Despite his own increasingly ambivalent attitudes about slavery, Washington was optimistic that his plan for peace and progress in Indian country was working. First on the agenda in his eighth and final message to Congress, delivered on December 7, 1796, was a review of his Indian policy and its achievements: measures adopted to maintain the friendship of the tribes and preserve peace on the frontiers, protecting settlements from unruly individuals who could not be restrained by their tribes, on the one hand, and protecting the Indians’ treaty rights, on the other, and always “to draw them nearer to the civilized state; and inspire them with correct conceptions of the Power, as well as justice of the Government.”90
Hawkins believed his hard work among the southern tribes had given them so much confidence in justice “that the malice or wickedness of the enemies of our government cannot destroy it.”91 In May 1798, at a meeting of Upper and Lower Creeks and Seminoles assembled in the town square at Tuckabatchee, Efau Hadjo handed the agent a wampum belt as a “token of friendship to General Washington and his children.” The belt comprised six strands: two white ends, two rows of blue beads on each edge, and two rows of white through the middle to represent the path of perpetual peace linking “the hands of the people of the United States and the people of my land.” Efau Hadjo offered the belt in the hope “that they may never again be separated or at enmity.”92
One likely disturber of perpetual peace exited the scene in 1797. William Blount’s schemes finally caught up with him. On July 3 Washington received a letter enclosing correspondence from Senator Blount to an Indian interpreter, James Carey, who had served as Indian agent while Blount was governor and Indian superintendent. Blount’s correspondence had been intercepted and sent to Philadelphia, with a copy to Mount Vernon. Despite being an avid speculator in western lands, Blount was in poor financial shape and in 1796 began plotting to involve the Creeks and Cherokees in conspiracy with the British and attack Spanish Florida and Louisiana.93 He urged Carey to foment Indian suspicion and hostility against Hawkins, who was now governor of the Southwest Territory, and anyone else in the Spanish or American interest. He also directed Carey to spread the word among the southern Indians that it was Washington, not Blount, who was responsible for any discontent they might have in regard to their boundary line. Washington was outraged at this attempt “to poison the minds of the Indians, and destroy the utility and influence of the agents employed by the government for the express purpose of preserving peace and harmony with the Indians,” and expressed his “sovereign contempt” for Blount. The evidence of conspiracy was laid before Congress, and on July 8 Blount was expelled from the Senate.94 Hawkins hoped Blount’s downfall would check “a base system for the destruction of the four nations, by the Ecunnaunuxulgee (people greedily grasping after all their lands).”95
The optimism proved unfounded. It would take more than Blount’s fall to protect Indian land. As Washington had noted, it would take a Chinese Wall. For an elected government to use troops to keep its own citizens off Indian land was politically inadvisable even if it had the will and resources to do so, and their assault undermined the policies of civilization and orderly transfer of land devised by Washington and applied by Hawkins.
For a time things seemed to be going well. In the last year of Washington’s life, Hawkins reported, Creek people were “ploughing, spinning and weaving, and begin to be attentive to the raising of stock,” three hundred women and children were clothed in homespun, “and we had for market, 1000 beef cattle and 300 hogs.”96 Washington and Hawkins imposed changes with what they saw as the best of intentions. In fact, their policies produced uneven results, mixed reactions, and a troubled legacy. Washington did not live to see his efforts among the Creeks unravel in tragedy and bloodshed; Hawkins did. Divisions within Creek society hardened—over the civilization plan, land sales, and whether to negotiate with or defy Americans and their incessant demand for land. Many Creeks sought to redefine their place in a world of changes imported and orchestrated from outside and to remake themselves as Creeks. The yearning grew into a movement of spiritual and cultural rejuvenation that ultimately led to civil war within the Creek Nation and war with the United States. The aged Hoboithle Mico, who had shaken hands with Washington in New York in a pledge of perpetual friendship, condemned the recurrent land cessions and the civilization program, opposed Hawkins and the chiefs on the national council, and took a leading role in the Creek resistance. In 1811 he dictated a letter to King George III, requesting British assistance; in 1813 he died fighting the Georgians. After a series of devastating, some would say genocidal, campaigns, Andrew Jackson killed eight hundred Creeks at the Battle of Tohopeka or Horseshoe Bend in 1814. He then dictated the Treaty of Fort Jackson, confiscating 23 million acres of Creek land. Many Creeks from Nuyukv, the town named in honor of the 1790 treaty with Washington, died fighting the Americans.97
In the end, Washington’s hopes, intentions, and policies to do something for Indian people could not compete with the human and economic forces arrayed against them. After visiting the United States in the mid-1790s to survey agricultural lands and labor practices, the English aristocrat farmer William Strickland lamented that the operations of unscrupulous speculators threatened “to extirpate the much injured owners of the soil” and that their annihilation was too often pursued with relentless determination and “spoken of with atrocious pleasure.” As long as such things were allowed, and Strickland acknowledged they could not be prevented, “it is in vain for the government of the country to attempt the civilization of the Indian, or the amelioration of their condition by the introduction of the arts and comforts of civilized life.”98
Washington and Strickland corresponded regularly, and the president wrote letters of introduction to Jefferson and others when the Englishman traveled south from Philadelphia. Washington would have read Strickland’s book when it was published, but Strickland’s account of Indian dispossession would have told him nothing he did not already know.
Chapter 20
A Death and a Non-Death
Washington spent a lifetime turning Indian homelands into real estate for himself and his nation. He rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the thousands of acres he acquired and owned in the West were Indian lands, but he spent the last years of his life, as he had spent the previous forty, planning, corresponding, and fretting about properties carved out of Indian country.1 As he neared the end of his presidency and retired, as he was fond of saying, “to the shades of my own Vine and Fig tree,” Indians faded from his correspondence.2 But Indian land occupied his pen and mind as much as ever as he looked toward life’s end.
The retired president was land rich and cash poor. When friends and family asked for financial help he often pleaded poverty. “You are under the same mistake that many others are, in supposing that I have money always at Command,” he told his nephew Samuel Washington in July 1797. The situation was “so much the reverse of it” that before he retired from the presidency he had had to sell almost 5,000 acres of his lands in Pennsylvania and his shares in the Dismal Swamp Company just to make ends meet.3 Washington no doubt had a cash flow problem, but he was one of the richest men in America, with his wealth tied up in land he had spent more than forty years accumulating.4
Nevertheless, the western lands he had worked so hard to acquire continued to give him, as he frequently said, more plague than profit. Speculators like Washington operated on the assumption that lands acquired for a song would sell for a fortune when settlers flooded the country, but things did not always work out that way. As James Ross advised him in February 1798, the country beyond the Ohio was opening up; adventurers with money would snap up high-quality lands at moderate prices, and that would “greatly retard the sale of high priced lands upon the Kenhawa and on this side of the Ohio,” where Washington’s holdings lay.5 Washington in 1797 had considered exchanging some of his Great Kanawha lands for some of Daniel McCarty’s Sugar Land holdings in Loudon County, at a ratio of three
acres to one.6 Nothing came of it. Instead, in December 1797 Washington leased his lands on the Great Kanawha to James Welch, a speculator from Greenbrier County, who agreed to make annual payments until he had paid $200,000, when the land would become his. But Welch failed to pay his rent and never bought any land. Frustrated and angered by Welch’s promises and excuses and his failed schemes to raise the money, Washington warned him he was not someone to be trifled with. “I am in extreme want of the money which you gave me a solemn promise I should receive the first of January last,” he wrote in April 1799. However Welch might have succeeded deceiving others, “you shall not practice the like game with me, with impunity. To contract new Debts, is not the way to pay old ones.”7 When Washington did sell or lease lands, he had trouble getting payments and threatened legal action, which involved him in acrimonious correspondence, with Israel Shreve, for example.8
Other schemes were slow to generate income or just did not work out. Washington negotiated with Archibald McClean, a Scottish printer who had relocated to Alexandria, to lease, exchange, or purchase his 587-acre Round Bottom tract in the Ohio country, near present-day Moundsville, West Virginia. He conveyed the property to McClean in August 1798, and the next year McClean settled tenants on it. But final payment had not been made at the time Washington drew up his will, and discrepancies regarding the actual acreage and terms of the deed meant the subsequent history of the property was “filled with legal difficulties.” He also concluded a complicated bargain for his additional Ohio lands between modern Marietta, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and his Kanawha tracts. According to this deal the purchaser signed a thirty-year lease, paid $5,000 down, and pledged to pay off the balance in three annual payments of $5,000 each, beginning in 1806.9 When John Gill fell behind in the rent for his tract at Difficult Run, Washington agreed to accept articles suitable only “for cloathing my Negros” in partial payment. Gill finally asked to be released from the agreement, leaving Washington in possession of the tract at the time of his death.10 In addition to the time and trouble involved in trying to attract emigrants, leasing, and renting, the retired president received notice that he was behind with taxes that had accrued on his Kanawha lands in Greenbrier and Kanawha Counties between 1789 and 1797.11 And he continued to have to explain his right to some of the lands he had acquired all those years ago by military claim.12
In January 1799, less than a year before his death, he wrote his nephew Samuel again, explaining why he could not give him money. He had expected to receive several thousand dollars from selling land west of the Alleghenies, but he had “received not one” and had little expectation of receiving payment.13 The month before he died, he was making inquiries into the “supposed value” of his tracts on the Ohio, Kanahwa, and Little Miami. His many efforts to peddle the three tracts had proved futile.14
On December 10, 1799, Washington wrote out instructions for the coming year for his estate manager, James Anderson, a Scottish farmer he had hired in 1796. Among many other carefully laid out tasks, Anderson was “To visit my Lands in the Western Country (at my expence), so soon as the weather becomes temperate and settled in the Spring, Reporting the circumstances under which they are—and what they are cap[able of ]—will be expected, It being of importance for me to receive a just, & faithful acct respecting [them].” They were the last lines he wrote about his western lands.15 In his final days, after a lifetime’s endeavor, he was still trying to get accurate information about his western lands and still agonizing over how to get a profit from them.
He remained adamant that internal commerce was essential to national unity and progress and continued to have faith that the Potomac canal project would secure the nation’s future and his family’s fortunes: “I have every day additional reason for supporting my former opinion, and new proof of its advantages,” he wrote in January 1798. But even as he continued to work on behalf of the Potomac Company, the company’s fortunes and prospects continued to decline.16 His western canal project was no more successful than his western land ventures in turning a profit. He had to seek bank loans during the last two years of his life. If his goal in his land dealings was financial independence, he had made little progress.17
In preparing his last will, Washington made a list of landholdings and estimated their total value at $488,137. But, he acknowledged with a sigh, “My estate, though it might sell on credit for a tolerable sum, has been and probably will continue to be an unproductive one.”18 He left instructions to sell it all and divide the proceeds among twenty-three heirs.19 The will ran on for twenty-nine pages, many of them devoted to the schedule of landholdings he prepared. In addition to 8,000 acres divided over five farms at Mount Vernon, it listed twelve separate tracts in Virginia, four in Ohio, five on the Great Kanawha, two in Maryland, the tract at Great Meadows in Pennsylvania, three in the Northwest Territory, two in Kentucky, and one in New York. He explained how he had acquired each tract and estimated what it was worth.20 On the Ohio River, including those on the Little Kanawha, he had a total of 9,744 acres of land “of the first quality” that he valued at $97,440. He had 23,341 acres on the Great Kanawha, and there was “no richer, or more valuable land in all that Region.” Conditionally sold to James Welch for $200,000, they would command considerably more if the terms of the sale were not met. His 3,051 acres on the Little Miami he valued at $15,251, and 5,000 acres in Kentucky at $10,000. Whatever nostalgic value they may have had for him, his 234 acres at Great Meadows, where he fought the French in 1754, were worth $1,404.21 He had sold nearly all his land in Pennsylvania (although final payment on the Miller’s Run tract had not been made), most of his land in New York, and his share in the Dismal Swamp reclamation project. His landed property was, as Edward Lengel says, “immense.”22 Including his Shenandoah lands, Washington still had 45,000 acres in the West when he died.
Washington insisted that Native American farmers must adopt new agricultural practices. Increasingly, he came to believe that white American farmers must do the same. While his western lands failed to bring him the profits he’d hoped for, he invested time, money, and energy in making his Mount Vernon lands more productive. He continued to increase his holdings, negotiating with William Harrison to acquire control of his adjoining property.23
He corresponded with the leading scientific agriculturalists in Britain—Arthur Young, Sir John Sinclair, and William Strickland—and regarded Britain’s National Board of Agriculture as “one of the most valuable Institutions of Modern Times,” which “must be productive of great advantages to the nation and to mankind in General.”24 He was impressed by Scottish agriculturalists and favored attracting immigrants from the Scottish Highlands because they were “a hardy industrious people, well calculated to form new settlements.”25 However, when Richard Parkinson, an English farmer and agricultural author, visited Mount Vernon in 1798 with a view to renting 1,200 acres, he saw little sign of improvement and was not impressed. He deemed Washington’s sheep and cattle of poor quality, and pronounced the land so barren that he would not have taken it even if Washington had given him it. Parkinson’s own farm near Baltimore failed, and in his book he recommended that prospective English emigrants stay at home rather than compete with poor lands and slavery in America. He included narratives of William Crawford’s capture and execution to show “how dangerous it is for the migrant to venture far into the country.”26
Washington, too, worried about the related problems of poor lands and slavery. Through a lifetime of acquiring land, he had acted like the rest of the Virginia planter class, who dominated the government and made sure that the best property went to “the best people” rather than to family farmers. Instead of yeoman farmers working the land with care for a precious commodity and planting a variety of crops, planters acquired vast amounts of land cheaply and exhausted it with single-crop agriculture and slave labor, keeping it “under constant cultivation,” as Washington said, “until it will yield scarcely anything at all.”27 He acknowledged Strickland
’s criticisms of American agriculture as wasteful, making little effort to improve land, with the result “that we ruin the lands that are already cleared and either cut down more wood if we have it, or emigrate into the western Country.”28 He adopted a seven-field, seven-year crop rotation system on his Mount Vernon estates.
How to get rid of the other problem occupied his thoughts increasingly. Had he not been opposed to “selling negros, as you would do cattle at a market,” he wrote in 1794, “I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one as a slave. I shall be happily mistaken, if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ere many years pass over our heads.”29 According to Ron Chernow, Washington’s “secret agenda” in selling his western lands was to use the proceeds to emancipate his slaves.30 But his desire to free slaves ran counter to the effects of his constant desire to promote westward expansion. Whites moving west in great numbers helped entrench slave labor in eastern Virginia, where a greater proportion of those who stayed were, or became, slaveholders.31
Despite his growing personal aversion, Washington remained publicly silent on the question of slavery.32 A French traveler, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, who visited Mount Vernon, observed that the biggest obstacle to freeing slaves lay “in the character, the manners and habits of the Virginians. They seem to enjoy the sweat of slaves.” He believed beginning the revolution in Virginia and preparing the way for emancipation was a task worthy of such a great man as Washington. But Washington was slow to move against slavery, thinking it “dangerous to strike too vigorously at a prejudice which had begun to diminish; that time, patience, and information, would not fail to vanquish it.”33
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