The British held an essential advantage in the West because they managed to keep their tribal allies from the long fight against the French. But in 1775, when British agents pressed their advantage, urging the Haudenosaunee to attack the Patriots, they received a tepid response. “We are unwilling to join on either side of such a contest, for we bear an equal affection to both Old and New England,” declared one Oneida chief. “Let us Indians be all of one mind, and live with one another; and you white people settle your own disputes between yourselves.” Disease, alcohol abuse, and economic dependency had weakened the once powerful Six Nations, and the French departure from North America made it difficult for them to play the traditional balancing game. Many Iroquois chiefs saw neutrality as their only course.1
Other war leaders, especially the Mohawk leader Thayendanega, known also by his English name, Joseph Brant, saw the situation differently. Descended from a prominent native family, Brant was the brother-in-law of British Indian agent Sir William Johnson, who sent him to Anglican mission school and then to an Indian academy (later known as Dartmouth College), where Brant developed into a brilliant scholar. When the fighting broke out in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord, Brant went to London at the request of British authorities to negotiate an anti-Patriot alliance between the Six Nations and the British. He toured the capital, dined with luminaries, and sat for a portrait by a fashionable artist. The questions of land and sovereignty, Brant told the British, would determine Mohawk support. The Iroquois would fight for their own independence. Receiving British assurances that the Six Nations would be able to write their own terms at the end of the conflict, Brant returned home to lobby for the British among the leaders of the Six Nations.
Dominated by chiefs seeking neutrality, the Haudenosaunee council refused to let Brant speak, so he called his own meeting of sympathetic chiefs at the British trading town of Oswego. Representatives of the Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas agreed to fight for the English king with Brant in command, but chiefs of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with the Patriots. Fratricidal civil war would tear at the bonds of peace and power that had held the Iroquois together since the fifteenth century. For many Iroquois patriots, Joseph Brant was a hero of the resistance against the Americans. But others condemned him for destroying their unity.
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant. Painting by Gilbert Stuart, 1786. Wikimedia Commons.
Brant’s army trounced the Patriots at Oriskany in 1777 and Cherry Valley in 1778, and his name summoned more fear in the hearts of settlers than any Indian leader since Pontiac. The Iroquois absorbed devastating Patriot invasions, then pushed back, ejecting the Americans from their territory and pushing the outskirts of Albany. “We are now deprived of a great portion of our most valuable and well inhabited territory,” announced Governor George Clinton of New York. Meanwhile the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, and Mingo peoples of the Ohio valley formed their own pro-British military confederacy centered at Detroit, a fur-trade hotspot and supply depot at the strategic junction of Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1777 and 1778, the Ohio confederacy sent warriors south against American communities planted in defiance of the Royal Proclamation in Kentucky and western Virginia. The Americans barely held on.2
George Rogers Clark. Engraving by T. B. Welch, c. 1865. Author’s collection.
The only American military leader in the West who could match Brant’s leadership was George Rogers Clark. A Virginian and a gentleman planter, warrior, and speculator, Clark had taken part in several western land surveying expeditions. He had a stake in lands along the Ohio and refused to allow them to be abandoned to the British or their Indian allies. His western army conquered the former French settlements in the Illinois Country and captured the British commander. The Spanish, though careful to distance themselves formally from the Patriot cause, supplemented Clark’s gains by retaking Florida and the Gulf coast and tossing the British out of the Mississippi River towns of Natchez and Baton Rouge. While the Spanish hoisted their flags over key transportation and trade junctions, the Americans’ advance stalled at Detroit. Clark lacked the manpower to attack the garrison. The Americans raided Indian towns across the Ohio River, but they could do little more than defend their forts in Kentucky and hang on to Illinois.
As the British had learned after their victory over the French, starting fights in the West proved easier than ending them. When General Charles Cornwallis surrendered the British army at Yorktown in 1781, concluding the war in the East, the battle in the West intensified. Brant launched new offensives, casting a shadow over Clark’s successes. American militiamen from western Pennsylvania marched into the Ohio valley to put a stop to Indian raiding. Finding no enemies, in early 1782 they attacked peaceful Christian Delawares at the mission village of Gnadenhutten. The mutilated bodies of 96 peaceful men, women, and children testified to the levels of violence in the West after the Revolution. The Pennsylvanians nailed Indian scalps over the doors of their log cabins to advertise their victory. Outraged, Ohio Indian warriors invaded Kentucky, and in August, at the Battle of the Blue Licks, they ambushed an army of militiamen, leaving the mutilated bodies of 147 Kentuckians on the battleground.
By 1783 the confederated army of Indian fighters was winning the war for the West. It came as a shock, therefore, when they received news of the British surrender. The Americans had acquired the imperial right of conquest to the entire trans-Appalachian country, from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River to the boundary of Spanish Florida, the region the British had defined as Indian Country in the Royal Proclamation of twenty years before. Given the advantage they held through their Indian allies, why did the British cede the West? Strategists in London believed that they still held an advantage. They understood that gaining the right to the West was not the same as controlling it. By returning Florida to the Spanish and strengthening their fortifications in Canada, the British succeeded in surrounding the infant republic with jealous European powers. The treaty stipulated that the British would evacuate their forts in the ceded territory “with convenient speed,” but London issued instructions to “allow the posts in the upper country to remain as they had for some time.” These forts supplied guns and ammunition to Indian insurgents. The Americans could have the West—and slowly bleed to death there. At a date in the near future, the British could sweep in and reclaim their empire.3
. . .
The American Revolution was fought over the question, who will rule? In the West, the fighting continued over another, who will own? The answer to both questions seemed the same. The people ruled and the people would own the nearly 230 million acres beyond the accepted boundaries of the Atlantic states. The answer was elegant in simplicity and noble in spirit. But who were “the people”?
Indians at Independence Hall, Philadelphia. From William Birch, The City of Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia, 1800). The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.
The Indian residents of the West assumed that they held the equivalent of title to their traditional lands. They had not been defeated, yet the United States assumed that the victory over Great Britain also included victory over their Indian allies. The national government claimed the right to seize the lands and property of all who had opposed the Revolution. When the Indians were informed that they would suffer the same fate as the Tories, they were thunderstruck. “When you Americans and the King made peace,” declared the Seneca leader Red Jacket, “he did not mention us, and showed us no compassion, notwithstanding all he said to us, and all we had suffered.” The Americans paid no attention to such complaints. Seizing hostages, commissioners of the Confederation Congress forced the Six Nations to sign a treaty in 1784 ceding a large portion of their homeland. Joseph Brant and his followers fled north to British territory, creating a second Iroquois confederacy on the other side of the new international boundary. The next year the commissioners bullied the tribes of the Ohio confederacy into ceding the southeastern portion of what would became the state of Ohio. Even In
dian nations that had fought with the Patriots—the Oneidas and Tuscaroras of the Six Nations and the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys of northern New England—were compelled to make large cessions. The Americans translated victory into arrogance, guaranteeing a bloody aftermath following the Revolution, especially in the West.4
WESTERN LAND CLAIMS OF THE STATES
There was also a dispute over whether the West fell under the jurisdiction of the states or the national government. The English king had granted several of his American colonies charters that extended westward, in some cases stretching all the way across the continent to the “South Sea.” When these colonies became states, they were reluctant to surrender their claims. But the six states without claims demanded that Congress assume authority over the western lands “for the good of the whole.” The dispute delayed the ratification of the Articles of Confederation until 1780, when Congress resolved that all ceded western land would “be disposed of for the common benefit of the United States, and be settled and formed into distinct republican States, which shall become members of the Federal Union.” New York immediately agreed to give up its western claims, followed by Virginia in 1781 and soon thereafter most of the others, with the exception of Georgia, which held out for years.5
The Land Ordinance of 1785. National Archives.
The Congress looked to colonial traditions of land dispersal to guide their decisions about what to do with this vast public domain in the West. The colonies employed systems of land distribution that blended social aims with geographic realities. In New England, a communal ethos prevailed. Colonial governments granted lands not to individuals but to congregations and community groups, and they discouraged migrants from moving too far from existing towns. Before relocating, an advance party surveyed their grant, designating the appropriate place for the town center, with its church, roads, pasturage, and most promising farming fields. Each family in the group received a lot in the center, as well as farm, pasture, and timber lots on the fringes. The enthusiasm for this pattern of settlement outlasted the enthusiasm for the Puritan church’s cultural dominance, and Yankees continued to practice prior survey and compact settlement. In the South, where land and climate encouraged staple agriculture (tobacco, rice, and later cotton), a different system, featuring large tracts relatively far apart, took root. Individual planters spread out across the countryside looking for appealing chunks of property, then requested a grant from the colonial government. Unlike New England, southern farmers bore the cost and assumed the obligation of independent development. The law Congress wrote, the Land Ordinance of 1785, drew from both traditions, borrowing from New England the idea of prior survey and orderly contiguous development and from the South the practice of allocating land directly to individuals.
THE SURVEY SYSTEM
The land law, however, also broke with tradition. The authors tossed out the “metes and bounds” system of surveying, in which each parcel was described by the distinctive lay of the land and the property lines of adjacent plots, and replaced it with an elegant grid mechanism that screamed eighteenth-century enlightened planning. All the western territory would be divided “into townships of six miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles.” A great grid of “Principal Meridians” and “Base Lines” would divide the whole of the West into numbered ranges of townships, with each township divided into thirty-six square-mile sections, each section further divisible into half-sections, quarter-sections, and quarter-quarters of forty acres. Coordinates framed every farmer’s field; you could locate each patch of the public domain by range, township, and section numbers. This system, a product of the Age of Enlightenment, worked well in some landscapes, weirdly in others. The national survey would assure clear boundaries and firm titles, but it would press on the land a uniformity that took no account of the landscape, the climate, or previous human occupation.6
The Land Ordinance set the table, but Congress still had to decide who would have access to the public domain as well as who would foot the bill. Thomas Jefferson argued for giving western land away “in small quantities” to settlers. “I am against selling the lands at all,” he declared. The people on the margins were poor, and “by selling the lands to them, you will disgust them, and cause an avulsion of them from the common union.” Jefferson understood that expansion was the operational dynamic of a settler society. His ideas anticipated the 1862 Homestead Act, but in 1785 his views were out of step with most American leaders. Instead of giving the land away, Congress decided to auction it off in chunks no smaller than 640 acres, at prices no less than one dollar per acre, well beyond the means of most settlers. Revenue concerned Congress more than plowboys. The national government had borrowed heavily to finance its independence, and the nation needed to sell its western lands to people with cash.7
But the dream of personal, communal, and national improvement in the West continued. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur echoed the hope in his 1782 book, Letters from an American Farmer: “Scattered over an immense territory” and “animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained,” Americans were building “the most perfect society now existing in the world.” A boundless—yet rationally parceled—West would guarantee that the American people would maintain their economic independence, the foundation of republican government. Jefferson seconded these sentiments, writing in 1787 that Americans would remain virtuous as long as they kept their roots in the agrarian soil.8
. . .
The ink was barely dry on the Iroquois and Ohio Indian land cessions when the surveyors headed west in late 1785. Here right angles and Euclidian grids ran headlong into bogs, thickets, and hummocks. Actual terrain slowed the running of lines and the marking of township boundaries. Impatient for the anticipated western payoff, Congress ordered a public auction of the first surveyed ranges. The results disappointed. Land speculators stayed away, no bidding war erupted, and Congress failed to get its windfall. While eastern capitalists waited, western settlers moved. They sauntered north of the Ohio, picked good-looking spots, and squatted, claiming ownership by right of occupancy. Congress called out the army to evict them. “There is scarcely one bottom on the river but has one or more families living thereon,” Ensign John Armstrong reported to his superiors. If Congress did not “fall on some speedy method to prevent people from settling,” the West would soon be populated by “a banditti whose actions are a disgrace to human nature.” Class resentments flared as land controversies grew. The eastern upper crust feared a settlers’ rebellion. Fresh in their memories was the protest of Daniel Shays, a poor farmer and Revolutionary War hero in western Massachusetts, who in the tradition of the Regulators led a protest against monetary policies and farm foreclosures in 1786. Shays and hundreds of his neighbors prevented the local county courts from sitting, and state authorities called out troops to quell the uprising.9
Daniel Shays (left) and his fellow insurgent Job Shattuck. From Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack for 1787 (Boston, 1786). Author’s collection.
Farmers were not the only ones in debt. The federal government also had obligations to pay. In 1787 Congress modified its plans. A Massachusetts lobbyist named Manasseh Cutler approached a number of congressmen with a proposal for a huge western land grant to a group of wealthy New England capitalists known as the Ohio Company of Associates (not to be confused with the earlier Ohio Company of the 1750s). The Ohio Associates wanted one and a half million acres of lush green Ohio hills and valleys but balked at paying the one-dollar-an-acre price mandated by the Land Ordinance. Cutler, a Yale divine and a free-range amateur scientist, was also a dealmaker, and he suggested a scheme: let his associates purchase the block in depreciated revolutionary currency. Desperate for revenue, Congress agreed, and the Ohio Associates bought a principality for a pittance.
If Cutler and his congressional enablers massaged the Land Ordinance, state officials and land speculators in Georgia beat the law to a pulp. The only
state that continued to claim trans-Appalachian lands, Georgia in 1795 granted an enormous tract in what would later be the states of Alabama and Mississippi to a group of shady investors (“bribes,” as they say, “were paid”). Georgia’s ownership of this territory was dubious at best. In fact, the Spanish still claimed most of it. The lack of secure title, however, did not deter the speculators, who sold their “rights” to land jobbers, who resold them to thousands of gullible investors. After President Washington declared the sales a fraud, the Georgia legislature repealed the Yazoo Act, so named for a meandering river in the region. The repeal caused even more controversy, as droves of speculators across the country faced the loss of their investments. A congressional committee investigated complaints and claims for years, and in 1802 Georgia finally coughed up its western lands to the federal government in an attempt to limit its liability in the wake of the scandal. The Supreme Court waded into the Yazoo affair in 1810, ruling in the case of Fletcher v. Peck that the constitutional guarantee of the sanctity of contracts prevented Georgia from revoking its actions, however corrupt. Congress voted to award the speculators more than four million dollars. The Ohio Associates and the Yazoo affair tarnished the reasoned planning and democratic impulse behind the Land Ordinance. Debt, speculation, and fraud often drove land policy in the early Republic. The interests of actual settlers trailed in the line of considerations.
The American West Page 14
