The Indian World of George Washington

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The Indian World of George Washington Page 83

by Colin G. Calloway


  79. Ethridge, Creek Country, 99; Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 20–21.

  80. Saunt, New Order of Things, ch. 6; Ethridge, Creek Country, 113; Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 47–48, 83–85 (quote).

  81. APS, Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” 19; Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” in Foster, Collected Works, 24s–25s; Ethridge, Creek Country, 29, 31.

  82. Ethridge, Creek Country, 92, 181; Saunt, New Order of Things.

  83. Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” in Foster, Collected Works, 44s. On the Grierson family, see Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  84. ASPIA 1:384 (“first man”); APS, Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” 23–24, 31–32; Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” in Foster, Collected Works, 27s, 30s.

  85. APS, Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” 111–12.

  86. ASPIA 2:602. Cussetah Mico’s observation echoes that of the Onondaga orator Canasatego at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744; Colin G. Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1994), 101–4, and as elaborated by Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 41 vols. to date (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 4:483.

  87. APS, Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country,” 133–35; Ethridge, Creek Country, 105–7; Saunt, New Order of Things, 179–80; Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 57 (“Indispensable”); Evan Nooe, “Common Justice: Vengeance and Retribution in Creek Country,” Ethnohistory 62 (2015): 241–61.

  88. Saunt, New Order of Things.

  89. Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery Emancipation and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Saunt, Black, White, and Indian.

  90. Writings of Washington 35:311.

  91. Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 252.

  92. Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 316–17.

  93. PGW, Ret. 1:178–80.

  94. Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington, 1-vol. abridgement by Richard Harwell of the 7-vol. George Washington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 714–15.

  95. Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster, Collected Works, 252.

  96. PTJ 31:335.

  97. Ethridge, Creek Country, 20–21, 238–41; Saunt, New Order of Things, chs. 10–12; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 135 (Hoboithle Mico); J. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles: Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 118, 150, 175 (Hoboithle Mico’s letter and death); Kathryn E. Holland Braund, ed., Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 196–204 (Nuyukv).

  98. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. Rev. J. E. Strickland (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1971), 168.

  Chapter 20: A Death and a Non-Death

  1. Rick Willard Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden: George Washington’s Frontier Land Interests” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), ch. 9.

  2. PGW, Ret. 1:391.

  3. PGW, Pres. 19:154–55; PGW, Ret. 1:66–68, 247–48.

  4. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004), 262.

  5. PGW, Ret. 2:70.

  6. PGW, Ret. 1:438–39, 451–54, 459–60, 470–73, 2:606–7.

  7. PGW, Ret. 1:483, 490–91, 493, 507–9, 511–14, 2:34–35, 508, 3:92–93, 470–71 (quotes), 4:76, 90; Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” 353–59, 362–66.

  8. PGW, Pres. 18:199, 267–68, 505–6; PGW, Ret. 2:265–66, 3:66–68, 3:275–76, 314–15.

  9. PGW, Ret. 2:364–65, 492–94, 4:514; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 489–90; Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” 348–50; Roy Bird Cook, Washington’s Western Lands (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930), 94–97 (“legal difficulties”), 130.

  10. PGW, Ret. 4:344–45 (quote), 351–53, 403–4, 519–20.

  11. PGW, Ret. 2:27–29; Cook, Washington’s Western Lands, 70–71.

  12. PGW, Ret. 2:53–54, 4:422; Writings of Washington 36:142–43, 251–52.

  13. PGW, Ret. 3:349–50.

  14. PGW, Ret. 4:407–9 (“futile”).

  15. PGW, Ret. 4:456n–477 (quote at 457n); Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” 371.

  16. PGW, Ret. 2:1; Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Boston: Da Capo, 2016), 204–6; Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” 371–80.

  17. Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden,” x.

  18. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 372–73; Writings of Washington 36:256–57, 295–300.

  19. PGW, Ret. 4:477–512; 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), 184.

  20. PGW, Ret. 4:512–19.

  21. PGW, Ret. 4:514–16.

  22. Lengel, First Entrepreneur, 246.

  23. PGW, Ret. 3:175–76, 474–76, 4:74–75.

  24. Lengel, First Entrepreneur, 148–56, 196–200; PGW, Ret. 1:255.

  25. PGW, Pres. 10:359.

  26. Richard Parkinson, A Tour in America in 1798, 1799, and 1800, Exhibiting Sketches of Society and Manners and a Particular Account of the American System of Agriculture with Its Recent Improvements, 2 vols. in 1 (London: J. Hardy & J. Murray, 1805), 1:5 (12,000 acres); 88–117 (narratives), 154 (“dangerous”).

  27. Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2, 17 (“constant cultivation”).

  28. PGW, Ret. 1:254–55.

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

  30. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 750.

  31. Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 485.

  32. François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006), 83.

  33. Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America performed in 1788, 2 vols. (London, 1792), 1:281, 290. Andrew Burnaby, an Englishman who had visited Mount Vernon in 1759, made similar observations about how slavery shaped the character of Virginians; Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Burnaby’s Travels through North America (New York: A. Wessels, 1904), 53–55.

  34. Susan P. Schoelwer, ed., Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon (Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2016); Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, “Slave Flight: Mount Vernon, Virginia, and the Wider Atlantic World,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 197–222.

  35. PGW, Ret. 4:288.

  36. Ellis, His Excellency, 237; John Avlon, Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

  37. PGW, Ret. 4:527–40.

  38. PGW, Ret. 4:256.

  39. Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003) provides an overview of Washington’s changing attitudes toward slavery.

  40. Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father, 30.

  41. Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Fo
rmation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 29. On “big government,” see Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); on the army, see William Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017); on the role of the federal government in regulating settlement patterns to shape the contours of national expansion, see Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  42. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gregory Evans Dowd, “Indigenous Peoples without the Republic,” Journal of American History 104 (June 2017): 19–41.

  43. Gregory Ablavsky, “Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause,” Yale Law Journal 124 (2014–15): 1012–90, esp. 1021, 1067, 1075–81, 1083–84, 1089–90; Francis G. Hutchins, Tribes and the American Constitution (Brookline, MA: Amarta Press, 2000), 103–6.

  44. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 337.

  45. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 42 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 38:209–10, 39:590–91.

  46. In reality, the United States acquired only the right of preemption and then had to pay many times the purchase price of $15 million to buy the land from the Indian nations who inhabited and held it. Robert Lee, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,” Journal of American History, 103 (2017), 921–42.

  47. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1969), 334, 337.

  48. PGW, Pres. 19:225; Writings of Washington 35:214–38.

  49. 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), 370. The relationship of Indian people with Washington, DC, in subsequent years was in fact quite complex; C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, “The Indians’ Capital City: Diplomatic Visits, Place, and Two-Worlds Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Washington, DC,” in Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North Ameica, ed. James Joseph Buss and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 117–35.

  50. Gerald E. Kahler, The Long Farewell: Americans Mourn the Death of George Washington (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 18; Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, Mar. 20, 1800, p. 3.

  51. ASPIA 2:660–62, 672, 679 (Efau Hadjo quote).

  52. Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 185; Arthur C. Parker, The History of the Seneca Indians (Port Washington, NY: J. Friedman, 1926), 132.

  53. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Papers of Chief John Ross, 1807–1866, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 1:155, 187–88, 227, 322, 453, 481, 524, 2:85, 105, 145, 276–77.

  54. Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1970), 239–49.

  55. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 183.

  56. Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Iroquois (1851; Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1972), 178–79, 256–57; Parker, History of the Seneca Indians, 132.

  57. Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, Indian Peace Medals in American History (Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 9.

  58. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 303.

  59. PGW, Pres. 19:431–33, 579–80; ASPIA 2:617–18 (quotes).

  60. PGW, Pres. 19:608.

  61. Colin G. Calloway, “My Grandfather’s Axe: Living with a Native American Past,” in Reflections on American Indian History: Honoring the Past, Building a Future, ed. Albert L. Hurtado (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 3–31; Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: Norton, 2005); N. Bruce Duthu, American Indians and the Law (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2008).

  Index

  Note: An ‘f’ or ‘m’ following a page number indicates a figure or a map, respectively. A plate is indicated by ‘pl.’

  A

  Abeel, Henry, 456

  Abenakis, 21m, 51, 53, 76, 94, 222–23, 225–27, 228, 514n74. See also Cook, Louis; Gill, Joseph Louis; Swashan

  Abercromby, James, 121, 141, 152

  Ablavsky, Gregory, 322, 551n22

  Achenbach, Joel, 297

  Achiout. See Half Town (Seneca)

  Ackawonothio (Shawnee or Western Delaware), 117

  Ada-gal’kala. See Attakullakulla (Cherokee)

  Adair, James, 42, 119, 125, 163, 164

  Adams, Abigail, 288, 367

  Adams, John, 218, 223, 281, 326, 332, 357, 358, 359, 460, 461, 466, 467

  Adams, John Quincy, 427

  African Americans (blacks), 218, 237. See also Atiatoharongwen and other African Americans; enslaved African Americans

  Agashawa. See Egushawa (Ottawa)

  agriculture. See also “civilization”; corn; cotton; settlers (colonials, farmers, frontiersmen, squatters); tobacco Cornplanter and, 401, 404

  East against West and, 337

  English, 23, 480

  Federal Indian policies and, 341–45

  gender and, 454–55, 462

  Guyasuta and, 263

  Handsome Lake and, 489, 490

  Indian, 22, 23, 31, 345

  Mount Vernon and, 480, 481

  Pickering and, 405, 406–7

  plantation system of, 172

  Red Jacket and, 399–400

  soil depletion and, 31–32, 78, 448

  Treaty of New York and, 369, 372, 373

  Virginia and, 25, 31–32

  Western Indians and, 412

  westward expansion and, 36

  Agushaway. See Egushawa (Ottawa)

  Agwerondongwas. See Good Peter (Oneida)

  Akiatonharónkwen. See Cook, Louis (Abenaki–African American–Kahnawake Mohawk)

  Akwesasnes, 437, 490–91

  Alabama, 27, 285, 346, 364, 471. See also Creeks; Yazoo Companies

  Albany, 21m, 90

  Albany conference (1776), 238

  Albany Congress (1754), 100, 107, 117–18, 578n86

  Albany Plan (1754), 98–99

  Algonquians, 21m, 263, 444. See also Abenakis and other Algonquians

  Algonquins, 21m, 94

  Alien and Sedition Acts, 497n13

  Aliquippa, Queen, 79, 91, 92, 100

  Allan, John, 228, 231

  Allegheny Mountains, 36, 43, 55, 115, 195. See also roads

  Allegheny River, 5, 51, 61, 67, 79, 82m, 132, 248, 250–51, 255, 257, 263, 271, 272, 296m

  Allegheny Senecas, 455. See also Cornplanter; Guyasuta

  Allen, Ethan, 215

  Allerton, Isaac, 25

  Alumapees (Delaware), 60

  Ambler, Charles, 202

  Ambridge (Pennsylvania), 53

  American Archives (Force), 535n16

  American history, 3–5, 13–14

  American identity, 12, 285, 367, 544n9

  American Revolution. See also Allen, Ethan and other leaders; Oneidas and other Indian allies and enemies; Peace of Paris (1783); Revolutionary War in the West; Stamp Act; veterans, Revolutionary British land policies and, 6, 12

  Chickasaws and, 305

  corn and, 235–37, 243, 245, 246

  Creeks and, 347

  Indian identity and, 347

  Indian land and, 6, 12, 212, 234

  Indians and, 217–21

  Indian ways of fighting and, 215–16, 231

  Iroquois and, 220–21, 230, 235, 237–39, 240, 242–45, 258
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  McGillivray and, 348

  McGillivray’s father and, 347

  Mi’kmaqs and, 231

  Oneidas and, 235, 236–37, 239–43, 258–59, 458

  Pontiac’s War and, 177

  Royal Proclamation of 1763 and, 184

  Somerset v. Stewart (1772) and, 201

  speculators and, 212

  strategies, offensive versus defensive, 216–17

  Virginia independence and, 212

  war debt and, 327

  Washington and, 5–6, 167, 245–46, 259, 386

  Washington and Indians and, 5–6, 14, 216–17, 218–34, 245–46

  Washington’s Indian land acquisitions and, 234, 243–44, 289

  white racial consciousness and, 285

  Amherst, Jeffery, 174, 176

  Anderson, Fred, 89, 108, 157, 167, 510n29

  Anglo-Cherokee War, 6. See also frontier advance and Cherokee war

  Anglo-French rivalry. See also Braddock’s defeat (Battle of the Monongahela); Canada; Fort Duquesne; French, the; “French and Indian War”; frontier defense and Cherokee alliance; Ohio country; Seven Years’ War; Tanaghrisson’s war; Treaty of Paris (1763) American neutrality and, 397

  Cherokees and, 126, 127

  Delawares and, 116–17

  Dinwiddie and, 65, 67, 80–81

  Forks of the Ohio and, 68, 80

  forts and, 80, 117

  French and Indian War and, 148

  Great Lakes Indians and, 135

  Indian land and, 154–55

  Indians and, 136, 152, 175

  Iroquois and, 49–53, 53–54, 61, 74, 98, 144, 161

  Logstown Treaty and, 59

  Ohio country and, 260

  Ohio country forts and, 61–62, 65, 84

  Ohio Indians and, 58, 62, 63, 72, 73, 81, 93, 94–95, 97–98, 99, 107

  Saint-Pierre and, 80–81

  Scarouady and, 100, 108

  Shawnees and, 116–17

  Shingas and, 106, 107

 

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