The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  118. ASPIA 2:564 (New Corn), 577 (Little Turtle), 580 (Tarhe), 582 (Wayne).

  119. White, Middle Ground, 472–73.

  120. PGW, Pres. 18:727 (quote and queries), 744, 745 (more land than expected).

  121. PGW, Pres. 19:28.

  122. PGW, Pres. 16:613–15; Henry P. Johnston, ed., The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890–93), 4:55–56.

  123. PGW, Pres. 18:337–39; Syrett et al., Papers of Alexander Hamilton 18:461–64.

  124. Johnston, Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay 4:139; Todd Estes, The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

  125. CO 42/100:109–13.

  126. PGW, Pres. 18:146.

  127. PGW, Pres. 19:488–89.

  128. John Adams to Abigail, Jan. 9, 1794, and Feb. 8, 1796, John Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 5, 1796, The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. C. James Taylor (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008–16).

  129. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 3–4, 140–41, 233–35; Charles A. Weeks, “Of Rattlesnakes, Wolves, and Tigers: A Harangue at the Chickasaw Bluffs, 1796,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010): 487–518; Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 241–42; “Talk of the Chickasaw Chiefs at Silver Bluffs, represented by Wolf’s Friend … [1797],” University of Michigan, Clements Library, McHenry Papers.

  130. Writings of Washington 34:399–400.

  131. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 194; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), 238; Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 268–69.

  132. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 417–18.

  133. PGW, Pres. 19:223.

  134. PGW, Pres. 17:425.

  135. PGW, Pres. 19:15–16, 540 (“almost incredible”), 569; Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 176–77.

  136. Cayton, “Radicals in the ‘Western World,’ ” 88; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “ ‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 39–67.

  137. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage/Penguin, 2014), ch. 5 (“infinite consequence” at 100; figures at 104; fabulously profitable at 177); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  138. Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14, termed it the path of “migrant agricultural capitalism.”

  139. PGW, Pres. 17:63, 206–7, and GW to Spotswood, Nov. 23, 1794, NYPL, GW, reel 2, typescript.

  140. PGW, Pres. 12:499.

  141. Joel Achenbach, The Grand Idea: Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 192.

  142. Philander D. Chase, “A Stake in the West: George Washington as Backcountry Surveyor and Landholder,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 183; 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), 81–83 (“cream” and “perplexities” quotes); PGW, Pres. 16:25–26 (to Lear), 129–35 (“Memorandum” at 131–34), 208, 237–38 (“cream” and “perplexities” quotes); 17:404–7 (“plague than profit” at 405); Writings of Washington 34:222 (ditto).

  143. PGW, Pres. 18:199–200, 267–68, 505 ($2,693), 572–75; Ferling, First of Men, 489.

  144. Writings of Washington 34:173–74, 438–41; PGW, Pres. 18:37–39.

  145. PGW, Pres. 19:414–22, 462; PGW, Ret. 1:56–57; Roy Bird Cook, Washington’s Western Lands (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930), 126–28.

  146. PGW, Pres. 19:458, 462.

  147. Writings of Washington 35:393.

  148. PGW, Ret. 1:484–85, 507–8.

  149. Rick Willard Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden: George Washington’s Frontier Land Interests” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), 306, 328.

  Chapter 19: Transforming Indian Lives

  1. Rev. John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876), 145, 188–89.

  2. I am grateful to David Silverman for pushing my thinking on this point.

  3. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 474, calls the policy “imperial benevolence.”

  4. Knox to GW, Dec. 29, 1794, GWPLC; PGW, Pres. 17:328–32; ASPIA 2:543–44.

  5. PGW, Pres. 9:110–16; Writings of Washington 31:397–98.

  6. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 300; Writings of Washington 21:199; 32:10, 20.

  7. PGW, Pres. 14:466; Writings of Washington 34:391–92.

  8. Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), 239.

  9. Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 16–17; Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (1962; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 86–87, 146; 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), 176–78; David Andrew Nichols, Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986), 195; ASPIA 2:583–84 (awaiting goods).

  10. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), 147.

  11. Theda Perdue, “George Washington and the ‘Civilization’ of the Southern Indians,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 313–25.

  12. Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 229; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1969), 220–21.

  13. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 221–28; Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 138–40.

  14. Iroquois Indians: A Documentary History of the Diplomacy of the Six Nations and Their League, ed. Francis Jennings et al., 50 reels (Woodbridge, CT: 1985), reel 44 (1797), Feb. 28, quoted in Abler, Cornplanter, 122.

  15. Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 576–77.

  16. IALT, 37; Knox to GW, Nov. 14, 1795, GWPLC; PGW, Pres. 19:151–52.

  17. June Namias, ed., A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison by James E. Seaver (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 84–85.

  18. Granville Ganter, ed., The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 41, 138–48.

  19. Archer Butler Hulb
ert and William N. Schwarz, David Zeisberger’s History of the North American Indians (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1910), 121–22.

  20. Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 39 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 4:481–83; Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams, eds., Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer” by St. John de Crèvecoeur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925), 193–95; Adolph B. Benson, ed., Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, 2 vols. (New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1937), 2:457; Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 and 1797, ed. Jack D. L. Holmes (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1969), 212.

  21. Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778–1779 (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1916), 168; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 77–78.

  22. Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel, eds., The Moravian Mission Diaries of David Zeisberger, 1772–1781 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 11 (tavern), 18–19; Guy S. Klett, ed., Journals of Charles Beatty, 1762–1769 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 46 (tavern); Hermann Wellenreuther, “White Eyes and the Delawares’ Vision of an Indian State,” Pennsylvania History 68 (2001): 139–61.

  23. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell (New York: Dial), 106.

  24. Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005): 187–220 (quote at 205–6).

  25. John Sugden, Blue Jacket, Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 54.

  26. ASPIA 2:579; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 213; “Letters of Colonel John Francis Hamtramck,” MPHC 34 (1904), 739 (quote).

  27. Richard C. Knopf, ed., Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960), 532.

  28. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 214–15.

  29. Writings of Washington 35:299–302; GW’s speech, Nov. 29, 1796, GWPLC.

  30. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 215.

  31. John to Abigail Adams, Dec. 4, 1796, C. James Taylor et al., eds., The Adams Papers: Adams Family Correspondence 11:430, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/

  32. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 216–17.

  33. Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2007), ch. 7. Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005) examines subsequent Shawnee responses and sociopolitical adjustments to American cultural assault.

  34. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 532.

  35. PGW, Ret. 1:534.

  36. Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, 158; Donald H. Gaff, “Three Men from Three Rivers: Navigating between Native and American Identity in the Old Northwest Territory,” in The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850, ed. Daniel P. Barr (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 148.

  37. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 240–41.

  38. Carter, Life and Times of Little Turtle, 4–6.

  39. Adams to James Wilkinson, Feb. 4, 1798, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2321 (last modified July 12, 2016).

  40. Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961–87), 23:231.

  41. PTJ 36:274–90; Paul Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 176.

  42. William Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), ch. 8; Gaff, “Three Men from Three Rivers,” 149.

  43. ASPIA 2:551.

  44. IALT, 31.

  45. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), quotes at xv, 3, 34; Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 7, 13 (“new Cherokee world”).

  46. Writings of Washington 35:193–98.

  47. Perdue, “George Washington and the ‘Civilization’ of the Southern Indians,” 319–20; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 109–12, 115–20.

  48. ASPIA 1:247; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 39–42.

  49. Writings of Washington 35:196; Dinsmoor’s account of his public service [undated], Dinsmoor Papers, Dartmouth College, Rauner Library, Ms. 40, box 4, miscellaneous file (hereafter DP40/4), and Ms. 797118.1 (spinning wheel).

  50. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 43.

  51. Silas Dinsmoor Alumni File, 1791, Dartmouth College, Rauner Library, “Genealogies: Col. Silas Dinsmoor,” 453–55.

  52. Dinsmoor’s account of his public service, DP40/4.

  53. Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791–1795 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 205–6.

  54. Dinsmoor’s account of his public service, DP40/4.

  55. Quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 43.

  56. GW to 1st Session of the 4th Congress, Feb. 2, 1796, GWPLC.

  57. GW to Secretary of State, July 17, 1796, GWPLC; Writings of Washington 35:112 (quote), 146, 149.

  58. H. Thomas Foster, ed., The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 160–64.

  59. Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America, 245, 262.

  60. ASPIA 2:637–40 (quotes); IALT, 51–54; Alice Barnwell Keith et al., eds., The John Gray Blount Papers, 3 vols. (Raleigh, NC: State Department of Archives and History, 1959–65), 3:197–98, 205, 249.

  61. “Genealogies: Col. Silas Dinsmoor,” 452.

  62. PGW, Ret. 3:177; “Genealogies: Col. Silas Dinsmoor,” 455; Silas Dinsmoor Vertical File, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon, VA.

  63. Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1816 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 205.

  64. Dinsmoor’s account of his public service, DP40/4; War Department instructions to Dinsmoor, May 8, 1802, DP40/4.

  65. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 44–45; John Phillip Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970).

  66. Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40–41.

  67. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 57; Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 75–76.

  68. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Papers of Chief John Ross, 1807–1866, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 1:155, 322, 2:276–77; Gary E. Moulton, John Ross, Cherokee Chief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 13. Ross was not the last southern Indian leader to name a son for the first president. For example, George Washington Grayson, a Creek warrior, rancher, and politician, who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, served as Creek chief from 1917–20 and led the Creeks during the dissolution of Indian Territory to make way for Oklahoma statehood. W. David Baird, ed., A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G. W. Grayson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Mary Jane Warde, George Washington Grayson and the Creek Nation, 1843–1920
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

  69. Writings of Washington 35:195; Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 87–88; Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 17–18. Ethridge thinks Hawkins was “probably fluent in Muskoghean.”

  70. Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 56.

  71. Martin, Sacred Revolt, 92.

  72. Henri, Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 94–96.

  73. Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). On broader patterns of exchange in the colonial era, see Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); on the consequences and collapse of the deerskin trade among the Choctaws, see Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), chs. 4–5.

  74. Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  75. Ethridge, Creek Country, 111; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 5.

  76. Writings of Washington 35:157–58, 311, 350–51; Ethridge, Creek Country, 176–94, 215–28; Robbie Ethridge, “Creeks and Americans in the Age of Washington,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 284–85, 290. Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, ch. 2, examines the ongoing issue of the Creek boundary, and its porous nature.

  77. Ethridge, Creek Country, 9, 158–74; Ethridge, “Creeks and Americans in the Age of Washington,” 281–82; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 34–35; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands, 202.

  78. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter APS), Benjamin Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798, 1799”; Benjamin Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” in Foster, Collected Works, 115, 126–28; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 171–73.