The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  2. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 9.

  3. Hugh Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 273.

  4. Sachs, Home Rule, 29–30.

  5. JHBV, 1773–76, 282; Robert L. Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence: A Documentary Record, 7 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973–83), 3:270; Reuben G. Thwaites and Louise P. Kellogg, eds., The Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 1775–1777 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1908), 34.

  6. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 194.

  7. Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia 7:257–73; Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 35–42.

  8. The conference proceedings are in Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 25–127.

  9. Guyasuta’s assurances are in Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 108, and EAID 18:107; Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia 4:199 (Virginia and Pennsylvania).

  10. Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 53, 61–62; Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia 3:377–78 (determined on war), 389–90, 7:770.

  11. Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia 4:113, 117–18; Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 27–33.

  12. Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia 4:222.

  13. Hermann Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State,” Pennsylvania History 68 (2001): 139–61; Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia, 3:262–65, 4:180, and Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 86–87 (“foolish people”); Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940), 185, and Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State,” 149–50 (petticoat speech).

  14. JCC 4:208, 266–70; EAID 18:114.

  15. Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State.”

  16. Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel, eds., The Moravian Mission Diaries of David Zeisberger, 1772–1781 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 35–36, 319–21, 608–10.

  17. Gregory Schaaf, Wampum Belts and Peace Trees: George Morgan, Native Americans and Revolutionary Diplomacy (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1990); Wellenreuther and Wessel, Moravian Mission Diaries, 324.

  18. Morgan to Commissioners of Indian Affairs, May 16, 1776, “Letter Book of George Morgan, 1776,” Pennsylvania Historical Commission, Harrisburg.

  19. American Archives, ser. 4, 5:816.

  20. “Letter Book of George Morgan, 1776,” 36–39; EAID 18:121–22; Thwaites and Kellogg, Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 172; American Archives, ser. 5, 1:36–37.

  21. JCC 5:621.

  22. EAID 18:134–36.

  23. American Archives, ser. 5, 2:512.

  24. Cornstalk’s speech to Congress, Nov. 7, 1776, “Letter Book of George Morgan, 1776”; EAID 18:147.

  25. Colonel George Morgan Letterbooks, 1775–79, 3 vols., Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 1:57; hereafter Morgan Letterbooks.

  26. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 131–40; Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 72.

  27. On Cornstalk’s murder, see Charles A. Stuart, ed., Memoir of Indian Wars and Other Occurrences, by the late Colonel Stuart, of Greenbrier (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971), 58–62; Draper Mss. 3D164–73, 2YY91–94; Reuben G. Thwaites and Louise P. Kellogg, eds., Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio, 1777–1778 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1912), 126–27, 149, 157–63, 175–77, 188–89, 205–9, 258–61.

  28. Thwaites and Kellogg, Frontier Defense, 188–89; PGW, Rev. 12:562–63n.

  29. PGW, Rev. 11:238–39, 12:179–80.

  30. PGW, Rev. 12:353, 420.

  31. PGW, Rev. 6:350, 8:314.

  32. Roy Bird Cook, Washington’s Western Lands (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930), 118.

  33. PGW, Rev. 8:376.

  34. Consul W. Butterfield, ed., Washington-Irvine Correspondence: The Official Letters Which Passed between Washington and Brig.-Gen. William Irvine and between Irvine and Others concerning Military Affairs in the West from 1781 to 1783 (Madison, WI: David Atwood, 1882), 15–16; Thwaites and Kellogg, Frontier Defense, 215–23; Wellenreuther and Wessel, Moravian Mission Diaries, 29 (son); Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 167 (brother); White, Middle Ground, 385 (brother); PGW, Rev. 14:182.

  35. PGW, Rev. 15:167; Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778–1779 (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1916), 54 (quote), 60.

  36. PGW, Rev. 15:204–5, 249; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 59.

  37. Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 116; Consul W. Butterfield, ed., The Washington-Crawford Letters: Being the Correspondence between George Washington and William Crawford, from 1767 to 1781, concerning Western Lands (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1877), ix–x, 64–73.

  38. PGW, Rev. 15:345, 373.

  39. Wellenreuther and Wessel, Moravian Mission Diaries, 28–29, 388 (quote).

  40. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 117–18; Wellenreuther and Wessel, Moravian Mission Diaries, 30 (White Eyes).

  41. PGW, Rev. 17:388.

  42. EAID 18:161–69; IALT, 3–5; “Account of a Council Meeting,” Sept. 12, 1778, and “Articles of Confederation between the United States and the Delaware Nation,” Sept. 17, 1778, Morgan Letterbook 3.

  43. Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State,” 160.

  44. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 240.

  45. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 211.

  46. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 178–80; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 220.

  47. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 20–21; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 217.

  48. Morgan Letterbook 3:149–51; EAID 18:173–74; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 203–4, 217, quoted in Downes, Council Fires, 216. Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State” provides evidence from Zeisberger’s diary to refute charges that the treaty was a betrayal or forgery.

  49. Morgan Letterbook 3:136; PCC, reel 180, item 163, 321.

  50. Morgan Letterbook 3:162–65; PCC, reel 183, item 166, 411–17; EAID 18:176–78; PGW, Rev. 20:405, 414–17; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 313, 317–21.

  51. PGW, Rev. 20:495; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 327.

  52. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 303.

  53. GW to Congress, May 14, 1779 (“at a loss”), GWPLC; PGW, Rev. 20:447–49; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 322–24.

  54. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 360.

  55. Martha quoted in James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 346.

  56. PGW, Rev. 20:461.

  57. PGW, Rev. 20:302, 551–52; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 296–98, 332.

  58. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 307.

  59. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 337–38, 354–56.

  60. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 340–42, 351–53; EAID 18:179–82.

  61. PGW, Rev. 22:76; Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 73–75.

  62. PGW, Rev. 19:7, 199, 497; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 200, 238–39.

  63. PGW, Rev. 19:451–52, 454n, 478.

  64. PGW, Rev. 20:344.

  65. PGW, Rev. 19:565–66.

  66. PGW, Rev. 20:148, 412–14; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 293–94, 315–17; Louise P. Kellogg, ed., Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779–1781 (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1917), 18.

  67. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 214.

  68. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 215; Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 41–42.

  69. Kellogg
, Frontier Advance, 279–80, 349.

  70. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 249; Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 262, 371, 388.

  71. Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, 55–66; PGW, Rev. 22:433–36.

  72. Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 8:167, 176, 283, 369, 393; Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, 183.

  73. James Alton James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 1781–1784 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1926), 144, 167, 189.

  74. Milo M. Quaife, ed., The Conquest of the Illinois by George Rogers Clark (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley and Sons, 1920), 166–68.

  75. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 229.

  76. White, Middle Ground, 368–78; Griffin, American Leviathan, 141–47 (land grab at 142).

  77. DAR 17:50 (Hamilton); Haldimand Papers 21781:74 (every day).

  78. PTJ 3:259, 276, 27:693.

  79. J. Martin West, ed., Clark’s Shawnee Campaign of 1780: Contemporary Accounts (Springfield, OH: Clark County Historical Society, 1975).

  80. MPHC 10:462–65.

  81. Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, 101, 111–12, 114–15, 123–24; Writings of Washington 19:119–20; Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 83.

  82. Kellogg, Frontier Advance, 371; Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, 314; Writings of Washington 21:82–83.

  83. C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972, 1989), 314; Writings of Washington 21:457; Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, 342–44, 352–53, 376–81, 399 (£80,000); Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 9:161–62 (no casualties). Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 140–41, says the twenty prisoners were killed; C. Hale Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Telegraph Press, 1929), 629, questions the evidence that the killings were carried out in cold blood.

  84. Paul A. W. Wallace, ed., Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder; or, Travels amoung the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York & Ohio in the 18th Century (Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), 189–200; Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 9:524–25; PCC, reel 73, item 59, 3:49–51: CVSP 3:122–24.

  85. Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 99–109 (to Washington), 343–45 (to his wife).

  86. Writings of Washington 24:273, 279.

  87. Quoted in Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008), 276.

  88. Haldimand Papers 21762:13–14.

  89. John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), ch. 3, quote at 84.

  90. Haldimand Papers 21756:94, 21779:109–10.

  91. Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 118n.

  92. Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, 199.

  93. John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (Philadelphia, 1876; rpt. New York: Arno, 1971), 284–89.

  94. Quoted in David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 13.

  95. Haldimand Papers 21762:80; Eugene Bliss, ed., The Diary of David Zeisberger, a Moravian Missionary among the Indians of Ohio, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: R. Clarke, 1885), 1:431 (Joseph); Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, 199; Hardin in CVSP 3:235.

  96. Haldimand Papers 21756:94, 21779:109–10.

  97. Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 125; Writings of Washington 24:417; PGW, Confed. 4:36 (Mrs. Crawford’s slaves).

  98. Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 126–27, 249; CVSP 3:235. The accounts of Knight and Slover are in Archibald Loudon, A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages, Committed by the Indians in Their Wars with the White People, 2 vols. (Carlisle, PA: A. Loudon, 1808), 1:1–40.

  99. Washington to Irvine, Aug. 6, 1782, GWPLC; Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 131–32; Writings of Washington 24:474.

  100. Griffin, American Leviathan, 169–77.

  101. Sipe, Indian Wars of Pennsylvania, 665–71; Butterfield, Washington-Irvine Correspondence, 176, 251, 381–83.

  102. Haldimand Papers 21762:149–50; DAR 21:114–15; CVSP 3:275–76, 280–83, 333–34; Faragher, Daniel Boone, 16–25.

  103. “Journal of Daniel Boone,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 13 (1904): 276; Draper Mss. 1AA 276–77.

  104. William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–91), 5:44, 92 (first quote, Edmund Randolph; the second, Edmund Pendleton).

  105. De Peyster to McKee, Aug., 6, 1782, Claus Family Papers, National Archives of Canada, MG 19 F1, 3:147 (reel C-1478); Colonel Arent Schuyler De Peyster, Miscellanies by an Officer, 1774–1813 (New York: A. E. Chasmer, 1888), ix–xxxv, xxxiv–xxxv; DAR 21:116, 155.

  106. Writings of Washington 25:420 (Irvine), 26:283 (Congress), 305 (Carleton).

  107. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors; Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 534–43.

  108. Haldimand Papers 21779:111–12.

  109. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 293–95; Parkinson, Common Cause, 547–51.

  110. John Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 423; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 295.

  111. François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 655.

  112. Griffin, American Leviathan, 175.

  113. Cameron B. Strang, “Michael Cresap and the Promulgation of Settler Land-Claiming Methods in the Backcountry, 1765-1774,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 118 (2010): 127–30.

  114. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 185–90, 222.

  115. Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America, 147–48.

  116. Haldimand Papers 21763:42–43, 70, 86–87; Mary Beacock Fryer, Allan Maclean, Jacobite General (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987), 197–98.

  117. L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 2:23 (quote), 63.

  118. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001) (“weapon of Defence” at 90); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 415–26.

  Chapter 13: Building a Nation on Indian Land

  1. James H. Merrell, “Declarations of Independence: Indian-White Relations in the New Nation,” in The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 197, 201.

  2. Writings of Washington 27:135; GW to Duane, Sept. 7, 1783, GWPLC.

  3. Haldimand Papers 21756:138.

  4. Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 226, 268, 313 (“imagined futures”).

  5. François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 659–65; Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), ch. 1; Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History (New York: Penguin/Plume, 2002), 60; Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). W. Meinig, The Shap
ing of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 386, describes the idea of a continental republic as “a new experiment on a grand scale.”

  6. JCC 9:919.

  7. Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 150–51, 155.

  8. Joseph Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789 (New York: Knopf, 2015), xiv.

  9. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008) terms the uniting element in the 1760s an “anti-Indian sublime.”

  10. Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

  11. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 186, 270.

  12. David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 10–11.

  13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8–10, 38; Saler, Settlers’ Empire; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  14. Franklin had long urged agricultural expansion into the vast lands of the interior as the basis for extending empire, first British and then American. Carla J. Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 95–96, 143–44, 174 (“easily prevail’d on to part with Portions of Territory”).