many good men had given much thought to how the condition of the Natives of the country could be improved, and many attempts had been made to do so; all these attempts had been “nearly fruitless.” The growth of American settlement was destroying the Indians’ hunting way of life. They should learn to live like American farmers. Some Cherokees already kept cattle and hogs; they should add sheep to give them clothing as well as food. They could raise livestock not only for their own needs but to sell to white people. They should grow cotton, wheat, and flax. The government would provide an agent to advise and instruct them, and the agent would furnish plows and other agricultural implements, and award medals to the best farmers. Their wives and daughters should learn to spin and weave, and the government would hire a woman to teach them how. Washington held himself up as a role model. “What I have recommended to you, I am myself going to do. After a few moons are passed, I shall leave the great town and retire to my farm.” There he would work on increasing his livestock and growing his crops, and employ women (meaning slave women) in spinning and weaving, “all of which I have recommended to you, that you may be as comfortable and happy as plenty of food, clothing and other good things can make you.”

  The Cherokees would serve as a role model and a test case, as “the experiment made with you may determine the lot of many nations.” If the civilization program succeeded with the Cherokees, the government would give the same assistance to all the tribes; if it failed, “they may think it vain to make any further attempts to better the condition of any Indian tribe.” He encouraged the Cherokees to emulate the United States in convening a council once or twice a year, made up of the wisest councilors from each town, to discuss the affairs of the nation. (Although Cherokees held occasional national councils, such as occurred at Chota in 1776, their government operated through town council meetings, custom, clan, and kinship.) So his talk would be known and remembered, Washington had it printed and distributed throughout the Cherokee Nation, with one, “signed by my own hand, to be lodged in each of your towns.” Having heard that some chiefs wished to see him in Philadelphia, Washington sent word that he would be happy “to receive a few of the most esteemed,” but not before November.46

  As the historian Theda Perdue points out, his address to the Cherokee Nation really only addressed Cherokee men. Although women exercised considerable influence in Cherokee and other southern Indian societies, in Washington’s vision of the Indian future, men would exercise their proper power and control, women would be subordinate, and patriarchal families would replace matrilineal clans. The new economic order that transformed hunters into farmers threatened the traditional gendered division of labor. Cherokee women took up spinning and weaving more readily than Cherokee men took up farming and generally adjusted with less difficulty to new roles and expectations.47

  Washington’s agents of change were already at work in Cherokee country. When Leonard Shaw was appointed agent in 1792, his instructions were to convince all the Indians of “the uprightness of the views of the President of the United States” and his desire to improve their situation in every way he could. Shaw was to collect materials for a history of all the southern tribes, endeavor to learn their languages, and compile vocabularies. Knox had spelled out the philosophy behind the plan: the idea that the difference between civilized and savage ways of life was based on different “races of men possessing distinct primary qualities” was fallacious; the differences arose from “education and habits.” Consequently, Shaw’s job was to teach them agriculture and “useful arts.” Shaw married a Cherokee woman but struggled in vain to curb warfare on the frontier, protect Cherokee lands against encroachment, and secure the Cherokees fair treatment in their dealings with William Blount.48

  In 1794 Washington appointed Silas Dinsmoor as his “beloved agent” to the Cherokees (see figure 6). A first lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, Dinsmoor had graduated three years earlier from Dartmouth College, where he would have encountered some Indian students. At Knox’s request, Dinsmoor took charge of the Cherokee deputation visiting Philadelphia at the time, sailed with them back to Charleston, and accompanied them home. He remained with the Cherokees for five years. His duties were to visit every town to oversee their progress in achieving Washington’s vision and instruct the Cherokees “in the raising of stock, the cultivation of land, and the arts.” He ordered spinning wheels for the women.49

  Figure 6 Silas Dinsmoor, Hawkins’s deputy and Washington’s principal agent among the Cherokees in the mid-1790s.

  Dartmouth College Library.

  Dinsmoor was the first agent to make significant efforts to transform Cherokee men from hunters to farmers.50 According to Dinsmoor’s son, an old Cherokee chief named Bloody Knife at first opposed the new agent and his program but was eventually won over and became his father’s friend.51 Reviewing his services years later, Dinsmoor wrote that when he first went to Cherokee country, the men did the hunting and the women were the farmers, millers, cooks, woodcutters, and water carriers. He introduced plowing and cotton growing by the men and cotton manufacture by the women. “In this I received personally, the express approbation of the two first Presidents of the United States.”52

  Dinsmoor was not the only person offering the Cherokees a progra
m of culture change. About the same time, Governor Gayoso persuaded Bloody Fellow to hand over his eleven-year-old son for schooling. Gayoso believed it was important that the young men who would one day govern the Indian nations should “have a Spanish education and heart”; he also thought having Bloody Fellow’s son in a Spanish school would help ensure the chief’s good conduct. Bloody Fellow agreed to let the boy take a Christian name, Charles, along with that of his family, Bloody Fellow Swan, and evidently was willing to have Charles go to Spain. Gayoso, however, feared the risks of accident and disease, and the boy went to the public school in New Orleans.53

  Dinsmoor’s instructions required him to end hostilities between the Indians and their white neighbors, a difficult task in a borderland region where Cherokees and Scotch-Irish settlers shared similar codes of revenge and killings were commonplace. With the cooperation of “good & virtuous” people, he made headway in removing prejudices, restricting retaliatory revenge, and restoring trust and tranquility.54 Peace was “the general talk of this country,” Dinsmoor said in March 1795, but progress was not uniform. He believed the Cherokees really wanted to bury the hatchet and shed no more blood; “would to God the frontier people were of the same mind.”55

  Dinsmoor urged the government to establish a clear boundary. The Treaty of Holston had stipulated that three persons appointed by the United States and three on behalf of the Cherokee Nation should mark the boundary, but the line still had not been run and was out of date. Washington agreed and understood the magnitude of the challenge. In February 1796, transmitting a report on the “daring designs of certain persons” to take possession of lands the United States had solemnly guaranteed to the Cherokees by treaty, the president recited his familiar refrain on the need to prevent such intrusions “and the mischievous consequences, which must necessarily result therefrom.”56 In July he instructed his cabinet to consider how to start running a clearly marked boundary line between the United States and the Cherokees as soon as possible. “The Indians urge this; the law requires it, and it ought to be done,” he said, “but I believe Scarcely any thing Short of a Chinese Wall, or a line of troops, will restrain Land Jobbers, & the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian territory.”57