The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  105. PTJ 23:241–42.

  106. George C. Chalou, “St. Clair’s Defeat, 1792,” in Congress Investigates, 1792–1974, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Roger Burns (New York: Chelsea House, 1975), 1–18; James T. Currie, “The First Congressional Investigation: St. Clair’s Military Disaster of 1791,” Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly 20 (Dec. 1990): 95–102.

  107. Knox to St. Clair, Dec. 23, 1791, Arthur St. Clair Papers, OSL, card 36; St. Clair to Fitzsimmons, Jan. 23, 1792, Arthur St. Clair Papers, OSL, card 37, and St. Clair Papers 2:278–79.

  108. PGW, Pres. 10:168–69; Mark J. Rozell, “George Washington and the Origins of Executive Privilege,” in George Washington and the Origins of the Modern Presidency, ed. Mark J. Rozell, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 147–48. Jefferson’s notes on the cabinet discussion of the question are in PTJ 23:261–62.

  109. The testimonies of the committee of inquiry are in Arthur St. Clair Papers, OSL, cards 38–40. The committee’s report is in American State Papers: Military Affairs, 1:36–39, St. Clair, Narrative, 59–79, and, with extracts from testimonies, St. Clair Papers 2:286–99.

  110. PTJ 19:468; American State Papers, Military Affairs 1:39, 41–44; also rpt. in St. Clair, Narrative, 155–73.

  111. St. Clair, Narrative

  112. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 216.

  113. CO 42/89:193; MPHC 24:336–37.

  114. Simcoe Correspondence 1:29–30, 67, 100–101, 114, 151, 170, 173–74; CO 42/89:47–50.

  115. PGW, Pres. 9:274, 10:85–86, 129.

  Chapter 17: Philadelphia Indian Diplomacy

  1. Sandra M. Gustafson, “Historical Introduction to Hendrick Aupaumut’s Short Narration,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 237.

  2. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1969), 173.

  3. PGW, Pres. 8:11.

  4. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom? Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 116–33.

  5. PGW, Pres. 6:393–96, 401–2, 8:433; Pickering Papers 61:6, 10, 14; Michael Leroy Oberg, Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48–52.

  6. PGW, Pres. 7:112.

  7. PGW, Pres. 7:27–29; Pickering Papers 61:108.

  8. Pickering Papers 61:119.

  9. Christopher Densmore, Red Jacket: Iroquois Diplomat and Orator (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Quaker at the Newtown conference quoted in David McLean, Timothy Pickering and the Age of the American Revolution (New York: Arno Press, 1982), 315.

  10. Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?”

  11. Granville Ganter, ed., The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 1–15; PGW, Pres. 7:114n2, 157–58 (“entire approbation”), 234–35 (declines); Pickering Papers 61:69–122 (Red Jacket’s speeches at 62, 71, 82–83, 93–94 [“the mind of yr. broths”]), 61:113A (ambition).

  12. Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 16, 22. Abler finds “no convincing evidence” to support the notion that Cornplanter’s mother was Queen Aliquippa, whom Washington had met in 1753.

  13. Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 123.

  14. Archer Butler Hulbert, ed., The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 2 vols. (Marietta, OH: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), 1:82.

  15. Abler, Cornplanter, 72–74 (visit to New York), 78 (Harmar treaty); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2005), 246–48.

  16. Guyasuta and Cornplanter quoted in Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 222.

  17. Samuel Kirkland Papers, 1764–1837, Dartmouth College, Rauner Library, MS-867, file #7, 33–39; Walter Pilkington, ed., The Journals of Samuel Kirkland: 18th-century Missionary to the Iroquois, Government Agent, Father of Hamilton College (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College, 1980), 208–9.

  18. CO 42/82:316–38.

  19. ASPIA 1:140–42; PGW, Pres. 7:7–15; Thomas A. Abler, ed., Chainbreaker: The Revolutionary War Memoirs of Governor Blacksnake as told to Benjamin Williams (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 160–61, 176–77, 238–46. In 1786 the state of Massachusetts sold the right of preemption to lands it claimed in New York to Phelps and Gorham, who in 1788 persuaded Cornplanter and other Six Nations chiefs to sell them more than 2.5 million acres for $5,000 and an additional annuity of $500.

  20. Franklin B. Hough, ed., Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs Appointed by Law for the Extinguishment of Indian Titles in the State of New York, 2 vols. (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1861), 2:465–66.

  21. PGW, Pres. 7:121–27.

  22. PGW, Pres. 7:146–50; ASPIA 1:142–43; Abler, Chainbreaker, 177–79, 246–50.

  23. PGW, Pres. 7:218–21, 252–53, 322–23; ASPIA 1:143–44; Abler, Chainbreaker, 250–55.

  24. PGW, Pres. 7:221; ASPIA 1:144–45; Abler, Chainbreaker, 254; Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 203–4.

  25. Arthur St. Clair Papers, Ohio State Library (OSL): Knox to St. Clair, March 23, 1791, card 23; St. Clair to Knox, April 19, 1791, card 24; “Indian Goods for Col. Timothy Pickering for Treaty to be held with the Six Nations, May 16, 1791, card 24.

  26. ASPIA 1:145–47; 149–65 (Proctor’s narrative); CO 42/73:175–87; PGW, Pres. 8:258 (Knox quote).

  27. PGW, Pres. 8:58.

  28. CVSP 5:315 (“as fast as they can”), 318; PGW, Pres. 8:360. Others echoed Washington’s sentiments. A visiting Englishman thought “it would be impossible to find any jury in the back parts of America, who would bring any one in guilty of murder, for causing the death of an Indian.” Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797, ed. Jack D. L. Holmes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 106.

  29. Ganter, Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, 22–32; Pickering Papers 60:69–112 (Red Jacket’s speeches at 92, 96,105, 110); Taylor, Divided Ground, 250–53.

  30. Taylor, Divided Ground, 253.

  31. PGW, Pres. 10:141; Pickering to Knox, Aug. 10, 1791, Pickering Papers 60:115–16 (“corrupt”; “splendor”); Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, On America: New Travels in the United States of America Performed in 1788, 2 vols. (1792; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970) 1:312–13.

  32. Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).

  33. Simcoe Correspondence 2:68–69, 86, 99–100, 102, 105.

  34. ASPIA 1:226, 228–29, 245, 249.

  35. Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961–87), 11:375.

  36. ASPIA 1:229; Taylor, Divided Ground, 271 (quoting Kirkland to Knox, Jan. 5, 1791). According to a note from the War Department to Tobias Lear, “the names of the Indians who are invited to dine with the President on Monday next, are, The Farmer’s Brother; the Young King; China Breast Plate; the Infant; Solomon & John, young warriors; and Hendrick Aupamat & Solomon, his brother”; Stephen Decatur Jr., Private Affairs of George Washington: From the Records and Accounts of Tobias Lear, Esquire, His Secretary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 324. A portrait of the Infant painted by John Trumbull while he was in Philadelphia is in the Yale University Art Gallery.

  37. Laura Auricch
io, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered (New York: Knopf, 2014), 137–39; Dean R. Snow, Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 337 (Watson); PGW, Pres. 10:317.

  38. PGW, Pres. 10:142–43; Pickering Papers 62:11; Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton 11:375–77.

  39. PGW, Pres. 10:148–49, 151–52; ASPIA 1:229–33; Abler, Chainbreaker, 190–91, 260–65.

  40. Pilkington, Journals of Samuel Kirkland, 130, 231.

  41. Ganter, Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, 33–44; PGW, Pres. 10:190–94 (Red Jacket’s speech).

  42. Densmore, Red Jacket, 37–38.

  43. Thomas S. Abler, “Governor Blacksnake as a Young Man? Speculation on the Identity of Trumbull’s The Young Sachem,” Ethnohistory 34 (1987): 329–51.

  44. PGW, Pres. 10:310, 316–17.

  45. Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton 11:373-74.

  46. Haldimand Papers 21756:330 (pension), 21763:99 (quote), 108, 21882:29 (captain), 21785:36–38, 52, 70–71.

  47. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs 2:465.

  48. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs 2:470.

  49. Writings of Washington 15:173.

  50. Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 459–63; Taylor, Divided Ground, 253–65, 275; William L. Stone, Life of Joseph Brant–Thayendanegea, 2 vols. (New York: George Dearborn, 1838), 2:319–26; ASPIA 1:228 “(“such eminence”); PGW, Pres. 9:588–89, 10:310–12.

  51. CO 42/90:196–97.

  52. PGW, Pres. 10:491.

  53. PTJ 24:106.

  54. Isaac Weld Jr., Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: John Stockdale, 1799), 2:279–80.

  55. ASPIA 1:236–37; Simcoe Correspondence 5:18–19.

  56. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 470–74; Taylor, Divided Ground, 275–77; PTJ 24:133 (“best dispositions”); Stone, Life of Joseph Brant 2:328 (refused offers); FO 4/16:33–35 (Brant and Hammond). I am grateful to Paul Williams for suggesting the possibility of a private agreement between two Masons. On Brant as a Mason, see Joy Porter, Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 194–206.

  57. Mary Quayle Innis, ed., Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965), 82–83.

  58. Hammond’s secretary said Jefferson made clear his hatred and malevolence toward Britain; he thought Washington polite but reserved: “a man of great but secret ambition, and has, sometimes, I think condescended to use little arts, and those too very shallow ones, to secure the object of his ambition.” S. W. Jackman, ed., “A Young Englishman Reports on the New Nation: Edward Thornton to James Bland Burges, 1791–1793,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 18 (1961): 95–97 ( Jefferson), 104 (Washington).

  59. FO 4/11:249–51, 255–59, 14:253–55, 15:313–14, 16:1–4, 272–74; FO 5/1:29–30, 50–51; CO 42/73:15–16, 83:134–37, 89:47–50; William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Papers, UK National Archives, formerly PRO 30/8/344:47–53; Simcoe Correspondence 1:58–59, 66–68, 130–31, 151, 173–76, 208–9, 233, 267–68; Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton 10:373–74; 11:347, 446–48; 13:213–14; Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy toward the United States, 1783–1795 (New York: Norton, 1971), chs. 12–13; Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., “Barrier to Settlement: British Indian Policy in the Old Northwest, 1783–1794,” in The Frontier in American Development, ed. David M. Ellis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 249–76. On British-Indian policy more generally at this time, see Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), and Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

  60. PTJ 20:109–13, 140–41, 23:240.

  61. PGW, Pres. 10:490.

  62. PTJ 24:29–31, 717–21, 728–30; Simcoe Correspondence 1:267–68.

  63. Simcoe Correspondence 1:142.

  64. Simcoe Correspondence 1:142, 202 (quotes); S. F. Wise, “The Indian Diplomacy of John Graves Simcoe,” Annual Report of the Canadian Historical Association (1953): 41.

  65. ASPIA 1:227.

  66. ASPIA 1:230; PGW, Pres. 10:187–89.

  67. William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–1991), 14:297–98.

  68. ASPIA 1:229–30, 243; Jacob Burnet, Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-Western Territory (Cincinnati: Derby, Bradley, 1847), 129–31.

  69. ASPIA 1:337.

  70. PGW, Pres. 10:653.

  71. PTJ 23:240.

  72. PGW, Pres. 10:635.

  73. PGW, Pres. 11:29; PTJ 24:316.

  74. Simcoe Correspondence 5:34 (“yanky Indian”); Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory 43 (1996): 431–57; Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005): 187–220 (“front door” quote at 209).

  75. B. H. Coates, ed., “A Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians from the Original Manuscript of Hendrick Aupaumut,” Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 2, pt. 1 (1827): 76, 78.

  76. Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut,” 205 (consent of the governed); Coates, “Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians,” 128 (“Yorkers”).

  77. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 458–59.

  78. PGW, Pres. 10:338–42, 12:141–42; Taylor, Divided Ground, 173, 182–84, 217, 222–25, 345–56. Cook’s complaint against Brant is in Pickering Papers 59:50.

  79. PGW, Pres. 12:186.

  80. PGW, Pres. 12:422–23; ASPIA 1:123 (Knox declines).

  81. PGW, Pres. 11:85, 115–16 (quote), 124, 150.

  82. Pilkington, Journal of the Rev. Samuel Kirkland, 231.

  83. ASPIA 1:233–36 (“foot of their land” at 234); Rowena Buell, ed., The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam and Certain Official Papers and Correspondence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 118–20, 257–67.

  84. PGW, Pres. 10:653.

  85. 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), 258–93. On Wells, see William Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

  86. The treaty and proceedings are in ASPIA 1:338–40; Buell, Memoirs of Rufus Putnam, 335–67; R. David Edmunds, “ ‘Nothing Has Been Effected’: The Vincennes Treaty of 1792,” Indiana Magazine of History 74 (March 1978): 23–35; JPP, 66.

  87. Decatur, Private Affairs of George Washington, 325–26; PGW, Pres. 11:368–70. On DuCoigne’s earlier visit, see PTJ 6:43, 60–64n.

  88. JPP, 11.

  89. PGW, Pres. 15:7n. On January 6, 1793, Tobias Lear and “the other gentlemen of the family” represented the president at the funeral of one of the chiefs who died; Decatur, Private Affairs of George Washington, 325.

  90. JPP, 40, 42–43; PGW, Pres. 12:79–80, 82–90 (quotes at 82, 83, 89); PTJ 25:112–18.

  91. PGW, Pres. 12:551–53; JPP, 45 (pipes to War Office).

  92. PGW, Pres. 12:137–39, 15:6–7 (Knox quote); ASPIA 1:470; JPP, 44.

  93. Richard C. Knopf, ed., Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960), 84.

  94. ASPIA 1:243; Consul Willshire Butterfield, History of the Girtys (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1890), 203 (“can not tell the names”).

 
95. The following discussion of the negotiations at the Glaize council is based on the account in Simcoe Correspondence 1:218–29; see also Coates, “Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians,” 118; JPP, 3–4, 66.

  96. Coates, “Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians,” 113.

  97. ASPIA 1:337.

  98. Simcoe Correspondence 1:243.

  99. Simcoe Correspondence 1:258.

  100. PGW, Pres. 12:41–42, 57–60, 74, 246; PTJ 25:88–89, 229.

  101. JPP, 31.

  102. PGW, Pres. 12:130–31; JPP, 49–50.

  103. PGW, Pres. 12:153–55, 292–93, 354–55, 457, 13:37–40; GW to cabinet (Circular), Mar. 22, 1793, GWPLC; PTJ 25:220–22, 258–59 (first written cabinet opinions at 259n), 271–73, 354–56 (Jefferson’s report on treaties and boundaries), 424.

  104. ASPIA 1:340–42 (“explicitly” at 341).

  105. PTJ 25:272.

  106. ASPIA 1:343.

  107. Simcoe Correspondence 5:31.

  108. Simcoe Correspondence 1:354–55, 400 (quote).

  109. Simcoe Correspondence 5:47.

  110. Simcoe Correspondence 1:355.

  111. ASPIA 2:478; Brant to ——, Mar. 23, 1793, National Archives of Canada, Claus Family Papers, MG 19, 1F, 5:95–96, and reel C-1479 (quote).

  112. Simcoe Correspondence 5:29.

  113. On the Sandusky negotiations, see Simcoe Correspondence 2:1–35 (Brant’s journal of the council at 5–17; Indian proposal at 17–20); General Benjamin Lincoln, “Journal of a Treaty held in 1793, with the Indian Tribes North-west of the Ohio, by Commissioners of the United States,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 5 (1836): 109–76 (“express authority” at 149; Wyandot chief at 150); ASPIA 1:340–60 (“Great chief” at 350; Wyandot and Girty at 354); Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, 312–20; PGW, Pres. 14:143–47 (Beverley Randolph’s report to Washington); JPP, 236–37; Pickering Papers 60:158, 160, 170, 175–79; and Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Abortive Treaty of Lower Sandusky, 1793,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 70 (1961): 189–213.