Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Jeffersonian America)

JEFFERSONIAN AME RICA

Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onu!, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy, Editors

'Red gentlemen & WHITE SAVAGES Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier

I

,

David Andrew Nichols

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press © 2008 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2008

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

eIP to come Nichols, David Andrew, 1970Red gentlemen and White savages : Indians, federalists, and the search for order on the American frontier / David Andrew Nichols. p. cm. - (Jeffersonian America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN .978-0-8139-2768-8 (alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America-HistorY-18th century. 2. Indians of North America­ Treaties. 3. Indians of North America-Wars-1750-1815. 4. Frontier and pioneer life-United States-HistorY-18th century. 5. United States-HistorY-18th century. 6. United States-Politics and government. 7. United States-Race relations. 1. Title. E77.N543 2008 973.04 '9 7-dc22 2008021733

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To My Mother, Jacqueline Nichols

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Origins ofan Uneasy Alliance

1 1. Post-Revolutionary Polyphony, 1783-1785 19 2. The Evaporation of Federal Authority on the Frontier, 1785-1786 37 3. Unruly Young Men 55 4. The "Real Americans" Draft a Government, 1786-1788 77 5. "These Haughty Republicans" The Limitations ofa Gentlemen's Government, 1789-1790

98 6. War and Appeasement, 1790-1793 128 7. Musket, Quill, and Calumet, 1794-1799 160

viii

Contents Conclusion The Revolution 0/1800 in Indian Country

191 Notes 203 Bibliography 249 Index 269

�CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Despite all appearances, writing history is far from a solitary enterprise. A great many individuals and institutions contributed to the production of this book. The University of Kentucky provided me with three fellowships that gave me time to research and write free from teaching responsibili­ ties. A Phillips Fund Grant from the American Philosophical Society al­ lowed me to visit half a dozen archives from New York to Georgia, while the Clements Library and the David Library of the American Revolution gave me extended access to their magnificent collections through visiting fellowships. The librarians and archivists with whom I worked were uniformly cour­ teous and helpful. I am particularly grateful to the staffs of the New York Historical Society, the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg's Millstein Library, the Filson Club, the Georgia Department of Archives and History, the Georgia Historical Society, the Clements Library, the Haverford Col­ lege Department of Special Collections, the New York State Archives, and the David Library of the American Revolution. Robert Cox and John Dann of the Clements Library enriched this work by bringing several obscure sources to my attention. David Fowler made the David Library a convivial place to live as well as study during my residence there. Mark Wethering­ ton encouraged me to make use of the Filson Club's outstanding collec­ tions and to present some of my findings at a Filson Institute conference in May 2003. I am also deeply grateful to the employees of the University of Kentucky

x

:J{cknowledgments

Library. Terry Birdwhistell, Lisa Carter, Gordon Hogg, Cheryl Jones, and Bill Marshall helped me feel at home in the Department of Special Collec­ tions and Archives. Jeff Suchanek was both friend and mentor, introducing me to the archival world through four summers of employment at the Uni­ versity of Kentucky's Modern Political Archives (now the Wendell Ford Re­ search Center) and giving me encouragement throughout graduate school. Many faculty members in the University of Kentucky's Department of History shaped my thinking on the themes discussed in this book, notably Daniel Gargola, Kathi Kern, Jeremy Popkin, Mark Summers, and especially Daniel Blake Smith, who helped me understand the colonial background of U.S.-Indian relations. My graduate student colleagues were uniformly sup­ portive; thanks are especially due Deborah Blackwell, Mary Block, Tim Gar­ rison, Harry Laver, and Greg O'Brien. John Craig Hammond provided gen­ erous and insightful comments on several chapters of this manuscript. My friends Rob Bricken, Chris Crockett, Tim Harper, Jon Lay, Christy Nilsen, and Sean Williford provided additional encouragement and support. Outside of the University of Kentucky, I have benefited from the advice of Kathryn Abbott, Andrew Denson, John Faragher, Joanne Freeman, Mark Hammon, Donald Hickey, Daniel Richter, Leonard Sadosky, and Mary Young. Kathleen DuVal provided helpful comments on chapter 3 and orga­ nized a panel at the 2001 OAH convention, at which I presented some of my thoughts on the U.S. Army's recruitment of Indians. My colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg allowed me to present parts of this manuscript at a faculty symposium in 2002 and an Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in 2003. Frank Cassell, Pilar Herr, Bill Pamerleau, Joel Sabadasz, and Judy Vollmer provided many useful comments. Special thanks are due to Alan Taylor and Gregory Nobles, who read and insightfully critiqued every chapter of this book while it was in its early stages; to Richard Holway of the University of Virginia Press, whose pa­ tience and encouragement were invaluable to me; and to Mark Mastroma­ rino, for his skillful copyediting of the final manuscript. Small portions of chapters 4, 5, and 7 appeared, in substantially different form, in my article "Land, Republicanism, and Indians: Power and Policy in Early National Georgia, 1780-1825" (Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 [Spring 2001]). They are reprinted here with the kind permission of the Quarterly. I am indebted to the members of my graduate committee at the Uni­ versity of Kentucky for seeing through to its conclusion the dissertation on which this book is based. Dwight Billings asked the questions that helped

.7fcknowledgments

xi

me redefine the project from a conventional policy study to a deeper analy­ sis of political culture. Philip Harling provided careful, timely comments on every chapter. Mike Green and Theda Perdue taught me everything I know about the ethnohistorian's craft, and most of what I know about the culture and motives of eighteenth-century Native Americans, and helped make the u.K. History Department a stimulating place to work and learn. My director, Lance Banning, provided expert instruction on eighteenth­ century American history and outstanding direction throughout my ca­ reer. He was generous with his praise and temperate with his criticism, expressed unflagging enthusiasm for my idiosyncratic research interests, helped me define and refine this project and identify its central themes, and displayed immense patience and kindness. He was a scholar and a gentle­ man, and our profession is a smaller and poorer place without him. Finally, my family-David E., Jacqueline, Corinna and Patrick Nichols­ kept me going throughout the trials of graduate school and the rigors and reversals of writing. I am particularly grateful to my mother, Jacqueline Nichols, who encouraged my interest in history as a teenager and urged me to study American history in college and graduate school. As a trained archaeologist she has provided numerous insights into Indian motives and decision making. In more ways than the obvious, she has been the progeni­ tor of this work, and it is dedicated to her. ALL E R RORS A N D fault of the author.

MISCONCE PTIONS H E R EIN A R E,

of course, solely the

Red Gentlemen and White Savages

Indian treaty and conference sites in the United States, 1783-1803. State lines are shown in their present-day form. (Map by Bill Nelson)

1ntroductiOrL THE ORIGINS OF AN UNEASY ALLIANCE

n hearing of the British defeat at Yorktown, Frederick North, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, is said to have exclaimed, "Oh God! It is all over." If he was referring to his career as prime minister, he was correct, for the surrender of Cornwallis's army led directly to the fall of North's war government. Otherwise, the pronouncement was premature. Fighting between Britain, America, and their respective allies would continue for another year, and the upheavals bred by the Revolution­ ary War would persist for another generation.! Nowhere was this more apparent than in western North America be­ tween the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, where whites and Indians would remember 1782 not as the dawn of peace but as one of the conflict's bloodiest years. Kentucky and Pennsylvania militia destroyed Shawnee towns and slaughtered unarmed Delaware Indians; Iroquois and Northwest Indian warriors destroyed the Pennsylvania village of Hannas­ town and killed a hundred Kentuckians at the Battle of Blue Licks; Georgia and South Carolina militia invaded Cherokee country for the fourth time since 1776, burning cabins and cornfields as they went; while Chickasaw warriors raided Spanish shipping on the Mississippi River.2 Viewed from a distance, these attacks appear as part of a long, bloody war between white Americans and Woodland Indians for control of the Trans-Appalachian West, a struggle that began in the 1750S and ended only with Indian Removal in the 1830S.3 Studied closely, however, the battles of 1782 reveal a more-complicated story, one that i llustrates the political and

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'Red yentlemen and 1f}hite- Savages

social divisions within both white and Indian communities, and the chal­ lenges facing leaders within each. The last flames of the Revolutionary War illuminated the conflicts that were to shape the postwar frontier. 1782 does not, on first glance, appear to have been anything other than a senseless atrocity. In March, at two Native American towns on the Muskingum River, a party of Pennsylvania militia apprehended Delaware Indian refugees who had returned home to recover their food stores. The refugees were Christian converts belonging to the pacifist Moravian sect, who had settled in the Muskingum Valley in the 1760s and named their settlements Gnaddenhut­ ten and Salem. They had attempted to remain neutral during the Revolu­ tionary War, a precarious position for Indians to maintain on an embattled frontier. Now their luck had run out. Ignoring the Delawares' pleas for mercy, the Pennsylvanians herded them indoors and bludgeoned or hacked ninety-six of them to death.4 John Heckewelder, a missionary to the Gnaddenhutten Delawares, en­ countered the brother of one of the militiamen a few years later and asked him why his kinsman had slaughtered innocent Christians. He replied merely "that Man is by nature the worst creature in the world." Another Pennsylvanian, interviewed about the massacre decades later, ascribed it to the inspiration of the Devil. Scholars examining the incident have con­ cluded that the Pennsylvanians' actions were more the product of their recent experiences than of original sin. In part, the militiamen were seek­ ing revenge for raids that British-allied Indians had conducted on western Pennsylvania settlements in early 1782. The Moravian Delawares may have been neutral pacifists, but the Pennsylvanians suspected they were supply­ ing food and intelligence to Indian raiders (partially true) and receiving plunder in return (probably untrue).5 More significantly, the expeditionaries were defying the military poli­ cies of local Continental Army commander William Irvine, whose defen­ sive posture western Pennsylvanians strongly opposed. As Indian warriors destroyed their neighbors' homes, local settlers saw Irvine keep his troops in their barracks, and they grew increasingly disgusted with the commander and the army he served. Finally, some decided to organize an unauthorized military expedition to strike any Indians they could find, regarding all Na­ tive Americans as enemies, irrespective of political affiliation. Nor did the citizen militia kill only neutrals. Returning from Gnaddenhutten, the expe­ ditionaries murdered two Delawares serving as soldiers in the Continental THE MOST I NFAMOUS F RONTIER INCIDENT OF

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Army, and others among them issued death threats against General Irvine. The Continentals had joined the Indians as their enemies.6 Later that year, the capture, torture, and execution by Delaware Indian warriors of William Crawford, the leader of a failed militia raid on San­ dusky, Ohio, eclipsed the Moravian massacre in the minds of American of­ ficials. Yet some Americans still recognized that the slaughter on the Musk­ ingum River remained a threat to the new nation's honor. General George Washington, no lover of Indians, disavowed the Gnaddenhutten massacre and declared that "the cruelties committed on both sides" were "entirely repugnant" to him. The militiaman's brother whom John Heckewelder had encountered said that the raiders had " disgraced their country."7 In the spring of 1782, the Continental Congress directed the president of Pennsylvania to investigate the attack on Gnaddenhutten, though the state made no subsequent effort to punish the raiding party's leaders. A few years later, in 1786, Congress tried to atone for the massacre by inviting the surviving Moravian Delawares back to the Ohio Country and offering them land and supplies. There were, to be sure, pragmatic reasons for the offer. Congress hoped that the returning Moravian Delawares would advertise the U.S. government's good intentions to other Northwest Indians while acting as a buffer between new white settlements in eastern Ohio and the militant Indian communities on the Wabash River. These mixed motives, however, merely underscore the lessons that the Gnaddenhutten massacre, and subsequent events in the Northwest, drove home to national leaders. There could be no peace on the frontier without the consent and goodwill of Native Americans, and no permanence to that peace could exist unless the national government could control its disorderly white frontier citizens.s THESE W E R E ALSO THE CONCLUSIONS THAT South Carolina militia of­ ficer Andrew Pickens was drawing from his experiences on the frontier in 1782. Pickens, a backcountry trader and farmer, was also a Revolutionary War veteran, joining three of his state's offensives against the Cherokees. He proved an ardent Indian fighter. In one engagement in August 1776, Pickens and his troops fought until "every white man was literally covered with blood," killing or wounding eighty-three Cherokees. During the cam­ paigns of 1781-82 Pickens helped destroy fifteen Cherokee towns and kill over a hundred warriors. In October 1782 he also extorted a land cession from Cherokee chiefs as punishment for their warriors' continued attacks on white settlements.9 By then, Pickens had begun to find the Cherokees' Tory allies and fron-

4

'Red yentlemen and 'lVhite- Savages

tier Whig adversaries as troublesome as his Indian opponents. After British troops occupied Charleston in 1780, civil government in South Carolina had collapsed. The Revolution in the Lower South turned into a brutal civil war between Patriot and Loyalist militias, who rustled cattle, burned houses, and lynched their enemies. Pickens, a partisan fighter but also an aspiring planter and friend of order, directed his volunteers' guns against both Tory and Whig insurgents during the last year of the war. In late 1781 he led an expedition against Loyalist camps in the backcountry (he didn't find any), and in the summer of 1782 he organized a police company to arrest Whig bandits in the South Carolina uplands. That fall, Pickens observed that "a considerable number of the disaffected" were still roaming through the backcountry, and two years later he notified the governor that " disorderly [white] people" were threatening the fragile peace with the Cherokees by squatting on their lands.lO Pickens did not share the disdain that elite colonial travelers, like Wil­ liam Byrd and Charles Woodmason, had expressed for the " low, lazy, slut­ tish, heathenish, hellish" white inhabitants of the Carolina frontier. He did believe that there could be no security for the property of law-abiding planters unless local authorities took a hard line against bandits, who ap­ peared to be a serious threat at the end of the Revolutionary War.l1 Bandit gangs were not confined to the South Carolina backcountry: they also operated in southern New York, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the inlets of Chesapeake Bay, the Dismal Swamp, and northern Florida. Nearly all were former militiamen and irregular troops recruited by the British or the rebels during the war. Many were ex-Tories or runaway slaves who turned to banditry because they faced death or re-enslavement if they returned home. Pickens and his colleagues were uninterested in the bandits' wartime origins and postwar travails; they instead viewed banditti as a symptom of the weakness of civil government, and sometimes conflated them with white farmers who trespassed on Indian lands. Both groups prevented the peaceful development of frontier regions by elite landowners, and both re­ quired stern treatment, at bayonet point if necessary, if American leaders were to secure the gains of the RevolutionY could tame their own frontier districts, other elite Americans believed that frontier gover­ nance was best left to the national government, weak as it was in the 1780s. The gentlemen of the Continental Congress and the officers of the ContiW HILE PICKE NS ASSUME D THAT STATE GOV E R NMENTS

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5

nental Army, these nationalists argued, were better suited to balancing the interests of Indians, settlers, and land developers than the more parochial and vindictive state governments. One particularly heated, if bloodless, dispute between a state legislature and a federal official illuminates their concern. In March 1783, the New York Senate instructed the state's Indian com­ missioners permanently to expel most of the Six Nations of Iroquois from their homeland, leaving behind only the small, American-allied Oneida and Tuscarora Nations. The legislators' motives were complex but rational. Iro­ quois warriors had sided with King George during the war and attacked vir­ tually every white settlement west of Albany. In 1779, the Continental Army had destroyed the Six Nations' towns and fields, killing hundreds of people and forcing thousands more to take refuge near British Fort Niagara. Dev­ astating as it was, this invasion had not destroyed the will to fight of the British-allied Iroquois, and their raids continued into 1782. Expelling the Iroquois seemed an essential security measure to New York's legislators.13 New Yorkers were also trying to forestall an attempt by Massachusetts to claim the Finger Lakes country under its coast-to-coast colonial charter. . New York's government had already lost control of the state's northeastern counties, where New England farmers had settled on illegal land grants, driven out provincial officials, and proclaimed themselves the independent republic of Vermont. Other parts of the state also lay under foreign juris­ diction: the British Army still controlled New York City, and Westchester County and Long Island were bandit-infested no-man's-lands. The fear that a "second Vermont" might arise within New York's borders was a very real one to state officials at war's end. To keep Massachusetts from taking west­ ern New York, state legislators sought preemptively to seize the Six Nations' land titles, by right of conquest and by virtue of colonial New York's claim of suzerainty over the Iroquois. They also offered Congress New York's land claims south of the Great Lakes in exchange for a federal promise to uphold the state's claim to Iroquoia.14 Congress accepted New York's cession, but did not guarantee its other land claims. Meanwhile, the principal federal commissioner to the Six Na­ tions, General Philip Schuyler, pressed both Congress and New York to make a diplomatic settlement with the Iroquois rather than trying to ex­ pel them from the United States. In September 1782, Schuyler argued that the only practicable way to end Iroquois raids was through a peace treaty, which Iroquois chiefs would probably be willing to sign. IS

6

�ed gentlemen, and 'White- Savages

Ten months later, after the United States and Britain had proclaimed an armistice and Six Nations chiefs had sent the Americans a peace mes­ sage, Schuyler reframed his advice for the president of Congress. Forcibly expelling the Iroquois would require an expensive military campaign and an equally costly occupation of western New York. On the other hand, if Congress allowed the Six Nations to return home, it could eventually buy their lands for a pittance, because the advance of white settlements would deplete the local game animal population and render tribal lands useless to the Iroquois. This option was cheaper and more humane, but in following it the United States would have to override the objections of New York, which would not "permit the Indians a residence anywhere within the limits of the state.''16 General Schuyler was not a disinterested public servant. A wealthy landowner from an aristocratic family, Schuyler had l ittle love either for New York 's revolutionary government or its upstart governor, George Clin­ ton. He was also something of a partisan for the Iroquois, whom he had tried to recruit as American allies during the war (with some success in the Oneidas' case). Yet his remarks made good sense to officials familiar with the financial and military exhaustion of the U.S. government. General Washington endorsed Schuyler's call for diplomacy, while New York's com­ missioners to the Iroquois urged the governor to reject the state senate's proposed land seizure. Clinton agreed, but neither he nor the legislature acceded to Schuyler's demand that the state allow federal commissioners to direct its negotiations with the Six Nations. Instead, New York's govern­ ment would hold its own councils with Iroquois leaders and press them hard for land cessions, even as Congressional commissioners were nego­ tiating a peace treaty with the Six Nations. The results would be resentful Iroquois, exchanges of threats by state and federal officials, and a growing belief among American nationalists that land-hungry states were as great a threat to peace as disorderly white settlersP A THOUSAN D MILES AWAY F ROM THE FIELDS OF GNADDENHUTTEN, the bandit camps of South Carolina, and the drawing rooms of upstate New York, the Chickasaw nation was demonstrating that the dislocations of the Revolutionary War affected Native American communities no less severely than white American ones. The Chickasaws were one of the smaller Indian nations of the Southeast, numbering about three thousand people, but their strategic location and military reputation gave them a high political profile.

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They lived in what is now northern Mississippi, where they enjoyed easy access to the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas Rivers-all prime avenues for hunting and trade. At the time of the American Revolution, they had been British trading partners for nearly a century and military ad­ versaries of France for half a century. French officials described the Chicka­ saws as fierce warriors and implacable enemies, while Charleston traders identified them as staunch British allies.ls As with most other Woodland Indians, however, a Chickasaw's principal allegiance was to his or her kinsmen, not to any particular European state. The nation's apparent love for the British and hostility toward France de­ rived from the important material and cultural roles that trade and warfare played in Chickasaw society, and indeed throughout Native North Amer­ ica. Trade with Europeans provided access to goods that Native Americans could not manufacture themselves, while warfare allowed Indian warriors to acquire horses and plunder, as well as captives who could be adopted or ransomed. Both enterprises also gave spiritual and political power to their participants. Trade was a sacred exchange, whereby civil chiefs (mingos, in the Chickasaw language) created alliances, or "fictive kinship" bonds, with foreign peoples. The scarce goods acquired through trade became a source of prestige, because they betokened alliances with powerful strang­ ers and because one could redistribute them to loyal followers. War was also a sacred enterprise, wherein young men extracted life force from other warriors by capturing, scalping, or torturing them, thereby increasing their own power and status.19 Given different circumstances, the Chickasaws could as easily have been French allies and British adversaries as the reverse. What they could not do was isolate themselves from European affairs. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Chickasaws, like most other Southeastern Indians, had come to depend on European textiles, metal wares, firearms, and liquor. This dependency increased during the decade before the War of American In­ dependence, as dozens of whiskey peddlers and dry-goods salesmen came into Chickasaw country to trade British merchandise for furs. Some, like Scottish trader James Colbert, became permanent residents and married Chickasaw women (three women, in Colbert's case), thereby reinforcing economic ties with bonds of kinship.2o During the Revolutionary War, several hundred Chickasaw men led by Colbert and his sons answered the call of the royal Indian Superintendent John Stuart to fight for King George. The warriors seized American boats on

8


the Mississippi River, forced Virginia militia to abandon a stronghold they had established on tribal land, and helped defend the British-held towns of Pensacola and Mobile against Spanish attacks. In 1782, Chickasaws and British Loyalists raided Spanish shipping on the Mississippi, taking, among other spoils, a boat carrying diplomatic gifts to the Indian peoples of the Illinois Country. In retaliation, Governor Francisco Cruzat recruited Mas­ couten and Kickapoo warriors to attack Chickasaw hunters and threaten their towns. Cruzat believed that these attacks induced Chickasaw chief Payamataha to make peace with SpainY Actually, the Chickasaws' peace overtures had more to do with the changing international situation than with fear of the Kickapoos. Witness­ ing the fall of British Florida to the Spanish, Chickasaw warriors had real­ ized that they could no longer rely on Britain to supply the "powder, ball, muskets, linen, calicos, rough ginghams, coarse cloths, blankets, hats, nee­ dles, pins, scissors, knives . . . vermilion, mirrors, mattocks, hoes, hatchets, saddles [and] bridles" that were, according to one official, "of prime neces­ sity to the Indians." Making peace and establishing commercial relations with the Revolutionary War's victors were now vitally important.22 Different factions of Chickasaws negotiated with different victors. One group, led by Payamataha and the war captain Wolf's Friend, signed treaties of commerce and alliance with Spain in July 1784. Another faction, led by the younger Colberts, the two principal Chickasaw war captains-each of whom was titled Piomingo-and Payamataha's brother Tuskau Pataupau, sent peace messages to Virginia and the Continental Congress.23 This divided diplomatic policy was partly the product of personal rival­ ries among Chickasaw leaders, but it also reflected the desire of chiefs and captains to "play ·off" the Americans and Spanish against one another in order to obtain gifts and concessions from both. In so doing, the Chicka­ saws were adopting a policy of engaging rival European powers that other Woodland Indians had developed decades earlier, after learning, as Daniel Richter has written, that while "direct military confrontation with Euro­ pean powers was suicidal, . . . accommodation that relied solely on a single European power was an almost equally certain path to extinction." The Chickasaws' relative isolation had afforded them the luxury of allying with one European nation and making war on another, but that isolation was ending. Now it was time to adopt what one colonial official had called "the modern Indian politics": cultivating as many European allies and trading partners as possible.24

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To an extent, Chickasaw leaders could exploit the Spanish and Ameri­ can governments' postwar rivalry. The two Piomingos and their colleagues were careful to inform Congress that "the Spaniards are sending talks amongst us and inviting our young men to trade with t hem," so that the U. S. government would feel the need to counter Spain's advances. However, not all political divisions among whites were useful to them. In the same message, the Chickasaws observed that they had received messages from Georgia, Virginia, and the French communities of Illinois, and had learned that there were thirteen different American governments. "We know not which of them we are to listen to." The authors greatly preferred, they said, to do business with "the head Chief of the Grand Council," rather than with any of the individual Thirteen Fires.25 This was partly a matter of prestige. Chickasaw leaders were used to dealing with officials representing European monarchs and may have felt they would be lowering themselves if they consented to treat with the rep­ resentatives of former colonies. They accepted Congress as the successor to their English "father" in London, King George III. The Chickasaws' pref­ erence for Congress was also practical. Individual states, they suspected, could not send them the goods on which they had come to rely, nor protect them from the new tribe of people-American farmers-who had begun settling on the Cumberland Plateau and encroaching on the tribal hunting preserve.26 In this respect, too, the Chickasaws were unknowingly emulating other Woodland Indian nations. The Six Nations insisted that they wished only to do business with Congress, rather than the land-hungry New York govern­ ment. "We conceived that the United States formed one general system," the Mohawk captain Aaron Hill told federal commissioners, and thus "no particular state can have any right to treat separately." The Cherokees made similar remarks when they held their first treaty with the United States, ask­ ing Congress to shield them from the land claims of the southern states.27 Neither the Iroquois, the Cherokees, nor the Chickasaws understood the feeble nature of the American national government under the Articles of Confederation. They would learn of its weaknesses soon enough. Yet these weaknesses did not change a fundamental fact: Woodland Indian chiefs and captains shared many interests with the officers and support­ ers of the American national government. Both groups of leaders wanted to restore peace, order, and commerce on the Trans-Appalachian frontier. Both believed that expansionist state governments were a threat to peace

10

'Red gentlemen and ruJhite- Savages

on the frontier, and both wanted the new American federal government to manage Indian-white relations. Both feared, or at least deplored, the law­ less behavior of white settlers. These common interests did not constitute the basis for warm friend­ ship. They could, however, form the basis of an alliance-an uneasy alli­ ance, to be sure, but one that would provide structure and coherence to the treaty councils, personal embassies, and other negotiations conducted by Indian and white leaders in the two decades following the American Revolution. To DESCRIBE U. S . I NDIAN R ELATIONS in the post-Revolutionary period­ from the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783) to the election of Thomas Jef­ ferson as president (1801}-as a process of alliance building may seem bi­ zarre. Previous historians of federal Indian policy have argued that the new nation's fundamental goal in the West was the acquisition of Indian land, by force if necessary, by negotiation and guile otherwise. Native Americans would either have to assimilate into the growing white population, via the government's Indian "civilization" program, or leave the United States. Re­ taining their lands and sovereignty would not be options.28 U.S. Indian policy, however, was never merely the product of a time­ less American hunger for land or an eternal sense of European-American cultural superiority. It was instead subject to political and cultural influ­ ences specific to particular times and places. In his study of Progressive-era Indian policy, Frederick Hoxie observed that policy decisions were "expres­ sions of a complex culture confronting an alien people in a rapidly chang­ ing environment." A close survey of federal Indian relations in the Trans­ Appalachian West during the 1780s and 1790S reveals both the complexities of white and Native American cultures, and the stresses and conflicts pro­ duced by their dynamic post-Revolutionary political environment. It also shows us that white American political leaders were far from united in their support for territorial expansion, and that Native American leaders were not invariably determined to resist it.29 American nationalists and Federalists often opposed western expan­ sion, fearing that the opening of new lands to white settlers would depopu­ late the eastern states and flood the West with ungovernable frontiersmen. Others favored western settlements but wanted them confined to a limited area controlled by the federal government, which would enforce the laws, promote orderly development, and apply the proceeds of land sales to the -

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nation's Revolutionary War debt (and, incidentally, to the enrichment of its creditors). Meanwhile, many Woodland Indian chiefs and captains were willing to cede peripheral tribal lands to the u.s. government in order to achieve important political goals: re-establishing their connections with the Atlantic economy, procuring diplomatic gifts and annuities, and ob­ taining guarantees of protection for their peoples' core settlements. While land cessions were often the cause of arguments at treaty conferences, they were just as often a subject on which federal commissioners and Indian chiefs could find some grounds for agreement.30 The very process of treaty making also represented a form of common ground between white and Native American leaders. As Nancy Shoe­ maker has explained, European officials and Woodland Indian chiefs had developed an elaborate set of diplomatic protocols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a lexicon of rituals and metaphors that had spread throughout the Trans-Appalachian region by 1783. At treaty conferences, Indians and whites gave slow and cadenced speeches filled with metaphors that reflected common human experiences: clear skies, open roads, council fires, the burial of disputes, grief, condolence, gender, arid kinship. They used symbolic tokens to attest to the sincerity of their words: ceremonial tobacco pipes (calumets), wampum belts, and signed and sealed treaty documents. Treaty councils also featured hospitality rituals intended to set participants at their ease and create social bonds: welcoming ceremonies, feasts, dances, and the distribution of gifts.31 Treaty conferences were not merely venues for peace negotiations and land deals. They were also vital political theaters, where both white and Indian political leaders could demonstrate the personal characteristics that legitimized their rule. Civil chiefs could display their speaking abili­ ties, mastery of ritual, and ability to forge alliances and obtain scarce goods from powerful strangers. Warriors and captains could display their mar­ tial valor through war dances and rough-and-tumble ball games. American commissioners, for their part, could display their fitness to rule by acting the parts of gentlemen.32 The European term "gentleman" had evolved slowly over the previous four centuries, and its definition remained in flux throughout the eigh­ teenth century, but Revolutionary-era Americans generally recognized (if they did not always respect) the basic characteristics of the class. These included physical courage, politeness, a talent for conversation, hospitality to strangers, and condescension-that is, the ability to mingle unpreten-

12

'Red gentlemen and 'lfJhite- Savages

tiously with one's social inferiors and put them at their ease. Gentlemen en­ joyed exemption from physical punishments meted out to commoners; as military officers they could obtain release on parole rather than rotting in prison camps; and as candidates for public office they could usually count on the support of deferential voters. Genteel status was often hereditary, but not always: one could become a gentleman through military service, an advantageous marriage, or the acquisition of wealth and patronage. Many of the "young men of the Revolution," the ambitious parvenus, like Alex­ ander Hamilton and Henry Knox, who had risen in society through their service as Continental Army officers or through the acquisition of confis­ cated Loyalist estates, keenly desired the title of gentleman. They hoped to win it in part through their attachment to the American nation-state-the successor to the British Crown as the font of political legitimacy and status in America-during and after the Revolutionary War.33 Serving as a federal treaty commissioner aided these aspiring gentle­ men's pursuit of higher status in two ways. First, it displayed their attach­ ment to the national government and allowed them to assert and extend their government's prerogatives-its political jurisdiction and its preemp­ tive claim to Native American lands-at a time when federal authority was still new and poorly defined. Second, it allowed them to demonstrate their gentility, to their Indian counterparts and to readers of the conference re­ cords. The rituals of the treaty ground-polished speeches, polite conver­ sation with Indian leaders, and the treating of supposed inferiors to food, gifts, and attention-were akin to those that Anglo-American gentlemen employed back home to secure their claims of mastery and authority. Offi­ cials also smoked, dined, and even danced with Native American chiefs and matrons, rituals of condescension intended to show that they were confi­ dent of their own superior status. At the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, for ex­ ample, American commissioners not only watched Iroquois social dances but also, according to Griffith Evans, "generally stepped in their circle when present, which appeared to please them very much. Nay they would think us churlish if we did not."34 While playing at gentlemen before an Indian audience, American offi­ cials often came to the conclusion that their Native American counterparts, far from being savages, had the characteristics of gentlemen themselves. At a 1776 dinner with a party of Caughnawaga (Christian Mohawk) Indians, John Adams described the guests as "wondrous polite . . . [and] cordial" in conversation. Numerous white commentators, including Thomas Jefferson

1ntroduction

13

and the Quaker missionary James Emlen, compared Indian speakers to the best orators of classical Greece, while Jonathan Trumbull described Creek chiefs visiting New York City as "possess[ing] a dignity of manner, form, countenance and expression worthy of Roman senators." Diplomatic din­ ners, speeches, and conferences thus helped convince many American of­ ficials that Indian leaders were natural patricians, creating another bond between them and the self-described patricians of the u.s. government. Such observations, of course, also caused Indians' lawless white frontier adversaries-"Christian white savages," as Benjamin Franklin called them­ to sink even lower in the estimation of gentlemen-nationalists. As General Josiah Harmar said of Captain Pipe, a Delaware leader who hosted several Army officers at his hunting camp, "He is a manly old fellow, and much more of a gentleman than the generality of these frontier people."35 TH E FRONTIER "WHITE SAVAGES," of course, had nearly as much con­ tempt for Indians and their white patrician allies as the eastern gentry felt for western white settlers, for whom the American Revolution had been a radicalizing experience, not an affirmation of the importance of govern­ ment and diplomacy. The white men and women who settled in Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley, and western Pennsylvania in the 1760s and 1770S had endured repeated Indian raids, the squalor of crowded blockhouses, and the fear of death or torture during the Revolutionary War. Like the militia who attacked Gnaddenhutten, they had come to view Native Americans as an enemy race, and eastern state governments-and the Continental Congress-as ineffectual nuisances.36 In the 1780s, tens of thousands of new American emigrants joined the old settlers. They brought to the frontier a spirit of revolutionary insur­ gency grounded in the belief that natural laws were more important than statutory ones. Some, who argued that occupancy and improvement of land gave one a natural right to it, settled illegally on land claimed by Indians or absentee proprietors. Others invoked the right of self-government to form breakaway republics whose policies would be more agreeable than those of the eastern states. Eastern officials and Indian chiefs viewed these frontiers­ men as squatters, rebels, and savages, but the settlers viewed themselves as respectable farmers seeking equality, dignity, and a competent living.37 Meanwhile, many Woodland Indian men were challenging the author­ ity of their traditional leaders, under the rubric of pan-Indian federation­ ism, a political creed that had matured during the Revolutionary era. Fed-

14

'Red yentlemen and 1f}hite-- Savages

erationism grew alongside a belief system that Gregory Dowd has called "nativism," whose adherents felt that peaceful coexistence between whites and Indians was impossible. Nativism was a syncretic creed preached by Woodland Indian prophets who taught that a single creator deity had made the red and white races separately, and intended them to remain separate. Contact with white traders and settlers had poisoned Native Americans, sapping their strength and reducing their numbers. Only by abjuring Euro­ pean artifacts and returning to "traditional" lifeways could Indians purify themselves and restore their lost power.38 Nativism was a spiritual ideology that primarily critiqued Indians' re­ ligious and economic behavior. However, it contributed to the emergence of the political ideology that I have labeled "federationism": the belief that Indians had common racial interests that transcended intertribal rivalries and differences, and should unite to protect their land from encroaching whites. Federationism spread widely during the imperial wars of the eigh­ teenth century, when the French helped organize large multi-tribal war parties to defend Canada. After France's withdrawal from North America, federationist leaders sought to preserve these alliances, using war belts, conferences, and nativist rhetoric to unite warriors into new confedera­ tions. Ottawa, Shawnee, and Seneca captains organized a powerful confed­ eration that nearly annihilated Britain's western garrisons during Pontiac's War (1763-65). A decade later, Shawnee and Mingo federationists fought hunters and militia from Virginia in the conflict known as Dunmore's War. During the Revolutionary War over ten thousand British-allied warriors assaulted rebel frontier settlements from New York to Georgia, and by the end of that war, despite devastating American attacks on their towns, fed­ erationists remained strong and determined. In 1783, as British and Ameri­ can commissioners signed their peace treaty, federationist captains from thirty-five nations met in Sandusky to reaffirm their united opposition to American expansion. The end of the War of American Independence only rekindled Indian federationists' own war for union and independence.39 While civil chiefs and American officials opposed federationists and frontiersmen, both ultimately depended on the frontier militants. Chiefs lacked the coercive power to prevent their warriors from joining the federa­ tionist movement, and in fact many found the postwar Indian confedera­ tion useful because the U.S. government appeared to fear it. Indian leaders could warn American officials that if the United States did not moderate its demands or give their people more trade goods, their young men would rebel and join the federationists.4o

1ntroduction

15

Chiefs thus made little effort to contain the growing confederacy. A few Seneca and Stockbridge envoys urged the federationists to make peace; a few Potawatomi and Wyandot chiefs promised to keep their kinsmen from joining the Northwest Indian confederation; a few Chickasaw scouts tried to help the U.S. army defeat the federationists in battle. Their efforts were ineffective. Most other chiefs simply waited to see whether the United States or the federationists would prevail. When the federationist movement went down to defeat in 1793-94, it fell more as a result of its own internal divi­ sions and the withdrawal of European support than because of the efforts of Indian peacemakersY The U.S. government found itself equally unable to restrain its own disorderly young men-the white settlers who intruded on Indians' land, poached their game, burned their towns, and killed their chiefs. In the 1780s, the American federal government was bankrupt, its western army tiny, and its authority ill defined. Even after ratification of the new U.S. Constitution, federal power remained limited. A few thousand soldiers and a few dozen territorial officials could not by themselves hope to police a re­ gion as large as the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. However much contempt they might feel for "white savages," federal officials depended on them to help develop and govern the West. They needed frontier settlers to buy and farm the region's land; to man the juries and militia companies that main­ tained order at the local level; and to vote in the elections that would estab­ lish republican government in the territories and bind them to the Union. This dependence on settler cooperation helps explain why Federalist policy­ makers chose to fight a long, expensive war against the Northwest Indian confederation: to protect and appease white settlers. It explains why the government did not punish Kentucky or Tennessee militias for conducting illegal raids on Indian towns. And it explains why frontiersmen became the dominant political force in the Trans-Appalachian West by 1800, allowing them to contribute their votes to the electoral defeat of the Federalists.42 After the Federalists' ouster, their Jeffersonian Republican successors tried to create a new alliance, a framework of mutual accommodation that would bind federal officials, Indian chiefs, and white settlers together in a single agrarian civilization. Chiefs would trade land for technical assis­ tance, which would help their kinsmen become English-speaking com­ mercial farmers; white settlers would buy the ceded lands and envelop and assimilate the old Indian communities; and federal officials would preside over the peaceful merger. However, this peace plan also failed. A new Indian federationist movement arose under the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and

16

'Red yentlemen and White-- Savages

Tenskwatawa, a charismatic war captain and a nativist prophet whose fol­ lowers rejected both land cessions and American "civilization" and fought accommodating chiefs and intruding settlers. During the War of 1812 fed­ eral troops, frontier militias, and several thousand American-allied Indians joined forces to defeat the new confederation-thus far did the new alliance work. After the war, though, western settlers' representatives in Washing­ ton rejected the Jeffersonian plan of assimilation and began preparing for Indian Removal.43 A NOTE ON THE TERMS USED IN T HIS BOOK: I use the word American to refer to white, English-speaking inhabitants of the United States. Currently there is no commonly accepted substitute. In referring to the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, I use the terms Indian and Native Ameri­ can interchangeably. Woodland Indians refers to Native North Americans residing east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes; their relationship with the United States is the subject of this book. Northwest In­ dians refers to the two dozen or so nations residing in the five future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Wabash Indians refers to the Indian communities in the Wabash Valley of modern Indiana: the Kickapoos, Miamis, Piankeshaws, Shawnees, and Weas. The Chickamaugas were a faction that seceded from the Cherokee nation in 1777 and formed a new polity in present-day southeastern Tennessee. The terms tribe and nation are of European coinage, and neither is an apt description of the noncoercive "kinship states" into which eighteenth­ century Native Americans organized themselves. In this book I generally use the latter term, but I occasionally employ the adjective "tribal" when I need to distinguish Indian nations from European ones (e.g., "intertribal"). In referring to specific Indian nations, I use the names most commonly used in treaty documents and by American librarians and historians, which regrettably are not the names that members of those nations use for them­ selves. Indian nations' self-referents remain obscure to most outsiders and nonspecialists, and using Anishinaabe instead of Chippewa (for example), or Muskogee instead of Creek, would confuse many readers.44 This book refers to three Woodland Indian political classes. Chiefs (or civil chiefs) derived their authority from their redistribution of scarce goods to their fol lowers, from their mediation of disputes between their clan or town and the outside world (including the spiritual world), and from their mastery of ritual, rhetoric, and diplomacy. Captains (or war cap-

1ntroduction

17

tains) usually owed their leadership positions to their prowess as hunters and warriors, though war-captaincies were sometimes hereditary. Matrons were generally older women whose authority stemmed from their real and metaphorical role as mothers, just as some Indian nations honored civil chiefs as metaphorical "fathers." At treaty conferences they helped resolve disputes, requested mercy and peace on behalf of their "young men" (war­ riors), ceremonially adopted white American commissioners into their na­ tions as fictive kinsmen, and (in the case of the Iroquois) gave their consent for land cessions.45 The American political terms nationalist and Federalist are used here as near-synonyms. Nationalists supported a stronger American national government prior to 1787. Federalists supported the federal Constitution of 1787 and the administration of President George Washington. Many, though by no means all, of these men opposed unrestricted western settle­ ment and favored an authoritarian territorial government to keep "white savages" in line. However, many other nationalists favored a strong federal government only insofar as it promoted their interests. They frequently dis­ agreed with the policies of the Washington administration, and in many cases ultimately wound up supporting the Federalists' political opponents. The word frontier has sometimes been a vexed one in American histori­ cal scholarship. Herein, it has two meanings. First, it refers to a borderland inhabited by two (or more) discrete ethnic groups with different political allegiances, neither of which has sufficient power to dominate the other. These groups frequently fight one another for dominance, though they may also trade, intermarry, and negotiate with one another in an attempt to reach accommodation. Second, a frontier is an ungoverned region into which a neighboring nation-state, like the United States, is trying to extend its authority. That this was often a protracted, difficult process is one of the principal themes of this book.46 One final note: in quotations from eighteenth-century sources, I have generally modernized the spelling and capitalization of words.

1

Post-
n the summer of 1783, the Native American allies of King George III received alarming, if not entirely unexpected news. After eight years of war, His Majesty's government had signed a treaty granting the Ameri­ can rebels their independence and sovereignty over all the lands east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes.l Some Indians bitterly protested Britain's betrayal of their trust. "Is the Great King conquered, or does he mean to abandon us?" asked a Creek man in Saint Augustine. "Does he intend to sell his friends as slaves, or only give our lands to his and our enemies?" Others had known for some time that Britain's capitulation was imminent, and had already initiated peace negotiations with American officials. All, however, would have to deal with a revolutionary change in Indian Country: the replacement of British mo­ narchical "fathers" with republican officials and land-hungry settlers. What might they expect?2 The answer, at least for the next few years, was cacophony. In the mid1780s, a multitude of organizations-the Continental Congress, state gov­ ernments, and private companies-would send emissaries into Indian Country to hold treaty conferences with Native American leaders. These groups shared a common interest in Indian land and a smug triumphalism stemming from the United States' recent victory. Otherwise, they differed from one another considerably in their goals and tactics. U.S.-Indian rela­ tions in the immediate post-Revolutionary period were not republican, but anarchic. The unity and sovereignty of the Thirteen Fires, Native Ameri­ cans learned, were merely polite fictions.3 _

20

'Red gentlemen and White- Savages

While some Indian leaders enjoyed learning that their former adversar­ ies were in disarray, many believed that no good could come of conflict among white leaders. They wanted to negotiate with a single government that could make a binding peace on behalf of all white Americans, not with a multitude of envoys who demanded their land and lacked the power to protect them. Both the Chickasaws and Iroquois preferred to negotiate solely with "the Grand Council" of the Thirteen Fires, while the Cherokees, after learning that state governments would not remove intruders from their lands, hoped that Congress would " interpose" its authority. "As we are now to be under the protection of Congress," matron Nancy Ward noted, " [we] shall have no more disturbance." 4 This would prove to be wishful thinking. Congressional commissioners insisted that they represented the entire Union, but the federal government of the 1780s was a shadow. Woodland Indian leaders would not receive the protection and commercial agreements they sought; Congress would not secure the lands it demanded; and gunfire would soon replace the voices of the treaty councilors.

T H E P R I O R I T I E S OF T H E CONTINENTAL CONG R E S S

When Americans framed their first national government, they were guided by the same mistrust of centralized power that had produced their Declara­ tion of Independence. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress had very limited legislative authority and no power to tax, in­ stead depending on state legislatures for funds. Its bureaucracy and peace­ time army were tiny. Indeed, with independence secured, some Americans wondered if Congress still had a useful function to perform. Yet, despite its weaknesses, the Confederation had several important and interrelated postwar responsibilities. It had to make peace with the Indians, repay the nation's $54 million war debt, obtain the bounty lands it had promised to Continental Army veterans, and resolve interstate boundary disputes that might otherwise turn violent.5 Virginia offered a solution to several of these problems when it ceded most of its Trans-Appalachian land claims to Congress. The Common­ wealth had claimed all the land between Kentucky and the Great Lakes un­ der its colonial charter, and had strengthened its claim during the war af­ ter George Rogers Clark captured Vincennes. Virginia's legislators quickly learned, however, that they could not govern the region and that their claim

Post-�evolutionary Polyphony

21

led to friction with other states. In March 1784, Virginia ceded the lands north and west of the Ohio River to the United States, receiving in return acknowledgment of its claims in Kentucky and 1.5 million acres of mili­ tary bounty lands (the Virginia Military District) north of the Ohio River. Other states soon surrendered their claims to the Northwest as well­ representing 150 million acres of land-thereby giving Congress political jurisdiction over the region and a potential source of revenue.6 However, Congress could neither govern the Northwest nor profit from it until it had made peace with the region's Indians and obtained title to their lands. In April 1783, it proclaimed an armistice with Britain's Indian allies and sent emissaries to invite them to treaty councils. Meanwhile, Congress created two temporary committees on Indian affairs-one for the North, one for the South-to identify priorities for the peace negotiations. Their reports, issued in October 1783 and May 1784, would serve as the United States' principal Indian policy statements for the next few years? The committees recommended that the U.S. government approach the Indians as a benevolent conqueror and "accommodate [them] as far as the public good will admit." Treaty commissioners should remind Native lead­ ers that the United States had defeated their ally and that they now stood alone against the American army, then inform them that Congress was prepared to show "Generosity, Clemency, and Mercy . . . [to] a people who live in a lamentable state of ignorance and error." Congress would offer its protection to the Indians, establish an official boundary between their ter­ ritory and white settlements, and reopen trade under federal regulation. As security for the repatriation of their wartime captives, the signatory Indians would have to surrender hostages to American officials, but the committee members did not believe that this was an innovative term. (Hostage-taking, James Monroe would later remind the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, was practiced by "the politest European nations and therefore cannot be held dishonorable to the Indians.")8 Congress's most onerous demand was for large land cessions-ultimately, two-thirds of present-day Ohio and most of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee-from the northern and southern Indians. However, congres­ sional policy-makers did not characterize these cessions as spoils of war or assert that the United States could simply seize Indian land by right of con­ quest. Instead, the committees argued that the western Indians should sur­ render part of their land as "atonement for the enormities which they have perpetrated, and a reasonable compensation for the expenses which the

22

Red yentlemen and '"White- Savages

United States have incurred by their wanton barbarity." "Atonement" was the key word, for it implied that these former adversaries were moral agents who had violated the standards of civilized warfare and had to make resti­ tution before the United States could legally recognize and protect them. (The committees avoided mentioning that white soldiers had committed the same "barbarities" during the war.) To sweeten this bitter pill, treaty commissioners proposed to give the Indian signatories several thousand dollars' worth of rations and gifts as token compensation for their lands.9 Committee members hoped their proposals would bring the western Indians into the sphere of American governance and secure enough land to pay off Congress's war debts. They recognized, however, that Indians were not the only frontier "barbarians" the United States had to pacify. The committee on northern Indian affairs warned Congress that unregulated white settlement in the Northwest Indians' cession would generate "feeble, disorderly, and dispersed settlements" whose white inhabitants would start new wars with the Indians. Congress should instead establish a civil gov­ ernment for the Northwest as swiftly as possible, limit colonization to the region "most convenient for immediate settlement and cultivation," and bar frontier settlers from lands too distant to govern.lO The northern committee members' concerns mirrored those of other elite Americans like George Washington, who preferred "compact settle­ ments" to widely dispersed ones and believed that a disorderly and violent frontier would bring more expense than profit to the nation. This would remain a central issue in American Indian policy for another decade. II

T H E I N S E C U R I T I E S O F THE STATES

Disorderly frontiersmen were one group of Americans who threatened Congress's frontier policy. Land-hungry state legislators were another. While federal commissioners prepared for their treaty conferences, five states with large Indian landholdings-Massachusetts, New York, Pennsyl­ vania, North Carolina, and Georgia-were holding or planning their own councils. Congress asked New York and Pennsylvania to hold their trea­ ties concurrently with federal negotiations and under its commissioners' supervision, lest state officials "diminish the dignity and authority of our government in [the Indians'] estimation." It also urged North Carolina and Georgia to cede their western claims to the Union, so that Congress could extend its jurisdiction to the southwestern frontier.12

Post:- �evolutionary Polyphony

23

Except for Pennsylvania, none of these states honored Congress's re­ quests. The Articles of Confederation limited Congress's jurisdiction over Indian affairs to "Indians, not members of any of the states," a vague dis­ tinction that allowed states to negotiate with Native Americans residing within their colonial charter boundaries. Massachusetts used this loophole to arrange two treaties with the Penobscots of central Maine (then part of Massachusetts) in which it purchased over a million acres of land for 350 blankets and 200 pounds of gunpowder. New York conducted more exten­ sive negotiations with the Six Nations, beginning with a 1784 conference at Fort Stanwix that closed w ithout results. Undaunted, Governor George Clinton met with the Oneidas in 1785 and browbeat their leaders into sell­ ing 200,000 acres on the Chenango and Unadilla Rivers for $11,500. While Chief Grasshopper told Clinton that "[we] expect this will be the last Ap­ plication for Lands," the 1785 treaty was only the beginning of New York's quest for Iroquois land.13 In the south, Virginia signed a treaty with the Chickasaws, while Geor­ gia brought Cherokee and Creek leaders to Augusta and procured from them the title to more than 3,000 square miles of land south of the Keo­ wee River and east of the Oconee. Meanwhile, after the Cherokees resisted North Carolina's demand for their lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, the legislature simply annexed all Indian land within the state's charter boundaries and sold 2.5 million acres of it. The assembly then voted to cede North Carolina's western territory to the Union so that Con­ gress would bear the expense of defending land the state had already sold, but angry voters turned the legislators out of office, and a new legislature repealed the cession.14 Like the Continental Congress, state governments hoped to use Indian land to repay their creditors and veterans. All had large debts to retire, and tax riots in the 1780s convinced legislators it would be dangerous to rely exclusively on taxpayers for funds. They imagined that conquered Indians would be a more easily tapped source of revenue than riotous white citi­ zens. State leaders also worried about challenges to their states' sovereignty and boundary claims. They feared that if they did not quickly purchase all Indian lands within their borders, private companies or neighboring states would take the land from them. Massachusetts commissioners complained that the Penobscots had sold land to private citizens, and told the Indi­ ans they must sell the rest of their domain to the state because "this Com­ monwealth . . . will not suffer individuals to purchase those lands which

24

Red yentlemen and 1f/hite- Savages

you are permitted to occupy." North Carolina's legislature justified its sale of the Indian lands west of Holston River by invoking "land jobbers" from northern states who would buy up those lands if North Carolina ceded them to Congress. New York's conferences with the Iroquois were partly a reaction to the announcement of the Massachusetts government that it would reassert its charter claim to the lands "the whole breadth of [the) state across New York" and send a commissioner to Congress's treaty with the Six Nations.ls Pennsylvania's quest for Indian land was equally earnest but appeared more restrained. The state's executive council agreed to show "a respectful attachment to the federal government" by holding its Indian treaties under the direction of federal commissioners. Pennsylvania's government could afford such restraint: unlike other landed states, the Commonwealth had secured its borders by 1783, thanks to boundary agreements with Virginia (1780) and Connecticut (1782), and, unlike those of other frontier states, Pennsylvania's Native American population had dwindled to a few hundred after half a century of land swindles, war, and emigration. If diplomacy failed, President John Dickinson was confident that his state could force its remaining Indian inhabitants to surrender their land. Finally, many of the soldiers assigned to accompany federal commissioners to their conferences were Pennsylvania troops led by Pennsylvania officers. Unlike the leaders of other states, Pennsylvania's officials felt they had l ittle to fear from Con­ gress, Indians, or other states.16

NATI V E A M E R ICAN O P TIONS

Congressmen and state officials often acted as though Native Americans were minor actors on the frontier, less important-or at least less worri­ some-than disaffected white frontiersmen and rival state governments. Indian civil chiefs and war captains knew better. In 1783, there were over a hundred thousand Woodland Indians living between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Except for the Iroquois and Cherokees, none of the western Indian nations had suf­ fered great damage during the war. Warriors, who comprised one-fifth of the total Indian population, were masters of guerilla raids and of the terrain and trails of their homelands. Civil chiefs were shrewd and tough nego­ tiators who knew well the grim history of Indian-white relations in North America: Loyalist J. F. D. Smyth attested that after two centuries of Euro-

Pos�-�evolutionary Polyphony

25

pean contact, Native leaders "far excel us at our own weapons of subtlety, craft, and precaution." These chiefs were determined to prove to the Ameri­ cans that the Indians were not conquered peoplesY The Woodland Indians held the balance of power on the Trans­ Appalachian frontier, but they also labored under several disadvantages. The prewar trickle of white settlers into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys became a torrent after the Revolutionary War. In May 1785, the Shawnee Captain Johnny (Kekewepellethe) told American emissaries that "you are drawing so close to us that we can almost hear the noise of your axes." The Cherokee chief Old Tassel complained that white farmers were "ranging through our country and marking our lands," and that "when one goes off two come in his place." Indian leaders knew they were in a losing demo­ graphic battle with whites, who squatted on their land, poached their game, and ambushed their hunters. The only feasible solutions were to drive the intruders away by force or ask American officials to eject them. The for­ mer course would mean renewed war with the United States, which in turn would cut off many Native communities from their closest source of vital trade goods. IS Indian leaders, particularly chiefs, were thus quite willing to meet with American officials. Congressional emissary Ephraim Douglass noted that the Indians he met at Detroit in 1783 "gave evident marks of their satisfac­ tion at seeing a subject of the United States." "My lodging," he continued, "was all day surrounded with crowds of them when at home and the streets lined with them to attend my going abroad, that they might have an oppor­ tunity of seeing and saluting me." The Iroquois, Cherokees, and Chickasaws sent their own peace messages or d iplomats to the Americans between late 1782 and early 1784.19 Woodland Indian leaders were not willing, however, to accept all of the Americans' terms. Those who had fought against the United States would accept neither responsibility for starting the war nor undivided blame for its excesses. The Mohawks argued that their loyalty to King George dur­ ing the war proved not their perfidy but their trustworthiness. The Creek Tallassee Mico, taking a different tack, portrayed the war as a vortex that had drawn in every nation in the world, even "that simple peaceable people called the Dutch." Moreover, Woodland Indians believed that the purpose of a treaty conference was to bury bad memories and console the afflicted, not to make accusations or demand compensation.20 Native Americans were also very reluctant to give up land for peace.

26


Indian leaders agreed with American officials that both sides should estab­ lish a firm, enforceable territorial boundary, but they wanted it to reflect the status quo ante bellum. In 1783, the British Indian superintendent Sir John Johnson proposed that the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty Line, which ran through western New York and Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River, serve as the postwar boundary between the United States and Indian Coun­ try. The English-educated Mohawk captain Joseph Brant embraced the pro­ posal, as did other northern Indians. At their 1783 conference in Sandusky, representatives of thirty-five Indian nations declared that they would not accept further white settlement north and west of the Ohio River.21 White Americans sometimes found it difficult to comprehend why Indi­ ans so tenaciously defended their lands. Most believed that Native Ameri­ cans used land only for hunting and that its value was declining for them as white settlers encroached and game stocks declined. To the Woodland Indians, however, land was not an alienable commodity, but the source of a people's identity. Most Indians believed that they owned their territory because God had created them there-"The Almighty placed us on the land and it is ours," as Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono told Massachusetts com­ missioners. They invested the physical features of their environment with sacred meaning based on the human and supernatural events that had oc­ curred there, converting the land into a text of their people's history. They employed a balanced regime of agriculture, hunting, gathering, and fishing that allowed them to exploit their territory's resources without permanently depleting them, and gave their bodies to the soil after death.22 Hoping for peace, yet unwilling to surrender part of their substance as an indemnity for a war they had not started, Native American leaders re­ sisted the demands of American officials at the postwar treaty conferences. Some tried to impose conditions on the sale of land in order to retain access to its resources or control over the terms of its resettlement. The Creeks, for example, asked for hunting privileges on the lands they had ceded to Georgia, though Governor John Houston did not grant the concession. At their 1785 conference with New York, the Oneidas offered to lease a "tier of farms" on their eastern boundary if the state agreed to settle "people of influence" there and "prevent encroachments" on the rest of the Oneidas' land.23 Others signed land-cession treaties but then disavowed them, claiming that an insufficient number of chiefs or warriors had attended the confer­ ence, or that those who did attend had not given their verbal consent-an important distinction for nonliterate cultures. For several years after their

Post:-1?.evolutionary Polyphony

27

1786 treaty with Massachusetts, Penobscot sachems refused to sign the fi­ nal deed of cession, because they had not been able to assemble the entire nation to give its assent.24 Still other nations, like the Shawnees and Miamis, refused to meet with the Americans at all. They knew that while American officials were adopt­ ing a truculent, triumphalist pose at their Indian treaty conferences, several thousand warriors were reviving and expanding old intertribal alliances, preparing their own list of demands for the Americans, and readying for war if the Thirteen Fires did not accommodate them. Pan-Indian federationists had already conferred with one another at Saint Augustine (December 1782) and Sandusky (September 1783). It fell to Shawnee captains, however, to mobilize these federationists for a new war against white Americans. The Shawnees opposed white settlement, both north and south of the Ohio River-Kentucky was their main hunt­ ing preserve-and during a century of migration they had formed strong kinship ties with Indian nations from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico. Af­ ter the Sandusky conference, Shawnees sent war belts to the Creeks and Cherokees, urging them to join the northern Indians in a new confederacy and resist American expansion. In the summer of 1784, Shawnee warriors conducted their first post-Revolutionary raids against white settlements in the Ohio Valley.25 At the same time, Chickamauga and Creek warriors ambushed white travelers in Kentucky and raided farms in Tennessee. Chiefs from Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw towns signed treaties with Spanish officials, and British and French traders opened trading posts in the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys, offering federationists alternative sources of military supplies. In short, as some Woodland Indians prepared to negotiate with the United States, others were negotiating foreign alliances or resuming hostilities with white settlers.26 Federal commissioners meeting with the Indians in 1784 and 1785 would either have to compromise or bluster their way into achieving the United States' objectives. The commissioners to the Iroquois and the Northwest Indians chose the latter approach. It failed.

P O S T U R I N G AND FA I L U R E AT FORT STAN W I X

The federal treaty with the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix in October 1784 was the first formal act of post-Revolutionary U.S.-Indian diplomacy. It was an inauspicious beginning. The conference took place not in a working fort but

28

'Red yentlemen and 1f)hite- Savages

at a ruin "overgrown with thorns and bushes," where federal commissioners and their companions resided in leaky huts. The blocked roads and burnt­ out farmhouses that the commissioners passed en route testified to the vi­ cious war that had just ended. Altogether, the setting was neither dignified nor conducive to a peaceful mindset.27 Moreover, the Iroquois contingent attending the conference was too small to negotiate authoritatively and too militant to negotiate diplomati­ cally. Due to an epidemic, only twenty Iroquois warriors and captains, ac­ companied by Delaware and Caughnawaga observers, were able to meet the commissioners that October. Because no chiefs or matrons came to Fort Stanwix, the Six Nations' representatives lacked the authority to give land to the United States (though this did not stop the Senecas from selling it to Pennsylvania). The Mohawk and Seneca captains attending the conference also wanted to remind the federal commissioners that they were still tech­ nically at war, and so donned their "war raiment": painted faces, red-dyed hair, silver chest plates bearing British coats-of-arms, and war clubs and bows at the ready.28 The congressional commissioners at Fort Stanwix were Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut, Richard Butler of Pennsylvania, and Arthur Lee of Virginia. They, too, came in a martial posture, accompanied by 150 soldiers repre­ senting the United States' military strength-though as one witness noted, these troops were unkempt and ill fed. The commissioners did not plan to leave Fort Stanwix without obtaining all Iroquois land claims outside New York, and they were prepared to take a harder line in their talks than Congress had advised. Arthur Lee, in particular, had no patience with Indi­ ans and called them "animals that must be subdued and kept in awe." 29 In addition to their army escort, the commissioners' companions in­ cluded Pennsylvania officials Samuel Attlee, Francis Johnston, and William Maclay; Congressman James Madison; French charge d'affaires Franyois Barbe de Marbois; and the Marquis de Lafayette, who had commanded Oneida warriors during the Revolutionary War and whom the Oneidas had ceremonially adopted. The commissioners asked the marquis to speak on behalf of the United States, not realizing that his speech would threaten to supersede their authority.30 Lafayette praised the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Caughnawagas for their service to France and the United States during the war, castigated the other Iroquois for fighting "your [French] fathers," and invited all the Six Nations to forge a new alliance with Congress and Louis XVI. "The great Onondio,"

Pos�-
29

he asserted, "has given forever his hand to your [American] brothers, who offer you theirs, and by this means we shall form a salutary chain." Lafayette thus asked the Six Nations to restore their old "covenant chain" alliances with white Americans, and suggested that France would replace Britain in that chain. The speech won Lafayette applause, but it also reminded the Iroquois that the Americans had not won the war unaided.31 Lafayette was not the only white man undermining federal authority. Following his failed negotiations with the Iroquois that September, Gov­ ernor Clinton of New York had left two agents at Fort Stanwix to observe the federal commissioners and "oppose . . . any of their proceedings which might eventually affect the interests of the State." These agents refused to show Lee, Wolcott, and Butler their credentials, and the commission­ ers wound up posting a guard around the treaty ground to keep the New Yorkers out. They also ordered local sutlers to stop selling alcohol to the Iroquois, and when one merchant disobeyed, they sent Lieutenant John Mercer to impound his liquor supply. The sutler protested to the Montgom­ ery County Inferior Court, which issued a warrant for Mercer's arrest. The commissioners disavowed the court's authority, arguing that "the dignity and rights of the United States would be violated by inferior jurisdiction over us," and ordered the sheriff serving the warrant to leave. The episode could not have favorably impressed the Indians, and Pennsylvanian Griffith Evans speculated that it would "furnish . . . the savages with proof of our want of unanimity and system." 32 It was in this contentious setting that Arthur Lee delivered the federal commissioners' first speech to the Iroquois captains, on October 12. In blunt language, pausing frequently to point at the Iroquois for emphasis, Lee informed his audience that King George had given the United States all the lands south of the Great Lakes and had abandoned its Indian allies to the Americans' mercy. As their new and only sovereign, Congress was pre­ pared to offer the Six Nations its protection, provided they returned their captives and agreed to such a land cession as "will be just for you to offer and honorable for the United States to agree to." 33 This opening speech took the Iroquois captains by surprise, both be­ cause of its bellicose tone and because it conflicted with reality. The United States was obviously not the only sovereign on the northern frontier, since New York had just held a conference with the Six Nations and was visibly fighting with federal officials. Moreover, if Britain had abandoned the Lakes country to the Thirteen Fires, why did British troops still occupy Oswego,

30

'Red yentlemen and 'White-- Savages

Niagara, and Detroit, commanding the region's principal routes of trade and communication? Nonetheless, Mohawk captain Aaron Hill and Seneca cap­ tain Cornplanter assured Lee that they would take "the business to be done at this treaty . . . into our immediate and most serious consideration." 34 After five days of deliberation, the Iroquois and commissioners reas­ sembled in the council house, where Hill and Cornplanter delivered their nations' replies. Hill told the commissioners that George III had "broke[n] the chain" of alliance with the Mohawks, who were therefore "free and in­ dependent." He assured them that he and the other captains had the au­ thority "to make a lasting peace" with the United States, and asserted that all of the Woodland Indians had authorized the Six Nations to conclude a peace treaty on their behalf. This last assertion was mere posturing, and Griffith Evans commented that Hill's speech "abound[ed] with ridiculous ostentation and arrogance." Cornplanter's address of October 18 was more conciliatory but just as contentious as Hill's in substance, for he proposed a U.S.-Iroquois boundary identical to the old 1768 treaty line. In short, Hill and Cornplanter offered Congress neither submission nor land, instead taking the same position that the federationists had agreed upon at the Sandusky conference.35 After listening to these less-than-deferential speeches, Lee, Butler, and Wolcott decided it was time to make the Iroquois grovel. On October 20, Lee blasted the Six Nations' deputies for their lack of contrition. He dis­ missed as groundless their claim to represent the other Indian nations. He reminded Hill that the Six Nations had broken a 1775 promise to remain neutral, and told him it would be wiser for his kinsmen to "repent" than to "justify [their] errors." Moreover, Lee continued, the end of the war had not restored Iroquois independence-quite the opposite. "You are a subdued people; you have been overcome in a war which you entered into with us . . . in violation of most sacred obligations. The great spirit who is at the same time the judge and avenger of perfidy, has given us victory over all our en­ emies. We are at peace with all but YOU; you now stand out alone against our whole force." Since the Iroquois were unwilling to give "the smallest satis­ faction," Congress's commissioners would dic;:tate the terms of peace. The United States would confirm its allies, the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, in their land claims; the other Iroquois nations would hand over six hostages as security for the return of captives, and surrender their land claims west of Pennsylvania, along with a six-mile reservation around Fort Oswego. Lee, d isregarding Congress's official position, said that the United States were

Post:-
31

not merely taking land as "compensation . . . for the blood and treasures which they have expended in the war," for "by the right of conquest they might claim the whole" of Iroquoia. Congress was instead giving the Six Nations the right to use their remaining territory in New York State, "as extensive a country . . . as they can in reason desire, and more than . . . they could expect." 36 By now, the Iroquois were accustomed to the commissioners' bellicosity, and Cornplanter politely thanked the officials for their candor. By the fol­ lowing afternoon, he and the other captains had decided to sign the treaty and let their kinsmen debate its terms later. The Oneida captain Good Peter addressed the commissioners on behalf of all the Six Nations, explaining that in the interests of peace they agreed to the United States' terms. Twelve Iroquois signed the formal treaty on October 22, received and divided the treaty goods, and departed.37 Predictably, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix generated massive contro­ versy in Iroquoia. Later that fall, Seneca and Mohawk warriors denounced the agreement and threatened to kill their chiefs if they assented to the land cession. These threats forced Cornplanter and thirty other Iroquois leaders to take refuge at Fort Pitt, where they remained for nearly a year. In March 1786, Iroquois chiefs reviewed and repudiated the treaty. Congress would have to negotiate another treaty with the Six Nations in January 1789, and for years the Fort Stanwix conference would remain a bitter memory for the Iroquois participants. "You demanded from us a great country," Cornplanter reminded George Washington in 1790, "as the price of the peace which you had offered us, as if our want of strength had destroyed our rights . . . . Were the terms dictated to us by your commissioners reasonable and just?" Most of the Iroquois believed they were not.38 The conference yielded one positive result for the U.S . government. Be­ tween December 1784 and May 1785, the Senecas brought over sixty cap­ tives to Fort Stanwix in exchange for the Iroquois hostages held there. The Pennsylvanians enjoyed better luck: after patiently attending the entire conference, the state's commissioners met with the captains and bought nearly all of the Six Nations' lands within Pennsylvania's borders for $6,000 in merchandise. Iroquois chiefs grumbled about the sale, especially a pro­ vision reserving 800 acres on the Allegheny River to Cornplanter and his family, but they did not challenge its validity.39 On the whole, however, the 1784 Fort Stanwix conference was a diplo­ matic failure for both the federal commissioners and the Iroquois. Stanwix,

32

'Red gentlemen and White- Savages

like all other Indian diplomatic conferences, was not merely a forum for po­ litical negotiation-it was a theater in which both parties staged their inter­ pretations of political reality. Hill and Cornplanter acted as if the year were 1768, when Anglo-American settlement stopped at the eastern slope of the Appalachians and the Iroquois still claimed suzerainty over the Northwest Indians. The American officials rejected this interpretation of events. The Revolutionary War had brought devastation and defeat to Iroquoia, and the Six Nations' influence over the western Indians had been fading for de­ cades. Much of Arthur Lee's speech of October 20 was a reminder of the events that had stripped the Six Nations of their power.40 The federal commissioners' version of political reality, however, was as unconvincing as that of the Iroquois captains. Lee, Wolcott, and Butler ar­ gued that Congress was the only party qualified to treat with Indians, but that did not prevent New York and Pennsylvania from negotiating with the Iroquois. They insisted that the U.S. government was the "sole sovereign" in the Trans-Appalachian West, but the presence of British troops in the Lakes forts belied that claim. They asserted that the Continental Army had conquered the Iroquois, but the 150 ragged soldiers at Fort Stanwix seemed an unlikely engine of oppression. If, in short, the Revolutionary War had weakened and divided the Six Nations, it had done the same to the Ameri­ cans, o r at least to their governments. Subsequent events would drive this point home to Indian leaders.

A HOLLOW CONQU EST: FORT MCINTOSH,

1785

After leaving a detachment of soldiers at Stanwix, Lee and Butler proceeded to Pittsburgh and joined George Rogers Clark, who would serve as the third commissioner at the treaty with the Northwest Indians. Due to the approach of winter, the commissioners decided to move their next conference from the Cuyahoga River to Fort McIntosh (present-day Beaver Falls, Pennsylva­ nia), but to travel even this far proved an ordeal for the supply officers, who nearly froze to death shipping provisions down the ice-clogged Ohio River. Meanwhile, over three hundred Delaware men, women, and children, ac­ companied by eighty-two Wyandots, thirty-two Chippewas, twenty-eight Ohio Senecas, and twenty-four Ottawas, trekked to Fort McIntosh to meet the Americans.41 Lee, Butler, and Clark opened their treaty conference on January 8. The commissioners read to their counterparts the Treaties of Paris and Fort

Post'-'Revolutionary Polyphony

33

Stanwix, which surrendered British and Iroquois claims south of the Great Lakes to the United States. The Delaware chief Council Door and the Wyan­ dot Half-King gave the Indians' replies on January 13. They delineated the boundaries of the nations residing in western Pennsylvania and present-day Ohio, identifying the lands from the Allegheny River to the Tuscarawas as the Delawares' and the remaining territory west to the Great Miami River as the Wyandots', and observing that the Wyandots had given the Ottawas and Chippewas the right to hunt and fish on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Council Door and Half-King thus responded to Congress's territorial claims by denying them, or more precisely, by implying that their own in­ tertribal agreements had priority over them.42 As they had done at Fort Stanwix, Lee and Butler responded to their Indian counterparts' speeches with reprimands and threats. Delaware and Wyandot land claims were irrelevant, the commissioners said, "because we claim the country by conquest and are to give, not to receive." Butler and Clark warned the chiefs, "You stand alone against our whole force . . . which if provoked to fall upon you, would fall like the mighty oak that crushes the shrub beneath it." The United States, as the Northwest Indians' conqueror, would give them peace, protection, gifts, and a reservation, and destroy them if they did not accept its terms. On January 19, the commis­ sioners identified the lands that the U.S. government would take: the north­ ern watershed of the Ohio River from the western edge of Pennsylvania to the Great Miami River, a 30-million-acre domain comprising more than two-thirds of present-day Ohio. They "granted" the Northwest Indians a forty-mile-wide reservation on the southern shore of Lake Erie (between the Cuyahoga and Maumee Rivers), and gave them the right to continue hunting on federal land.43 On January 20-21, Council Door, Half-King, and the Delaware captain Wingenund made their final speeches, rhetorically removing the hatchet from the Americans' heads "and bury(ing] it deep in the earth," and promis­ ing to return their captives. A few chiefs who had received British medals gave them to the commissioners, symbolically exchanging their royal "fa­ ther" for a Congressional one. However, as a later commentator observed, the Delawares and Wyandots "said nothing about lands." On the 21st, Lee, Butler, Clark, and thirteen Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, and Chippewa chiefs signed the federal treaty. Pennsylvania commissioners concluded a separate treaty in which they purchased the Northwest Indians' land claims within their state's boundaries for $2,000 worth of goods. Thereafter, the

34

'Red gentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages

476 Indian conferees returned to their towns, and the commissioners de­ parted from Fort McIntosh believing that they had succeeded.44 Like the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Fort McIntosh treaty was a hol­ low victory for Congress. Only two Shawnees, Katherine Grenadio and her daughter Fanny, attended the treaty (seeking compensation for cattle they had given the Continental Army), and none of the Wabash Indians­ the Weas, Miamis, and Kickapoos-came to Fort McIntosh. Those absent from the conference asserted that they were not bound by its terms. Indeed, when a white settler asked a party of Ohio Cherokee warriors whether they had signed "General Clark's" treaty, they replied that "if they could meet General Clark they would kill him." Those Delawares who did not attend the treaty accused their kinsmen of betraying them, while the Shawnees and Miamis angrily denounced the signatories, claiming, "They have sold their lands and themselves with it." 45 In the fall of 1786, Half-King demanded a halt to federal surveys, claim­ ing that the Wyandots could not "deliver up the lands" until they had con­ sulted the Wabash Indians. "I am now just between two fires," he com­ plained, "for I am afraid of you and likewise of the back nations." When surveyor Jacob Springer reminded Half-King of the land cession he had signed, the chief "replied that [the treaty] should remain as it was expressed and not a word be altered." The reply seems cryptic, until one recalls that most Native Americans regarded the ceremonial and verbal transcript of a diplomatic conference as the "real" treaty, and the formal written document as a mere monument to the event. As far as the Wyandots and Delawares were concerned, they had not made a valid land cession at Fort McIntosh because they had not given their spoken consent thereto, signed documents notwithstanding.46 Within two years, then, both the Iroquois and the Northwest Indians had repudiated their land cessions, and federationist warriors had annulled the frontier peace that both treaties were supposed to have secured. Some historians have attributed this failure of federal Indian diplomacy to the inept and arrogant conduct of the United States' treaty commissioners. It is certainly true that Lee, Butler, and Clark adopted an undiplomatic tone in several speeches, but otherwise they tried to adhere to the conventions of Indian diplomacy. The commissioners provided their Native American guests with food, drink, and gifts, and gave them wampum belts and strings as records of their speeches. They also attended an Iroquois condolence ceremony occasioned by the death of Cornplanter's daughter, an act that helped establish their bona fide commitment to a diplomatic settlement-

Post'- 'Revolutionary Polyphony

35

for such ceremonies were the marrow of Iroquois diplomacy, the funda­ mental protocol upon which all others were based.47 The Iroquois condolence ritual was a centuries-old, elaborately staged drama of reconciliation, elements of which had seeped into the diplomatic ceremonies of most of the Great Lakes Indians. It began with the procession of a "clear-minded" delegation to the house of the mourners. The mourners greeted their clear-minded guests at the woods' edge, exchanged the "three bare words of requickening" (by which both parties metaphorically wiped one another's eyes and cleared their ears and throats), and took them by the arm into the house. The clear-minded and the mourners sat at opposite ends of the room and smoked, separated initially by a deerskin curtain. A clear-minded speaker would then recite the names of the fifty founders of the Iroquois League, after which the other clear-minded participants would sing six Songs of Farewell and Over the Forest, a hymn to the Iroquois League and its founders. The curtain now raised, the clear-minded gave the mourners additional words of requickening-metaphorically pouring the waters of pity, clearing the sky, restoring the council fire, and bury­ ing the bones of the dead-whereupon the mourners responded by singing the Songs of Farewell, reciting the words of requickening, and exchanging strings of wampum. The clear-minded finished with a charge to the public to be at peace, and the mourners finished with a feast and a celebratory dance. More than a funerary rite, the condolence ceremony sought to re­ store human society to wholeness in the wake of loss and restore the bonds of reciprocity that held it together. The commissioners probably attended this lengthy ritual for the same reason that Griffith Evans and other of­ ficials joined in Iroquois social dances-out of fear of seeming ungentle­ manly if they declined. To the Iroquois, their attendance demonstrated something more: that the commissioners and their government were will­ ing to transform themselves from enemies of the Six Nations into kinsmen and allies.48 The issue of land cessions, of course, remained contentious, particularly with the Iroquois. At Fort McIntosh, however, the commissioners departed from their instructions regarding the boundary of Indian Country. Con­ gress had instructed Lee, Butler, and Clark to procure all Indian lands east of the Great Miami River. Instead, the diplomats granted the Northwest Indians a large reservation on the south shore of Lake Erie and the right to continue hunting throughout their ceded territory.49 Yet despite the commissioners' attention to protocol and their willing­ ness to make concessions, and despite Native American leaders' eagerness

'Red yentlemen and 'White- Savages to meet with representatives of the Thirteen Fires, the conduct of both parties during and after the 1784-85 conferences suggests that they were not entirely ready to bury the hatchet. Both American officials and Indian leaders were still too close to the devastation of the War of American In­ dependence to negotiate a durable peace settlement, or even to put one an­ other at their ease. "I can't, when I reflect on what ravage, destruction, and barbarities [were] committed in the late war by those infernal savages . . . reconcile our forgiving or treating with them without the greatest exertion of philosophy and New Testament principles," confessed Griffith Evans. Peter Muhlenberg warned Congress not to hold its treaty conferences in Pittsburgh or Louisville, where memories of William Crawford's execution and the Battle of Blue Licks were still fresh. For his part, George Rogers Clark agreed with Arthur Lee that terror was the only way to keep Native Americans in line. Clark, who during the Revolutionary War had killed In­ dian prisoners and burned Shawnee fields and towns, told the governor of Virginia that "We shall be eternally involved in a war with some nation or other of them until we . . . convince them that we are always able to crush them at pleasure." 50 At war's end, many Americans wanted to redeem its bitter memory by proclaiming the triumph of their republican cause and creating a landed empire in the West. The members of Congress's Indian committees did not belong to this triumphalist group, but their Indian treaty commissioners clearly did. The ceremonialism with which Butler, Clark, and Lee clothed the proceedings at Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh was not merely diplo­ matic politesse-it was also a conscious effort to impose their interpreta­ tion of postwar political reality on the Iroquois and Lakes Indians. With their written documents, bold public speeches, displays of hospitality, and more-pointed displays of force (namely, taking hostages at gunpoint), the commissioners tried to persuade the northern Indians that Congress was indeed their conqueror and sovereign, and that the Thirteen Fires could both reward their friends and punish their foes. Their theatrics proved un­ persuasive. The Iroquois, Delawares, and Wyandots knew that the Ameri­ can commissioners' voices were among many that claimed to rule the Trans-Appalachian West, and the shabbiness of their stages and props­ decaying forts, ragged soldiers, a few token gifts-made it clear that though their words were sharp, their voices were weak. The events of the next four years would make that point progressively clearer to the Indians and their white frontier neighbors.

2

The- Evaporation of Tederal :7futhority on the- Trontier, 1785-1786

' ongressmen and federal officials took some time to realize how little authority they enjoyed in the West. In 1784-85, while federal commissioners dictated terms to the northern Indians, Congress drafted ordinances to govern the sale of the lands that the Iroquois, Dela­ wares, and Wyandots had supposedly surrendered. Under the new laws the federal government would survey the ceded lands, give some sections to veterans, then sell the rest at auction. In September 1785, the U. S. Surveyor General Thomas Hutchins began charting the first seven ranges of town­ ships in the Northwest. "The public attention," observed the Secretary at War Henry Knox, is "turned toward surveying, selling and settling that fair fine tract of country between the Ohio and Lake Erie, sufficiently large and fertile for an independent kingdom."l If Congress hoped to gain any revenue from its new public domain, it first needed to guard it. In June 1784, Congress created a regiment of seven hundred men to accompany its treaty commissioners and garrison the forts on the Great Lakes. When Britain refused to relinquish the Lakes forts, claiming them as security for the United States' unfulfilled treaty obliga­ tions, Knox diverted the troops to the Ohio Valley to guard Hutchins's surveyors and expel squatters from the public lands. By late 1785, federal troops had garrisoned Fort Pitt and Fort McIntosh, built new posts (Fort Harmar and Fort Finney) at the mouths of the Muskingum and Great Mi­ ami Rivers, and begun patrolling the north bank of the Ohio, warning off illegal settlers and burning their homes.2


CONFRONTATION A N D M I S I N T E R P R ETATION I N T H E NORTHWEST: FORT F I NNEY, 1786

Given the Shawnees' and Miamis' opposition to American settlements in the Ohio Valley, Congress's choice of men to make peace with them proved

The- Evaporation of 'Federal :7futhority

39

infelicitous. All three commissioners had a personal stake in extinguishing Northwest Indian land claims. George Rogers Clark claimed 150,000 acres of land near the Falls of the Ohio, where he had established Clarksville in 1784. Richard Butler wrote glowing appraisals of Ohio Valley lands during his trip to Fort Finney, and bought some real estate on the Kanawha River. Samuel Parsons was one of several Continental Army officers hoping to make their fortunes in the Northwest selling public lands pledged to Revo­ lutionary War veterans. He had begged Henry Knox to make him a treaty commissioner so that he could promote his own interests, and after the conference he helped found the Ohio Company of Associates? The Shawnees and their western neighbors were much more reluctant to attend the conference. British traders had told them that the meeting was a ruse by American soldiers "determined to collect [them] and put them to death." Shawnee warriors scouting the treaty grounds in October 1785 ran into parties of Captain Walter Finney's soldiers, who chased the scouts back to their towns-giving some credence to the traders' claims. The Mingoes (Ohio Iroquois), the Ohio Cherokees, and many Shawnee captains refused to attend any treaty not held at Detroit, where Northwest federationists could assemble in force and seek advice from British officials. For three months after the commissioners arrived at Fort Finney, the only Indians they saw were 130 Delawares and Wyandots who had come to discuss the terms of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh. Butler and Clark asked several to help find their elusive Shawnee neighbors.8 In early 1786, a party of Shawnees finally agreed to meet the commis­ sioners. The 230 warriors, matrons, and chiefs who arrived at Fort Finney on January 14 impressed the officials with their discipline, their attention to form, and their "elegant though savage" painting and attire. Shawnee lead­ ers made a strong initial effort to evince their good intentions. Upon enter­ ing the treaty ground, the civil chief Molunthy and war captain Aweecanny directed several young men to perform a calumet dance, and had their war­ riors exchange four carefully fired salutes with the American soldiers. Once in the council house, Captain Johnny delivered an opening speech modeled on the Iroquois condolence ceremony, in which he rhetorically cleared the ears and eyes of the commissioners, wiped sorrow from their hearts with a wampum string, and urged them to "go on with the good work of peace."9 Yet the Shawnees would not grant concessions easily and did not find the Americans very impressive. The captains and matrons declined to shake hands with the commissioners, explaining they could not do so while the conference's outcome remained in question. Shawnee warriors

40

R.ed yentlemen and '"White- Savages

derided a party of soldiers detailed to serve them a meal-work that the Shawnees reserved for women-and Captain Ebenezer Denny opined that "they conceived us all old women clad in uniform." Richard Butler doubted that men who had come of age during the Revolutionary War could ever commit themselves to peace: "many of the young fellows which have grown up through the course of the war . . . [are] trained like young hounds to blood."l0

Butler's opening speeches to the Shawnees were thus calculated to in­ timidate rather than conciliate. Butler upbraided Shawnee leaders for align­ ing their people with Britain and "distress[ingj" American citizens, and told them they were now at the mercy of Congress. On January 30, Butler, Clark, and Parsons presented the party with Congress's terms: acknowledge the United States as their sovereign, surrender hostages until they returned their captives, and cede all Shawnee land claims east of the Great MiamiY In reply, Shawnee leaders accepted Butler's upbraiding but rejected his demands. Captain Johnny and Chief John Harris agreed that their warriors had " done . . . mischief" during the war. They condemned British agents for leading their young men astray, promised to return captives, and expressed the Shawnees' desire to "cover over [the Americans'] blood." Both chiefs and captains strongly objected, however, to the commissioners' demand for hostages and land. The chiefs, Butler reported, "complain[ed] that we were putting them to live on ponds and leaving them no land to live or raise corn on." Shortly thereafter, Johnny told the commissioners that their demand for hostages insulted the Shawnees, who had already promised to return their captives, and that the proposed boundary line was unacceptable, for "God gave us this country, we do not understand measuring out the lands, it is all ours." He chastised the commissioners for their arrogance and lack of comity, and closed by rejecting the commissioners' gifts and giving them a black string of wampum, symbolizing discord.12 Butler, Clark, and Parsons decided to abandon civility and give the Shaw­ nees an ultimatum. Butler flatly informed Captain Johnny and his kinsmen that their promises were worthless, for during the Revolutionary War the Shawnees had broken agreements, burned American settlements, and tor­ tured and killed prisoners. He asserted that the Shawnees' lands were now U.S. property by right of conquest, and that the terms of the United States were nonnegotiable. If the Shawnees rejected those terms "you may depend the U.S. will take the most effectual measures . . . to distress your obstinate nation." Butler closed by dashing Johnny's black string against the confer-

The- Evaporation of TederaL :7futhority

41

ence table and insolently tossing down a black and white wampum string, symbolizing the Shawnees' choice between peace and war.13 This last gesture was a grave one, because wampum had enormous po­ litical and ritual importance for the northern Woodland Indians (as But­ ler knew). Wampum was a form of diplomatic currency invented by the northeastern Algonquians and eventually adopted by their Indian trading partners throughout eastern North America. Originally, Woodland Indi­ ans manufactured wampum from a small, bicolored (white and purple) seashell, which craftsmen laboriously drilled with stone awls and threaded onto strings or wove into patterned belts. After European contact, Native Americans began substituting colored glass beads for the more expensive shells, but their function remained the same.14 One could give wampum as a gift, payment for a crime, tribute, or a dowry. In the seventeenth century, European colonists used it as currency. Its primary function at treaty conferences, however, was documentary. Chiefs and captains used wampum strings and belts to affirm the sincer­ ity of their words, and as mnemonic devices that would allow witnesses to recall important speeches in the future. Wampum belts and strings thus served both as a form of record and a seal attesting to the authenticity of a speech's content. Wampum itself, in this context, was crystallized speech. By abusing Captain Johnny's wampum string-according to one account, sweeping it off the table and stepping on it-Richard Butler was effectively calling the speaker a liar and windbag.ls Given the severity of Butler's insult and the deep "sullen[ness]" with which Shawnee warriors received it, it is surprising that in the afternoon Captain Johnny apologized and asked the commissioners to "take pity on our women and children." Butler assumed that his speech had convinced the warriors "of the futility of their arguments." It appears, however, that more influential persons were pressuring Johnny and his followers. The Wyandot and Delaware chiefs attending the Fort Finney conference repeat­ edly urged the Shawnees to make peace with the United States, as they had done. While Shawnee captains believed that the Wyandots and Delawares had betrayed them at Fort McIntosh, treaty protocol prevented them from openly rejecting the advice of their "grandfathers" -of Indian nations who claimed prior ownership of the Shawnees' lands. Conversely, the refusal of the militant Wabash Indians to come to Fort Finney weakened the position of Shawnee federationists at the conference.16 Most importantly, the majority of the Shawnees at the 1786 treaty con-

42

'Red yentlemen and 'White- Savages

ference belonged to the neutralist Mekoche division, whose chiefs had long been urging other Shawnees to make peace with the Americans. Those same chiefs made it clear to everyone that they were the Shawnees' presid­ ing leaders during the conference, and that the purpose of the treaty was to establish amity between the two sides. Shawnee chiefs opened the con­ ference by shaking hands with the commissioners, and shortly thereafter they produced wampum belts that Congress had sent the Shawnees in 1775, claimed that the chiefs had held fast to those belts for ten years, and asked the commissioners to join them in burying the hatchet. Following Butler's confrontation with Captain Johnny and prior to Johnny's request for mercy, Molunthy, principal chief of the Mekoche Shawnees, begged an audience with Butler, Clark, and Parsons and wiped away "all that their chief war­ rior had said." However contemptuous Shawnee captains might be of the United States, however ardently they might oppose land cessions, the Fort Finney council was a civil ceremony, not a military one, and the nation's chiefs were in charge of it.17 Shawnee chiefs could assert their authority at a treaty council, but those same chiefs could not force their warriors to accept terms to which they so strongly objected. In March, the five hostages whom the chiefs had sur­ rendered to the Americans escaped from Fort Finney and returned to their towns. The fugitives paused en route to take new captives: the family of the fort's interpreter. Later that spring, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Mingo war parties began a new series of raids on white settlements in the Ohio Valley. At first the chiefs attributed these attacks to the "disorderly [and] mischie­ vous" Ohio Cherokees, but by summer Molunthy admitted that Shawnee warriors were participants, noting that several Shawnee towns had rejected the treaty and denounced its signatories.18 Few American officials held the Shawnee chiefs responsible for their warriors' actions. Indeed, they believed that most of the Shawnees and their Indian neighbors were peaceably inclined, except for a small minority leagued with the Ohio Cherokees. The notion that only a small Indian ban­ ditti opposed the United States-rather than a confederacy of several thou­ sand warriors-comforted anxious Army officers who sought to minimize the forces that opposed them. It also gratified the vanity ofAmerican treaty commissioners, who wanted to believe their negotiations with the "regular tribes" had succeeded. Their misperceptions would shape subsequent fed­ eral policy in the region.19 American officials ascribed the raids of these Indian "bandits" to prov-

The-- Evaporation of 'Federal :7luthority

43

ocation by two groups of whites. One was a coterie of British merchants from Detroit and Michilimackinac, who continued to trade with the In­ dians south of the Great Lakes and were reportedly encouraging them to resume their war with the United States. Richard Butler assumed that the British provocateurs' sole motive was "to monopolize the peltry trade," and that the Northwest Indians followed their lead because they were "naturally credulous."2o The other agents of Indian discontent were more numerous and trouble­ some: the lawless elements of the local white settler population. While the Fort Finney treaty commissioners strongly favored American expansion into the Northwest, their experiences during their journey to Great Miami and during the conference dimmed their views of the frontiersmen who were the leading edge of that expansion. The first whites whom Butler and Clark encountered west of Pittsburgh were families squatting in the na­ tional domain, whom the commissioners warned off. Shortly after federal troops finished building Fort Finney, white intruders began selling liquor to the Wyandots and Delawares encamped nearby, or stole their horses. "We are infested with scoundrels," Butler wrote, "who . . . seem to be more un­ ruly and unprincipled than the savages." Even the citizens of nearby Louis­ ville seemed devoid of social virtues-clannish, surly, vulgar, and interested only in drinking and card playing. Those Kentuckians who bothered to talk to the commissioners opposed their mission, arguing that after recent In­ dian attacks Congress should be mustering an army, not holding a treaty council.21 Small wonder, then, that Richard Butler viewed each boatful of settlers that passed Fort Finney with apprehension, believing that "these people consider themselves out of the trammels of the law." Nor is it surprising that in their final report to Congress, Butler and Parsons attributed the fighting on the northern frontier to a "banditti" of Cherokees and Shawnees "stimulate[dl to mischief" by the "licentious people" of Kentucky. Accord­ ing to one witness, Samuel Parsons had gone further, informing eastern friends that Kentuckians were themselves a murderous and thieving " ban­ ditti of refugees" who had started the war in the Ohio Valley.22 Congressmen readily accepted the commissioners' explanations of why fighting had resumed in the Northwest. Reports that murderous Kentuck­ ians, British agents, and a few Indian malcontents were responsible for the frontier war absolved U.S. officials of blame, allowing them to believe that the treaties of 1784-86 had been successful and that most Native Americans

44

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages

accepted the United States' peace terms. The reality-that most Northwest Indians had rejected or repudiated those treaties-was apparent only to a few observers. David Duncan, an American fur trader from Pittsburgh, was part of this minority. In March 1786, he warned Thomas Hutchins not to believe re­ ports of the Indians' peaceable intentions, for several Wyandot, Delaware, and Shawnee captains had told him they had consented to neither the Fort McIntosh Treaty nor the Fort Finney Treaty and stood ready to defend their land. "I am certain the treaties have answered no other purposes but to sour the minds of the Indians and to make them uneasy," Duncan averred. "I would be glad to know what Congress have gained by [them]?" The answer, it seemed, was a false sense of security and accomplishment-and the belief that the troubles in the Northwest were caused solely by a lawless local mi­ nority, rather than by Congress's own policies and weaknesses.23

T H E S OU T H E R N BOU NDARY OF F E D E R A L POWER: THE HOPEWELL T R EATIES

. While Butler, Clark, and Parsons held their council with the Shawnees, an­ other party of commissioners held a brief meeting with Creek leaders in Galphinton, Georgia, followed by treaty conferences with the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws at Andrew Pickens's estate of Hopewell, South Carolina. These commissioners-Pickens, Joseph Martin, Benjamin Hawk­ ins, and Lachlan McIntosh-operated in a very different political environ­ ment than that of their northern counterparts. The Indian nations with whom they treated were larger and more cohesive than those in the North­ west. Two of them, the Choctaws and Chickasaws, were distant from the frontier of American settlement and more concerned with trade and inter­ tribal rivalries than with the preservation of their lands.24 Moreover, the southern commissioners had less room to maneuver in their negotiations than Butler and his colleagues. The southern Indians lived on territory claimed by North Carolina and Georgia, neither of which had ceded those claims to the United States. Under the Articles of Confed­ eration, the southern states had jurisdiction over the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws as "members of [their] states." Congress could therefore only pursue limited objectives in the region. Southern Congressmen made this point clear in March 1785, when they rejected a committee report recommending that the U.S. treat with the southern Indians on the same terms as the northern. Delegates

The- Evaporation of 'Federal :Jfuthority

45

from the four southern states feared that a comprehensive treaty "might cover . . . purchases of Indian rights of soil within the[ir] boundaries." In its final instructions to the southern commissioners, Congress merely di­ rected them to assert the United States' sovereignty, require the southern Indians to renounce allegiance to European monarchs, and demand the return of captives.25 Congress also permitted Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to send observers to its southern Indian treaties. Since those states were to finance the conferences and provide a militia guard for the com­ missioners, this made good sense. Indeed, insofar as Congress wanted the southern Indians to confirm land cessions they'd previously made to the southern states, the commissioners were to act more as state representa­ tives than federal ones.26 When Congress selected the four southern commissioners, however, it paid more attention to their experience with Indians than their loyalty to their home states. Pickens, for instance, had by 1786 refashioned him­ self into an advocate for the Cherokees, and had received from them the sobriquet of Skiagunsta, the name of a famous Cherokee peacemaker. His counterpart from Georgia, General Lachlan McIntosh, had left that state in disgrace after a fatal duel with Button Gwinnett, later serving as the com­ mandant of Fort Pitt and a negotiator (albeit an inept and blustering one) with the Ohio Valley Indians.27 Joseph Martin was a fur trader who had negotiated Virginia's 1783 treaty with the Chickasaws. He was also an avid land speculator who had entered into an ambitious venture with North Carolina politicians William Blount and Richard Caswell. The three men sought to establish a settlement at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River, a site suitable both for agriculture and fur trading. To that end, Martin bought the Cherokees' rights to the re­ gion for £1,000 worth of goods, while his associates tried to bribe a Georgia commission into giving them that state's title to the land.28 One might expect Martin to have supported North Carolina's and Georgia's western claims, but as an out-of-state speculator, he was more interested in lining his own pockets than fattening those states' treasuries or defending their sovereignty. Moreover, the Muscle Shoals venture de­ pended on good relations with potential Indian trading partners, and Mar­ tin thus opposed any actions that might lead to a war. In fact, the Virginian was acquiring a reputation among southern white settlers as "an Indian's friend."29 Congressman Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina also hoped to serve

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages as an Indian advocate. In an effort to demonstrate his enlightenment and gentility, Hawkins had studied Indian languages while in college, and at Hopewell quizzed his Native American counterparts on their progress in agriculture and manufacturing. "It is a melancholy reflection," he later wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "that the rulers of America in rendering an ac­ count to Heaven of the aborigines thereof, will have lost everything but the name." Hawkins even wrote the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray that he planned to settle among the Creeks someday, asking him "to choose for me a young damsel, out of one of your most reputable families," as his wife.3D These appointments did not reassure the southern states that Congress would respect their land claims. Indeed, the two states that sent observers to Hopewell did so mainly to protest the infringement of their sovereignty. The North Carolina observer William Blount protested the federal treaties with the Cherokees and Chickasaws, which partially invalidated his state's 1783 land sales, and refused to turn over the treaty goods that Congress had requisitioned from North Carolina. Governor Richard Caswell forbade the state's delegates in Congress to consent to the Hopewell treaties, declaring them "repugnant to our Bill of Rights and Constitution."31 Georgia's leaders also objected to the proceedings. The state had already purchased several million acres of land from the Creeks and Cherokees, and its jurisdictional claims extended west to the Mississippi River, into Choctaw and Chickasaw territory. The federal conferences at Galphinton and Hopewell threatened both Georgia's land deals and its land claims, and state observers joined Blount in lodging protests against them.32 Moreover, Georgia officials used the pretext of the federal meeting with the Creeks to convene their own treaty conference at Galphinton. Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh had hoped to sign a federal treaty with the Creek confederacy, but only two chiefs and sixty warriors met with them that October, and the commissioners decided they did not have a quorum for negotiation. Instead, they gave the Creeks some gifts and sent them home. After the federal officials left, however, Georgia officials John Twiggs and Elijah Clarke presented the Creeks with a treaty for their signature. The Treaty of Galphinton gave Georgia all Creek lands between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers and between the Altamaha and Saint Mary's Rivers­ some of the nation's most valuable hunting territories. From Congress's standpoint, the treaty was unwise but constitutionally legitimate. Most of the Creeks would take a different view.33

The- Evaporation of 'Federal :7Iuthority

47

The few Creeks who signed the Galphinton treaty belonged to the mi­ nority faction that had also signed the Treaty of Augusta in 1783. This fac­ tion had approved the Augusta accord with some reluctance; indeed, the mica (chief) of the town of Tallassee, whom whites called "the Tallassee King," had protested that he and his companions did not have the authority to cede land, and warned that the rest of the Creeks would surely protest the treaty and that Georgians would "not cut a cane on that land" without violence. True to his prediction, in the summer of 1784 representatives of thirty-five Creek towns denounced the Augusta cession at a general meet­ ing, and some began preparing for war.34 As Creek militants made their preparations, the signatories of the Au­ gusta treaty, men like Eneah Mico (the "Fat King") and Tallassee Mico, hoped to negotiate a new treaty with Georgia. Their authority as civil chiefs, after all, depended on their friendly relationship with foreign powers and their ability to obtain trade goods from them. Several chiefs gladly accepted Georgia's 1785 invitation to rectify "a small mistake" in the boundary line, hoping they would be able to press the state-or Congress-for hunting rights east of the Oconee and favorable trading terms. Instead, Congressio­ nal commissioners dismissed the chiefs, and state officials browbeat them into signing away more land. Tallassee Mico later recalled telling Twiggs and Clarke that the few Creeks at Galphinton didn't have the authority to cede land without consulting "the whole body of the nation." He then "tried to snatch and destroy the paper while the man was writing but was prevented."35 Meanwhile, the federal commissioners crossed the Savannah River for their meeting with the Cherokees. Over nine hundred Cherokee chiefs, warriors, women, and children came to Hopewell in November 1785, all in a "naked distressed condition," and the commissioners found their sup­ plies severely depleted by month's end. The Cherokees' hopes and griev­ ances were equally numerous. The majority wanted peace with the United States, and an end to the militia raids that had destroyed their crops and homes. The Cherokee chiefs at Hopewell displayed their peaceful inten­ tions by wearing white eagle feathers in their hair; senior chief Old Tassel of Chota gave the commissioners a string of white beads; and the matron Nancy Ward presented the American officials with a pipe and tobacco "to smoke in friendship."36 White and Native American leaders often inaugurated diplomatic con­ ferences with a pipe of tobacco-either commercial tobacco (Nicatiana ta-

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages bacum) or a mixture of "Indian" tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) and aromatic

substances like cedar bark or bearberry leaves. This ritual had both practi­ cal and symbolic uses. Tobacco calmed smokers and helped suppress their hunger, thus serving as an analogue of the food and drink that were es­ sential elements of hospitality. (When the Ottawa visitor Kitanokey offered a pipe to the commandant of Fort Finney in 1786, he told the officer that "when you smoke it you feel as you would after a good meal.") Tobacco smoke also connected the smoker with the skies and celestial spirits, and served as a beacon of peace. Finally, all Woodland Indians used tobacco as a component of conjuring and divination, and thus as a demonstration of the spiritual power that gave chiefs some of their authority.37 As the smoke cleared, though, Cherokee leaders noted there were sig­ nificant obstacles to peace making. White Americans had extracted mas­ sive land cessions from the Cherokee nation during the preceding decade, and the Cherokees viewed most of these deals as illegitimate. They accepted a 1777 land cession to South Carolina and Virginia because those states had paid the Cherokees (though chiefs had agreed to the cession under du­ ress), but they did not approve of the 1775 cession of the Cherokees' rights in Kentucky to the North Carolina adventurer Richard Henderson. Old Tas­ sel said that the Cherokees had only given Henderson a little pastureland on the Kentucky River, not the 27,000 square miles he claimed, and that the "rogue and liar" had probably forged several chiefs' marks on the title deed.38 The Cherokees objected even more strongly to white settlers' invasion of the Overhill Towns district, formerly a place of refuge for those flee­ ing American raids. By 1785, more than three thousand white families had moved onto the lands between the Holston and French Broad Rivers and built cabins between the principal Cherokee towns, and some were con­ ducting surveys within nine miles of the Cherokees' ceremonial capital, Chota. Several speakers complained that the invaders were driving Chero­ kee hunters out of their "own grounds" and robbing peddlers coming to trade with the nation. They asked Congress to remove the intruders and restore their people's livelihood, and insisted that they would never cede this " favorite spot of land."39 While the American commissioners had opened the conference by as­ serting "Congress is now the sovereign of all our country," their replies to the Cherokees indicated that its powers were very limited. Henderson's pur­ chase of Kentucky was irreversible because over thirty thousand whites had

The- Evaporation of 'Federal :Jfuthority

49

settled there, which "puts it out of our power to do anything." Nor could Congress eject white intruders from the Overhill district, for "they are too numerous to remove." The commissioners instead asked the Cherokees to mark a temporary boundary line until Congress could resolve their dispute with the settlers. In their official report to Congress, Hawkins and his com­ rades doubted that the United States could either remove the intruders or pay the Cherokees more than a pittance for the four million acres they had lost.40 In reply, Old Tassel challenged Congress's authority, arguing that a truly sovereign power would be able to "do me justice . . . [by] removing the peo­ ple from the fork of French Broad and Holston." He observed the decline of the U.S. government's power since the end of the war: "Are Congress, who conquered the King of Great Britain, unable to remove these people?" In the end, Tassel acknowledged that he and the other chiefs would accept the loss of Kentucky and abide by Congress's decision on the Holston-French Broad settlers.41 However, several other Cherokees reminded the commissioners that the United States was not the only power on the southern frontier, and that accepting a disadvantageous peace settlement was not the Cherokees' only option. One informant observed that Spanish officials were offering the southern Indians "arms, military stores and clothing." Another told the commissioners "that the Northern Indians have their emissaries among the Southern tribes, endeavoring to prevail on them to form an alliance offensive against the United States." None of the Cherokees openly threat­ ened the commissioners with a Spanish alliance or a united Indian war, but they surely found it useful to raise the possibility in the Americans' minds. It was a disturbing prospect for the United States, for the commissioners estimated that the Cherokees could raise two thousand gunmen, at a time when Congress's treasury was empty and its army only numbered five hun­ dred men.42 On November 28, the Cherokee chiefs and captains signed the Treaty of Hopewell, whereby they (ostensibly) acknowledged American sovereignty, agreed to return captives and hand over criminals, and surrendered over 6,000 square miles of land to the Americans. The next day the commission­ ers gave the Cherokees $1,311 worth of gifts and bade them farewell, though a few chiefs returned to Hopewell for Christmas dinner with the commis­ sioners. Lachlan McIntosh had departed on December 4, believing that the Choctaws and Chickasaws would not make it to Hopewell,43

50

'Red yentlemen and 1f/hite- Savages

Two days after Christmas, however, 127 Choctaw men and women joined Hawkins, Martin, and Pickens for the second Hopewell conference. The Choctaws' situation and goals differed considerably from those of the Creeks and Cherokees, for in 1786 they were one of the largest nations in the Southeast-six thousand warriors and twenty-four thousand older men, women, and children, by the commissioners' estimate-and their towns were several hundred miles from the American frontier. The principal goal of the Choctaw chiefs who came to Hopewell was to establish a trading partnership with the U.S. government. A diplomatic and commercial ac­ cord would enhance their prestige and give their communities an alterna­ tive to dealing with Spanish and British merchants. A few captains wanted American assistance against the Creek Indians, with whom the Choctaws still had a tense relationship in the wake of the Creek-Choctaw War of 1766-77.44 The Choctaw chiefs at Hopewell, like the Cherokees, took pains to create a rhetorical and ceremonial atmosphere conducive to diplomacy. In their speeches they drew the commissioners' attention to the clear skies over the treaty ground, and politely declined to negotiate on cloudy days when the sun could not witness their good intentions. On the day that the commis­ sioners and chiefs signed the formal treaty, six Choctaw men painted white (the color of peace for southeastern Indians) performed an eagle tail dance to sacralize and purify the treaty ground, while the chiefs erected a twelve­ foot white pole and chief Toboca lit a fire at its base with coals carried from Choctaw country. Toboca also affixed eagle tails to the commissioners' la­ pels, presented them with white deerskins, and smoked a white calumet with them.45 Toboca and his companions viewed Congress as they had viewed the French and British monarchs: a metaphorical father who could provide gifts and resolve disputes among his Indian children. They arrived at Hopewell in ragged clothing and without supplies, presenting themselves as starv­ ing children seeking succor from their fictive parent-a common trope in Woodland Indian diplomacy. The commissioners grudgingly fed the Choc­ taws from their depleted stores, privately deriding them as "the greatest beggars . . . we ever saw." Choctaw chiefs also asked the commissioners for uniform coats and three U.S. flags-one for each division of the Choctaw nation-but these did not imply recognition of American sovereignty. In­ stead, the flags would denote the economic and spiritual power that Choc­ taws drew from their alliance with powerful strangers.46

The- Evaporation of 'Federal :7futhority

51

Indeed, without directly contradicting Hawkins, Martin, and Pickens, the Choctaws disagreed with their account of the Revolutionary War and their assertion that the United States was now the sole sovereign east of the Mississippi. While acknowledging their earlier friendship with Britain, the chiefs denied that they had harmed a single American during the war, and when the commissioners tried to show them the United States' territorial limits, they politely replied that they did not understand maps.47 Choctaw leaders also disregarded Articles II and VIII of the written treaty, which ended their right to seek the protection of another European power and gave Congress the "exclusive right" to regulate their trade. When the commissioners explained Articles IV-VII, whereby the Choctaws would renounce retaliatory justice and extradite criminals to the United States for punishment, chief Mingohoopoie praised the idea but deemed it unenforceable. Finally, after signing the treaty, Choctaw chiefs protested its third article, which gave three six-mile-square reservations to the United States for trading posts. Like other Trans-Appalachian Indians, the Choc­ taws did not want to exchange land or sovereignty for peace, and unlike the Iroquois or Cherokees, they could enforce their position.48 While they opposed permanent trading posts, the Choctaws at Hopewell were eager to see American pack trains, telling the commissioners that they were "much in Want of Match Coats powder and lead." The Choctaws had become dependent on European goods earlier in the century, and the Revo­ lution had cut them off from their British trading partners. In 1784, several chiefs had signed a commercial treaty with Spain and secured a promise of trade from Georgia. However, Georgia's traders proved unable to fulfill their state's promise, while the Choctaw leader Franchimastabbe described Spanish goods as expensive and "inferior to what we have formerly had from the English." The Choctaws hoped that Congress could provide them with an alternative and cheaper source of imports.49 The commissioners promised that Congress would open trade with the Choctaws as soon as Spain opened the Mississippi River to American navigation. That date proved a long time in coming, and Choctaw leaders' patience wore thin. Eight months after the Hopewell conference, Franchi­ mastabbe complained that the Americans had abandoned his people and warned that he would have to take a Spanish commission unless American traders arrived soon. In 1787, Toboca went to Philadelphia to take his kins­ men's case to Congress. Henry Knox gave the chief medals and presents and sent him home, promising that Congress would soon license several traders

52

'Red yentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages

to supply the Choctaws. However, the Creeks' war with Georgia and Spain's continued closure of the Mississippi River prevented the federal govern­ ment from following through.50 The Choctaws did not discuss 'an anti-Creek alliance with the Hopewell commissioners, but did raise the subject with American officials two ' months later. During the Choctaw emissaries' trip home from Hopewell, . Creek warriors waylaid and killed several of them. Choctaw chief Spo­ kohummah (Red Woodpecker), captain Tinctimingo, and several compan­ ions subsequently met with South Carolina Governor William Moultrie in Charleston, warning him of the Creeks' warlike intentions and offering to help the state defeat a common foe. In reply, the governor told his guests that Congress would give the Choctaws muskets and ammunition if the Creeks attacked them again. 51 Moultrie's promise was a limited one, but it was what his Choctaw guests wanted to hear. As at Hopewell, the Choctaws at Charleston were more interested in trade and supplies than military alliance. Despite the Creeks' recent provocations, few Choctaws wanted a war with them; in fact, as Spokohummah and Tinctimingo were traveling to Charleston, Franchimastabbe was contemplating an alliance with the Creek war leader Alexander McGillivray. When the governor of Georgia subsequently asked the Choctaws to join that state's war against the Creeks, they ignored him. Indeed, the Choctaws who met Governor Moultrie tried to play on Ameri­ cans' fears of the Spanish more than they tried to mobilize them against other Indians, informing South Carolina officials that Spanish traders had armed Creek warriors to the teeth. To receive an equally large gift from the United States was, for the moment, a more important goal for the Choctaws than avenging the killing of emissaries. 52 The Choctaws left Hopewell, bearing $1,181 worth of goods, on Janu­ ary 6, 1786, three days after signing their treaty. Representatives of the . Chickasaw nation, led by one of the Piomingos (the man known as Moun­ tain Leader), arrived a day later. They stayed at Hopewell for less than a week, as the commissioners' supplies were nearly depleted, and kept their speeches "short and true." Like the Choctaws, the Chickasaw leaders at Hopewell sought to create an alliance with the new American govern­ ment in order to increase their personal prestige at home. Piomingo and chief Mingatushka gave the representatives of Congress their symbols of authority-eight strings of white beads and a medal kept by "the daughter and mother . . . [of] great men of our nation"-and received U.S. medals to wear and flags to fly in their towns.53

The- Evaporation of 'FederaL :7futhority

53

The Chickasaws' second goal was to open trade with the United States. To this end, Piomingo and his associates agreed to give the federal govern­ ment "the sole and exclusive right of regulating" their commerce and to trade only with U.S. citizens. Hawkins, Pickens, and Martin promised that Congress would send traders as early as possible, and in the treaty obtained a five-square-mile tract on the Tennessee River for a trading post. However, geographic reality made the Chickasaw emissaries' offer unenforceable. Chickasaw hunters could easily trade with French merchants in Kaskaskia and Vincennes, and in late 1785 a group of Baltimore merchants had opened a trading factory on the lower Tennessee River, while French traders from Saint Louis built a competing post at Muscle Shoals. 54 Congress, for its part, was slow to fulfill its commissioners' commer­ cial promises: straitened finances prevented the United States from send­ ing goods to the Chickasaws until 1793. Despite having many alternative trading partners, Chickasaw leaders complained bitterly about the United States' inability to trade with them. For the Chickasaws, as for most other North American Indians, trade and diplomacy were conceptually inter­ locked pursuits; the exchange of goods was both an economic transaction and an expression of good faith. Piomingo made this point when he later complained that since the United States had sent his people no supplies, his kinsmen were beginning to suspect the treaty had only been a land grab.55 The Chickasaws also hoped that Congress would protect their land from white settlers. In August 1784, after learning of the Cherokees' sale of Muscle Shoals, Piomingo had protested to white officials in Nashville. A year later, Chickasaw leaders halted plans by Tennessee settlers to es­ tablish "a considerable settlement" at Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Mem­ phis). Now Piomingo complained to federal officials that "the white people on Cumberland [River]" were building houses and grazing their cattle on the Chickasaws' hunting grounds without permission. The commissioners assured Piomingo that Congress would investigate; moreover, Article IV of the treaty withdrew the United States' protection from whites who in­ truded on the Chickasaws' lands, allowing that nation to "punish [them] or not as they pleased."56 Piomingo and chiefs Mingatushka and Latopoia signed the treaty on January 10. Several Chickasaw chiefs and warriors remained at Hopewell to discuss intruders and other concerns, while the rest of the party received their presents (worth $659.30) and headed home. Cherokee warriors sub­ sequently ambushed and robbed the homebound Chickasaws, and while the chief of the town of Chatauga apprehended the warriors and gave their

54

'Red gentlemen and 1f)hite-- Savages

plunder to Andrew Pickens, the incident helped demonstrate that there would be no order on the southern frontier unless Native Americans en­ forced it.57 Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws on April 18, 1786. Its secretary Charles Thomson then issued a circular letter to the southern state governors, asking them to uphold "justice, honor, and national faith" by enforcing the Hopewell ac­ cords. It was an unrealistic request, given that two of the states in question had protested the treaties and were annexing Indian lands that Congress had promised to protect. Yet Thomson had little choice: south of the Ohio, the U.S. government had neither the power nor the authority to enforce its own treaties.58 The Hopewell peace settlement would prove as short-lived as the Fort Finney armistice. Several members of Congress admitted that the south­ ern treaties were a dead letter as long as North Carolina and Georgia op­ posed them. American farmers continued to encroach on southern Indian lands, and Old Tassel observed ruefully that "we find your people settle much faster on our lands after a treaty than before." A few months after the Hopewell conference, Creek and Cherokee warriors went to war with fron­ tiersmen in Georgia and Tennessee, joining their northern confederates in a general war from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.59 As they surveyed the ruins of their peace settlement, federal officials asked why the treaties of 1784-86 had failed so quickly. Most concluded that Congress and its commissioners had dealt fairly with the Indians, and that irresponsible state governments and lawless white settlers had vio­ lated the United States' treaties and incited the Indians to violence. Most argued that only a strong national government with a clear mandate to reg­ ulate Indian affairs, an enlightened corps of officials, a full treasury, and a disciplined army could bring any kind of peace to the frontier. Charles Nis­ bet, the president of Carlisle College, put the case bluntly in a private letter on the western war, hoping that "those white Indians who are the cause of it were either sent away to their copper-colored brethren, or knocked on the head, as they deserve. But this supposes a government which does not exist among us at present."60 For the time being, the "white Indians" and their "copper-colored" rivals would be the dominant actors on the Trans-Appalachian frontier. It is to the aspirations of settlers and federationists that our attention must now turn. CONGR ESS E N D O RSED THE T R EATIES WITH THE SHAWNEES,

3

Unruly young Men

s Congress approved the Treaties of Hopewell and Fort Finney, the post-Revolutionary cease-fire collapsed, and war swept the entire k American frontier. In the north, Shawnee, Miami, and Ottawa war­ riors attacked American camps and farms on both sides of the Ohio River, taking scalps, prisoners, and plunder. By July 1786, the raiders had stolen seven hundred horses and killed over thirty people in Kentucky alone.l In the south, Creek warriors collectively resolved to expel white intrud­ ers from their hunting grounds. They attacked farms along the Oconee and Altamaha Rivers in the spring and summer of 1786, and the following year they joined the Chickamaugas in raiding settlements on the Cumberland Plateau. Meanwhile, in the eastern Tennessee Valley, Cherokee warriors waylaid white Americans trespassing on their nation's land.2 Faced with a concerted Indian attack, the U.S. government could only affirm its weakness. When Virginia Governor Patrick Henry pleaded for troops to help defend Kentucky, Congress sent him a "soothing answer" and moved two companies of soldiers to Louisville. It could do little more during that bloody summer, for the U.S. treasury was empty and federal officers were themselves under fire: Indian warriors attacked a federal sur­ veying party, killing a sentry and forcing Thomas Hutchins to suspend his surveys.3 South of Kentucky, where the federal government had neither army nor jurisdiction, its actions were even more limited. In August 1786, Congress again asked North Carolina and Georgia to cede their western territories

P

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'Red yentlemen and White-- Savages

to the Union, but both legislatures refused. Despite this refusal, Congress appointed Dr. James White its Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Department, and sent him on a peace mission to the Creeks and Cherokees.4 White held his office under the Indian Ordinance that Congress had en­ acted that summer. The ordinance created two departments, one north and one south of the Ohio River, whose superintendents had the power to is­ sue trading licenses, arrest white intruders, and handle daily business with Native American visitors. Due to southern states' concern that the Indian superintendents might infringe on their sovereignty, the ordinance obliged them to cooperate with state officials when they operated within a state's boundaries. Moreover, the superintendents' budgets and police powers were quite limited-indeed, neither had enough resources to execute his official duties successfully. Not surprisingly, White's peace mission failed, and Northern Indian Superintendent Richard Butler spent most of his term in Pennsylvania, avoiding his Indian clients.s The chiefs who had signed treaties with the United States proved just as powerless. In June 1786, Molunthy, the main peacemaker at Fort Finney, promised that he would try to control his young men but observed that his authority was limited. Like many other Indian nations the Shawnees were politically decentralized and did not allow chiefs to give binding or­ ders: "Being a lawless people," Molunthy explained, "[we] can do nothing . . . but by fair words and our people is very much scattered." Earlier that year, Choctaw chief Mingohoopoie observed that "it is as impossible for us [chiefs] to be responsible for all the warriors as it is for you to become re­ sponsible for the disorderly people of your nation." His observation became particularly salient as white settler militias attacked neutral Indian towns and widened the circle of war.6 As the war spread and intensified, eastern officials ascribed it to the breakdown of civil order on the frontier. Several Congressmen described the conflict in the Ohio Valley as a struggle between "vagrant Indians" and a "lawless banditti" of Kentucky whites. Henry Knox, Richard Butler, and Samuel Parsons agreed, warning that "the Wabash Indians and the li­ centious people of that country" now posed a grave danger to the region's "orderly People." Insurgents had gained the upper hand over the friends of government in the Northwest, just as they had done in the western counties of North Carolina and among Yankee settlers in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley. Absent a strong central government, one writer predicted, "the con-

Unruly young 1vlen

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cert and zeal of the vicious" would infect the whole Union with "anarchy and licentiousness." 7 The settlers and warriors whom Rufus King, Knox, and others charac­ terized as lawless vagrants were nothing of the kind. Like most rural insur­ gents in early America, the unruly young men of the post-Revolutionary frontier had rational goals they believed they could only attain through the use of force. They were fighting to control land, which they viewed as a source of personal power and collective sustenance. They were fighting to display their prowess as warriors or their status as citizens-in-arms, and thus to acquire prestige and self-respect. They were also fighting against political leaders whom they believed had betrayed their countrymen for personal gain.8 Warriors and frontiersmen justified their rebellion in quasi-legal terms, and used quasi-legal institutions to maintain discipline within their ranks. Squatters in the northern backcountry argued that they had a natural right to occupy and improve undeveloped land. Tennessee Valley settlers who op­ posed North Carolina's land policies invoked their right of self-government by creating their own state, which they named Franklin. Georgia and Ken­ tucky militiamen carried guns and torches into Indian country by order of their governors, who invoked their constituents' right of self-defense in the face of Indian attack and federal inaction. Similarly, the captains of the Northwest and Creek-Cherokee confederacies justified their warriors' raids as the repulsion of an American invasion, and declared that the treaties of 1783-86 were defunct because Congress and the states had procured them through force or fraud.9 As the peoples of the western country learned that Congress lacked the means or will to intervene in their struggles, insurgents and warriors re­ sorted to collective local action or turned to Britain or Spain for aid. Wood­ land Indian captains renewed their old intertribal confederations. White officials in Franklin and Georgia proposed military alliances with one an­ other, with settlers in Nashville, and with the Choctaws and Chickasaws. All looked to the British in Canada or the Spanish in Florida for assistance, whether in the form of diplomatic intervention, access to the Mississippi River, or supplies from sympathetic foreign agents. Reflecting on the frontier situation in 1784, George Washington wrote, "The Western settlers . . . stand as it were on a pivot." Two years later, both the white and red inhabitants of the Trans-Appalachian West had begun to pivot away from the United States and to pursue their goals using local or

58

'Red gentlemen and 1f/hite- Savages

European resources. If eastern elites and Indian chiefs would not or could not help frontiersmen and warriors promote their interests, they would not receive the insurgents' allegiance and could not stop their war.1O

SETTLERS A N D LANDLORDS

The Trans-Appalachian West had been a seat of war for over two decades, but for Native Americans the stakes had never been higher. White settlers flooded across the mountains after 1783, settling on Indian lands in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and in central Georgia. The intruders felled trees and drove game from Native American hunting preserves, and some­ times settled within sight of Indian towns. As Indians protested the invasion of their homelands, white officials watched the torrent of emigrants with wonderment. A Kentucky judge trav­ eling the Cumberland Road passed 221 other travelers in one day. En route to Fort Finney in 1785, Richard Butler commented that the flatboats passing him on their way to Kentucky and Nashville betokened an emigration so great that it "seem[edl as if the old states would depopulate." Army officers at Fort Harmar kept a more precise tally. Between October 1786 and De­ cember 1787 they recorded 323 boats, 267 wagons, 1,681 horses and cattle, and 5,585 settlers passing their garrison. In the single month of April 1788, Major John Doughty counted 181 flatboats, 2,125 horses and cattle, and 4,069 people passing the postY Migration to Kentucky, which increased the district's black and white population from seven thousand to seventy-nine thousand between 1780 and 1790, was only one element of a massive invasion of Indian country. Tens of thousands of American families headed west in the 1780s-or in one case to the east, as poor farmers from southern New England moved to Maine, tripling its population to one hundred thousand between 1775 and 1790. White emigrants resettled the war-ravaged Mohawk and Susque­ hanna River valleys of New York and colonized the Monongahela and Al­ legheny Valleys of Pennsylvania, doubling western Pennsylvania's white population in the 1770S and giving western New York thirty-two thousand taxable inhabitants by 1790. In the Tennessee Valley the non-Indian popu­ lation rose from ten thousand to thirty-six thousand in the 1780s. Georgia, still a frontier state, increased its population from fifty-six thousand in 1780 to eighty-three thousand by 1790.n One observer remarked that emigrating Americans "seem absolutely in-

Unruly young Men

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fatuated by something like the old crusading spirit to the holy land." The invaders' zeal was genuine, but their motives were secular. They moved to the frontier in part to escape economic woes in the Atlantic states: heavy taxes, high rents, and soil depletion. Some were lured west by speculators who boasted of the salubrious climate of the "western world" and the fertil­ ity and cheapness of its landsY Nearly all were farmers, who came to the frontier to practice what scholars have called "composite agriculture": growing food for themselves and their families and raising marketable cash crops. Husbands and wives grew maize, wheat, flax, and vegetables; raised chickens, swine, cattle, and horses; and produced maple sugar, potash, whiskey, and other value-added goods that commanded a high price relative to their weight. Some hoped to become wealthy, but most merely sought to achieve a comfortable standard of living and acquire sufficient land to leave to their children.14 Land was not merely a form of security. For white men in eighteenth­ century North America, it was also a source of status and power. For three hundred years, Englishmen had celebrated the yeoman farmer who tilled his own land as the exemplar and guardian of liberty and virtue. The white freeholder's economic independence allowed him to act as a responsible member of the community: to vote, serve on a jury, and bear arms in the local militia-in short, to be a full, self-respecting citizen of the American republic. IS Economic competence and independence would elude western farmers, however, if open land proved scarce or expensive. Given the supposed abun­ dance of land on the frontier, migrants were often startled to find that white landlords already owned much of the best real estate. Provincial and state governments had given great swathes of frontier land to well-connected gentlemen in the 1760s and 1770s, and both the states and Congress contin­ ued to do so in the 1780s, putting the interests of wealthy developers ahead of those of yeoman farmers.16 Massachusetts, for example, virtually gave away several million acres of Maine timberland to a few Revolutionary War officers. One was Henry Knox, a former bookbinder's apprentice who rose to prominence as Wash­ ington's artillery commander and became Confederation Secretary at War in 1785. Knox acquired most of the immense Waldo Patent in central Maine (560,000 acres) through marriage and by finagling an appointment as state agent for the tract's sale. The Bay State also sold its preemption right to 6,000,000 acres of land in western New York to Oliver Phelps, Nathaniel

60

'Red gentlemen and 'White-- Savages

Gorham, and Robert Morris; the partners paid £300,000 ($800,000) in state currency, which in 1788 was worth only 17 percent of par value.I? Among other land deals, Pennsylvania sold 120,000 acres of land in the Susquehanna Valley to Timothy Pickering and his business partners, who paid a shilling per acre in depreciated state currency. North Carolina sold 2.5 million acres of Tennessee Valley land to speculators who paid the state 2 shillings per acre in state certificates. Before the sale, the speculators convinced the legislature to depreciate North Carolina's currency by print­ ing £100,000 of paper money, thereby reducing their real purchase price to 5 cents an acre.IS The Continental Congress enacted a land policy that was similarly friendly to large buyers. A 1785 ordinance set a minimum price of 1 dol­ lar an acre for land in the Northwest, and made the minimum purchase 640 acres, beyond the means of most settlers. Some complained that such terms would only benefit "great land holders," men who wanted to engross frontier lands and then resell them to actual settlers for profit. The fed­ eral government's first large sales seemed to bear out this prediction. I n July 1787, Congress sold 1 . 5 million acres t o the Ohio Company, which paid 66 cents per acre in Continental military warrants and debt certificates · (then trading below 10 percent of par) for their prize. Three months later, Congress sold another million acres between the Little and Great Miami Rivers to John Symmes of New Jersey.19 Virginia and Georgia passed more egalitarian land laws in 1779-80, giv­ ing free or cut-price acreage to militia veterans and actual settlers. However, speculators quickly bought up poor veterans' land rights, or built empty shacks to establish false occupancy of large tracts. In Kentucky, haphazard surveys led to overlapping claims and expensive lawsuits: "The titles to the landed estate in Kentucky are so very uncertain," Samuel Parsons observed, "that the chance is at least three to one that a man who purchases there must defend his title by a law suit, the expense of which will ruin a new settler." 20 Not all frontier speculators were rich absentees. Some were surveyors working for eastern proprietors; others were farmers who claimed larger tracts than they needed for their own use, then sold or rented the surplus to other emigrants. Daniel Boone, who had worked as a surveyor for Vir­ ginia speculators, filed personal claims to over 20,000 acres of Kentucky land (and sold 11,900) between 1782 and 1786. Nashville's first leading men were farmers, distillers, and lawyers by trade, but all speculated heavily

Unruly young ::Men

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in land-9 of Davidson County's first 24 justices of the peace individually owned more than 20,000 acres.21 Not every western farmer fought the claims of frontier landlords. In­ deed, many were drawn to the backcountry by the generous terms offered by developmentally oriented proprietors. Large landowners, particularly in the northern states, often offered rent holidays to the first tenants on undeveloped land if they built improvements that increased their tract's value. George Washington, who had received 40,000 acres of land in Penn­ sylvania and western Virginia for his service in the Seven Years' War, of­ fered tenants a 3-year rent holiday if each built a house and barn, planted an orchard and cleared 5 percent of their land during that period. New York landlords had been offering similar terms for decades, and in the 1780s and i790S, some tried to lure prospective buyers or tenants by building them roads and warehouses, giving them supplies, or offering low-interest loans. Under such terms, leaseholders of limited means could potentially accumu­ late enough money to buy their own land.22 S QUAT T E R S A N D INSURGENTS

If settlers lacked the means to buy land or the ability to negotiate with landlords, they had another option: occupying it illegally. Squatting was endemic in the post-Revolutionary United States: thousands of families il­ legally occupied public land, Indian land, and proprietary land, and land­ owners rarely commanded sufficient force to expel intruders. Squatters in the national domain, for example, far outnumbered the troops sent to expel them, and those who did leave frequently returned and rebuilt their farms after the soldiers had departed.23 These intruders rarely believed that they were breaking the law. Most argued they were staking a legitimate land claim through "occupancy and improvement"-that is, homesteading. The idea that undeveloped land be­ longed to those who cleared and tilled it had a respectable pedigree, ex­ tending from the Old Testament, through English common law regarding waste land, to the writings of natural rights philosophers John Locke and Emmerich de VatteL Pennsylvania lawmakers included the homesteading principle in the commonwealth's bill of rights, and Virginia alluded to it in its 1779 land law, which allowed settlers on unclaimed land to buy up to 1,400 acres at a discount if they had cleared ground and built a cabin.24 When state governments proved unsympathetic to squatters' claims,

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'Red gentlemen and 1f}hite- Savages

some settlers responded by taking up arms to defend their presumptive rights. American farmers had rebelled against unsympathetic landlords and officials before: between the 1740S and 1770S rural rioters had attacked sheriffs, broken open jails, and closed courtrooms from Vermont to South Carolina, defending their land claims against those of large proprietors. During the War of American Independence many of these rioters became revolutionaries, declaring themselves the citizens of new states (like Ver­ mont) and seeking the protection of Congress.25 Yankee settlers in northeastern Pennsylvania typified this process of re­ volt and separatism. The Susquehannah Company of Connecticut claimed northern Pennsylvania under Connecticut's colonial charter, and between 1769 and 1775 it brought over four thousand settlers to the Wyoming Valley. The interlopers forced open provincial prisons, defeated two militia forces sent to expel them, and by 1776 had secured political recognition from Con­ gress, which urged Pennsylvania to "cultivate harmony" with the Yankees during the Revolutionary War.26 Congressional recognition, however, did not protect the Wyoming set­ tlers from Indian attack. In July 1778, Iroquois warriors routed local militia and burned the Yankee settlements in the Valley to the ground. Survivors · returned at the end of the war to find that a federal court had nullified Con­ necticut's jurisdiction and that Pennsylvania had begun selling their land to speculators. Many of the old settlers left for good. Others pleaded with Congress and Pennsylvania to restore their property, arguing that their former improvement of "a country in its original state" entitled them to relieF7 A small group of insurgents built stockades, stockpiled weapons, and clashed with Pennsylvania claimants led by Alexander Patterson, who in the spring of 1784 used state militia to drive Yankee farmers from the valley. Pennsylvania's supreme court indicted Patterson for riot and allowed the settlers to return, whereupon the Susquehannah Company began sending · them reinforcements in the form of "half-share men": armed recruits prom­ ised one hundred acres of land if they occupied and defended it for three years. By 1786, Yankee gunmen controlled the Wyoming Valley once more, Pennsylvania militia refused to march to Wilkes-Barre, and the insurgents were contemplating forming a new state.28 At the opposite end of Pennsylvania, frontiersmen living in the Monon­ gahela Valley, a region claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia, asked Congress in 1776 to let them form the state of "Westsylvania." The petition-

Unruly young ::Men ers claimed they merely wanted to enjoy "those lands . . . to which by the laws of nature and of nations [they] are entitled as first occupants," and that Virginia landlords were trying to impose "vassalage and dependence" on them. Congress did not act on the petition, and after Virginia agreed (in 1780) to recognize Pennsylvania's political jurisdiction over the region, the Pennsylvania legislature made attempts to establish new states within its borders treasonable. Some of the Westsylvania separatists moved west and became squatters in the upper Ohio Valley; one, John Emerson, tried to organize a statehood convention there, arguing that "all mankind . . . have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country and there to form their constitution." Settlers who remained in the Monongahela Valley con­ tinued to resent both the Pennsylvania government and Virginia landlords; when George Washington came to survey his lands there in 1784, the white occupants refused to leave and sued him.29 In Kentucky, settlers petitioned the Virginia legislature for statehood. They claimed that "a set of Nabobs in Virginia" had engrossed the best land in the Bluegrass region but were unwilling to pay the cost of defending settlers, and that few Kentuckians could afford to attend court or legisla­ tive sessions in Richmond. Virginia eventually agreed to grant the district separate statehood, and between 1784 and 1788 Kentucky militia companies elected delegates to seven statehood conventions. These delegates initially focused on drafting a state constitution, but as negotiations with Virginia dragged on some began to discuss secession from the Union.3D Farther south, in the Tennessee Valley, the land policies of the North Carolina government engendered the most militant separatist movement of the 1780s. The North Carolina legislature had closed its western land office before the Tennessee settlers could register their claims, and then attempted to cede the state's western territories to Congress. Many fron­ tiersmen feared that Congress or North Carolina would return their un­ registered lands to the Cherokees. In December 1784, a convention of farm­ ers from the eastern Tennessee Valley voted to declare independence from North Carolina and form the new state of Franklin. During the next two years, the Franklin assembly appointed John Sevier governor, sent William Cocke to represent the state in Congress, printed paper money, levied taxes, and organized a militia.3! Governor Alexander Martin warned the separatists that North Carolina would either "regain her government over the revolted territory or render it not worth possessing." The state legislature acted more temperately, of-

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages fering the secessionists amnesty if they returned to their old allegiance. By 1786, North Carolina loyalists in Franklin had rallied and began an armed struggle with the separatists. The two factions seized each other's court records, intimidated one another with rival militia drills, and exchanged blows in village streets. In the summer of 1788, with public support for the separatist movement declining, North Carolina officials finally indicted John Sevier for treason. The insurgent leader evaded arrest, however, and rallied the remnants of the Franklin militia for one last campaign against the Cherokees.32 By the end of 1788, one could view an almost continuous range of rural riots, frontier insurgencies, and secessionist movements from Pennsylvania to the Tennessee Valley. Yet these insurgents behaved in a peculiarly orderly fashion toward their antagonists. Rioters and separatists always petitioned state governments for redress, and asked Congress to protect their rights or approve their bids for statehood. The Franklinites identified Thomas Jef­ ferson's draft 1784 land ordinance as one of the justifications for their in­ dependent state west of the mountains. Separatists used the mechanism of the popularly elected convention, which the American Revolutionaries had legitimized as the embodiment of the public-at-Iarge, to assert a superior authority to their old legislatures and thereby create new ones;33 Eastern state governments tried to keep western dissidents in line with bayonets and proclamations, but they also tried negotiation. Pennsylvania suspended ejectment suits against the Wyoming settlers and sent officials to arrange a truce, though the Yankee rebels refused to trust them. Vir­ ginia permitted Kentuckians to begin preparation for statehood, though the Northwest War and arguments over the division of Virginia's debts prolonged negotiations for years. North Carolina's legislature offered the Franklinites clemency if they rescinded their secession decree. The eastern states' willingness to negotiate derived in part from their financial prob­ lems: diplomacy was cheaper than civil war. It also reflected legislators' be­ lief that some of the rebels' leaders shared eastern elites' views and might come to terms without bloodshed.34 When insurgents did exchange blows with state officials, both sides focused their attacks on property and used minimal force against per­ sons. Combatants burned cabins, broke jails, and exchanged fisticuffs and threats, but they rarely exchanged gunfire or destroyed one another's crops, and fatalities were rare. Insurgent violence was as much a form of politi­ cal theater as an effort to damage and defeat one's opponents. When white

Unruly young Men

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frontiersmen fought Native Americans, however, it was a different and far bloodier story.35 DEFENSE A N D E X T I R PATION

Along with land ownership and political representation, Indian policy was one of the issues impelling frontier settlers to rebel against eastern govern­ ments. White westerners believed that Congress and the eastern states had betrayed them by failing to extract larger land cessions from the Trans­ Appalachian Indians, and by refusing to adopt a more aggressive strategy toward Indian federationists. Frontier insurgents thus adopted their own Indian policies, characterized by distrust for treaties and indiscriminately violent responses to wa,rriors' raids. Settler violence against noncombatant Indians had been distressingly common in America since the 1760s. The "Paxton Boys'" slaughter of twenty unarmed Conestogas in 1763, the murder of the Mingo John Logan's family in 1773, the bushwhacking of the Shawnee chief Cornstalk and the Delaware chief White Eyes in 1777-78, and the Gnaddenhutten massacre all elicited disgust and regret from eastern Americans. Indeed, Benj amin Franklin la­ beled the Paxton Boys "Christian White Savages." However, American of­ ficials were either unable or unwilling to punish white frontiersmen who were often ardent supporters of the Revolution.36 After the Revolutionary War, and particularly after Indian federation­ ists escalated their war against American settlers, neither Congress nor the cash-starved states had the power to restrain frontier militias or protect neutral Indian communities from their vengeance. In May 1786, Virginia governor Patrick Henry ordered the county lieutenants of Kentucky dis­ trict to "concert some system for their own defense," and that fall George Rogers Clark and Benjamin Logan led militia forays against Native com­ munities north of the Ohio River. Clark's expedition ended ignominiously when his men mutinied, but Logan's force destroyed seven Shawnee towns, took thirty captives, and killed a prominent Shawnee chief. Unfortunately, the towns belonged to the Mekoches, the main Shawnee peace faction, and the chief was none other than Molunthy, who had been captured while he brandished a copy of the Treaty of Fort Finney and a homemade American flag and was murdered shortly thereafterY Federal Army officers expressed their dismay at these raids, which they believed would bring discredit to American arms and drive neutral Indians

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'Red yentlemen and 'White- Savages

into the arms of the British. (Cornplanter confirmed that the surviving Me­ koches fled to the Wyandot towns near Detroit and became British allies.) From the standpoint of Kentuckians, however, a government that would not help them fight the Northwest Indians did not deserve their respect and obedience. During the next two years, they continued to attack Na­ tive American hunters and towns north of the Ohio River with little regard for their guilt or allegiance.38 In 1787, Kentucky militia destroyed the last Shawnee town on the Scioto River, shortly after the Shawnees had agreed to a truce. The following summer, Kentucky militia killed nine Piankeshaws from the towns of neutral chiefs Pacane and Demoiselle, causing Pacane and his kinfolk to flee to Arkansas.39 The state of Franklin pursued an even more violent Indian policy than that of the Kentuckians. In May 1785, the Franklin governor John Sevier con­ vened a treaty council with a few Cherokee chiefs and captains at Dumplin Creek, and procured from them the right to "inhabit . . . and cultivate" the lands between the Holston and French Broad Rivers. While other Cherokee leaders repudiated the agreement, hundreds of white farmers immigrated to the "ceded" lands that summer and fal1.40 In the spring of 1786, after these settlers had killed several Cherokee men, warriors raided white farms in the Holston Valley, taking fifteen scalps and touching off one of many cycles of vengeance. That summer, 250 militia under William Cocke and Alexander Outlaw burned the town of Coyatee and forced chiefs Old Tassel and Hanging Maw to cede more Cherokee land.41 The "Treaty" of Coyatee intensified the war in the Tennessee Valley. For the next two years, Cherokee warriors and white settlers raided one an­ other's settlements, stole horses, and took captives. The ability of chiefs to restrain their warriors, always limited, now disappeared as settler militias attacked and killed those chiefs. In May 1787, Kentucky militia mistakenly attacked a party of neutral Cherokees near the Chickamaugas' towns, kill­ ing seven (including a Chota chief). One year later, a Franklinite killed Old Tassel while he met John Sevier under a flag of truce.42 After Tassel's murder, Franklin became a charnel house. In the summer and fall of 1788, Cherokee and Creek warriors ambushed militia columns, attacked flatboats, and killed and mutilated white settlers. Franklin and North Carolina militia retaliated by burning Cherokee towns and slaugh­ tering those who did not flee. Alexander McGillivray told federal commis­ sioners that the southern Indians now believed "professions [of peace] are

Unruly young :Men only deceitful snares to lull them into security whereby the Americans may the more easily destroy them." 43 McGillivray's principal adversaries, the Georgians, demonstrated that an isolated and frightened, state government could act as brutally toward Indians as did frontier insurgents. Following Creek raids into Georgia, the legislature in 1786 authorized a l,soo-man militia muster and a treaty coun­ cil at Shoulderbone Creek, where the state agent Benjamin James forced Creek chiefs to sign another treaty and state troops took hostages. In the spring and summer of 1787, Georgia's militia fortified frontier towns and conducted several raids into Creek country. These measures proved inef­ fectual. Neither the Shoulderbone Treaty nor the state's fortifications pre­ vented the Creeks from resuming their raids and destroying the town of Greensboro. The militia's punitive expeditions mainly killed noncomba­ tants, and drove the Tallassee King, a former peace advocate, into alliance with McGillivray.44 The frontiersmen who participated in these campaigns were not merely seeking to acquire Native Americans' land. The pattern of settlers' attacks­ burning fields and towns, killing women and children, gunning down friendly chiefs-demonstrates that many viewed Native Americans as an enemy race whose very existence threatened their own lives and livelihoods. "The white Americans," J. F. D. Smyth asserted, "have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth." This attitude was the byproduct of three decades of frontier warfare, and a reaction to the military practices of Woodland Indian warriors, of which white settlers had considerable firsthand experience.45 The guerrilla tactics of Native American warriors, who favored am­ bushes and hit-and-run attacks over open-field fighting, were understand­ able to observers who realized that Indians could not afford heavy losses, but struck white frontiersmen as perfidious and cowardly. Indian warriors routinely scalped prisoners and sometimes also mutilated the bodies of their victims. Whites denounced these efforts to extract spiritual power from the body of a foe as rank barbarism, even as they applied the same treatment to Indians. Woodland Indians frequently tortured captives, flay­ ing and burning their victims over the course of hours or days. Indians saw torture as a way for a community to expiate grief and anger and give captive men a last chance to prove their courage. White Americans chose to regard torture as another proof of savagery. Those captives whom Native Ameri-

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'Red gentlemen and "White- Savages

cans did not torture or ransom, they adopted, and the captives' families as­ sumed that they had become slaves, even though some became "so attached to the Indian mode of life" that they did not wish to leave.46 Frontiersmen did not merely attack Indians because they were fright" ened or vengeful. Destroying Native communities and driving away the survivors allowed white settlers to distance themselves from the Indians ' to whom elite easterners frequently compared them, and whom during the early years of settlement they closely resembled in dress and diet. Indi­ ans like the Moravian Delawares who had adopted some of the lifeways of Europeans made particularly appealing targets, for by killing them, white militiamen made it clear that they defined Indian inferiority as a byprod­ uct of race, not behavior. By burning towns and killing noncombatants, white frontiersmen proclaimed their own superior status as white men and citizens.47 Finally, attacking neutral or friendly Native communities allowed set­ tlers to express their disgust with eastern officials and their contempt for treaties and static defenses. Insurgents could strike at white elites through Native American clients. The members of Benjamin Logan's expedition, for example, not only scorned the treaty that Molunthy showed them but alleg-· edly displayed his homemade American flag in Fayette County Courthouse "as a trophy." Later, militia leader Patrick Brown defied John Hamtramck, commander of the U.S. garrison at Vincennes, by attacking Piankeshaws under federal protection.48 From the standpoint of western settlers, the Indian war of the 1780s was a continuation of the Revolutionary War on the frontier. It allowed frontier militiamen to vent the hatreds engendered by the earlier conflict, assert their status as citizens of the republic, procure the land that secured their economic independence, and declare their political independence from eastern elites who wanted to accommodate Native Americans. By 1787, In­ · dian chiefs understood this political dimension of the war. "It seems very strange to us," the Wyandot Half-King and the Delaware Captain Pipe told Richard Butier, "that . . . large bodies of men should slip off from you. It makes us doubt that you are carrying on a confederacy with those people that strike us." Of course, Butler could have made similar observations about the warriors who were striking American farms and the chiefs who were increasingly unable to govern them.49

Unruly young :Jv[en T H E F E D E R AT IO N ISTS

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69

CREED

An array of motives induced Indian warriors to attack white frontiers­ men. One of their objectives was to reclaim land that whites had stolen from them. It is important to remember, however, that Woodland Indi­ ans' definition of trespass differed markedly from that of white landlords, because Native Americans rarely recognized an absolute individual right to real property. While each Indian nation claimed a defined territory, it could share land and its products with outsiders after the newcomers placed themselves into a fictive kin relationship with their predecessors. In the mid-eighteenth century, several Algonquian bands settled on lands claimed by the Iroquois in the Susquehanna Valley, while the Miamis and Wyandots welcomed Shawnees into their towns south of the Great Lakes. The Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees and Creeks shared a hunting terri­ tory around the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, which they called "the middle ground." 50 Indians did not always exempt whites from these protocols of coexis­ tence. The Kaskaskia chiefJean-Baptiste Ducoigne told his white neighbors, "The Great Spirit above was the Creator of the Grounds and he gave us all privileges to live upon it." The Shawnees allowed white hunters to use their ranges in Kentucky as long as they hunted for food rather than pelts. Af­ ter the Revolutionary War, Iroquois and Creek leaders i nvited respectable farmers and artisans-"chosen men of competent property"-to settle on their lands, thereby providing them with trading partners and protection against more unruly frontiersmen.51 Most whites who settled on Native lands in the eighteenth century failed to respect or aid their Indian landlords. They came without chiefs' permis­ sion or under color of fraudulent treaties. They hunted animals by firelight (causing them to freeze) and felled trees for timber or farmland, thus de­ pleting or destroying game reserves and depriving Indian hunters of their livelihood. Their l ivestock-the free-range swine and cattle that were the mainstay of Anglo-American agriculture-rooted up Indians' crops and devoured the undergrowth in their forests. Moreover, when Native Ameri­ can travelers came to their white neighbors' homes for food and drink, their hosts rarely showed them the hospitality owed by kinsmen, instead driving them off at gunpoint.52 The behavior of white settlers convinced younger Indians that coexis­ tence would be impossible, and that there was a basic incompatibility be-

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tween whites' and Indians' lifeways. It therefore contributed to the spread of federationism-the belief that all Indians had common racial interests and should unite to protect their lands from encroaching whites-through the Native American towns of the Trans-Appalachian West. Federationism would prove a potent force in the 1780s. Hundreds of warriors and captains attended councils at Detroit (1785) and Buffalo Creek (1786), and warned , American officials and conciliatory chiefs not to buy or sell Indian land without the consent of all the Woodland Indian nations. In late 1786, the captains of the growing Northwest Indian confederation met near Detroit to exchange belts of union and send a joint message to the Continental Congress. The missive declared that the federationists wanted peace and proposed a multitribal treaty council with the United States, but warned that neither would be possible until Congress prohibited white settlement north of the Ohio River.53 The Northwest confederacy maintained "a constant correspondence" with Creek and Chickamauga captains in the south, and by 1787 the two groups had resolved "jointly to attack the Americans in every place where they shall pass over their own limits." At the same time, the southern fed­ erationist movement followed its own dynamic. Where northern federa- . tionists tried to keep conciliatory chiefs in line with warnings, Alexander McGillivray and his Creek followers burned their homes and denied their towns access to trade goods. McGillivray treated the southern confedera­ tion more like a government than an alliance, even to the extent of trying to control his allies' foreign relations; in 1789, he claimed that the Chero­ kees "now no longer Negotiate for themselves but Conduct themselves as I advise." 54 McGillivray overstated his case. Like civil chiefs and American officials, federationist captains could not entirely control their followers. Indian warriors fought not merely to protect their nations' land and independence, but also to fulfill traditional community obligations and attain personal recognition. They fought, first of all, for the glory and prestige that accom­ panied prowess in battle. The scalps and captives that warriors brought back to their towns and the tales they told of their exploits demonstrated their courage and their extraction of spiritual power from enemies, traits that would later allow them to assume positions of authority. Raiding also provided young warriors with plunder that they could give to their kinfolk, turn over to followers to create a bond of patronage, keep for themselves, or sell to white traders.55

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Warfare also served a communal function, insofar as many Woodland Indian nations used military raids to punish violent crimes. Most northern Indians believed that an indemnity payment of gifts could right the spiri­ tual imbalance caused by assault or murder, but the southern nations held that only blood vengeance could quiet the "crying blood" of the victim's relatives. The Cherokees and their neighbors regarded violent crimes not as individual acts but as offenses committed by one clan against another. The protocols of vengeance allowed young warriors to pay blood debts by killing, scalping, or capturing the aggressor's kinsmen. When whites killed a Cherokee or Creek, warriors from the victim's clan might retaliate by at­ tacking nearby white settlements, regardless of the inhabitants' identity or behavior.56 Since white militias tended to be similarly indiscriminate when retaliat­ ing for Indian raids, southern warriors' method of punishing crimes often led to cycles of vengeance that ended in the incineration of one side's fields and towns. To take one example: In May 1788, Cherokee warriors led by Slim Tom of Chilhowee entered the house of the Kirk family-a family that had previously shown Tom hospitality-and murdered all eleven people there. This raid was almost certainly retaliation for one of the Franklin­ ites' earlier attacks on Cherokee towns. The only surviving member of the family, John Kirk, took his vengeance the next month at Chilhowee, when, as a militiaman under John Sevier's command, he killed chief Old Tassel under a flag of truce. A Cherokee war party then avenged Tassel's murder by killing seventeen white men gathering fruit in an abandoned village, af­ terwards stuffing the corpses' severed genitals into their mouths. The cycle continued into the winter, when Sevier's militia burned several Cherokee towns and put the inhabitants to flight. It ended only when the exhausted Franklinites and Cherokees agreed to a truce early in 1789.57 Some chiefs futilely tried to prevent counterattacks by informing white officials that their warriors sought only satisfaction for past crimes, not to start a war. Meanwhile, federationist captains tried to control their warriors' raids by urging them to make carefully targeted attacks. These captains' ef­ forts to restrain their followers were products of their political ambition. Federationist leaders like Joseph Brant and Alexander McGillivray were, in their own way, revolutionary insurgents. They derived their authority not from years of experience or mastery of religious rituals, but from their mili­ tary exploits in the Revolutionary War and their subsequent willingness to challenge the authority of conciliatory chiefs.58

72


Like those chiefs, however, the captains of the confederacy could not isolate themselves from whites. Indeed, the success of their movement de­ pended on their ability to obtain supplies from European traders, and to negotiate with British, Spanish, and even American officials who might be able to enforce boundary agreements. Federationist leaders could not ne­ gotiate effectively, however, if they could not control their warriors, for if , these captains could not make peace as well as war, white officials would have no compelling reason to talk with them. To an extent, they had to follow Alexander McGillivray's example by turning their confederations into something approximating governments, and provide their warrior fol­ lowers both with incentives to fight and reasons to stay home when asked. When McGillivray described the Creeks' war against Georgia as a quest for the "justice demanded . . . by a nation of warriors," he was still learn­ ing of the contradiction inherent in those last three words, and the chal­ lenges of building such a nation. Ultimately, those challenges would prove insurmountable. 59

FOREIGN

(A N D

M U TUAL

)

AID

The state-building efforts of white frontier insurgents and the political ef­ forts of Native American federationists followed similar dynamics. Both groups sought to protect their followers' collective rights through military action. Both followed men who built their reputations by denouncing es­ tablished leaders. Both used new political institutions-statehood conven­ tions on the one hand, multitribal councils on the other-to legitimize their struggles and shape their agendas. Moreover, both movements tried to en­ list the help of outsiders. American frontiersmen sought aid from neighbor­ ing communities, Congress, and friendly Indian nations, while federation­ ists forged alliances with Britain and Spain. British officials were initially reluctant to aid Indian federationists. Whitehall's postwar American policy focused instead on resettling Loyal­ ist refugees and collecting debts that the former colonists owed to Brit­ ish creditors. Britain's pursuit of these objectives, however, affected King George's former Indian allies. The Loyalist refugees who resettled in Can­ ada included 1,800 Iroquois, to whom the Crown granted a reservation on the Grand River in what is now southern Ontario. The Mohawk federation­ ist Joseph Brant later turned this reserve into a base of operations for the Northwest confederation.60

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Meanwhile, as security for payment of American debts, the home secre­ tary suspended plans to surrender eight British forts on the >Great Lakes to the United States. English and French-speaking fur traders used these forts as supply bases, and some urged Indians to defend their territory against American settlers and sold them sufficient weapons to do so. British gar­ rison commanders who feared that warriors would attack their forts if they were not fighting Americans cultivated friendship with Indian federation­ ists, giving them gifts, hosting council meetings, and assuring them that the king had not abandoned them. By 1786 Alexander McKee reported that the Northwest Indians viewed the British "as the real support of their inter­ ests" and a bulwark against American aggression.61 Native American federationists might have regarded Britain as a useful ally, but British Indian policy during the 1780s was essentially reactive and localized. The same could not be said of Spanish policy, which was proac­ tive and centralized. Despite friendly relations with its American cobel­ ligerents during the Revolutionary War, Madrid never formally recognized American independence and feared that the rapid expansion of American settlements would eventually threaten Louisiana and Florida. Spanish offi­ cials therefore sought to contain American expansion through commercial restriction and by arming the southern Indians.62 In 1784, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American shipping, de­ priving American farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee of their best com­ mercial outlet. Congress hoped to reopen the river through diplomacy, but when John Jay and the Spanish envoy Don Diego de Gardoqui negotiated a commercial treaty in 1786, it stipulated that the United States forgo the use of the Mississippi River for twenty-five years in return for access to Spanish ports. Angry southern Congressmen prevented Congress from ratifying the treaty, but the Mississippi would remain under Spanish control for the next ten years. Spain consolidated that control by establishing or strengthening garrisons at Natchez, Fort Nogales (future Vicksburg), and New Madrid.63 Spanish officials also tried to extend their political influence in the Trans-Appalachian region by cultivating alliances with both American settlers and their Native American rivals. Esteban Mira, the governor of Louisiana, allowed American farmers to ship provisions to New Orleans in exchange for bribes, and in 1788, Spain permitted U.S. citizens to sell pro­ duce in that port upon payment of a 15 percent duty. That same year, Mira met with Kentuckians who offered to take their district out of the Union in exchange for unrestricted access to the Mississippi. Spanish officials

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'Red yentlemen and 1f)hite- Savages

encouraged white Americans to settle in Natchez and New Madrid, prom­ ising them land and duty-free access to New Orleans if they became Span­ ish subjects. Several thousand emigrants accepted these offers, including a party led by the Pittsburgh merchant George Morgan.64 Meanwhile governor Arturo O'Neill of Florida cultivated friendship with the southern Indian nations, whose chiefs he invited to treaty confer­ ences in 1784. He made Alexander McGillivray Spain's official agent to the Creek confederacy, and negotiated trade agreements with the Chickamau­ gas, the Choctaws, and Payamataha's faction of Chickasaws. Spanish offi­ cials permitted the Scottish firm of Panton & Leslie to reopen its stores in Florida, and allowed French-speaking traders to establish a post at Muscle Shoals. These merchants sold weapons to Creek and Chickamauga federa­ tionists, and some even helped them fight American settlers: In June 1787, the French traders at Muscle Shoals joined Chickamauga warriors in fight­ ing a militia expedition from Nashville.65 By 1787, observers described the Creeks and Chickamaugas as firmly in Spain's interest, while many Chickasaws and Choctaws were receiving Spanish gifts and medals. Alexander McGillivray assured one official that Spanish aid sustained a "formidable Indian Confederacy" that prevented the "turbulent Americans" from injuring Spain's North American provinces.66 Woodland Indian leaders were quite willing to negotiate with European colonial officials, since access to British and Spanish traders and the threat of foreign alliance gave them leverage in dealing with the United States. Chickasaw and Choctaw chiefs repeatedly warned American officials that unless they received American goods they would have to ally themselves with Spain. The reverse was also true: McGillivray pressured Miro into sending presents and allowing Panton & Leslie to reopen their stores by threatening otherwise "to accept the friendship of the American states." Ultimately, federationist leaders were not looking to throw in their lot with one particular government, but rather to practice the "modern Indian poli­ tics": playing one nation off against another to maximize their own follow­ ers' advantage.67 White frontier leaders were less willing to seek foreign aid. True, a handful of men like James Wilkinson and James White did propose that western settlers find "some protection for their betrayed rights" by seceding from the Union and allying with Spain. Their followers were few, however, and, after Congress rejected the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty, most Kentuckians believed that the U.S. government would eventually open the Mississippi River for them.68

Unruly young Men

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Since Britain and Spain were aiding Indian federationists, western Americans did not ask those powers for help fighting Indians. Georgia gov­ ernor Edward Telfair instead sent pleas for aid to other southern states, to Congress, and to the Choctaws and Chickasaws. His successor George Mathews made an agreement with the republic of Franklin under which Franklin militia would help Georgia fight the Creeks in exchange for land grants near Muscle Shoals.69 Georgia also promised reinforcements for Franklin's war against the Cherokees, which John Sevier sorely needed. In the fall of 1788, as his sup­ porters abandoned him and his government collapsed, Sevier sought help from many sources-even from Alexander McGillivray. Farther west, the officers of Davidson County (Nashville) responded to Chickamauga raids by organizing two militia expeditions against the Chickamaugas' towns and asking North Carolina, Kentucky, and the Chickasaws for help'?o Little came of these requests. The southern states and southern Indi­ ans were unwilling or unable to assist Georgia, and the state's alliance with Franklin collapsed along with that republic's government in 1789. David­ son County settlers received only slightly more help from their neighbors: North Carolina sent a ragged militia battalion over the mountains to "re­ lieve" them, and Chickasaw river pilots accompanied one of the county's expeditions against the Chickamaugas. Kentuckians offered to help rein­ force Nashville but failed to follow through?l An impartial observer analyzing both sides of the Trans-Appalachian conflict in the 1780s would have to conclude that the confederated Indians enjoyed great advantages over white frontiersmen. Their sources of arms were more secure; their supply lines were shorter; their warriors were more willing to attack distant targets and cooperate with other Indian commu­ nities; and their leaders were better able to coordinate strategy than their white counterparts. These advantages allowed Indian federationists to hold their own against opponents who could easily replace their losses. Match­ ing the federationists' superior diplomacy and organization against white settlers' demographic advantages produced a rough balance of power, and by the late 1780s a stalemate had emerged in the Trans-Appalachian Indian wars. During the brief truce that followed the Treaty of Paris, the Trans­ Appalachian frontier had been a place of many voices: the bombastic speeches of Congressional commissioners, the elegant protests of Native American leaders, the dickering of state officials for land, and the more figurative but equally loud "voices" of settlers' axes and federationists' war

'Red yentlemen and 'White- Savages belts. By 1786, gunfire had become the dominant form of communication in the region. It would inhibit negotiation for the next eight years. As on any frontier, however, force and authority would remain local­ ized. White farmers and Indian warriors willingly fought to defend their homes and prestige, but the former hesitated to march hundreds of miles to assist other American settlements, while the latter resisted their captains' attempts to put the interests of confederation above their own. Both would accept aid from Britain or Spain, but neither wanted to swear permanent allegiance to a European power. Neither group had much use for the weak American Congress, but each believed that it might benefit from a stronger American nation-state. Some federationists believed a strong federal government could interpose its army between their people and land-hungry frontiersmen, while white set­ tlers expected it to help them destroy Native American towns. However, no one on the frontier would give the United States their allegiance without a constant quid pro quo. And as the Federalists formed a new government and implemented its frontier policy, it became clear that they had no inten­ tion of giving any of the warring parties preferential treatment.72

The- ((Real Y1mericans" rfJraft' {L government; 1786-1788

y the late 1780s, many white frontiersmen and Indian leaders, despite their murderous differences with one another, agreed on one thing: the desirability of a stronger American federal government. The for­ mer believed a more powerful Union could defeat Indian confederacies and open the Mississippi River, while the latter hoped that a strong central gov­ ernment could open trade with them and protect them from white settlers. They joined a large number of eastern Americans who had come to support a reformed and empowered national government: ship captains worrying about piracy, merchants who favored a federal navigation act, genteel credi­ tors seeking a ban on state paper-money laws, holders of public debt who wanted repayment, and Continental Army veterans who wanted compen­ sation for their service.! Congress could not grant these requests without new legal powers and revenue. The Articles of Confederation did not give Congress the power to regulate trade, block state laws, or collect taxes. By 1786, Congress had no credit and could only requisition a pittance from the impoverished states. To meet the demands of merchants, creditors, veterans, frontiersmen, and Indians, the Confederation would need the powers to tax and legislate, and would thus have to become a genuine government rather than an interstate executive council. 2 A small but influential group of men wanted to strengthen the central government for personal as well as practical reasons. During the Revolu­ tionary War, the Continental Army and Congress had incubated a nation­ alist movement, comprised of young congressmen and officers who had

B

Red yentlemen and White- Savages come to associate their own honor and fortunes with those of the entire Union. These "young men of the Revolution"-Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox were noteworthy examples-believed that, without a strong national government, Americans could not hope to defend their honor and . interests.3 The nationalists had tried to expand the federal government's powers during the last years of the Revolutionary War, when British military suc­ cesses in the South created an atmosphere of crisis. They reorganized the haphazard federal bureaucracy, and wrote an amendment to the Articles of Confederation giving Congress the power to collect a 5 percent import tariff. However, the end of the war dissipated the crisis atmosphere, and several states subsequently blocked approval of the tariff amendment.4 By 1786, though, the economic and political dislocations of indepen­ dence had given the early nationalists hundreds of powerful allies: mer­ chants, gentry, financiers, and former Army officers. These nationalists, whom Noah Webster would shortly dub "Federalists," wanted both to protect their own interests and to save American society from what appeared to be a rising tide of anarchy. Everywhere the propertied elite looked, they saw self­ serving farmers electing uneducated demagogues to state offices, then mob­ bing tax collectors, closing c ourts! and burning prisons when those legis­ lators failed to cut taxes or bail out debtors. In Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley and western North Carolina, armed insurgents openly defied state authority. In Georgia and Kentucky, frontier militias broke federal treaties with the Indians, attacked neutral towns, and killed friendly chiefs.s The most chilling episode of insurgency, for most nationalists, occurred in New England. In the spring of 1786, an agrarian party gained control of the Rhode Island legislature and passed radical debtor-relief legislation. Town meetings in the other New England states demanded similar laws; when state lawmakers failed or refused to act, farmers picked up their guns and forcibly closed county courts. Militia quickly dispersed the rioters in three states, but in Massachusetts the militia refused to march, and by au­ tumn, insurgents controlled the state's western counties. The secretary at war Henry Knox feared the rebels would seize the Springfield arsenal and attack Boston, and spread wild rumors about their numbers and motives. He informed his correspondents that insurgent leader Daniel Shays had raised "12 or 15 thousand desperate and unprincipled men," and that they planned to cancel all debts, redistribute private property, and "annihilat[el government."6 Shays's Rebellion filled the American gentry class with dread. Richard

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Henry Lee warned James Madison that it was a "national calamity" in the making. Gloomy patricians who had read Polybius and Plutarch assumed that republics like the United States were invariably short-lived, doomed to collapse under the weight of democratic excesses. Popular suffrage, accord­ ing to classical political theory, led to demagoguery, rioting, and civil war. A foreign invader or domestic Caesar would then establish a dictatorship on the republic's ruins? Many elite Americans believed that Shays's Rebellion foreshadowed a general descent into chaos and dictatorship. Henry Knox feared that Shays's associates were conspiring with fellow insurgents in Vermont to secede from the Union and invite British troops into American territory. Even if Britain did not intervene, Knox believed unchecked rioters and rebels would destroy the weak state governments and lay the groundwork for fu­ ture tyranny. The only bulwark against anarchy, he and other fearful patri­ cians believed, was a strong national government with the legal power to protect property from demagogues and enough armed force to quash re­ bellions in weak states. A large electorate of several thousand freemen per voting district would presumably choose the most distinguished men for service in the new Congress: educated and patriotic gentlemen who could lend their personal gravity to the republic.8 A strong and well-administered national government could do more than uphold law and order. It could also lead the United States to economic, cultural, and military greatness. Federalism was as much a positivistic re­ form movement as it was a reaction to agrarian radicalism. Its adherents sought to restore public credit, charter banks, build a national university, and encourage commerce and invention. "The feeble finances of the United States . . . damp the ardor of the generous," William Johnson complained in 1785, but a solvent national government could encourage "every liberal and enlarged idea."9 Some Federalists hoped to extend this developmental vision to the frontier. They advocated the creation of "compact settlements" in the Northwest-orderly towns where industrious farmers would work and live under the wise rule of gentlemen-developers. They urged the federal gov­ ernment to use its army and territorial courts to maintain peace and pro­ tect whites and Indians from one another. And they hoped that the same government could encourage the Indians to trade with the United States and adopt the lifeways of white Americans. In short, they believed that a stronger national government could promote "civilized" institutions and behavior among both white frontiersmen and Native Americans.1O

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The Federalists, however, discovered that reorganizing the Union and transforming the frontier would not be easy. The new Federal Constitution proved unpopular with much of the American electorate, and the states continued to pursue their own land and Indian policies in spite of federal · attempts to centralize frontier administration. Moreover, while some of the Federalists' goals dovetailed with those of white settlers or Indian leaders, federal officials on the frontier soon learned a lesson that had escaped the Continental Congress: Local actors, be they chiefs, warriors, or militia, set the agenda west of the Appalachians.

T H E WA R D E PA R T M E N T A N D F E D E R A L F R O N T I E R P O L I C Y

By the fall of 1786, Congress's authority in the West had collapsed. The In­ dian signatories to the treaties of Fort Stanwix, Fort McIntosh, and Fort Finney had annulled them, and frontier militias had defied Congress's de­ fensive military policy. Federal land surveys had come to a halt. Superin­ tendent of Northern Indian Affairs Richard Butler balked at traveling west of Pittsburgh and did little more than send Congress reports about the Iroquois.ll In the South, North Carolina and Georgia still refused to cede their west­ ern lands to Congress. Superintendent of Southern Indian Affairs James White met with Cherokee and Creek leaders in 1787, but, as he refused to disavow the southern states' land seizures, the southern Indians' refused to make any formal ag�eements with him. Indeed, the Lower Creeks told White that they intended "to have recourse to arms to maintain [their] just rights."12 Absent effective civilian administrators, the U. S. government relied on its western army to conduct business with settlers and Indians. By the fall of 1786, the First U.S. Regiment comprised about six hundred officers and men occupying a chain of posts from Pittsburgh to Louisville. In April 1787, Knox ordered Colonel Josiah Harmar to open a new post, Fort Franklin, at present-day Venango, Pennsylvania, the better to protect Pennsylvania land surveyors and keep an eye on British Fort Niagara. Later that year, Harmar stationed ninety-five soldiers in Vincennes who began building the first Fort Knox.B The men at all these posts suffered from serious supply and morale problems. Their barracks and outbuildings were often ramshackle, hast­ ily rebuilt on ruins that emigrating settlers had stripped bare. Bad roads, rain-swollen creeks, and winter ice impeded the shipment of supplies and

"'Real .'7fmericans" 'Draft (L government

81

reinforcements to the Ohio Valley, and the soldiers were frequently short of food and medicine, or received spoiled meat and watered whiskey from contractors. Morale was low, desertions common, and discipline lax, par­ ticularly during holidays-one Christmas, drunken artillerists fired their cannon within Fort McIntosh, and the commandant spitted one of the cul­ prits on his sword. Throughout the 1780s, the U.S. Army was too disorga­ nized to pose a threat to either white squatters or Indian raiding parties.14 The northern Indians soon realized that American forts were less a wall of soldiers than a string of military villages. The garrison troops, unlike the white settlers across the river, were fairly harmless but might make useful allies and trading partners. Forts Franklin, Pitt, McIntosh, Harmar, Finney, and Knox became stopping places for Iroquois and Northwest Indian hunt­ ers, who came to sell their furs and buy liquor and food. Some comman­ dants found these visits troublesome. In 1786, Captain David Zeigler told Seneca visitors to Fort Pitt that "they must not be lazy nor come again to beg," but should instead "be industrious and when they come again bring many furs with them." However, Zeigler did not feel confident enough to send his guests away empty handed: He gave them fifty-six bushels of corn and potatoes, three gallons of whiskey, and "about a dozen hoes and spades." (It is also unlikely that the Senecas understood enough of Zeigler's speech to find it insulting, since Zeigler spoke poor English and no Seneca, and the Iroquois did not understand his native German.)15 Whatever they might have felt toward their Indian neighbors, garrison commanders in the Ohio Valley were under orders to keep the peace, and consequently to act diplomatically. Officers extended hospitality to visiting chiefs, listened to their speeches, and forwarded transcripts and wampum strings to the War Department. Some gave refuge to Indians seeking pro­ tection from federationist warriors and settler militias. Fort Pitt sheltered the D elawares of White Eyes' Town and the Senecas who signed the Fort Stanwix Treaty, while Fort Knox briefly protected neutral Miamis and Pi­ ankeshaws led by Pacane and Demoiselle.16 While Army officers doubled as Indian agents, their civilian commander, Secretary at War Henry Knox, increasingly assumed a double role as chief of frontier law enforcement and de facto Indian superintendent. Knox was by 1786 a well-connected gentleman who believed it was good policy to di­ vide white frontiersmen into law-abiding settlers and disorderly insurgents, and to use the Confederation's limited resources to keep the latter from trespassing on public lands or attacking neutral IndiansP Knox also divided Native Americans i nto classes: those who lived peace-

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fully under their chiefs' authority, and a minority of disaffected warriors who raided American settlements. He initially believed that minority to be very small, describing it in March 1786 as "about fifty or sixty yellow ras­ cals . . . bad men and outcasts of a great number of tribes." The federal gov­ ernment must be careful to distinguish, Knox wrote, "between the preda­ tory incursions of a banditti . . . and the conduct of any of the more regular , tribes."J8 Knox's early frontier policy focused on "conciliat[ing] the affections" of those Indians who had signed treaties with the United States, avoiding combat with the "predatory" minority, and using the soldiers under his command to patrol the north bank of the Ohio River and check "the pro­ pensity of lawless men to establish themselves on the public Lands." Such were his recommendations to Congress in April 1786. Later that year, the Secretary responded to Indian raids in Kentucky by forbidding Harmar's men to respond to anything but direct "insults to the [federal] troops or posts." To counterattack the towns whose warriors were fighting American settlers would require a larger army than the Confederation could field.19 Knox was concurrently turning the Army into an auxiliary Indian Department. He ordered Josiah Harmar to build a council house for fu­ ture treaty conferences and asked Congress to give Harmar six hundred dollars for diplomatic gifts and espionage. Sensitive to the government's adverse financial situation, Knox advised Congress to limit gifts to more "importan[t]" chiefs, advising it to reject requests for aid from obscure ap­ plicants like the Wyandot Half-King's nephew or the Brotherton Montauks. On the other hand, Knox was eager to win the allegiance of the southern Indian nations, and so, after meeting with Choctaw and Chickasaw visitors in June 1787, he asked Congress to grant their request for engraved medals, gorgets, and armbands, with insignia that would demonstrate these chiefs' and captains' alliance with the United States.20 The secretary knew, however, that the u.s. government could not ef­ fectively counter the blandishments of European agents and federationist captains unless it had enough troops to defend its allies and interests. There seemed little hope of raising more until the outbreak of Shays's Rebellion, when Knox believed American leaders might finally muster the will to cre­ ate a strong national army. On Knox's recommendation, Congress voted in October 1786 to increase the western army to a "legionary corps" of 2,040 infantry, cavalry, and artillery, funded by a $500,000 loan from the states, The authorizing resolution specified that the troops would defend Kentucky

"
T H E V I N C E N N E S EXPEDITION

As federal troops prepared to depart from Louisville that July, Knox pro­ posed a new set of responsibilities for the western army. Rather than guard surveyors or expel squatters from public lands, Knox recommended to Congress that his soldiers assume the role of police, and through force

'Red gentlemen and White- Savages and negotiation put an end to the fighting in the Ohio Valley. "The deep rooted prejudices and malignity of heart and conduct reciprocally enter­ tained and practiced on all occasions by the whites and savages," he wrote, "will ever prevent their being good neighbors," unless the u.s. government "compel[led] them to be moderate and just."25 Well aware of his limited budget, Knox proposed closing the posts on the , upper Ohio and moving six companies of the First Regiment to Louisville and Vincennes. Such a force would intimidate both white frontiersmen and federationist warriors and encourage the latter to make peace. To place a legal imprimatur on the army's mission and demonstrate the United States' commitment to peace, Knox asked Congress to authorize a new treaty with the Shawnees and Miamis, and proposed that Josiah Harmar both conduct the negotiations and receive the authority to arrest and punish whites who " infract[ed] the treaty." The army could thus formally undertake the peace­ keeping and diplomatic functions it had already been performing.26 Knox admitted that it might be necessary, should the Wabash Indians reject the treaty, to "expel them from their towns or extirpate them." He suggested that Virginia and Pennsylvania hold 1,500 militia in reserve for this eventuality. However, Knox believed a strong, centrally located gar­ rison and a new treaty could end the Northwest Indian war without the need for a punitive expedition. The Indians, he argued, were not blood­ thirsty fiends but misguided rustics with legitimate grievances, "anxiously defend[ing] their lands" from white squatters and unable to distinguish between their adversaries and law-abiding U.S. citizens. A strong contin­ gent of federal troops and officers, by protecting the Shawnees and Miamis from lawless whites, would prevent them from subsequently injuring other Americans.27 Congress agreed. On July 21, 1787, the delegates approved Knox's report and authorized Harmar to negotiate a peace treaty with the Shawnees and the Wabash Indians. They also asked the governor of Virginia to reserve one thousand Kentucky militia for a punitive expedition, should one prove necessary.28 By then, federal troops had arrived in Vincennes. The expedition's com­ mander, Josiah Harmar of Pennsylvania, had led the First U.S. Regiment since 1784. The colonel had little affection for Native Americans, and did not share Knox's belief that raids on white settlements were only perpetrated "by a banditti." Like Knox, however, Harmar identified white frontiersmen as the United States' principal adversaries in the Ohio Valley. These "vil-

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lains" were only too happy "to seat themselves on the best of the lands . . . [with] a tomahawk right" and waylay and murder peaceful Indians. Only condign punishment would deter unruly whites, and Harmar promised to "give them federal law" if they killed friendly chiefs. In June 1787, after re­ ceiving his marching orders, Harmar notified Vincennes' French-speaking magistrates of his army's impending arrival, assuring them hls men were not Kentucky militia but "regulars . . . sent by the authority of the Grand Council of the Empire."29 Colonel Harmar and his 300 officers and men arrived in Vincennes in mid-July. The force made a strong impression on the settlement of 1,300 people. The commander paraded his troops before the assembled habitants, displaying his soldiers' clean blue uniform coats, trimmed in red; their cocked hats; their polished white metal buttons; and the officers' polished gorgets and swords. The appearance of the infantry contrasted sharply with that of the scruffy, buckskin-clad French fur traders and Kentucky farmers who dominated Vincennes. Harmar knew that this sort of martial theater was more effective than words could be in establishing the u.s. govern­ ment's authority in Vincennes, and his theatrics paid off when the French settlers referred to Harmar's men as "the real Americans," clearly distin­ guished by their insignia and behavior from the 400 Kentuckians in town. Harmar followed his military demonstration by starting construction of a sturdy fort near the settlement, inspecting town records, and demanding an end to local land sales, which were now the prerogative of Congress.30 On August 9, Harmar took 30 soldiers and 2 Miami escorts on a recon­ naissance mission to Illinois. After a grueling 160-mile march, the party reached the Mississippi River and visited the villages of Kaskaskia, Prai­ rie de Rocher, and Cahokia. Harmar enjoined the French-speaking inhab­ itants to organize their militias and obey their magistrates, and warned Anglo squatters that they held but a "precarious" title to their land. He also stopped at Saint Louis and Saint Genevieve in Spanish Missouri, where he assured the commandants of his peaceful intentions (while noting the small size of their garrisons.)31 In his report to Knox, Harmar observed that the Francophone villagers he'd met had shown " decent respect and submission" to the United States. This was probably because they realized that Harmar was following a dif­ ferent agenda from that of American frontiersmen, and that his primary goal was to create order rather than kill Indians. The American commander showed respect for French leaders and warned his superiors to ignore the

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political pretensions of Anglo settlers in the French villages, dismissing one as a "would-be governor . . . despised by the inhabitants." He also agreed to bring to Congress the French settlers' petitions for recognition of their land titles, which the "Grand Council" granted them in August 1788.32 Harmar believed that the federal government should rule the French with an even but firm hand. They were not, in his view, ready for the respon- , sibilities of full republican citizenship. "A commandant with a few troops to give them orders is the best form of government for them," he told Knox.33 Harmar was both expressing his own prejudices and following the ad­ vice of a local informant, Bartholomei Tardiveau. A French merchant re­ siding in Kentucky, Tardiveau came to Vincennes in 1787 to act as the ha­ bitants' emissary to Congress. He insinuated himself into Harmar's circle and urged the new commandant to govern both Anglo and French settlers with authority and vigor. "The manners of the first inhabitants are so un­ cultivated," Tardiveau wrote, "their ideas of liberty so unlimited, the reins of government so slack, the voice of the law so faint, that it is not until after many years that regularity, order, peace, justice, [and] subjection to legal authority can take place."34 Tardiveau expressed a different view of Native Americans, averring "How much so ever we may despise the Indians, they have very noble no­ tions of order and subordination." The best way for the United States to make peace with the Miamis, Piankeshaws, and Kaskaskias would be "to keep the Whites under subjection" and-though Tardiveau didn't specify this-treat Indian leaders with respect. In this case Harmar did not follow his French informant's lead, preferring to take the same line toward the Northwest Indians as George Rogers Clark: "to impress upon them . . . the majesty of the United States" and its supposed ability "to march to their towns and sweep them off the face of the earth."35 When 120 Wabash Indians (Piankeshaws, Kickapoos, and Weas) canoed into Vincennes to visit "the true Americans," Harmar ordered his men to greet them in a martial posture. The soldiers fortified their camp, donned new uniforms, and saluted the Indian visitors with volley fire, which doubt­ less impressed the habitants as much as the Indians.36 On September 7, the chiefs and warriors came to the federal encamp­ ment to hear the colonel's address. Joining them were eleven Kaskaskias (including Chief Jean-Baptiste Ducoigne) who had accompanied Harmar from Illinois. Harmar gave his Native American counterparts his commis­ sion and thirteen strings of wampum symbolizing his government. He took

"'Real :7/mericans" 1Jraft: a government: his guests by the hand, proclaimed that their path to the United States was now open, and invited them to continue selling their furs in Vincennes, thereby "brighten[ing] the chain" of friendship. Harmar urged the French, Indians, and Virginians to live together in peace, and warned the Weas and Piankeshaws not to attack American settlements. The Thirteen Fires, he as­ serted, were as powerful as they had been when they defeated "the mighty armies of the King," and "should they stretch out their right hand against any of the nations of Indians they would destroy them." The colonel also de­ manded the identity of Indian warriors who had recently ambushed three of his men on the Wabash River, killing two and taking one captive.37 Five chiefs delivered the party's reply. They gave Harmar calumets and wampum strings wrapped in otter skin, agreed to take the Americans by the hand and let the blood spilled during the Revolution "be washed away," and promised they would investigate the July attack. Skeptical though he might have been of the Indians' good intentions, Harmar accepted the gifts, gave his guests food and presents, and allowed the warriors to dance in his encampment. On September 12, with considerable relief, he bade the Indian visitors farewell. 38 While "admir[ing]" the American soldiers' martial attire and bearing, and addressing Harmar and his superiors as "their fathers the Bostonians" (the latter term borrowed from British officials), the Wabash Indians rec­ ognized that these new fathers were a weak and parsimonious lot. When the Piankeshaw chiefs asked Harmar for presents, something any politi­ cal father worthy of the name would have given freely, the colonel first re­ plied that "we did not come to purchase their friendship with trinkets but barely to take them by the hand if they chose to give it." Harmar eventually spent just $1.25 for each Indian who visited the conference, and while he later reported that the Weas and Piankeshaws were "highly satisfied with the treatment they received," one doubts that he impressed them with his generosity.39 Nor did these nations submit to the United States' authority. Those liv­ ing near Vincennes continued to trade with their white neighbors, and Wea warriors later signed an alliance with the United States, but none renounced their allegiance to other sovereigns or gave up land. Most soon learned that Harmar's promises of protection were hollow, for in the summer of 1788, Kentucky militia killed Piankeshaw warriors near Vincennes and stole horses from the habitants. A year later, in August 1789, Kentuckians at­ tacked the neutral Wea towns on the lower Wabash River, killing fourteen

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warriors and bringing their scalps to Vincennes. John Hamtramck, the commandant of Fort Knox, wrote, "It is mortifying to me to see the author­ ity of the United States so much sneered at and not have sufficient power to chasten the aggressors." Many of the Weas and Piankeshaws living on the lower Wabash abandoned their towns and their accommodation with the United States after these assaults. If Harmar and his soldiers were the most , powerful federal agents in the Ohio Valley, Congress's authority there was weak indeed.40

T H E N O RT H W E S T O R D I N A N C E AND A R T H U R ' ST. C L A I R S I N D I A N P OL I C Y

By the summer of 1787, no one needed to tell Congress that it had lost con­ trol of the Northwest. Reports from surveyors, army officers, and travelers made that point plainly. As Josiah Harmar was departing for Vincennes, congressmen were completing a territorial constitution that they hoped would restore civil order in the region. The Northwest Ordinance (July 13, 1787) provided the territory north of the Ohio River with an appointed governor, a secretary, and three judges. The governor would hold great power: He would command the militia, erect new counties and townships, appoint magistrates, and (with the judges) en­ act all laws for the Northwest Territory until it attained a population of five thousand free male inhabitants, whereupon local landowners would elect their own legislature. The Ordinance also guaranteed the inhabitants' right to life, liberty, property, jury trial, and freedom of worship; banned slavery; and promised that each district of the Territory could become a state of the Union when it attained sixty thousand free inhabitants.41 Congress extended some of the Ordinance's protections to the North­ west Indians. The third article obliged American citizens to respect the persons and property of Native Americans, and specified "the utmost good faith shall always be observed" toward them. Other articles, however, per­ manently incorporated the Northwest into the United States, guaranteed Congress's right to sell the territory's public lands, and authorized the sei­ zure of Indian land " in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress." Es­ tablishing peace and civil government in the Northwest was a high priority, but selling Indian land was of equal importance. Indeed, each goal would complement the others.42 In the eyes of many congressmen, however, simply taking Indian land

"'Real :JImericans" Draft'tL yovernment' and selling it to the highest bidder would not civilize the frontier. They be­ lieved that the United States would never enjoy peace in the West until solid, law-abiding citizens settled there with their families. One obvious group of such men was Continental Army veterans, who presumably had the discipline and energy to establish orderly settlements and defend them from attack. In 1786, a group of former officers assembled in Boston to real­ ize this vision of settlement. Calling themselves the Ohio Company of As­ sociates, they pooled Continental certificates to buy a tract of land west of the Seven Ranges (the territory that federal surveyors had already marked for auction). Thereon they would build their homes and grow rich selling real estate to subsequent settlers.43 In March 1787, the Ohio Company elected Winthrop Sargent, Samuel Parsons, and Manasseh Cutler as its directors. Parsons and Cutler then spent several months in New York negotiating with Congress and the fed­ eral Treasury Board. They argued that the Company's proposed purchase would serve the public interest in two ways: by retiring part of the national debt, and by creating frontier settlements to serve as "a powerful barrier" against Indian attacks. Meanwhile, Cutler sold shares in the company to leading government officials, including Arthur St. Clair, president of Con­ gress; Edward Carrington, chairman of Congress' committee on land sales; and William Duer, secretary to the Treasury Board. With such influential backers, it is not surprising that the Company secured an alteration in the federal land ordinance that allowed them to buy one and a half million acres of public land for just sixty-six cents an acre.44 It is possible that Cutler gave some of these men free shares in the com­ pany (each worth one hundred dollars in hard currency) in return for their support. Winthrop Sargent later intimated that the company procured St. Clair's help by giving him some stock and endorsing him for the po­ sition of territorial governor. "It will be no difficult matter to prove that his Excellency has been the most favored Proprietor of the Company," Sar­ gent wrote eleven years later. St. Clair, who owned much land in Pennsyl­ vania, had initially opposed settlement of the Ohio Valley and endorsed the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty, believing that the "occlusion" of the Mississippi River would slow emigration from the eastern states. A year later, however, St. Clair supported the Ohio Company and accepted Congress's appoint­ ment as first governor of the Northwest Territory. Meanwhile, other com­ pany shareholders, namely Sargent, Parsons, and James Varnum, became the territory's first secretary and judges.45

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One is tempted to call such proceedings corrupt, but neither the Ohio Company nor Congress would have seen matters in this light, because their definition of political corruption differed substantially from that of later Americans. Eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans usually applied the term "corruption" to the subornation of a legislature by an executive; the notion that private interests could "corrupt" public officials only began to enjoy , currency in the nineteenth century. Indeed, British and American officials assumed that government could only function if it mobilized private re­ sources for public projects. Chartered corporations operated on this prin­ ciple, and eighteenth-century governments only chartered companies that served some form of public interest (building a road, for example). The Ohio Company's shareholders portrayed it as a public contractor that would take over some of the responsibilities of government in its territory: surveying land, marking townships, and setting aside tracts for the support of schools. It made sense to the company's directors that federal officials would want to support their project by buying shares in it or accepting a gift of stock. It made sense to Congress that Northwest territorial officials should be of­ ficers of the Ohio Company, who had placed their private fortunes at the public's disposal.46 Since congressmen hoped to end the Northwest Indian war before the territorial courts opened and the first Ohio Company settlers arrived, they began discussing a December 1786 message from the Northwest Indians, which proposed a formal diplomatic conference between federal commis­ sioners and all the Northwest Indian nations. Henry Knox, still trying to make the War Department the principal arbiter of U.S. Indian policy, ar­ gued that the United States could not reject the confederated Indians' offer to negotiate without appearing to be an aggressor and "fix[ing] a stain on the national reputation of America." He suggested that the new treaty com­ missioners could answer the Indians' objections to earlier treaties by pay­ ing them a nominal sum for their land cessions, a practice once employed by British officials who found it "prudent and in no degree dishonorable to the nation." A treaty council and land purchase would cost the nation only 1 percent as much as a war and would save it further bloodshed and dishonor.47 A Congressional committee responded that the United States had al­ ready paid the Shawnees, Delawares, and Iroquois (in gifts) for the Ohio land cession. However, the committee members agreed that "the Indians appear to act a natural part for men in their situation," and that a war would not be "expedient." They approved Knox's recommendation of a new gen-

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eral treaty council, argu i ng that it would be "politic and just . . . to treat with the Indians more on a footing of equality" than one of superiority. Not all Indians would be treated equally, however: Committee members advised that the commissioners "ascertain . . . who are the true chiefs and most re­ spectable and influential men" among the nations in attendance, and secure their good offices by giving them medals, rifles, military commissions, and agricultural hardware. Just as the Ohio Company proposed to bring order to the Northwest by linking Congress's interests with those of elite land developers, so the committee proposed to pacify the region's Native Ameri­ cans by engaging the interests of influential chiefs.48 Congress formally accepted the Northwest Indians' invitation on Octo­ ber 5, 1787, and commissioned Governor St. Clair to hold a treaty council with the nations residing between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Subse­ quent resolutions, perhaps less well-considered, ordered St. Clair to "defeat all combinations among the Indians" and to extinguish all Northwest In­ dian land claims east of the Mississippi River.49 St. Clair had a poor opinion of Native Americans, but he agreed with other officials that Northwest warriors' raids were the consequence of Brit­ ish influence and the "injuries and depredations . . . done to the Indians by the frontier settlers." The federal government could therefore only make peace if it restrained frontiersmen and offered more gifts than the Indians could obtain from Britain. He also recognized that Congress was instruct­ ing him to accomplish contradictory goals: acquire more land and break up the Northwest confederacy, the members of which had united to resist further land cessions. "If a general Indian war is to be avoided," St. Clair insisted, "some accommodation with these people must take place." That meant avoiding new cessions and possibly redrawing the boundary im­ posed on the Indians at earlier conferences.5o During the winter and spring of 1788, St. Clair selected the falls of the Muskingum River as the site for his treaty council. He sent invitations to all the Northwest Indian communities and purchased several thousand dol­ lars' worth of gifts and supplies. Despite the governor's peaceable actions, however, the Wabash and northern Lakes Indians remained suspicious of all white Americans in the Northwest, and some warriors and captains still regarded all American gunmen as their adversaries, irrespective of what uniform they wore.51 On July 12, 1788, an Ottawa war party attacked the soldiers whom St. Clair had posted at Muskingum Falls to guard the treaty stores. The war­ riors killed two men-a white soldier and a black slave owned by trader

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David Duncan-and severely wounded two others. Two weeks later, an­ other war party attacked soldiers and boatmen ferrying supplies to Vin­ cennes, killing or wounding eighteen people. St. Clair, who had just arrived at Fort Harmar when the first attack occurred, held an emergency meet­ ing with territorial judges to consider a response. He decided to withdraw the stores from Muskingum Falls, relocate the conference to Fort Harmar, , and demand "satisfaction" from the Northwest Indian council at Detroit. He acknowledged in a report to Henry Knox that the attacks had "shaken my opinion" of the Northwest Indians' trustworthiness, but he also said he would go ahead with the treaty in hopes of splitting their military confed­ eration. To remove a possible source of provocation, St. Clair ordered the Ohio Company to suspend its land surveys pending the outcome of the treaty. 52 The Ohio Company's vanguard had arrived in the Northwest on April 7. The first party of settlers established their camp across the Muskingum River from Fort Harmar, and by summer had built a stockade and cabins and laid out a street grid. By fall they were holding religious services and their first ball. According to Samuel Parsons, Indians visiting the new town of Marietta claimed that the New Englanders were "much more acceptable to them than any settlers with whom they have been heretofore acquainted." However, in an open war between the U.S. government and the Northwest Indian confederacy, the infant settlement would become a prime target, and St. Clair feared that its destruction would end any chance of attracting more "respectable characters" to the territory. 53 By the fall of 1788, the governor's hopes of making peace with the Northwest Indians were fading. He noted that the Wyandots and Shaw­ nees planned to bring their guns to the treaty conference and to reject any land cessions north of the Ohio River. He asked the governor of Virginia to keep his militia ready, and even sent Knox a confidential proposal for a campaign against the Kickapoos and Miamis. He agreed that such an expe­ dition would certainly be a last resort, "for it is of very great consequence that the new government should get into motion with as few external em­ barrassments as possible."54

U NION, STATES, S E T T L E R S , A N D I N D I A N S

The government to which St. Clair referred was the reformed federal gov­ ernment created by the Philadelphia Convention. Pressured by multiple in-

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terest groups and frightened by Shays's Rebellion, the Continental Congress had in February 1787 authorized a federal convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. Three months later, the convention delegates decided to scrap the old Confederation and replace it with a strong national govern­ ment. The new Federal Constitution created a bicameral national legisla­ ture, an indirectly elected president, and an appointed federal judiciary. The framers gave their proposed government substantial new powers: to levy taxes, regulate commerce, make binding treaties, govern federal ter­ ritories, raise an army, and regulate and mobilize state militias.55 Preoccupied with other issues, the framers paid little attention to Indian affairs. One exception was James Madison, who had attended the 1784 Fort Stanwix conference and had witnessed the squabbling there between fed­ eral and New York officials. One of the defects of the Articles of Confedera­ tion, he observed, was its vague apportionment of responsibility for Indian relations, characterized by the clause in the ninth article giving Congress responsibility for relations with "Indians not members of any of the states." Madison proposed that Congress have the exclusive right to manage Indian affairs both within and outside of state boundaries. The other delegates to the federal convention rejected this proposal and instead implied federal supremacy in clauses empowering Congress to regulate Indian trade and empowering the president to make treaties-and prohibiting the states from exercising the same powers.56 To justify replacing the Confederation with a new national government, the framers invoked the principle of popular sovereignty, specifying that the new Constitution would go into effect following ratification by nine popularly elected state conventions. Over the next three years, all thirteen states held ratifying conventions, several of which witnessed acrimonious debates over the powers of the new government and the threats it posed to state sovereignty and individual liberty. The issue of Indian relations was of secondary importance at these conventions but did figure in some newspa­ pers and private exchanges. Some New Englanders opposed the extensive military powers in the new Constitution, arguing that Congress could use the pretext of an Indian war to raise an army for use against white insur­ gents, as it had tried to do during Shays's Rebellion. Federalists from west­ ern Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, by contrast, argued that a stron­ ger national government could properly defend frontier settlers' interests: protect their settlements from Indian attack, force Britain out of the Great Lakes forts, and compel Spain to open the Mississippi River to American

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navigation. Without the new Constitution, Samuel McDowell wrote from Kentucky, "we shall be in a wretched situation."57 Most frontier Americans supported the Constitution cautiously and pragmatically. They favored a stronger Union not because they feared an­ archy, but because they wanted protection from Indians. This was quite clear in Georgia, where some local leaders feared that the Constitution was ' a plot to destroy state sovereignty, but all feared the Creek confederacy more. By the fall of 1787, Creek warriors had killed or captured dozens of Georgian freemen and slaves and destroyed thousands of dollars worth of property.58 Georgia's ratifying convention met during this crisis, and the delegates deliberated for less than a day before unanimously approving the Federal Constitution. Outside observers understood why the state had ratified so quickly. "If a weak state with powerful tribes of Indians in its rear and the Spaniards on its flank did not incline to embrace a strong general govern­ ment," wrote George Washington, "there must . . . be either wickedness or insanity in their conduct."59 Frontier states balanced their desire for protection against their fears that a more active national government would interfere with their land claims. Georgians dealt with these fears by grabbing all the land they could. In October 1787, the legislature proclaimed the Creek Indians outlaws and annexed all Creek territory east of the Chattahoochee River. The lawmak­ ers then established a county government for the annexed district, issued £30,000 of paper money backed by the anticipated proceeds of land sales there, and asked Congress to guarantee Georgia's new land claim, offering in return the cession to the Union of all the state's lands west of the Chat­ tahoochee. Congress rejected the deal, however.6o North Carolinians refused to cede their western lands to Congress, partly because the state had thousands of frontier settlers whose allegiance it did not wish to lose, partly because the state's land speculators opposed any cession. The state government wanted Congress to protect its settle­ ments but was unwilling to give up its political jurisdiction in exchange. Thus, between 1785 and 1787, North Carolina officials sent state troops to Nashville without congressional approval, and protested the Hopewell trea­ ties as infringements of state sovereignty.61 When the Southern Indian superintendent James White returned empty handed from his meetings with the Creeks and Cherokees, Henry Knox and a congressional committee castigated North Carolina and Georgia for their

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"interference" with federal Indian relations. Knox warned that unless the two states ceded their western lands Congress could not establish peace with the Creeks and Cherokees, who would join the Northwest Indians in "a general Indian war." Absent acceptable cessions from either state, how­ ever, Congress in October 1787 had to ask the governors of North Caro­ lina, South Carolina, and Georgia to support a new federal treaty with the southern Indians. The treaty resolution appointed one commissioner from each state and forbade the three officials to abridge the southern states' land claims.62 After a year's delay, the North Carolina legislature appointed John Steele as its federal treaty commissioner. The legislators commanded him to block any attempt to return land to the Cherokees, and to buy additional land from that nation, preferably with South Carolina's share of treaty goods. North Carolina officials saw the treaty solely as a vehicle for state interests. On the other hand, North Carolina's relationship with the Union was am­ biguous in 1788, as the state's ratifying convention had voted in August to reject the federal constitution. One suspects that if Georgians had not faced an emergency, their convention might have taken the same course.63 Where North Carolina and Georgia tried to cozen Congress into helping them obtain Indian lands, New York's governor and legislature ignored the federal government and wrung cessions out of the Iroquois on their own. In the fall and winter of 1788-89, Governor Clinton and other officials held conferences at Fort Stanwix with the Onondagas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras, and at Albany with the Cayugas. Over the protests of the western Iroquois towns on Buffalo Creek, state officials convinced the eastern Iroquois to sell almost all of their lands. In return, New York gave each signatory nation a small reservation-seventy-two square miles for the Onondagas, two hun­ dred for the Cayugas, and four hundred for the Oneidas and Tuscaroras­ along with several thousand dollars in cash and gifts, an annuity of five hundred to six hundred dollars, and hunting and fishing rights.64 These treaty conferences were in response to a private land company's attempt to procure the Six Nations' remaining land claims. In 1787, sev­ eral dozen Hudson Valley aristocrats, together with several British Indian agents and traders, had formed the Genesee Company of Adventurers. In November 1787 and January 1788, company agents negotiated 999-year leases to all of the Six Nations' lands in northern and central New York. Officials and newspaper essayists raised a hue and cry against this auda­ cious seizure of (supposedly) public property, and the legislature annulled

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the Genesee Company's title. Meeting with Onondaga chiefs in September 1788, Governor Clinton chastised them for agreeing to the lease, calling the Company "disobedient children who have violated the laws made by their fathers and will defraud you of the lands unless some means be devised to prevent it." The remedy would be the sale of the Onondagas,' Oneidas,' and Cayugas' lands to the state government.65 Most of the Iroquois nations lacked the solidarity and military strength to resist New York's demands. The Senecas were in a stronger situation: They were more numerous, and their leaders had diplomatic connections with both British officials and the U.S. government. By 1788, however, New York no longer had an interest in the Senecas' lands because it had ceded them to Massachusetts. Massachusetts had reasserted its colonial charter claims to western New York in 1785, and in November 1786, commissioners from both states signed an agreement under which the Bay State received the preemption right to several million acres of Seneca land, while New York's government retained political jurisdiction. In 1788, Massachusetts sold the land to two developers, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham, who then held their own treaty with the Senecas at Buffalo Creek,66 If the frontier states viewed the federal government as a threat to their land claims, state officials and legislators believed they could easily man­ age that threat. New York ignored Congress altogether, settled its dispute with Massachusetts without appearing before a federal court, and bought the lands of the Onondagas, Oneidas, and Cayugas without interference. Pennsylvania's Assembly, reflecting the same self-confidence, appointed commissioners to attend the federal conference at Fort Harmar and there buy the claims of the Six Nations, Delawares, and Wyandots to the Erie Tri­ angle. North Carolina continued to claim sole authority over its Tennessee Valley counties, even though they had erupted in war and rebellion, and at­ tempted to use a federal treaty conference to buy Cherokee land with other states' money. Georgia approved the Constitution and offered its western land claims to Congress expecting that the U.S. government would strong­ arm the Creeks into accepting the state's past land grabs.67 Federalists expected the new Federal Constitution to change dramati­ cally the relationship between the national government and the states. Indeed, Josiah Harmar had expressed the hope "that the petty states who refuse[dJ" to ratify "may have the ultimo ratio applied to them." With re­ spect to frontier land and Indian relations, however, Georgians, North Car­ olinians, and New Yorkers believed business would continue as usual.68

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The white settlers and Indians living west of the Appalachians adopted a more hopeful, but nonetheless cautious, attitude toward the federal govern­ ment. The Ohio Company's first party of settlers celebrated the adoption of the Federal Constitution but at the same time prepared to defend them­ selves against Indian attacks. Kentuckians and Tennesseans hoped that Congress would protect them, but continued to destroy Native American towns and seek closer ties with Spain. Indian hunters traded with American troops, chiefs negotiated with American officials, and war parties attacked Army storehouses and convoys, treating federal officers in the Ohio Valley as though they were habitants or Kentuckian intruders. Southern Indian leaders hoped that Congress would protect them from white intruders, but kept their guns handy.69 Over the next three years, the representatives of the new federal govern­ ment would demonstrate that the skepticism of all westerners, white and Indian, was well justified.

5

((These-- :J{aughty 'Republicans" ' THE LIMITATIONS OF A GEN TLEMEN S GOVERNMENT, 1789 -1790

n April 30, 1789, George Washington became the president of a federal government that was, on paper, more powerful than its pre­ decessor. In reality, the new regime was quite weak. Its army was small and thinly spread. Its credit remained shaky throughout the 1790S, despite Congress's adoption of Alexander Hamilton's plan to fund federal debts with tariff revenue. Foreign relations remained troubled: Britain refused to evacuate its Great Lakes forts, while Spain continued to limit American access to the Mississippi River.! Moreover, the new government had many adversaries at home. Anti­ Federalism remained strong in rural New England, western Pennsylvania, and the South. North Carolina and Rhode Island had not ratified the Con­ stitution when Washington took office. Opponents of the Constitution like Senator William Maclay were a small but vocal group in Congress, consis­ tently critical of the Federalists' plans and motives.2 West of the Appalachians, white settlers and Indians generally viewed the new government with mild optimism or indifference. Some were hostile to it, but in early 1789, few westerners were willing to mount organized op­ position to federal authority. Secessionists in Kentucky and Tennessee had no real following. The rogue republic of Franklin had disbanded, and the North Carolina legislature gave amnesty to the Franklinites-even John Sevier, who won election to the state senate later that year.3 Indian confederations could potentially challenge national authority, but three years of war with white settlers, combined with famine and dis­ ease in the Northwest, had frayed the resolve of some federationist lead-

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ers. In the fall of 1788, between one and two thousand adherents of the Northwest Indian confederation met on the Maumee and Ottawa Rivers to discuss the forthcoming treaty with Arthur St. Clair. The council revealed deep divisions among the Northwest Indians. The Delawares and some Wy­ andots advocated a simple revision of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh. A fac­ tion headed by Joseph Brant proposed a compromise American boundary on the Muskingum River. The Kickapoos, Miamis, and Shawnees refused to treat at all and accused U.S. officials of plotting to kill them. "It is a difficult matter for our yellow brethren to enter into a general Confederacy and to preserve it," Josiah Harmar smugly observed. Meanwhile, in the South, the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray agreed to hold a treaty with the United States, and while the Cherokees declined to meet American commissioners (fearing a reprise of their disastrous "treaties" with the Franklinites), they did agree to a truce.4 Into the war-weary West President Washington and Secretary of War Knox sent two cohorts of federal representatives. The first consisted of treaty commissioners who met the chiefs and captains of the Indian na­ tions, informed them of the change of administration-from an ineffectual Congress to "a president who is like the old King over the great water"­ listened to their grievances, granted a few concessions, and gave them cash and gifts in return for land and allegiance. A second, larger, cohort con­ sisted of the 650 troops raised by the Continental Congress and reautho­ rized by the Federal Congress in September 1789. These men would enforce the U.S. government's treaties, protect Native American and federal lands from intruders, and if necessary draw the sword against Indian federation­ ists in the Ohio Valley. The first cohort displayed the liberality and gentility of the new administration. The second displayed its power.s The success of both groups, however, depended on the accuracy of Henry Knox's interpretation of sociopolitical reality. While mindful of the animosity between white settlers and Indian warriors, Knox believed that Native American chiefs shared the Washington administration's commit­ ment to peace and order and that skillful negotiation could induce them to restrain their warriors. He believed that white gentlemen with military or administrative experience would, perforce, have the restraint, tact, and creativity needed to master the details of Woodland Indian politics and ritual. And he assumed that Harmar's army could tie up any loose ends left after a new round of treaties, and punish whites or warriors who violated the peace.6 Knox was incorrect. Chiefs were not kings who could order their war-

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riors about. White treaty commissioners might think themselves gentle­ men, but that did not automatically confer any diplomatic skill upon them. Harmar's army would prove unable to fulfill its mission. The new Constitu­ tion might claim that the U.S. government exercised jurisdiction over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, but as had been the case for forty years, there were still no sovereigns in the Trans-Appalachian West-only pretenders.

T H E T R E A T I E S OF F O R T H A R M A R

Two days after Washington's inauguration, Arthur St. Clair reported on the treaties he had concluded at Fort Harmar that January. The governor ad­ opted an apologetic tone, for in many respects the treaties had been failures. He had not obtained the additional land cession Congress had ordered; had driven away the Miamis and Shawnees with a threatening address in No­ vember 1788; and had failed to secure the Ohio Valley settlements against Indian raids'? Rather than assess the Fort Harmar treaties as successes or failures, however, one could more fruitfully examine the uses to which American officials and Native American leaders tried to put the conference. Treaty minutes and correspondence between St. Clair and Knox indicate that the two men wanted to weaken the Northwest confederacy and establish a new legal relationship with individual Indian nations, transforming them from autonomous peoples into American clients. Meanwhile, neutralist chiefs wanted to mend fences with the "two fires" they were between, affirming their peaceful intentions toward the United States while mollifying federa­ tionists with an alteration of the Fort McIntosh cession. Failing that, they wanted to secure their nations' land claims by ceding other Indians' terri­ tory to the United States.s The first party to arrive at Fort Harmar consisted of Allegheny Senecas of Cornplanter's band, which had previously alienated other Senecas by consenting to the Genesee Company lease and the Phelps-Gorham cession. Cornplanter and his people, two hundred of whom would attend the treaty, hoped to obtain concessions both from the United States and Pennsylvania, including guarantees of their land claims on the Allegheny River and teach­ ers for those who wished to learn European lifeways.9 The other large delegation at the conference, the Wyandots, hoped to assume an influential role in the Northwest confederacy by convincing St. Clair to accept an Ohio or Muskingum River boundary. To cover their bases, Wyandot chiefs wanted the Thirteen Fires to guarantee their nation's

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lands against seizure in case federal troops marched against Shawnee fed­ erationists. Other chiefs and captains from the Delaware, Chippewa, Sauk, and Potawatomi nations pursued merely individual goals. They hoped to augment their influence at home by attending a sacred event (a diplomatic conference) and bringing home flags, medals, and other prestige goods that betokened their connection with a foreign power. Few could claim to repre­ sent all of their people; Miami chief Le Gris later described the conferees as "young men . . . without authority and instruction from their chiefs."10 Between five hundred and six hundred Indians came to Fort Harmar in December 1788 and January 1789. Most of the region's Native American leaders avoided the conference because they opposed St. Clair's decision to move the council fire from Muskingum Falls, or resented his subsequent threat of war. Some may also have believed the Wabash Indians' claim that the governor planned to kill the conferees with poisoned whiskey and smallpox-infected blankets-a potent accusation, given that a smallpox epidemic had just swept through Sandusky and Detroit. As St. Clair no longer believed that peace with the federationists was possible, he was happy to meet with a moderate minority whom he could isolate from the militant Wabash Indians, thereby speeding "the dissolution of the general confederacy." J1 The Wyandot chief Deuentete opened the conference on December 13 by rejoicing in the safe passage of St. Clair and two Pennsylvania commis­ sioners to the treaty ground, taking the officials by the hand and exchang­ ing wampum with them. The next day he gave a condolence speech, meta­ phorically drying the commissioners' tears, wiping the blood from their heads, and clearing their ears and throats. The rituals probably helped set the participants' minds at ease, but Deuentete's remark that the council fire would burn "for all Nations that are here in this Island," given before only a few hundred Indians, may have struck some as wishful thinking.12 On December 15, St. Clair assured Deuentete that "Our young men and yours shall blow the fire together until the flame of it shall reach the heav­ ens and the nations shall see it and rejoice." He and the chiefs and captains then spent the next few days arguing. Deuentete and Cornplanter asked St. Clair to release Chippewa prisoners he had taken after the Muskingum Falls attack; the governor refused until the Indians released their white cap­ tives, which Deuentete insisted that they had already done. The Wyandot chief Shandotte finally resolved the impasse by agreeing to leave Wyandot hostages at Fort Harmar in exchange for the prisoners, a maneuver doubt­ less intended to increase the Wyandots' standing with the Chippewas,13

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Iroquois and Wyandot leaders also argued with one another over the conferees' past relationships with the United States and present dealings with Joseph Brant. Wyandot speakers accused the Six Nations of delaying the conference and insinuated that the Allegheny Senecas and Brant's Mo­ hawks were plotting a military alliance with the Wabash Indians. Corn­ planter and Captain Joseph (a Cayuga) responded that the Six Nations had been advocating peace since 1783. They denied any connection to Brant and claimed he had personally discouraged the Miamis and Shawnees from attending the conference by misinterpreting St. Clair's messages to them. Joseph assured St. Clair, however, that the Cayugas and Senecas would "set [Brant] down in his chair at home" so that he would cause no more trouble.14 The Wyandots also disavowed any alliance with Brant, but because of their warriors' federationist sympathies the chiefs decided to adopt the Mohawk militant's bargaining position. On December 28, Shandotte re­ counted a long dream about the Wyandots' and Delawares' troubled histor­ ical relationship with the English and Americans. The Wyandots, who were "the first . . . that the Great Spirit placed upon this ground," sent their Dela­ ware "nephews" to the east to meet the first ships bearing Englishmen to America. The English begged the Delawares to let them stay for one night, then got their hosts drunk and tricked them out of their land. Shandotte described two of the whites' subsequent deceptions: the "ox hide" trick, wherein the newcomers asked for a plot of land the size of a cowhide, then cut the hide into strips and used them to enclose a larger tract, and the "Walking Purchase," wherein the English asked for as much land as a man could walk across in a day and a half, then hired runners to cover more than sixty miles. The chief noted that each acquisition only whetted whites' ap­ petite for more, so that the Indians "don't know when you will stop."IS Shandotte argued that Britain had only given the United States its forts, not its Indian allies' land, and denied that his kinsmen had consented to any land cessions since the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which established an Ohio River boundary between white and Indian settlements. This bound­ ary was "very plain . . . such as could not be altered or mistaken," but after conferring with other chiefs Shandotte agreed that the Northwest Indi­ ans could now give the Americans the land between the Allegheny and Muskingum Rivers, retaining the rest of the territory north of the Ohio for themselves.16 St. Clair also wanted a compromise, but knew that Congress would not

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accept Shandotte's terms. In his reply, the governor adopted an admonitory tone , reiterating Arthur Lee's and Richard Butler's claim that the Indians were conquered peoples. "The United States would have been justified to all the world," he asserted, "to have marched their armies into your country and punished you . . . but they chose to give an example of clemency." He insisted that the Fort McIntosh treaty had been validly approved by chiefs who claimed to speak for all the region's Native inhabitants. He was pre­ pared to give the Indians a new guarantee of their hunting rights in their ceded lands and six thousand dollars worth of goods, but would not alter the Fort McIntosh treaty line, and "if the Indians wanted war they would have war."17 Shandotte upbraided St. Clair for threatening war at a peace confer­ ence, but in the end over two dozen chiefs and captains signed the treaty because it offered them concessions that they valued more highly than the federationist agenda. The Wyandots met privately with St. Clair and let him know their chief worry: that Congress would use the pretext of war with the neighboring Shawnees to occupy the Wyandots' towns and take their land by right of conquest. Seeing a chance to isolate the Wyandots, St. Clair put a clause in the treaty guaranteeing that nation's lands in the event of a U.S.-Shawnee war.IS The Iroquois leaders at the conference also sought private concessions from the Americans, and they got them. On January 11, twenty-three Sen­ ecas and Cayugas signed a separate treaty with the United States on behalf of the Six Nations, confirming the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty in exchange for three thousand dollars in merchandise. That same day, the Senecas signed a treaty with Pennsylvania that sold Iroquois claims to the Erie Triangle for several thousand more dollars' worth of goods. Cornplanter received ad­ ditional douceurs: over two thousand acres of land from Pennsylvania and the Ohio Company, plus a guarantee (from the Pennsylvania legislature) of the Allegheny Senecas' reservation. As Anthony Wallace has observed, the Senecas were the clearest beneficiaries of the Fort Harmar negotiations.19 Of the other Indians who attended the conference, many must have been confused by the proceedings, for St. Clair had delivered his speeches in French, a language he spoke so badly that his interpreter "had to guess at his meaning." St. Clair also failed to provide the signatories with a proper record of the treaty, for he had been unable to procure enough white wam­ pum to make new belts. Instead, he handed out old belts to serve until he could send replacements.2o

10 4

'Red gentlemen and White- Savages

Upon returning home, many of the Indians who attended the Fort Harmar conference disavowed the treaty. They claimed that St. Clair had caused them to forgo their hunting, a great sacrifice given the failure of that year's corn crop, and had then withheld food and clothing from them until they signed the treaty. Since the agreement was coerced, they were not bound to honor it.21 St. Clair, however, claimed that the treaty signatories had "renewed their former engagements . . . and relinquished . . . the lands formerly granted." He also claimed to have divided the Northwest confederacy. The Shawnees and Miamis might resume their war in the summer, but neither the Iro­ quois nor the Wyandots, the latter of whom had left five hostages at Fort Harmar, would be joining them.22 The treaties also decreed a new legal relationship between the United States and the northern Indians. While the treaties of 1784-86 had left the punishment of white murderers and trespassers to the Indians they injured, the new accords obliged the signatories to deliver those accused of inter­ ethnic crimes-whites injuring Native Americans or vice versa-to state or federal officials. The Fort Harmar treaties thus incorporated the northern Indians into the legal structure of the Northwest Territory and curtailed their political autonomy.23 On January 24, St. Clair issued a proclamation announcing the treaty and ordering white settlers to respect the persons and property of the signatory Indian nations, with dire consequences if they disobeyed. That summer, a Kentuckian named Louis Weitzel would test the proclamation's authority by shooting and maiming Queshawsey, a Delaware Indian, in the Northwest Territory. Weitzel escaped from Army custody and traveled to Limestone, Kentucky, where federal troops rearrested him. Local offi­ cials and the editor of the Kentucky Gazette protested the federal invasion, claiming that the regulars plundered the town and subjected a "peaceable" citizen to martial law. To defuse the crisis, General Harmar court-martialed the expedition's commanding officer, Captain McCurdy, for disorderly con­ duct. (The court acquitted McCurdy but obliged him to return $20 he had taken from Weitzel.)24 By then, both Harmar and Kentucky settlers had a more serious conflict on their minds. In the spring and summer of 1789, Shawnee and Miami warriors resumed their raids, attacking flatboats, killing Ohio Company surveyors, and plundering farms from Pennsylvania to Vincennes. Ken­ tucky militia raided Wea villages on the lower Wabash River in August, but

«These- lIaughty
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this was more an act of vengeance than a planned campaign, and Virginia's Assembly pleaded for a federal expedition against the federationist towns on the upper Wabash.25 Henry Knox, however, believed that it was "bad policy to embarrass the new government with a request for troops," and urged President Washing­ ton to maintain a conciliatory course. White frontiersmen might be clam­ oring for a military offensive, but "the impartial mind of the great public"­ now embodied in Washington and his Cabinet-would have to listen to "the cause of the ignorant Indians." Knox recommended that St. Clair hold a new treaty with the Shawnees and Miamis, listen to their grievances, and quiet their land claims with presents. Such a treaty would be cheap, costing no more than twenty thousand dollars (the Fort Harmar Treaties had cost seventeen thousand dollars), whereas a military expedition would require two hundred thousand dollars or more. Just as importantly, by showing its willingness to treat with the most militant Northwest Indians, the govern­ ment would demonstrate its patience and liberality, thereby enhancing its officials' political reputations and legitimacy.26 Knox did not expect a treaty conference with the Wabash Indians to end the war. He considered it "only as an expedient dictated by a regard to public justice," and told Washington that, if the Miamis and Shawnees "continu[edJ refractory," the army could justly attack and disperse them. In late 1789, he confided to Harmar that the next treaty would effectively license the government to retaliate for future raids. "If any particular tribe, or a banditti . . . should violate the treaty and commit outrages, the prin­ ciples of justice and even humanity would urge a severe punishment in terror to others." Refusal by the Wabash Indians to treat with the United States would serve the same purpose: absolve the government of blame for "chastis[ingJ" themY Other federal officials joined Knox in continuing diplomacy while pre­ paring for war. In December, Arthur St. Clair exchanged his Wyandot hos­ tages for six white captives, and told the Wyandots that while the Thirteen Fires were "slow to anger . . . if they are obliged to take up the hatchet they will be terrible in their vengeance." It was not an idle threat, for in Septem­ ber Congress had authorized St. Clair to call upon Pennsylvania and Vir­ ginia for militia. St. Clair hoped, however, that the measure would "justify me in holding a language to the Indians which might obviate the necessity of employing force against them."28 Similarly, Josiah Harmar sent food, tobacco, and wampum to Captain

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Pipe of the Delawares and Tarhe of the Wyandots, urging them to keep "hold of the chain of friendship." At the same time, he was moving his headquarters from Fort Harmar to a promontory opposite the mouth of the Licking River. The ostensible purpose of the army's new base, Fort Wash­ ington, was to protect the village of Cincinnati and the other new Miami River settlements. More importantly, the transfer would position the army closer to the Wabash Indian towns. "If the word March! is given by a proper authority," Harmar assured a correspondent, "a speedy movement shall be made against the savages."29 St. Clair's and Harmar's actions were not as inconsistent as they might appear. Their diplomatic gestures were intended to shore up the United States' alliance with the Delawares and Wyandots, while their bellicose ac­ tions and words were aimed at the Shawnees and Miamis. Like Knox, they were using diplomacy to divide the Northwest Indians into "regular tribes" and "banditti" and to justify war with the latter. However, as 1789 drew to a close, it appeared that the United States might need its army on another front.

P R O S P E C T S OF A C R E E K WA R

Expense and national honor were not the only concerns keeping Knox and Washington from attacking the Northwest Indian federationists in 1789. The brief armistice with the Creeks was unraveling. The U.S. government had tried to prolong that truce and arrange a new treaty, but by early 1790 it appeared that the negotiations had failed. After Congress authorized treaty conferences with the Creeks and Cherokees in 1787, the states in charge of the proceedings spent over a year arguing about financial details. The treaty commissioners did not meet un­ til February 1789, did not send invitations to the Indians until April, and did not receive any replies until June, when Alexander McGillivray said that he and two thousand of his Creek compatriots would meet them at Rock Land­ ing, Georgia in three months. About five hundred Cherokees met commis­ sioner John Steele at Upper War Ford, North Carolina and consented to a truce, but declined to sign a treaty.30 By then, Knox had decided that the new federal government should override the southern states' jurisdiction and take control of relations with the southern Indians. On July 7, he advised the president to establish imme­ diately "a noble, liberal, and disinterested administration of Indian affairs"

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south of the Ohio R iver. He argued that the United States could bring peace to the region only by sending troops, restricting future land purchases, and attaching Native Americans "to the interest of the United States" with gifts and resident agents. The legal device that would allow the administration to circumvent North Carolina and Georgia's jurisdiction was the treaty­ making power, which the Constitution had vested exclusively in the Pres­ ident and Senate. Knox argued that the federal government should treat with "the independent nations and tribes of Indians . . . as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any particular state."3l Washington noted one complication: North Carolina had not yet rati­ fied the Constitution, and neither the state nor its Indian population were part of the Union. Thus, the president and Senate could not exercise their treaty-making power within the state's borders. Washington agreed, how­ ever, that Georgia and the Creeks were subject to federal jurisdiction, even though Georgia hadn't ceded its western lands to Congress.32 In July, Knox and Washington dismissed the state-appointed treaty com­ missioners, on the grounds that "their powers expired with the late confed­ eration," and replaced them with three federal appointees: Cyrus Griffin, a past president of Congress; David Humphreys, a diplomat and army vet­ eran; and Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War general and former com­ missioner to the Penobscots. All were "known in public life and . . . very re­ spectable," and, since none came from the states interested in the treaty, one could assume they would represent the interests of the whole Union. The Senate confirmed Washington's choices in August and joined the House in approving a treaty appropriation of twenty thousand dollars.33 Confirmation and approval came after a sharp exchange in the House of Representatives and an unexpectedly contentious presidential meeting with the Senate. The former dispute began on August 11, when Thomas Sumter of South Carolina proposed that the House limit its appropriation for South­ ern Indian affairs to "the sums necessary . . . to conclude a treaty with the Creek Indians." James Jackson of Georgia then proposed raising a force of federalized militia and attacking the Creeks if negotiations failed. When the other members of the House balked at the expense, Jackson declared that his state was at war and chastised his colleagues. "Men who . . . are se­ cure from being plundered and butchered, whose wives and daughters are not exposed to the brutal ravisher" could "contemplate distant evils with a stoical indifference," Jackson said, but it was not so for his constituents.34 Sumter then criticized Jackson for misrepresenting Indians: "those who

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know . . . their manner of warfare would allow that they seldom or never attempted the chastity of the female sex." Sumter was quite familiar with the southern Indians' military culture, having worked in his youth as a translator for the Cherokees and having fought their warriors in 1776. Jackson countered that Georgians might seek help from Spain or Britain if the Union did not defend them, but the other members of Congress didn't take this threat seriously, and in the end they rejected Jackson's proposal. The exchange typified the perceptual gap between white frontiersmen who viewed Indians as dangerous savages, and eastern political leaders who dis­ played their gentility through a more-nuanced assessment of Native Ameri­ cans. (It also suggested that the transition from frontier partisan to patri­ cian could be rapid, as Sumter had been an infamous backcountry guerilla during the Revolution.)35 The second confrontation began on August 22, when President Wash­ ington and Secretary Knox came to the Senate chamber to seek advice and consent for the Creek treaty. Vice President John Adams opened the session by reading Knox's reports on the Creeks and Georgia, but carriages passing outside Federal Hall interfered with his delivery. Several senators moved for postponement of discussion, and William Maclay, who feared that the president would "overawe the timid and neutral part of the Senate," moved to refer the reports to a committee. The latter motion ignited Washington's famous temper. "This defeats every purpose of my coming here," he said, in­ sisting that the senators discuss the treaty directly with him and Knox. At day's end, the president withdrew with "sullen dignity."36 Two days later, Washington returned, in better humor, to finish discuss­ ing the treaty. He and the senators agreed that the Creeks should give up all the lands they had ceded to Georgia between 1783 and 1786, and receive in return substantial compensation: cash, gifts, medals, commissions, and access to a port on the Altamaha River. The Senate rejected a proposal to give the Creeks an ultimatum if they refused to cede land; in that case, the commissioners were to set a temporary boundary and return to New York. The episode demonstrated that, contrary to Maclay's fears, the Senate would play a role in shaping federal Indian policy. It was also the last time a president would personally attend the Senate to obtain advice and consent for a treaty. In future, the two branches would conduct diplomatic business in writing, a form more likely to preserve decorumY On August 29, Washington and Knox gave the commissioners their in­ structions. They were to investigate Georgia's treaties with the Creeks, ob-

"'These:- 1-faughty
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tain depositions from "respectable private characters" who had witnessed them, and determine whether Creek chiefs had legitimately ceded the ter­ ritory between the Ogeechee and Ocmulgee Rivers. If so, the commission­ ers were to obtain signed confirmation of the cession; if not, they were to buy the land themselves. Washington also urged Griffin, Humphreys, and Lincoln to secure the allegiance of Alexander McGillivray, the presumptive commander of the Creek confederacy.38 Achieving these goals would require delicate negotiations. Unfortu­ nately for Washington, the commissioners he sent to Rock Landing were clumsy diplomats. Griffin, Humphreys, and Lincoln sailed for Augusta on August 31, ac­ companied by fifty soldiers and bearing several thousand dollars' worth of presents. The journey proved difficult, with the travelers enduring stormy seas, bad roads, and a broken carriage axle that forced them to cover the last seventy-five miles on horseback. Lincoln and Humphreys did not reach Rock Landing until September 20, five days after the scheduled start of the conference.39 At Rock Landing, the commissioners met an imposing company: nine hundred Creek warriors and women, forty chiefs, and the Creeks' Great Beloved Man (isti atcagagi thlocco), Alexander McGillivray. In his corre­ spondence, the Creek warlord claimed that the conference was a trium­ phal reception, not a capitulation. "We have in part if not wholly defeated the wicked intentions of the Americans," he informed Esteban Mira, and "brought these haughty republicans to bend & sue for peace from the peo­ ple whom they had despised."40 McGillivray's confident rhetoric masked a difficult personal situation. The Beloved Man's political influence depended on the goods he imported for his followers through the Panton & Leslie Company, but in 1788 Spanish officials had restricted McGillivray's importation of guns and ammunition. That same fall, a British adventurer named William Bowles had recruited a party of Creek warriors to plunder Panton & Leslie's stores in East Florida. Both incidents demonstrated the thinness of McGillivray's commercial lifeline and made him receptive to a deal with the United States, particu­ larly if it included access to a seaport.41 On the other hand, McGillivray's authority also derived from his leader­ ship of the Creek federationists, who had steadfastly rejected their chiefs' land cessions since 1784. In 1789, a convention of Creek warriors and Chick­ amauga captains had rejected negotiation with the United States, declaring

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that "the only answer fitting to be given" to the Americans "was from the mouths of their guns." McGillivray urged his colleagues to maintain their cease-fire with the Georgians until the Rock Landing conference, but it proved difficult for him to control hundreds of warriors over "a great extent and distance." If McGillivray failed to obtain "a restitution of encroached territory," many of his followers would return to war.42 Ceremony helped to maintain the equilibrium of the Rock Landing con­ ference for a few days. On September 21, a deputation of Lower Creek chiefs crossed the Oconee River to the commissioners' encampment, where they cleansed "all past grievances" from Humphreys and Lincoln with white birds' wings, smoked a "pipe of reconciliation" with the officials, and ate dinner with them. Over the next two days, the commissioners (now joined by Griffin) drafted their speeches and dined with McGillivray.43 McGillivray said that his people wanted peace and that the main stick­ ing point in the treaty was the Ocmulgee River boundary, which the U.S. government would have to move. He also insisted that the commission­ ers give their formal speeches in the Creek camp, rather than in their own camp. This would ostensibly ensure that all the chiefs and captains could hear them, but McGillivray also wanted to ensure his own safety, having heard a rumor that the Georgians planned to kill him at the conference.44 The conferees' veneer of civility began to crack on September 24, when the commissioners and their interpreters crossed the Oconee to address the Creeks. The day began with the mutual imbibing of black drink, a caffeine-laden herbal beverage brewed from the leaves and twigs of the ilex plant which the Creeks associated with purification and right thinking. After this ceremony, Griffin, Humphreys, and Lincoln showed the Creeks their commission and appealed to them to stay at peace with their white neighbors. They declared that the United States were stronger than ever, having made "a happy change . . . in our national government," and wished to share their blessings with the Creeks. In order to maintain peaceful rela­ tions, the Creeks would have to acknowledge the United States as their sov­ ereign, renounce retributive justice in favor of American judicial processes, and return captives and runaway slaves-terms similar to those of the Fort Harmar Treaties. They would also have to cede all their lands east of the Oconee River, a boundary that the commissioners selected after consulting both McGillivray and their instructions from the president.45 After conferring with the chiefs and captains, McGillivray sent a writ­ ten reply to the commissioners' address, stating that their proposed bound-

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ary was unacceptable and would have to be redrawn at a future conference. In the meantime, McGillivray proposed an extension of the spring truce and a generous gift to Eneah Mico, Tallassee Mico, and others. Angered by McGillivray's response, the commissioners replied that there would be neither presents nor a second conference until the Creeks signed the treaty, and that if they sought a change of terms they should negotiate it now.46 Hoping that a personal touch could sway McGillivray, David Humphreys conferred with him privately, but the meeting quickly became contentious. McGillivray insisted that the Creeks could not honor earlier treaties at which they had not been "fully represented," and when Humphreys asked whether the confederacy was adequately represented now, McGillivray in­ terpreted the question as an insult, a suggestion that he and the forty micas at Rock Landing lacked the authority to make a binding agreement. He took further umbrage at the commissioners' demand that the Creeks renounce all other sovereigns, which would oblige him to break his promises to Spain. Moreover, McGillivray insisted that he and other Creeks did not regard the Americans as fathers, but rather as younger brothers. This was probably an attempt to find a kinship metaphor that would let McGillivray remain loyal to his Spanish fathers while forming an alliance with his American broth­ ers. Humphreys, however, found the remark frivolous and insulting.47 Indeed, each man left the conversation regarding the other as an arro­ gant poltroon. In his correspondence, David Humphreys characterized the Creek leader as a "slovenly," self-important man seeking only his own "pe­ cuniary emolument." McGillivray described Humphreys as a "puppy" who alternated bragging about his diplomatic experience with attempts to ca­ jole and threaten his Creek counterpart. Had the two men expressed their views openly, rather than in private correspondence, either would have had grounds for a duel. As matters stood, each left the interview feeling that his personal and national honor had been slighted.48 On September 26, the commissioners sent McGillivray another request for his objections to the treaty. The missive arrived too late, for the Beloved Man and many of his warrior companions had already left for home. While the treaty observer Andrew Pickens set off after McGillivray, a large Creek delegation crossed the river to meet again with the commissioners and hear a "pathetic oration" by Tallassee Mico on the importance of "strict amity with the whites." Griffin, Humphreys, and Lincoln found this speech reas­ suring, but told the chiefs that they could not conclude a treaty without McGillivray's signature.49

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Pickens intercepted his quarry on the Ocmulgee River. McGillivray apologized for leaving early but said he and his warriors would not tolerate a settlement that gave the Creeks' hunting grounds to Georgia. However, he assured Pickens that Creek warriors would keep the truce until spring. On hearing this news the commissioners decided they could make no further progress and ended the conference. 50 While returning to New York, the three commissioners stopped in Au­ gusta, where Governor George Walton assured them that Georgia had con­ ducted all its treaties with the Creeks in good faith. The commissioners accepted Walton's assurances, and in their official reports recommended that the president immediately take steps to secure Georgia's frontier: sta­ tion infantry on the Oconee, Altamaha, and Saint Mary's Rivers, and if they proved insufficient to deter Creek raids, dispatch a 4,500-man army to de­ stroy the Creeks' towns. They admitted that an offensive would have to be a last resort, since the operation would drain the treasury and might lead to war with Spain. Privately, William Maclay speculated that the commission­ ers wanted a war and had deliberately sabotaged the treaty to give Henry Knox a chance "to labor in his vocation." 51 Secretary Knox did in fact endorse the commissioners' recommenda­ tions and advised President Washington to begin preparing for war, with the caveat that he should make one more attempt to negotiate with the Creeks before attacking. Realizing that the Creeks were a more formidable adversary than the Northwest Indians, Knox proposed sending 40 percent of Harmar's regiment to Georgia. In April 1790, the president agreed to move three companies of infantry and artillery from the Ohio Valley to the Oconee River, where they would prepare for a possible offensive. Josiah Harmar wrote one of his friends that in that event "it is more than probable I may visit you in Georgia." 52 The War Department also began to consider recruiting the Creeks' In­ dian rivals as allies. The likeliest candidates were the Chickasaws, or rather the faction led by Piomingo (Mountain Leader), who had been seeking an alliance with the United States since 1783. Piomingo's kinsmen had invited settlers from Nashville to build a trading house for them, but in 1787 Creek warriors attacked the post, killing seven whites and driving off the rest. The Creek-Chickasaw war resumed in 1789, when Creek warriors killed Pio­ mingo's brother and uncle as they returned from a visit to New York. That fall the Chickasaw leader headed to the American capital to seek military assistance. He made it as far as Richmond, Virginia, where he met with

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Griffin, Humphreys, and Lincoln and apprised them of the Chickasaws' "rooted aversion to the whole Creek nation." When Knox received the com­ missioners' report he decided to give Piomingo more assistance.53 In January 1790, Army officers John Doughty and Jonathan Heart under­ took a diplomatic and reconnaissance mission to Chickasaw country. While Heart visited the Chickasaws' towns, Doughty headed up the Tennessee River to the trading rendezvous of Ochappo (thirty-six miles below Muscle Shoals) to determine the feasibility of building a fort there. Doughty's mis­ sion ended badly: six miles from Ochappo he encountered forty Cherokee and Shawnee warriors who, after pretending to be friendly, opened fire on Doughty's boat and killed or wounded eleven of his companions. The sur­ vivors fled to the Spanish post of L'Anse au Graise, near the mouth of the Ohio, where Heart and Piomingo joined them a few days later.54 Conferring with the American officers, Piomingo noted that his peo­ ple desperately needed supplies and had been forced to deal with Spanish and British traders, who had told them that "a connection with [the United States) can avail them nothing." Doughty promised to give Piomingo pow­ der and lead, and told Knox and Harmar that a trading post between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers would be an excellent idea, since trade with the Chickasaws and Choctaws would serve as "a political engine giv­ ing [the United States) a concomitant influence with their neighbors [Brit­ ain and Spain) over the savages."55 A trading post deep in Indian country would require a garrison to pro­ tect it from federationist warriors and avaricious whites. The soldiers and traders there would need a secure supply route, presumably the Ohio River. In the spring of 1790, however, the Army was struggling to keep its forts on the Ohio supplied and could not extend a lifeline to a post deep in the southern interior. Until the Thirteen Fires dealt with the Wabash Indians, a U.S.-Chickasaw alliance against the Creeks would remain a theoretical enterprise.56

C H O O S I NG WAR IN T H E N O R T H W E S T

William Maclay's suspicions aside, Secretary of War Knox was not keen to fight an Indian war, which he believed would have ruinous consequences for the nation's honor and purse. In his report to the president of Janu­ ary 4, 1790, he again advised that the federal government "manage" the Trans-Appalachian Indians through treaties and gifts, rather than with

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'Red yentlemen and 1fJhite- Savages

bayonets. Citing the example of tribute payments to the Barbary pirates, Knox suggested that this was the customary way for civilized nations to live in peace with "barbarous" neighbors. Moreover, while conceding that Ken­ tucky settlers deserved protection, Knox observed they had so frequently injured Native Americans that the federal government could not justly at­ tack the Wabash Indians without first trying diplomacyP Yet, in the spring of 1790, it appeared that the Washington administra­ tion was going to fight at least one Indian war, if not several. The failure of the Rock Landing conference made war with the Creeks seem likely. More alarmingly, the war in the Ohio Valley had escalated, and many observers believed that if the u.s. government did not strike and disperse the Wa­ bash Indians, it would lose control of the Ohio River and the settlements thereon. In March, fifty Shawnee and Cherokee warriors camped on the Scioto River and began to raid flatboats on the Ohio. On one occasion the raid­ ers struck four boats, killed or captured the crews, and took nearly a ton of freight. Meanwhile, Miami, Ottawa, and Potawatomi war parties raided white settlements and attacked travelers. In one incident later reported to Knox, warriors fell upon a group of Kentucky settlers as they returned from church, killed two children, and dismembered "an ancient lady" with a scimitar.58 Increasingly, a federal expedition against the Northwest Indian federa­ tionists appeared inevitable. First, if the U.S. Army did not go on the of­ fensive, vengeful Kentuckians would do so and direct their wrath against "all bearing the name of Indians," including those under federal protection. Kentucky militia had, after all, attacked neutral Indian towns and hunters in each of the previous four years. "They are in the habit of retaliation," Ar­ thur St. Clair observed, "perhaps without attending precisely to the nations from which the injuries are received." Judge Harry Innes concurred. After estimating Kentucky's losses to Indian raids between 1783 and 1790 (fifteen hundred people killed or captured, and twenty thousand horses stolen), he warned that if the federal government did not intervene, "volunteer expedi­ tions will be carried on into the Indian countries upon the principle of re­ venge, protection, and self-preservation." Without federal officers to control them, Innes warned, the militia would attack Indians "who have treated" with the national government, thereby undermining its trustworthiness.59 Secondly, continued federal inaction would drive many neutral Indian communities into the federationist camp, undoing St. Clair's diplomatic work. In May 1790, the governor argued that if war parties continued to raid

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into Kentucky unchecked, the lure of booty and glory would cause Wyan­ dot and Delaware warriors to join them. Moreover, if Kentucky militia de­ stroyed another neutral town, the survivors would almost certainly join the United States' enemies.60 Thirdly, the diplomatic path to the Wabash Indians had apparently closed. In March, St. Clair sent them one last olive branch: his emissary An­ toine Gamelin visited half a dozen Wabash towns and gave white wampum strings and conference invitations to Kickapoo, Piankeshaw, Shawnee, and Wea leaders. Gamelin's Indian hosts did not give him a friendly reception. They scolded him for failing to bring gifts, said they could not treat without the approval of the Miamis, and claimed they could not prevent their young men from raiding because Britain had put "the axe" in their hands. This, St. Clair wrote to Washington, was "tantamount to . . . declaring that they will continue their hostilities."61 Gamelin spent several days at Kekionga, the complex of Miami and Shawnee towns at the portage between the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. There, the Miami chief Le Gris and the Shawnee captain Blue Jacket told him they could not negotiate until they consulted the British commander at Detroit and the leaders of other Northwest Indian nations. Privately, both men told Gamelin that their people would never accept American settle­ ments north of the Ohio River. Blue Jacket told Gamelin that the Shawnees hated the whites who had " destroyed their lands [and] put out their fire," and that if the Thirteen Fires " don't keep this side clear," they would never have "a proper reconcilement with the [Indian] nations."62 Such terms were unacceptable to St. Clair and his superiors. The United States, in the administration's view, had paid for the Ohio cession several times over, and the legal settlement of Northwest lands was underway. Americans had established the villages of Cincinnati and Marietta, and a French company had planted the settlement of Gallipolis at the mouth of the Scioto River. Continued Indian attacks on travelers and boatmen, which claimed a hundred American casualties during the spring of 1790, might force the abandonment of these settlements. Army posts in the region were short of supplies, and many settlers were famished. Shawnee and Cherokee warriors had slaughtered the game around Marietta to drive the residents out, and the white families there were subsisting on potato tops and pigeon­ berry shoots. A blow against the Scioto River pirates and the Miami towns could at least secure navigation on the Ohio River and preserve the settle­ ments on its north shore.63 Reluctantly, Knox decided to endorse a federal expedition against the

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Wabash Indians. However, he allowed himself to believe that the raiders harassing the United States' northwestern frontier comprised only about two hundred men, the rest of the region's Indians being friendly or neutral. The army, Knox informed Washington in May, could attack the Wabash towns and "strike . . . terror in the minds of the Indians hostilely disposed" with just one hundred regulars and three hundred militia. In a departure from his earlier reports, the Secretary estimated that the campaign would take only thirty days and cost the Treasury thirteen thousand dollars. As expense was the government's first objection to an Indian war, Knox's grow­ ing belief in the necessity of the latter (at least on a limited scale) caused him to reduce his estimate of the former. Assuming that the president would ap­ prove, Knox authorized St. Clair to begin assembling troops and Harmar to prepare to "extirpate . . . the banditti."64 St. Clair and Harmar gladly complied. Harmar had struck a first blow in April, when he led three hundred regulars and militia against the Shawnee and Cherokee pirates on the Scioto. While Harmar's gunmen killed four pirates, most escaped and resumed attacking white boatmen later in the year. Harmar opined that the only way to "cure the disorder" in the North­ west was to destroy the Wabash Indians' towns. "The savages," he insisted, "will continue their carnages and depredations until government raisers] a proper force to sweep them off the face of the earth." Federal officers in the Ohio Valley knew, however, that Knox had underestimated the number of Wabash Indian warriors, and so St. Clair and Harmar began to muster a much larger force than the one the secretary proposed.65 In September 1789, Congress had empowered the president to use state militias for frontier defense, and Washington had authorized St. Clair to mobilize fifteen hundred militia if negotiations with the Wabash Indians failed. The governor now ordered three hundred Kentucky militia to Vin­ cennes, where they would join two hundred regulars and local militia in a raid on the Wea and Kickapoo towns of the lower Wabash, and twelve hun­ dred Kentucky and Pennsylvania militia to Cincinnati, where they would join three hundred regulars in an expedition against Kekionga. St. Clair ordered Harmar to burn the Indians' fields and homes, leave a detachment in Kekionga, and march downriver to link up with John Hamtramck,66 Harmar and St. Clair's hopes for success soon began to fade. When the Kentucky militia arrived at Fort Washington, Ebenezer Denny noted they were mostly poor plowmen, "raw and unused to the gun or the woods." Many were hired substitutes or had been dragooned into service by county

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lieutenants. After Harmar's force of 1,453 men left Fort Washington on Sep­ tember 26, the undisciplined militiamen straggled for miles along the route of march, and despite good weather and terrain, the army took 3 weeks to cover the 140 miles to Kekionga.67 Once at their objective, Harmar's men discovered that the Shawnees and Miamis had fled. This was due to an ill-considered decision Henry Knox had made a few weeks earlier. Fearing that British officials might interpret Harmar's expedition as an attack on Detroit, Knox had notified John Smith, the commandant of Fort Detroit, of the impending attack on the Wabash towns and assured him he was not the target. Smith promptly notified his Indian allies, who withdrew before the Americans arrived.68 Harmar and his men spent four days at Kekionga, looting and burning the Indians' cabins, cornfields, and orchards. Hoping to kill or capture a few warriors, on October 18 Harmar sent out a detachment of three hun­ dred men to reconnoiter. The militia's lack of discipline soon reasserted itself. A third of the party drifted back to camp before they ever saw their enemy, and most of the rest fled when a hundred Shawnee and Potawatomi warriors ambushed them ten miles northwest of Kekionga. By the end of the skirmish, the army had taken sixty-five casualties, and Harmar was so infuriated that he threatened to turn his cannons on future deserters. Worse, however, was to come.69 On October 21, Harmar's men began marching back to Cincinnati. That evening, Harmar and militia Colonel John Hardin speculated that the In­ dians were planning to return to their towns the moment the Americans departed, and that a quick retrograde march might catch them off guard. They decided to send four hundred gunmen back to Kekionga the follow­ ing day?O What transpired was, for the Americans, a disaster. Outside of Kekionga the federationist captains Blue Jacket and Little Turtle had assembled seven hundred warriors, all of whom were ready for action when the American assault party returned. The Americans, meanwhile, remained in disarray. When the militia surprised an Indian scouting party, they chased after the scouts and left the regular troops unsupported. The main body of fed­ erationist warriors seized the opportunity and attacked the regulars with muskets, bows, tomahawks, and clubs. Fifty American officers and soldiers died in the battle, while one hundred and thirty-three militia were killed, wounded, or deserted.7l The remnant of Harmar's force returned to Fort Washington, shedding

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supplies and deserters on the way. In his reports, Harmar put a positive spin on the campaign, declaring that in their "clipping work with the savages" his men had burned six towns and killed one hundred warriors, a heavy blow "to a people whose population is on the decline." Yet, there was no dis­ guising the magnitude of his loss: nearly two hundred and fifty casualties, a greater blow than Indians had inflicted on any American force since 1778. After the debacle, Harmar requested that a formal board of inquiry exam­ ine his conduct of the campaign (it exonerated him), and then resigned his commission.72 Meanwhile, Major John Hamtramck's expedition met an ignomini­ ous end. The men marched for the town of Ouiatenon on September 29, but began to desert when they discovered that their supplies were rotten. Hamtramck finally led his troops back to Vincennes before they had seen a single enemy.73 In short, the campaign achieved none of its objectives. Harmar lacked the manpower to occupy Kekionga and thereby prevent future raids. The battles of October 18 and 22 did not chasten the Miamis and Shawnees; on the contrary, their losses had been so light (only twelve killed, despite Harmar's claim) and their victories so great that many previously neutral Wyandots and Delawares j oined the federationist cause. In the wake of their victory, federationist captains convinced their warriors to undertake a winter campaign against the Ohio settlements. In January 1791, war parties raided Belpre, slew fourteen settlers near Marietta, and attacked Dunlap's Station on Great Miami River. Meanwhile county lieutenants in Kentucky planned a spring militia offensive against the Wea villages on the lower Wabash-even though the Weas had not fought against Harmar. The Keki­ onga expedition had neither slaked Kentuckians' thirst for revenge nor changed their tendency to exact it from neutral Indians.?4 Harmar's expedition assured federal officials of only one thing: that there would be another offensive against the Wabash Indians the following year. Senator Maclay, who believed that the War Department had deliber­ ately bungled the campaign to increase military appropriations, confided to his journal that "This is a vile business, and must be much viler."75

T H E T R EATY OF N E W YO R K

The year 1790 was not one of unremitting setbacks for the Washington ad­ ministration's Indian policy. Diplomacy failed to avert war in the North­ west, but it brought temporary peace to the southern frontier. By the time

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Harmar and his men marched for Kekionga, Washington and Knox had signed a treaty with the United States' most formidable Indian neighbor, the Creek confederacy. The War Department had previously begun preparing for war with the . Creeks, but Henry Knox knew that this would be accompanied by "exten­ sive and complicated evils." McGillivray's Creek militants could not be dismissed as banditti, and defeating them would require a long, expensive campaign. Knox asked Senator Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina, one of the Hopewell Treaty commissioners and a student of southern Indian culture, for his opinion on how to resolve the crisis. Hawkins opined that Creek leaders would "gladly embrace any rational mean that could be of­ fered to avoid" war, and proposed that Washington invite them to New York for a private conference. If the Creeks rebuffed this overture and the U.S. government had to attack them, the world could at least observe the administration's " fair and honorable dispositions."76 Washington concurred. He and Knox had secretly recruited a new emis­ sary to the Creeks, former Continental Army colonel Marinus Willett, and on March 15, 1790, the president dispatched him to C�eek country. By late April, the colonel had reached the Creek town of Hillebee, where two white traders introduced him to Alexander McGillivray.77 Willett found McGillivray more confident and accommodating on his home ground than he had been at Rock Landing. On May 17 and 21, McGil­ livray brought Colonel Willett to address assemblies in the Creek towns of Oseechee and Tuckabatchee. The colonel assured them of the president's desire to protect their lands and invited them to come to "the council fire that is kindled in our beloved town"-that is, to the temporary federal capi­ tal at New York City. The Lower Creek mico Hallowing King said that, while the Rock Landing conference had been " disappointing" and New York was far away, the Creeks would send McGillivray and others to treat with the United States. The White Lieutenant of Okfuskee chided Americans for "making fools" of the Creeks at Rock Landing and claimed that his people preferred to "stay home and mind our hunting," but agreed that the Upper Creeks would send delegates to New York.78 Meanwhile, McGillivray treated Willett as an honored guest, lodging the colonel in his house and dining with him at one of his farms. His solici­ tude stemmed from his anxiousness to conclude a trade deal with the Thir­ teen Fires and to acquire the prestige that a trip-a political and diplomatic pilgrimage, so to speak-to the Americans' Beloved Town would bring. McGillivray also believed that the U.S. government was desperate enough

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to give him and his kinsmen numerous concessions. The Beloved Man told correspondents that he suspected what lay behind Washington�s "liberal terms" was not benevolence but weakness. For their part, Creek chiefs were eager to sign a treaty because their influence stemmed from their peace­ making abilities; they also wanted to keep an eye on McGillivray to ensure he kept their towns' interests at heart.79 A small but influential party of Creek leaders thus assembled at Hopewell on June 15 for the journey to New York. The travelers included Willett, McGillivray, McGillivray's nephews Alexander Durant and David Tate, and two dozen chiefs and warriors. Over the next month, the leading citizens of the American towns through which the Creeks passed sought to match one another in hospitality and to satisfy their curiosity about the "savage" kings in their midst. In Richmond, the governor and state council invited McGillivray and Willett to dinner at the city academy. In Fredericksburg, the chiefs and warriors spent the day at the theater, where they were prob­ ably more of an attraction than the actors on stage. In Philadelphia, McGil­ livray and his companions "were shown a great many curiosities," met with a party of Quakers, and again attended a formal dinner and the theater.so It was in Colonel Willett's hometown of New York City, however, that the Creeks received their most elaborate reception. A delegation from the Saint Tammany Society, a fraternal organization known for its Native American costumes and outdoor banquets, met the Creeks at the pier and led them up Wall Street to meet President Washington, Secretary Knox, and Governor Clinton. In the evening, the society held a reception for the Indian visitors in the City Tavern. The Grand Sachem William Smith urged his brethren to promote "friendship and reciprocal good offices . . . with all Indians" and praised the biracial McGillivray as one of the favorable outcomes of peace­ ful Indian-white relations. The Creek chiefs returned Smith's sentiments and gave him the name of White Town Chief.sl The Creeks' meeting with the Tammany Society was mirrored on the eve of their departure by a reception with the Society of Saint Andrew. The members of this Scottish fraternal order ostensibly wanted to celebrate Alexander McGillivray's paternal lineage, but their songs and toasts cel­ ebrated his Creek heritage. One singer asserted that "The time is at hand . . . when the Empire of Reason shall govern the world," and promised that "This Truth we'll pursue/That feature or colour, no difference can be/In the eye of that Mind/Which call'd forth Mankind/To make them one family, happy and free." Such assertions were more than politesse. They proclaimed the

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society's allegiance to the principles of the Enlightenment, including the belief in a common descent of humankind and the idea that racial differ­ ences were merely the product of one's environment. In embracing these principles, they sought to assert their membership in a cosmopolitan elite of educated gentlemen. A similar desire underlay Benjamin Hawkins's in­ terest in Native American languages and Knox's support for a program of Indian "civilization," which would bear its first fruits in the forthcoming treaty.82 While the Tammany Society reassured the Creeks about the Americans' good intentions, Washington, Knox, and Clinton showed their guests the republic's wealth and power. During the chiefs' and captains' first week in New York, their hosts took them to a review of the state militia, a tour of the city's wharves and markets, and dinners with local notables. Henry Knox then turned to the main business of their visit: resuming the negotiations abandoned at Rock Landing. The secretary interviewed McGillivray and several chiefs about the 'Creeks' treaties with Georgia, and asked whether they considered the land cessions of 1783-86 to be legitimate. Tallassee Mico replied that thirty-five Creek towns had protested the Treaty of Au­ gusta, that the Treaty of Galphinton had been a fraud, and that the Treaty of Shoulderbone was a shotgun pact extracted by state troops who threatened to destroy the Creeks' towns.83 This testimony put Knox in a difficult situation. Georgia claimed all Creek lands east of the Chattahoochee River under its treaties of 1783-86 and its 1787 act of annexation, and expected the federal government to pro­ tect its claims. The Creek leaders in New York denied the validity of their treaties with Georgia, and their warriors back home had the power to force the United States into a war "from which," Knox believed, "neither honor nor profit would be acquired." The U.S. government had to compromise un­ less it wanted to fight two Indian wars at once.84 Absent direct pressure from Georgia officials, Knox decided to jettison the state's claims west of the Oconee River. He believed Georgia should give up the trans-Oconee region because the state reportedly sought those lands not for settlement but as a "pledge . . . for the emission of a certain paper currency," which the U.S. Constitution now forbade Georgia from is­ suing. Better for both Georgia and the Union that the administration take "the opportunity of firmly attaching the Creeks to our interest," rather than alienate them with indefensible land claims.85 Under the terms of Knox's new treaty, the Creeks would cede to Georgia

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their lands east of the Oconee River, return all captives taken since 1783, and acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States. In return, Washington and Knox offered the chiefs and captains very favorable terms. The Creeks would retain their legal autonomy, including the right to punish most white intruders and retaliate for injuries to "persons or property," provided the guilty parties did not first offer material compensation to the victims. They would receive $1,500 in goods each year, as well as periodic gifts of livestock and farm tools and instruction in husbandry, "that the Creek nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization." A secret proviso allowed McGil­ livray's partners in the firm of Panton & Leslie to control the Creeks' trade until August 1792, whereupon the Creeks would resort to American trading posts. In the event of a falling-out between the Creeks and Spain, McGil­ livray himself could import up to $120,000 worth of goods through Ameri­ can ports duty free.86 Another set of secret articles offered more private concessions. One ap­ pointed McGillivray the United States' agent to the Creeks, with the rank of brigadier general and an annual salary of $1,200. A second gave medals and $100 salaries to each of six chiefs. A third obligated the government to educate up to four Creek youths each year.87 This last article was rooted in a pre-Revolutionary tradition: educat­ ing Indian leaders' children in order to secure the loyalty of the students' parents. Congress had adopted the practice during the Revolutionary War, appropriating nine hundred dollars for the boarding of Caughnawaga chil­ dren at Eleazar Wheelock's Indian Charity School, and paying for the up­ keep and education of three sons of Delaware chiefs. Funding the education of McGillivray's nephews would have struck no one in Congress as unusual, and Knox and McGillivray kept the article secret not to hide it from Ameri­ cans but from Spain.88 Generous as the Treaty of New York was to its Indian signatories, Knox and Washington believed that they were purchasing something more valu­ able than land: the loyalty of the Creeks to the United States. Annual gifts and salaries would give the nation's leaders a stake in good relations with the United States. McGillivray's commission and oath would bind him by his honor and fortune to the Thirteen Fires, while his nephews would be hostages to the government charged with educating them. The treaty's com­ mercial clauses would bring Creek hunters to American ports and make American goods a cement of union between the two nations-and a strong one, for the Creeks were running a £2,000 annual trade deficit with Euro-

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pean traders. Even the civilization initiative would serve a political purpose, insofar as gifts of ploughs and livestock would earn the recipients' gratitude and resident agents could "inculcate [their] friendship and attachment."89 Ultimately, Knox sought both to secure the United States' southern frontier from attack and to convert the powerful Creek confederacy into an American dependency. The Spanish, with whom the Creeks had signed a treaty of alliance (and from whom McGillivray was still drawing a sal­ ary), could not but object to this second goal, and when a Spanish agent in New York reported that McGillivray was leaving his nephews in the care of "Minister Knox," Spain pressured the Beloved Man to stop trimming his sails and choose a side. Spanish officials knew that the Treaty of New York was a device to shift power from Spain to the United States.90 American officials believed that the time was now ripe for such a shift. Their fear of a Spanish war had dissipated by summer, thanks to the Nootka Sound controversy and the consequent threat of war between Spain and Britain. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was convinced that Spain was in a dire international position, so much so that he proposed pressing that weakened country to cede Florida and Louisiana to the United States. Given these circumstances, peeling away one of Spain's Indian allies seemed risk free.91 The administration was not merely trying to control the Creeks and restrain the Spanish; it also wanted to bridle its own overly adventur­ ous citizens. In December 1789, three private companies-the first Yazoo Companies-had bought most of Georgia's land claims west of the Chat­ tahoochee River, and had begun planning settlements at Muscle Shoals and Walnut Hills (modern Vicksburg). The prospect of such remote and ungovernable American colonies alarmed the Washington administration, and the Treaty of New York offered it a chance to nip the land companies' schemes in the bud. Article VI authorized the Creeks to punish or expel whites who settled on their lands west of the Oconee River, and Creek war­ riors did subsequently destroy the Tennessee Yazoo Company's blockhouse at Muscle Shoals. Presidential proclamations forbidding American settle­ ment on Chickasaw or Choctaw lands completed the U.S. government's in­ terdiction of the Yazoo Companies' project.92 Meanwhile, Congress's 1790 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act banned the purchase of Indian land by the states. The law was partly the brainchild of Henry Knox, who argued that as Congress had in 1787 "conceded the Indian right to the soil," the U.S. government had the responsibility to regu-

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late purchases of Indian lands, and that Congress's constitutional authority to make war, approve treaties, and regulate trade carried with it the implicit power to do so. Congress agreed with this expansive view of federal power. However, the new law and the Treaty of New York engendered protests against the government's "Knoxonian plan" of Indian policy.93 These protests extended throughout the Union. Georgia witnessed grand jury presentments against the Treaty of New York, public toasts to the ill health of the treaty's supporters, and newspaper essays alleging a Federalist conspiracy to strip southern freeholders of land and liberty. From Virginia, Patrick Henry warned Georgians that the treaty threatened "all landed property in the state." And in the New York Journal, "Mentor" denounced Knox as the " lackey" of "a despicable marauding tribe," and asked whether the U.S. government's injurious treaty and "zeal for Indian connections . . . has not broken the compact which makes Georgia a part of the Union?"94 Georgia's citizens were not about to leave the Union, but "Mentor" raised a valid constitutional point. The Treaty of New York and the Trade and In­ tercourse Act had dramatically expanded the powers of the federal govern­ ment, particularly its power to draw borders, buy and sell Indian land, and regulate settlement. One may fairly ask whether the Constitution of 1787 explicitly gave the federal government any of these powers. It did not. One might also ask which clause of the Constitution allowed that government to "civilize" Indians at public expense, or to make a Creek warlord a brigadier general. Georgians did not back their angry words with hostile actions. The state could not muster enough gunmen to defeat the Creek confederacy, and for the moment the president, his secretary of war, and Congress had allied themselves with the Creeks. Knox and Washington had won themselves few white friends in the south, but they had purchased a few years of quiet.

THE

" K NOXON I A N " PLAN

Henry Knox and the Creeks signed and sealed the Treaty of New York on August 7, 1790, with the secretary of war invoking "the supreme principle of the universe [to] render it perpetual" and urging the micas to restrain their "rash young men." Six days later, the signatories attended a public signing in Federal Hall. While Vice President Adams, Governor Clinton, cabinet secretaries, and congressmen looked on, President Washington lectured the Creeks on their new obligations. The chiefs and captains then signed

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another copy of the treaty, received tobacco and white beads from the presi­ dent, shook hands with Washington, and sang "a song of peace." Having performed these rites of submission the Creeks left for home, and their new "father" issued a proclamation declaring the Creeks under American protection.95 In reality, the Creeks had submitted to very little. Their chiefs knew they were negotiating from strength, and had obliged Americans to pay a heavy price for their alliance. Part of this price was the alienation of white Geor­ gians, who had readily supported the Constitution three years earlier, but now bitterly opposed federal Indian policy. Several would draw attention to what they saw as that policy's cruelest irony: the same government that was giving Georgia's lands to the Creeks in the name of peace was simultane­ ously waging war against the Wabash Indians. "The Indians of the South are to be treated with humanity," Congressman Thomas Carnes sardoni­ cally observed a few years later, "and those to the North are to be butchered, that the United States may enjoy their property."96 There was much truth in Carnes's observation. The practical results of the Washington administration's early policy decisions were these: in 1790 the government returned Georgia's lands to the Creeks, and got peace; it re­ fused to return federal lands to the Northwest Indians, and got war. Crude material interests appear to have been the guiding elements of that policy. However, one cannot entirely adduce Federalist administrators' motives from the results of their decisions. The actions and words of Federalist poli­ cymakers indicate that their paramount goals were not to gain land or start a war, but rather to control the Trans-Appalachian Indians, and to do so in a uniform and systematic way. Henry Knox made this clear in a 1790 report to Congress, observing that "Since the United States became a nation, their conduct . . . towards the Indians seems to have resulted from the impulses of the moment," and recommending that "some system . . . be established on the subject." This.system, which Knox began developing in 1787, used formal treaties to regulate Indian land sales and legally bind Native Americans to the U.S. government; gifts, annuities, and honors, to secure the allegiance of Indian leaders; and federal troops, to keep vengeful white frontiersmen and Indian "banditti" in line.97 Federal officials applied Knox's system of peaceable manipulation to both the southern and northern frontiers in 1789 and 1790. They enjoyed greater success in the South not because they were more sincerely com­ mitted to peace there but because the region's sociopolitical environment

126


was more amenable to federal control. Powerful as they were, the south­ ern Indians offered the Washington administration more political levers to pull than did their northwestern counterparts. The Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws were heavily dependent on foreign manufac­ tured goods, and their demands were outpacing the ability of European merchants to supply them; consequently, all were eager for trade deals with the United States. Southern Indian families had also made greater efforts to adopt European lifeways-plow agriculture, stock raising, and English literacy-than the Lakes Indians. They were more willing to accept tools and training as part of a peace settlement, providing the Federalists with another means of influencing them.98 Then, too, for all their factional divisions, the southern Indian na­ tions were more cohesive than the loose multitribal confederations of the Northwest. Each of the four principal southern Indian nations was bound together by language, kinship, and formal moieties (like the Creek confed­ eracy's red and white towns), and their political leaders held occasional national meetings. It was thus easier for southern chiefs and captains to control their "young men" and enforce treaties with white Americans. The truces to which the Cherokees and Creeks agreed in 1789 would last for nearly three years, even though many disagreed with the terms of treaties that their chiefs subsequently signed with the United States.99 Finally, white settlers on the southern frontier appeared more tractable than their counterparts in the Ohio Val ley. After three years of nearly con­ tinuous fighting, the white inhabitants of Tennessee were reluctant to re­ sume their war with the Cherokees, and in fact kept the peace until 1792. Further south, Georgians fulminated against both Creeks and Federalists but lacked the manpower to attack either, and federal garrisons on the Oconee and St. Mary's Rivers sufficed, for the time being, to keep Creek warriors and Georgia farmers under control. None of these conditions pertained in the Ohio Valley. The Indian com­ munities there lacked most of the social structures that might bind them into larger national units, and when one faction made peace with the United States, the others could reject it by rejecting the authority of the signato­ ries. The wide diffusion of political power made it difficult to control chiefs through bribery, for there were too many people to be bribed, and skilled operators like the Senecas could easily walk away from a treaty with the lion's share of concessions. Trade dependency was not an effective lever, since Northwest Indian hunters who did not want to trade with the United

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States could always buy from British traders in Detroit or French merchants in St. Louis. And, ironically, the ethnic diversity and political disunity of the Northwest Indians were assets to the region's federationists, since the absence of large and cohesive Indian nations obliged northern federation­ ist warriors to cooperate with one another and to insist that only through unity could they defend their towns. Their victory over Josiah Harmar vin­ dicated this position, and eventually inspired southern warriors to follow their example. lOo The federal government found it difficult to manage the Northwest Indians-and impossible to control Kentuckians. Despite proclamations forbidding attacks on Indians and federal troops to enforce them, Kentucky militias had defied national authority and raided Native American towns for four years. They had alienated the neutral Indians whose towns they attacked, and strengthened the position of federationists who claimed that the Americans only understood force. When Washington and Knox reluc­ tantly approved an offensive against the Wabash Indians, it was not merely to chastise "banditti." They were also trying to control wrathful Kentucky settlers who otherwise would have attacked the nearest friendly Indians.tol The ironic, if predictable, consequence of the "Knoxonian" plan was to make a large part of the frontier more ungovernable. At the inception of the new federal government, Federalists had believed that a strong, rational, honorable central authority could bring peace to the turbulent "western world." Within a few years, however, the notion seemed merely a gentle­ man's illusion.

6

AL{

lJ&��

1Var and :7fppeasement, 1790 -1793

o governing class can free itself of illusions, for as Edmund Mor­ gan reminds us, the central idea of government-that a particular minority can legitimately coerce the majority-is itself a form of . collective "make-believe." While some of the Federalists' illusions were use­ ful to them, on the frontier they embraced an unworkable fantasy: that a weak nation-state could impose its will on peoples who had always resisted outside interference. Some of the consequences of that belief, like the fail­ ure of Harmar's expedition, manifested themselves early in Washington's presidency. Others would take more time to emerge.! The notion that the a federal government based on the Atlantic sea­ board could readily control the Trans-Appalachian West bred subordinate illusions. One was the revival of what Dorothy Jones called "the Iroquois mystique": the belief that the Six Nations still wielded influence over the Northwest Indians and could induce their federationists to make peace. A second was the idea that an army of short-term volunteers could reduce a strong Indian confederacy to obedience. A third was the belief that treaties and a territorial government could keep the peace in the Tennessee Valley, even though they had failed to do so in the Ohio country. Federal officials could have used prior experience to dispel each misconception, but men like Henry Knox clung to them for reassurance as they advanced through the labyrinth of frontier policymaking.2

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129

TIMOTHY PICKERING A N D H I S P R O T E G E S

Contingency is usually policy's worst enemy. An incident on Pine Creek in northern Pennsylvania threatened to unravel the Federalists' frontier pro­ gram at a critical point. That event was the tomahawking of two Seneca hunters by vengeful white backwoodsmen in the summer of 1790, just as Josiah Harmar's army was preparing to march.3 The Allegheny and Genesee Senecas had been seeking rapprochement with the United States since the mid-1780s. In 1786, Cornplanter and five other Senecas traveled to Philadelphia to meet with Congress and demand an explanation of the Treaty of Paris, the terms of which, they believed, did not apply to the Iroquois. Congress gave the visitors medals, a copy of the treaty, and assurances that the Thirteen Fires would "take pity" on them and send them a resident agent.4 Though the Six Nations' agent would not arrive until 1792, Cornplanter's visit initiated an entente cordial between the Senecas and the U. S. govern­ ment. Seneca observers gave Richard Butler intelligence on the Northwest Indian confederacy, Seneca hunters and women traded at Fort Franklin, and Seneca leaders attending the Fort Harmar conference urged the North­ west Indians to make peace with the United States.s The murders on Pine Creek, however, were the sort of episode that usu­ ally led to war. (The commandant of Fort Franklin hoped that the culprits "might be given up to the Indians & be by them burnt at the stake.") Seneca chiefs, observing that whites had killed eleven of their people since 1783, demanded restitution from President Washington and the Pennsylvania executive council. Washington decided to send a commissioner to condole with the Senecas, hoping this would prevent further bloodshed.6 The man Washington selected to smooth the waters seemed an unlikely choice for the job. Colonel Timothy Pickering, born in Salem, Massachu­ setts, and educated at Harvard, had distinguished himself during the Revolutionary War by his incompetent performance as the Army's quartermaster-general. By 1790, however, Pickering was also a federal of­ fice seeker with powerful friends. The president apparently decided to test Pickering with a temporary (albeit sensitive) commission before entrusting him with a permanent office? The colonel did have some experience with frontier negotiations. After the war, Pickering had become a speculator in Susquehanna Valley land, and in 1786 some associates in the Pennsylvania Assembly asked him to

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help end the rebellion in the Wyoming Valley. The legislature, which had just come under the control of a conservative political party, hoped that a new county government for Wyoming and a property settlement with the Yankees would bring peace to northeastern Pennsylvania and credit to their administration. Pickering, who knew that the restoration of order would in­ crease the value of his lands, agreed to serve as the assembly's point man.8 Traveling to the Wyoming Valley, Pickering met the old settlers and promised that if they took a loyalty oath to Pennsylvania, he would resettle in Wilkes-Barre and urge the assembly to guarantee their land titles. In March 1787, on Pickering's advice, the legislature passed a Confirming Act legalizing the land claims of all pre-1782 Wyoming settlers. Shortly thereaf­ ter, Pickering, armed with seven judicial and administrative offices, moved to Wilkes-Barre with his family and helped establish a court and a local grievance committee.9 Pickering proved an able negotiator with the Wyoming Yankees, who trusted him as a fellow New Englander. However, he always maintained an attitude of superiority. He privately scorned the Yankee settlers as ragged and unkempt peasants, and confessed that "I did not imagine such general apparent wretchedness could be found in the United States." He told a min­ ister that he wished to build a school and a church for the locals to "prevent their degenerating into a savage state, to which they have been verging." When one Yankee farmer told Pickering that the old settlers had a cultiva­ tor's right to the soil that superseded Pennsylvania's claims, he disdainfully rejected the idea. Land rights, Pickering said, derived not from "the laws of nature" but from "the positive laws of society"; the Wyoming settlers could not secure those rights through their labor but had to receive them from a benevolent government.lO Not surprisingly, Pickering had no sympathy for the insurgents, whom he derided as "a few villains of some ability but chiefly of desperate for­ tunes." In October 1787, he moved to decapitate the insurgency by arresting rebel leader John Franklin and dispatching him to Philadelphia for trial. Eight months later, Franklin's associates retaliated: Several men abducted Pickering from his home, hauled him into the woods on the end of a chain, and kept him hostage for twenty days, hoping to trade him for their im­ prisoned leader. Pickering refused to write a letter requesting Franklin's release, Pennsylvania's executive council refused to negotiate, and Picker­ ing's captors finally released him. The colonel then assembled a posse and pursued the "ruffians" into the backcountry, capturing two and mortally

"War and :7ippeasement'

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wounding a third. Such experiences could not have improved Pickering's impression of frontiersmen, and when Washington asked him to negotiate with the Senecas two years later, he was ready to sympathize with Indians who had been injured by white settlers.l1 In 1790, the Pennsylvania Assembly, influenced by speculators with designs on the Wyoming Valley, repealed the Confirming Act. Pickering's fortunes fell with his property values, and he applied to Hamilton and Washington for a job. Appointed "plenipotentiary to the Genesee nations," Pickering resolved to make a thorough reconciliation with the Senecas, in hopes that success in his commission would lead to bigger officesY ' As a negotiator on the Pennsylvania frontier, Pickering had acquired several skills that would serve him well as an Indian commissioner: appre­ ciation for the importance of ritual, recognition of the power of apparently spontaneous gestures, and the ability to portray his patron government as a font of benevolence. The colonel employed these skills during his first meet­ ing with the Senecas, held at the town of Tioga in November 1790. About two hundred and twenty Seneca men and women attended the ten-day conference with Colonel Pickering, who had previously corre­ sponded with former Indian interpreters to learn the protocols of Iroquois diplomacy. Pickering plied his Indian guests with food and rum, partici­ pated in a condolence ritual for the slain hunters, and gave the Senecas gifts and wampum belts "as an atonement for the blood of your brothers." He also announced that Pennsylvania had posted a reward for the murderers, and gave the chiefs a copy of the federal Trade and Intercourse Act, as­ suring them that the U.S. government would give them equal justice with whites.13 The Senecas probably guessed that Pickering's solicitousness was the product of his government's difficult circumstances. Their chiefs were well aware of the war in the Ohio Valley, and in fact had been trying to steer a middle course between federationists and white settlers for the past year. At a council in September 1789, Buffalo Creek Senecas patiently heard Shaw­ nee warriors denounce them for "turn[ing] your faces to the Americans," then urged the Northwest Indians to remain united and said the Senecas might join their struggle. A year later, Cornplanter told Pennsylvania farm­ ers that the Allegheny Senecas would help defend them from attack by the Northwest Indians. Having recently played something of a double game with federationists and Americans, Seneca leaders could understand that the U.S. government was doing the same thing-reaffirming treaties with

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the Iroquois while making war on their western neighbors-because it was also in trouble.14 The solemnity of condolence ceremonies and the imperatives of diplo­ macy prevented the Senecas from expressing any cynicism about Picker­ ing's motives. Moreover, Pickering was potentially a great asset to the chiefs, for his ignorance of the Senecas' factional divisions and back room deals allowed them to present themselves to him as stoic, blameless victims of white aggression. At dinner with Pickering, Seneca men discussed their nation's recent losses of land but described these "misfortunes with cheer­ fulness, and even with mirth." Chief Red Jacket, also known as Sagoye­ watha (the Keeper Awake), painted a somewhat darker picture of Iroquois­ European relations, observing that whites had cheated his people since they first arrived in America. Pickering replied that his government could do nothing about the Senecas' previous cessions but would restrict future land sales under the Trade and Intercourse Act.IS Meanwhile, the Senecas took pains to praise and co-opt the commis­ sioner. Red Jacket and other chiefs lauded Pickering's speeches and asked him for certificates attesting to their good character. Seneca matrons adopted the colonel as a fictive kinsman named Kanehsadeh (the Hill of Peace). One chief j oked that Pickering should strengthen the bond by mar­ rying one of the women at the conference. Pickering accepted the joshing with awkward good humor.16 The elders' treatment had the desired effect. After returning home, Pick­ ering told correspondents that "I entertain a better opinion of our tawny neighbors than I used to do, and I firmly believe most of their revengeful hostilities are occasioned by the robberies murders & encroachments . . . they receive from our frontier white savages," who "appear to me more fierce and revengeful than . . . the Indians." This attitude was similar to that of other Federalists, but Pickering's experiences in the Wyoming Val­ ley had sharpened his disdain. It turned to disgust when he heard that the Pennsylvania Court of Oyer and Terminer had acquitted one of the accused murderers, Samuel Doyle. "It is in the highest degree mortifying . . . that the bulk of the frontier inhabitants consider the killing of Indians in time of peace to be no crime," Pickering attested. He predicted that if neither Pennsylvania nor the U.S. government made an example of such men, it could at best expect "that such meetings as I have held with the Indians will frequently be necessary." At worst, Seneca warriors might join the North­ west confederacy.17

War and :7fppeasemen�

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Pickering's predictions came to pass. In March 1791, following the North­ west Indians' winter campaign, frontier militia killed four more Senecas in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. In April, a Delaware, Wyandot, and Seneca war party killed nine Pennsylvania settlers. Pennsylvanians then retaliated by plundering boats carrying diplomatic gifts to Cornplanter's town.18 Cornplanter was then returning from a meeting with President Wash­ ington in Philadelphia, which had become the new federal capital in the fall of 1790. Cornplanter had given Washington a long address on U.S.-Iroquois relations, devoting particular attention to the devastation of Sullivan's ex­ pedition, the humiliation of the Fort Stanwix treaty, and the Six Nations' victimization by land speculators. Washington, like P ickering, replied that his government could not reverse old land deals but would henceforth pro­ tect the Senecas from unscrupulous whites. He also promised his guests presents to bury "the miseries of the late war." By the spring of 1791, how­ ever, Pennsylvanians had annulled two of the federal government's acts of conciliation-Pickering's promise of justice in the courts and Washington's promise of compensation.19 Washington and Henry Knox recognized that their government could not risk a war with the Six Nations. Knox wanted Iroquois chiefs to take peace messages to the Wabash Indians, and if that mission failed Arthur St. Clair was preparing another offensive against the Northwest federation­ ists and could not spare soldiers for peacekeeping in Iroquoia. The secretary therefore asked Pickering, who now possessed "a high reputation" with the Senecas, to serve again as a commissioner to the Iroquois and "remove all causes of j ealousies and discontents."2o P ickering readily accepted this second commission, as he still wanted a permanent job in the administration. He had another motive for wanting to meet the Iroquois again: he wished to introduce them to the arts of Anglo­ American civilization. Having enjoyed the Senecas' civilities at Tioga and having heard of their "extensive fields" and towns, Pickering believed that they possessed sufficient "order and industry" to be receptive to further education. "I cannot admit the idea," he wrote, "that their minds are cast in a mold so different from that of the rest of their species as to be incapable of cultivation."21 Some critics, Pickering admitted, might observe that previous experi­ ments in Indian education had yielded disappointing results, but this was because they trained Native American boys for " literary professions," leav-

1 34

'Red gentlemen and 'White- Savages

ing them ill-suited to a plowman's life. The federal government should in­ stead build schools of "plain learning and husbandry" and present each Indian graduate with "a cow, a yoke of oxen, a plough [and] a cart." The pro­ gram would supposedly convince Indian men to abandon hunting for ag­ riculture and allow them to satisfy their wants through "industry," thereby obviating the need to give them presents. Pickering proposed to introduce his scheme to the Six Nations at the next conference, expecting they would accept it as the most rational course open to them.22 The proposal won Washington's approval because it accorded with his administration's civilization policy. For five years, commissioners and con­ gressmen had proposed that the federal government give the Indians agri­ cultural tools and instruction in "useful branches of mechanics," and Knox had incorporated their proposals into the Treaty of New York. Moreover, the Allegheny Senecas had indicated they would welcome technical assis­ tance. During his 1790 visit to Philadelphia, Cornplanter said that the Sen­ ecas would learn to farm if white Americans "leave us and our children any land to till." He recognized that the "civilized" arts carried benefits beyond those advertised by the administration, among them another rhetorical tool Indians could use to resist the Americans' demands for land.23 To help demonstrate his government's peaceful intentions, Pickering asked several Philadelphia Quakers to accompany him and help make the case for agricultural education. The Friends were glad to oblige. Since the early 1780s, they had engaged in an extensive campaign of philanthropy, including poor relief, prison reform, and opposition to the slave trade, in order to regenerate their public influence. A humanitarian alliance with the national government offered the Quakers another opportunity to revive their political fortunes.24 Pickering left for the treaty ground at Newtown (present-day Elmira, New York) in June 1791, accompanied by his Quaker companions, his son Timothy, and three tons of supplies. He was joined at Newtown by nearly one thousand Iroquois men and women, who filled the next few weeks with feasting, dancing, and speech making. As always, the Indian conferees had their own agendas, which made it difficult for Pickering to fulfill his own.2S One part of Pickering's agenda that he decided to ignore was a request by the secretary of war that he recruit Seneca scouts for St. Clair's army. Knox believed that young men's "passion for war" would draw the Iroquois into the Northwest Indian War one way or another, and that it was better to have them fighting for the United States than against it. After broaching

War and :7Ippeasemen�

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the subject of military recruitment and meeting a frosty reception, Picker­ ing decided it would be irrational to press the Iroquois to fight when he wanted them to farm, and so he instead urged younger men at the confer­ ence to "check your ardour" and "ask your fathers" to describe "the miseries of war."26 Pickering's recommendation that Iroquois men become farmers also generated some resistance, mainly from Red Jacket. The previous Novem­ ber, Sagoyewatha had lectured Pickering on moral economy, telling him that the Great Spirit intended whites and Indians to follow different life­ ways, the one to farm and the other to hunt. The speech placed Red Jacket at loggerheads with the colonel, and during the Newtown conference, the two men argued with one another over other issues, like Pickering's proposal that the Iroquois replace wampum belts with written records or the Six Na­ tions' request for a gunsmith. When Pickering interrupted one of Red Jack­ et's speeches, the offended chief remarked "It won't do to talk much more, perhaps we are deceived in the whole." Outraged, Pickering replied that Red Jacket had insulted him and the president, but the chief held his ground. The two men would not reconcile until the end of the council, and would remain in disagreement about the usefulness of the civilization program?7 Others at the conference sought to take advantage of Pickering's de­ votion to the idea of Indian civilization. One was Hendrick Aupaumut, a Stockbridge Mohican sachem and former Continental Army officer who asked to serve the United States as an emissary to the Northwest Indians. Aupaumut's people were a community of Mohicans who had allied with the Americans during the Revolutionary War, then sold their lands and moved to Oneida country. The Stockbridges had ties to several Northwest Indian nations, and Hendrick believed that a Stockbridge embassy to the North­ west confederation would have a good chance of success, thereby shoring up his people's influence with the United States and increasing their inde­ pendence from the Oneidas. Pickering was impressed by Aupaumut's "civi­ lized" traits-his command of English, support for agriculture, and opposi­ tion to alcohol-and agreed to employ the Mohican diplomat.28 Some petitioners sought more immediate and practical benefits: They wanted the U.S. government to endorse land grants or leases opposed by white claimants. The Genesee Senecas had offered Ebenezer Allen, the white husband of a Seneca woman, two 11,soo-acre land grants for his bira­ cial daughters Mary and Chloe. However, they feared that Robert Morris, the receiver for the bankrupt Phelps-Gorham Company, would oppose the

'Red gentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages grants as an infringement on his rights. In addition, several Cayuga chiefs wanted to lease a tract on Cayuga Lake to James Richardson, but feared Governor Clinton would consider this a violation of the Cayugas' treaty with New York.29 Pickering agreed to endorse both transactions, arguing in his official report that there were sound reasons for doing so. Washington had prom­ ised the Iroquois that they could dispose of their lands as they pleased, and the Cayugas believed their compact with New York gave them the right to sign leases, while the Senecas considered Allen's daughters members of the nation "agreeably to the rule of descent among them, which is in the female line," and thus eligible to own land. Moreover, Pickering believed that endorsing the Cayuga lease and the Allen deed would place the govern­ ment's imprimatur on the principle of "separate occupancy and enjoyment of land," one of the institutional bases of American civilization. Approving the two agreements would both promote goodwill and encourage the Iro­ quois to adopt individual land ownership.30 Both land deals ended badly. Ebenezer Allen sold his daughters' lands to Robert Morris, then moved to Canada, abandoning his Seneca wife Sally and threatening to beat her if she followed him. Meanwhile, Governor George Clinton declared the Cayuga lease illegal under the 1789 Treaty of Albany and protested to Washington and Knox. To Pickering's mortifica­ tion, the president and secretary of war (who wanted to avoid a legal battle with New York) upheld Clinton's decision and disavowed their commis­ sioner's action. Sheriff Abraham Hardenbergh denounced Pickering as a "damn'd rascal" and drove twenty families off of the Richardson tract, then burned their homes.31 The dispute with New York did not adversely affect Pickering's career, for he ultimately fulfilled his principal assignment: ensuring the contin­ ued amity of the Six Nations. On July 15, Iroquois chiefs and captains reaf­ firmed their friendship with the United States, and Pickering gave them several hundred dollars' worth of gifts. The next month, the commissioner received his hoped-for reward: Washington appointed him postmaster gen­ eral. Pickering settled his affairs in Wilkes-Barre and prepared to leave his old job as frontier negotiator. Yet, his involvement with Indian affairs was far from over, for by year's end, the U.S. government would need every dip­ lomatic asset it could muster, including both Pickering and his Iroquois kinsmen.32

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" " A L IT T L E S M O K E A R I SE S W E S T WA R D

The crisis that beset the American government in late 1791 was far larger than the one it faced the previous year. After Josiah Harmar's defeat and the Northwest Indian confederation's winter campaign, Secretary Knox proposed, and the president and Congress approved, another punitive ex­ pedition against the Wabash Indians. The new campaign, led by Governor St. Clair, would include twice as many gunmen as Harmar's: two full regi­ ments of regulars, another two thousand "levies" recruited for six months, and auxiliaries of militia and Indian scouts. Once assembled, the task force would march to Kekionga, destroy the remaining federationist towns there, and build a fort on the ruins.33 It was a straightforward plan, complicated by the previous year's nego­ tiations with the Senecas. Cornplanter and other Seneca leaders had of­ fered to take a peace message to the Wabash Indians, and in March 1791, Knox sent Thomas Proctor to escort an Iroquois party to the Maumee River, there to meet with the federationists and invite them to a treaty. In July, Pickering sent Hendrick Aupaumut on a similar mission. Given the War Department's concurrent military preparations, it is likely that neither Washington nor Knox expected these peace missions to succeed, and that their main purpose was to shore up the United States' alliance with the Iroquois and Stockbridges.34 Since St. Clair would be assembling a large force in a remote part of the country, K nox expected that several months would elapse between the dispatch of the peace missions and the launching of the governor's cam­ paign. He doubted that Kentuckians would be willing to wait so long before launching their own offensive. President Washington therefore authorized two federally-funded militia expeditions against the Wea and Kickapoo towns on the lower Wabash River. These raids would take place in late spring and would presumably deter Wabash Indian warriors from attack­ ing American settlements. They would also soften up the Northwest con­ federacy for the knockout blow that St. Clair would deliver. "The combined effect of the desultory and main expeditions," Knox predicted, "will humble the Indians and induce them to peace." The secretary proposed that the fed­ eral government strip the Weas, Shawnees, and Miamis of their lands east of the Wabash after the victory, and consider expelling the Delawares and Wyandots from their reservation south of Lake Erie.35 Few of the War Department's diplomatic or military operations went as

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages planned. Thomas Proctor received hospitable treatment from the Senecas but made it no farther west than Buffalo Creek, where Seneca chiefs indi­ cated that they had gotten cold feet about accompanying him. Red Jacket claimed Proctor's messages to the Wabash Indians were too warlike and worried that Proctor and his companions "shall not live long when the bad Indians see us." The Keeper-Awake had reason to be nervous: On May 12, federationist warriors came to Buffalo Creek and demanded that the Six Nations surrender Proctor to them. (The Iroquois refused.)36 On May 15, several Iroquois matrons, after reminding Proctor and the chiefs that they were "the owners of the land," tried to break the deadlock by appointing fifteen chiefs and captains to help Proctor negotiate with the Wabash Indians. A few days later, however, Fort Niagara's commandant Andrew Gordon mooted the entire affair by denying Proctor permission to charter a schooner on Lake Erie. Gordon might have feared Proctor was a spy, but he also wanted to prevent the Americans from negotiating directly with the Northwest Indians, as his superiors in Quebec now wanted to act as their intermediaries. Since Thomas Proctor had to reach the Maumee River before the Kentucky militia rode out, and since the only fast route to the Maumee was via Lake Erie, Proctor had to return home.37 Hendrick Aupaumut didn't fare much better. The Stockbridge sachem reached Fort Niagara on July 21 and attended a federationist council, at which Chippewa, Delaware, and Wyandot captains expressed their "stron­ gest affections" for the Mohicans. The federationists then told Aupaumut that they categorically refused to give up their lands north of the Ohio, explaining that any concessions would only whet the Americans' appetites. They also reported that they had "complete[dl the Union" they began build­ ing several years earlier, that their Miami and Shawnee allies were "hot for war," and that the British had promised to supply them and build a fort at the mouth of the Maumee.38 If the Northwest Indians were pleased to see the Mohicans, Joseph Brant-who still aspired to lead their confederation-his sister Molly, and the British Indian Superintendent John Butler were not. They derided the Mohicans as "Yankee" meddlers and spies. Aupaumut insisted that his "business is with my own color" and that his mission was peaceful even though "a little smoke arises westward." The Brants accompanied Aupau­ mut to their Grand River reserve, but Joseph refused to escort him to the Wabash, and so the Mohicans returned home.39 The "smoke arising westward" hung over the Wabash Val ley, where the

War and :7fppeasemen�

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first Kentucky militia expedition had destroyed its targets. On June 1, 1791, Charles Scott's five hundred gunmen reached Ouiatenon; burned six Wea, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi towns; and killed thirty-two people and took fifty-eight prisoners. Scott released twelve prisoners and sent them upriver with a message to the other Wabash Indians, proclaiming that the United States had "stretched forth the arm of power" and would do so again unless the federationists came to terms.40 Scott's expedition made "the people of Kentucky wonderfully pleased with the government," but it also alerted the upper Wabash towns and in­ spired retaliation. In the summer, Northwest Indian war parties harassed white settlements on the Ohio River, killing or capturing a dozen people. In August, James Wilkinson raided the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua, but found that most of the inhabitants had already fled. As short rations and lame horses prevented Wilkinson's men from advancing farther, he burned the town and returned home.41 Arthur St. Clair's expedition was not ready to march until early fall. Low water in the Ohio River impeded the shipment of men and supplies to Cin­ cinnati, and when St. Clair finally left his encampment on September 15, he was accompanied by only half of his planned force-about two thou­ sand men. The diminished army made slow progress, spending three weeks building an advanced post (Fort Hamilton) and another ten days construct­ ing a deposit post (Fort Jefferson) sixty miles from Cincinnati. Thereafter, the weather turned wet and cold, St. Clair's supply train bogged down, ra­ tions grew short, and soldiers began to desert. The governor tried to stop the loss of men by hanging two deserters, but he could not prevent his lev­ ies, whose terms of service were expiring, from leaving. By late October, St. Clair had only fourteen hundred men left in his army.42 The confederated Indians had been expecting St. Clair for months. Their scouts tracked St. Clair's movements throughout October, and on the night of November 3, the soldiers slept badly because their sentinels were firing at infiltrators. Shortly before dawn the next day, as St. Clair's officers were dis­ missing the men from morning parade, a force of about a thousand North­ west Indian warriors assaulted the army's encampment on St. Mary's Creek, twenty-nine miles north of Fort Jefferson. The attackers rushed from tree to tree, some pausing to gun down the army's sentries and officers, while the rest enveloped and ambuscaded the main body of troops. St. Clair's militia promptly fled, while his regulars and officers stood, fought, and died, until "the ground was literally covered with the dead." After three hours, St. Clair

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'Red gentlemen and 'lfJhite- Savages

rallied the survivors and ordered them to break out and retreat, while he remained in camp until he could join the rear guard.43 The few American survivors left their wounded at Fort Jefferson, then retreated to Fort Hamilton. Despite St. Clair's skillful management of the withdrawal, his losses had been catastrophic: of 1,400 Americans engaged in the battle, 630 officers and soldiers had been killed and 283 wounded. The former included St. Clair's second-in-command, Richard Butler, whose scalp a Shawnee warrior sent to Joseph Brant. The general also abandoned his artillery, which the Indians dragged off and buried.44 For federationists the battle of November 4 was an unalloyed triumph. The victors gathered scalps and trophies, inscribed red "hieroglyphics" on nearby trees, and carried off their twenty to thirty dead. One warrior who participated in the battle later boasted that "his own arm was quite weary with tomahawking," though he mistakenly told his story to a party of Chickasaw warriors who had been scouting for the American army. (The Chickasaws then killed him.) His bragging was justifiable, for Native Amer­ icans had not inflicted so great a defeat on white soldiers since the 1755 Battle of Monongahela-an encounter that had helped start a world war.4S

T H E PEACE O F F E NS I V E

St. Clair's defeat ignited a political firestorm in the eastern states. Criticism of the campaign began with Adjutant Winthrop Sargent, who attributed the defeat to the wretched quality of the Second Regiment-"offscourings of large towns and cities, enervated by . . . every species of vice." It soon spread to eastern essayists and editors, who blasted St. Clair, Knox, and Washington for their overconfidence and for conducting a campaign solely on behalf of land speculators. Some charged the administration with hav­ ing "forgotten altogether the rights of the Indians"; others suggested that the secretary of war had deliberately engineered the defeat to justify en­ largement of the army.46 Despite such criticism, Congress in February 1792 voted to create a new army of five infantry regiments and two artillery battalions-five thousand men and officers-under the command of General Anthony Wayne. With St. Clair's army shattered, and several states' frontier counties exposed to attack, the legislators had little choice. The House and Senate also approved an increase in tariffs to provide the $525,000 required for the new regi­ ments. Much of the support for the new army and taxes came from Vir-

War and :7ippeasement'

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ginia, South Carolina, and Georgia congressmen, as these states' citizens were most in favor of vigorous military action on the frontier.47 In March, the House of Representatives created a committee of inquiry into St. Clair's defeat. The committee's report exonerated the governor and attributed the defeat to inexperienced recruits, bad weather, and inferior supplies provided by contractor William Duer. Since Duer was in debtor's prison, and since his patron Alexander Hamilton had become a lightning rod for critics of the administration, he made a more politically convenient target than St. Clair. It was also more convenient for the committee to blame the fiasco on American malfeasance, rather than acknowledge the intelligence and marksmanship of Indian warriors.48 In the meantime, as antiwar sentiment grew in the Northeast, Knox wrote an apologia for the administration's Indian policy. The secretary in­ sisted that the federal government's conduct had been temperate and hu­ mane, designed to "conciliat[el and attach . . . all the neighboring Indians to the United States" and "lead them by degrees to a more settled and civi­ lized mode of existence." Harmar's and St. Clair's expeditions, he asserted, had been unavoidable responses to "the unprovoked aggressions" of Native American bandits who would not treat with the United States.49 To prove the administration's good intentions, and to forestall an In­ dian counterattack while Anthony Wayne reconstituted the army, Knox authorized a new diplomatic campaign to bring the Northwest Indians to the treaty ground. (If the federationists continued to fight, however, Knox wrote that "it will be considered as the dictates of humanity to punish with exemplary severity so incorrigible a race of men.")50 The first phase in the peace offensive began in December 1791, when Pickering and Reverend Samuel Kirkland invited Iroquois chiefs to Phila­ delphia to discuss the advantages of "husbandry and the useful arts." On March 14, fifty chiefs and warriors, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and Hendrick Aupaumut, arrived at the capital. For the next month and a half, federal officials and local worthies wined and dined the visitors, filled their hours with "amusements and invitations," and gave them uniforms and medals. When the Oneida Peter Otsiquette died of pleurisy, Knox orga­ nized a state funeral which drew ten thousand spectators and marchers. Pickering lectured the Iroquois on the arts of American civilization, and Washington promised them an annuity of fifteen hundred dolars for agri­ cultural tools, livestock, and teachers' salaries. He also appointed a resident agent to the Six Nations, Israel Chapin of Canandaigua. 51

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Philip Freneau, editor of the opposition National Gazette, criticized the administration for lavishing attention on "savage princes," arguing that such treatment would encourage Indians to attack Americans so that they could receive gifts at the peace negotiations. Knox and Washington, how­ ever, expected to receive a quid pro quo: They wanted Six Nations chiefs to help convince the Northwest Indians of the Thirteen Fires' good intentions. Pickering conferred with the chiefs, explaining the terms of the Treaties of Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar and marking the United States' land claims on a map in red, so that the Iroquois could show those claims to the federationists. The Iroquois "were exceedingly pleased to find the claims of the United States so limited," for Joseph Brant had once showed them a newspaper containing a map of Jefferson's 1784 plan for western states, and charged the Americans with seeking all Indian lands east of the Mis­ sissippi. Pickering's intermediaries hoped that the Washington administra­ tion's more-limited claims would mollify federationist captains. Pickering also told them to offer the Northwest Indians a treaty council at a place of their choosing, substantial gifts, and hostages (army officers) as surety for the safety of their chiefs.52 Other emissaries would precede and follow the Iroquois. In January, Henry Knox dispatched Peter Pond and William Steedman to Detroit with peace messages for the Wyandots, Ottawas, and Chippewas. Pickering asked Hendrick Aupaumut to proceed to the federationists' council ahead of the Iroquois to ensure that the United States' invitation arrived quickly. John Hamtramck sent Vincennes magistrates to arrange a truce with the Wea and Miami towns on the lower Wabash. Knox also ordered army of­ ficers John Hardin and Alexander Trueman to carry peace belts to the Mi­ ami towns, and an address urging the federationists "not [to] suffer the ad­ vantages you have gained to mislead your judgment, and influence you to continue the war."53 Knox had even bigger guns in his diplomatic arsenal. In May, he asked Rufus Putnam, a territorial judge, to convene a council at Fort Jefferson with the Wabash and Illinois Indians, and to offer those nations substantial concessions: payment for the Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar cessions (to which they had not assented), relinquishment of all land claims beyond the line of cession, help attaining "the blessings of civilization," and the return of the prisoners whom Scott had taken the previous summer. All this would be preparatory to a conference in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, to be attended by two chiefs from each of the nations who met with Putnam.54

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Knox's other notable was Joseph Brant, who came to Philadelphia in June at Pickering's invitation. President Washington personally asked Brant to help "undeceive the . . . hostile tribes" about the government's intentions, while Knox offered Brant a generous bribe if he used his good offices on behalf of the United States. Brant politely declined Knox's offer and tried to persuade him to accept a Muskingum River boundary, but the secretary re­ fused. Shortly before leaving Philadelphia, Brant visited George Hammond, the new British minister to the United States, and informed him of Knox's proposals, assuring Hammond that they did not "meet . . . his approbation personally."55 The diplomatic offensive of 1792 would ultimately end in a series of fail­ ures. British officials denied Steedman and Pond permission to charter a Lake Erie schooner. Wyandot warriors killed Major Trueman and Captain Hardin in June, while they were traveling under a flag of truce. Rufus Put­ nam asked some of the Seneca scouts who had served in the 1791 campaign to deliver another treaty invitation to the Wabash Indians; Delawares sub­ sequently killed two of the Senecas. Meanwhile, a hundred Ohio Cherokee warriors killed and scalped sixteen soldiers working in the fields outside Fort Jefferson, causing Judge Putnam to move his treaty conference from that fort to the more secure town of Vincennes.56 Putnam's council otherwise began quietly on September 24. Nearly seven hundred men, women, and children from the Eel Creek, Wea, Kicka­ poo, Piankeshaw, Potawatomi, Peoria, Kaskaskia, and Mascouten nations assembled in Vincennes. Putnam took pains to put his guests at their ease. "If we mean to make a peace with them," he wrote Henry Knox, "we ought to accommodate ourselves to their ideas of propriety." The judge wore his civilian clothes, even though he held a general's rank from the Revolution­ ary War, and introduced himself to the chiefs as an "agent of the great chief General Washington," so that the other chiefs would recognize him as one of their own. He brought several tons of flour, beef, and whiskey to Vin­ cennes, plus blankets and clothing for seven hundred people and medals, armbands, and hats for the chiefs. He hired four translators, including a former Miami captive named William Wells. Also accompanying him were the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder and the Wea and Potawatomi prisoners taken by Scott's militia, whom Putnam released on the first day of the conference.57 The Wabash and Illinois Indians met Putnam with suitable decorum. The thirty-one chiefs in attendance, who included Jean-Baptiste Ducoigne

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and the influential Potawatomi La Gesse, shook the commissioner's hand and smoked the calumet with him. Some gave Putnam "passes and recom­ mendations" from previous councils, and most gave him white wampum strings and short speeches. And all insisted, politely but firmly, that their people opposed American settlements north of the Ohio River. Several told Putnam that surrendering their lands would give offense to their ances­ tors and to the "Author of Life." The chiefs instead urged their American "older brother" to emulate their old French fathers, who "never craved our lands" nor "set fire to our towns." If Americans wanted a lasting peace, they should come to the Northwest as traders and mediators, not settlers and conquerors. 58 In reply, Putnam reminded the chiefs that their predecessors had given the French lands in Illinois and the Wabash Valley "to raise corn on and [as] a range for . . . cattle." He also promised that his government would never take land from Native Americans without paying for it. After the chiefs conferred among themselves, Ducoigne replied on their behalf that they did not object to the existing white settlements north of the Ohio River, only future ones. Since this was the position Knox had instructed Putnam to take, the judge consented.59 On September 27, Putnam and the chiefs signed the Treaty of Vincennes and read it into several belts, to provide the Indian signatories with a mne­ monic record of the conference. As this was the first treaty between the United States and seven of the nations attending the council, most of the articles simply established peace and obliged the Indians to return captives. Article IV, however, was extraordinary: It decreed that the Wabash and Illi­ nois Indians' lands "originally belong to" them and that they had the "right to sell and a right to refuse to sell" those lands. The United States' ten other post-Revolutionary treaties had only "allotted" land to the Indian signato­ ries, or provided them with a "guarantee," implying that Native American lands ultimately belonged to the United States. The Vincennes treaty vested full ownership in the Indians: They could refuse to sell land to the United States, or could sell it to foreign nations. The fourth article was consistent with Putnam's instructions, but it was a huge concession-a concession of sovereignty-to the signatories. Its inclusion in the Vincennes treaty re­ flected not merely the determination but the desperation of the federal gov­ ernment for peace in 1792.60 While the Treaty of Vincennes was a valuable indicator of the adminis­ tration's state of mind, it was somewhat meaningless as a peace agreement.

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Only four of the signatory nations had ever fought Americans, and while the chiefs at the conference promised to live in peace with white Ameri­ cans, they could not impose their agreement on their young men. A Wea matron drew attention to this reality when she asked Putnam to take pity on warriors who had joined the Northwest confederacy, claiming that drink and the Miamis had spurred them to mischief. She did not guarantee that they would not attack again.61 The treaty became a legal nullity the following year. Washington sub­ mitted the Vincennes accord to the Senate in February 1793, but the upper house rejected it because Article IV did not protect the United States' pre­ emption right to Indian land. Meanwhile, while traveling to Philadelphia, a party of influential Northwest Indian chiefs and warriors caught small­ pox, which killed nine of them (including La Gesse). Putnam and Knox had inadvertently deprived their government of some of its strongest Indian supporters.62 If Putnam's treaty had been a disappointment, the concurrent Iroquois­ Stockbridge mission to the federationist council was a debacle. Earlier in the year, the Northwest federationists had relocated their headquarters to The Glaize, a multitribal complex of towns at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers. In September 1792, the captains of the confederacy be­ gan a ten-day-long conference to discuss the future of their movement, an event attended by over two thousand people, including Hendrick Aupau­ mut, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, and Red Jacket. Federationist leaders like Painted Pole (Shawnee) and Buckongehelas (Delaware) initially welcomed the Iroquois as comrades, plying them with cornbread and venison and ex­ pressing their determination to resist white Americans' demands.63 Red Jacket warned the federationists against overconfidence and urged them to make peace with the Thirteen Fires. He argued that they could do so and retain their independence, for the Six Nations had developed a pragmatic and instrumental relationship with the United States since 1783. The Iroquois had "created [aJ new father near at home for our protection," and continued to negotiate the terms of their compact with that father, for "we have not completed . . . all the treaties we attended to with the Town Destroyer."64 The federationists rejected Red Jacket's advice. Painted Pole attributed the confederacy's victories not to luck but to the Master of Life, "who looks on us with as much or perhaps more compassion than those of a fairer com­ plexion." A Kickapoo demanded the Senecas' instructions so that he could

Red (jentlemen and 'White- Savages burn the "paper . . . written by Town Destroyer." He and others denounced the Six Nations as "coward[s]" who "deserve punishment . . . for fall[ing] in with white men," said that they would fight to the death to defend their lands, and ordered the Iroquois to "go back home and mind your own busi­ ness." The Senecas hastily complied.6s Hendrick Aupaumut, meanwhile, had arrived at The Glaize in July and spent two months conferring with chiefs and warriors there. He concluded there was no chance the federationists would sign a treaty with the United States. Even those captains who were open to a land deal with the Phila­ delphia government either doubted its ability to control white settlers, or opposed Knox and Washington's "civilization" program, believing that it would turn them into slaves.66 As for Joseph Brant, he did not reach The Glaize until October 11. Once there, he urged the western Indians to remain united and not to trust Washington, who "speaks very smooth . . . and at the same time want[s] to ruin US."67

T H E F O R E S HO R T E N E D ROAD T O S A N DU S K Y

Returning home, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and their companions convened a council on Buffalo Creek. There, Red Jacket reported the results of the Glaize conference and put forward a proposal by several moderate federa­ tionists: that Britain and the United States hold a joint meeting with the Northwest confederacy in Sandusky the following May. The treaty com­ missioners, he added, should be "sensible proper people . . . such as Colo­ nel Pickering." After receiving a report on the council, Washington con­ sulted his Cabinet-Knox, Treasury Secretary Hamilton, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph-on the pro­ priety of a multinational conference. The consultation lasted through Feb­ ruary 1793.68 The president asked his advisors three questions: 1) Should the United States agree to a treaty council deep in Indian country? 2) Did the U.S. gov­ ernment have the authority to retrocede Indian lands? 3) Would it be pru­ dent to make such a retrocession? To the first question, all four men gave an unqualified yes. On the third, the secretaries and Randolph agreed that the United States could restrict its settlements to those territories already sold to land companies, guaranteed to habitants, or set aside for veterans. This would leave much of the land within the Fort Harmar treaty line in Ameri­ can hands, but allow a boundary adjustment in the Indians' favor.69

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On the second question, the four men split. Hamilton, Knox, and Ran­ dolph agreed that the treaty-making power was "as plenipotentiary . . . as held by any sovereign in any other society," and certainly extended to the retrocession of "unsettled lands." Jefferson dissented, arguing that the pur­ chase of Native American land irreversibly "consolidated" it with the "so­ ciety" of the several states, thereby alienating it from federal jurisdiction. The United States, he argued, could create a neutral zone between its settle­ ments and the Northwest Indians' unceded territories, but it did not have the power to return lawfully purchased Indian land to its original owners. For the moment, the argument was academic because none of the officials expected the peace mission to succeed. They supported a treaty conference mainly "to gratify the public opinion" of New Englanders who opposed fur­ ther military action?O Whatever doubts Washington and his Cabinet may have felt, they did not share them with the treaty commissioners. President Washington se­ lected two experienced men for the commission, Benjamin Lincoln and Timothy Pickering, and a genteel newcomer, the former Virginia governor Beverley Randolph. Knox gave the commissioners the power to restore to the Northwest Indians all lands north of the Ohio River except for the Seven Ranges, Virginia Military District, Clark Grant, Symmes and Ohio Com­ pany Tracts, and French habitants' property-nine or ten million acres in all. The secretary of war and attorney general gave them copies of the trea­ ties signed with the northern Indians since 1784, along with treaty confer­ ence minutes-a documentary history of the last ten years of federal Indian relations in the Northwest, with which they could defend the government's claims. Finally, a dozen intermediaries would accompany or precede the officials to Detroit and Sandusky, including Quaker missionaries, Hendrick Aupaumut, and several Seneca, Potawatomi, and Peoria leaders.7l Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph's initial encounters suggested their mission might succeed. On May 25th the commissioners reached Niagara, where Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe received them politely, invited them to a levee and ball on King George's birthday (June 4), and gave them the official courtesies denied to previous emissaries: a license to employ a schooner on Lake Erie and a letter of protection. These gestures thinly covered Simcoe's distrust of the Americans, which the governor ex­ pressed by prohibiting them from traveling to Detroit. Unfazed, the com­ missioners spent over a month at Niagara and Buffalo Creek, conferring with the Senecas and arranging their passage westward.72 On July 5, a party of federationists met with the Americans, in Simcoe's

'Red gentlemen and White- Savages presence, at Freemason's Hall in Niagara. Joseph Brant spoke on the group's behalf, asking whether the commissioners had the authority to alter the boundary in the Northwest, and why the u.s. Army was on the move in the midst of American peace overtures. The latter question referred to the maneuvers of Anthony Wayne, who had recently moved his army to Cin­ cinnati and was now cutting a road to Fort Jefferson. Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph declared that both Indians and Americans would have to make "reasonable and just" territorial concessions, and assured the party that Wayne would not attack their towns while their peace mission was underway.73 Politely evasive, Brant closed the meeting by forecasting better pros­ pects for peace now that the United States was treating "unitedly" with the Lakes Indians. Shawnee chief Cat's Eyes declared that his people looked forward to "bring[ing] our pipes together" with their "brothers the Bosto­ nians." This seemed another harbinger of success?4 The diplomats' hopes were dashed, however, when they reached the home of British Indian agent Matthew Elliott at the west end of Lake Erie (present-day Amherstburg, Ontario). On July 29, a federationist delegation led by Buckongehelas, Captain Johnny, and Carry-One-About (Wyandot) met the commissioners at Elliott's. The deputies informed them that the confederation council had received their messages and would not make peace until the Americans evacuated all their settlements north of the Ohio River?5 The ultimatum, so different in tone from Brant's and Cat's Eyes' con­ ciliatory remarks, reflected a factional divide in the confederacy that had widened at the federationists' councils in July. The moderate faction, led by Brant's Grand River Iroquois and including most of the Ottawas and Chip­ pewas, was willing to accept American settlements north of the Ohio and as far west as the Muskingum River. The militant faction, comprising the Wyandot, Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee federationists, utterly opposed white settlement beyond the Ohio. The federationist victories of 1790-91 and the advice of belligerent British agents had energized the militants, who by late July had browbeaten their rivals into silence or cooperation.76 Pickering protested that the federationists were disregarding the trea­ ties of 1784-89, and asked them to realize that the Americans' " improve­ ments in building houses and barns and clearing and fencing their lands" had been made at such "expense" that it was "now impraCticable to remove our people" from the north side of the Ohio. He insisted that the Indians

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allow the Thirteen Fires to retain the lands it obtained at the Fort Harmar conference, adding that the United States could adjust the boundary line. In return, Pickering promised that his government would permanently re­ nounce its conquest right to the Northwest, "acknowledge the property or right of soil . . . to be in the Indian nations," and give the Northwest Indians an unprecedented amount of goods and cash for their lands, along with an annuity to replace the furs Native American hunters obtained thereon.77 Pickering's penultimate promise was no exaggeration. Knox had autho­ rized the commissioners to offer up to fifty thousand dollars for the North­ west Indians' lands (if they agreed to confirm the entire Fort Harmar ces­ sion), along with an annuity of ten thousand dollars . To sweeten the deal, the commissioners had brought presents for Indian warriors and women, "one hundred sets of silver ornaments" for chiefs, and twenty thousand dollars in cash as bribes for important leaders. These sums attested to the growing financial power of the federal government; they also totaled about one-tenth of the annual cost of Wayne's army.78 The militants refused the offer. They believed that their land and rights came from the Author of Life, and had defeated two armies sent by Town Destroyer to take those rights. Money was no substitute for the indepen­ dence and power that came from land and unity. On August 1, Carry-One­ About chastised the Americans for trying to divide the Indian confedera­ tion, and asserted that the settlements north of the Ohio had produced "much mischief." He told the commissioners to go back to Philadelphia and await word from the federationist council. As the meeting was breaking up, Elliott asked Captain Johnny to tell the Americans that their conference had not yet ended. Speaking through his interpreter, former Loyalist Simon Girty, Johnny asked the commissioners to remain at Elliott's until he re­ turned from the federationists' conference with a reply. The commissioners agreed, though the exchange made them suspect that the British were the real source of the Northwest Indians' bellicose speeches.79 American officials had long believed that Britain was the real master of the Indian confederacy and the author of its war against the United States. After the Harmar and St. Clair expeditions, the British government had indeed begun to play a more active role in the Northwest Indians' affairs. In 1791, Lord Dorchester, the royal governor of Canada, had offered to me­ diate between the Northwest confederacy and the United States, and in 1792 George Hammond and Foreign Minister George Grenville proposed creating an "independent [Indian] country" west of the Muskingum River

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and north of the Ohio. This region would belong exclusively to Indians, and Britain and the United States would jointly agree to remove their troops from it. Both the U.S. government and the militant federationists rejected the proposa1.80 While their superiors in Whitehall tried to arrange a peace settlement, British agents like Elliott and Alexander McKee were supplying the North­ west Indians with weapons, urging them to demand an Ohio River bound­ ary, and implicitly encouraging them to fight. American officials did not re­ alize that these men were actually disobeying higher-ranking royal officials who had no interest in war.8l Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph remained at Elliott's farm for two weeks. On August 16, the federationists sent them a final message, signed by Indians from sixteen nations, which carefully refuted all of the United States' arguments. Its authors denied the validity of the treaties of 1784-89, observing that "a few chiefs of two or three nations only" had signed them and that the signatories had lacked the authority to sell land. They rejected the offer of goods and cash, stating that "money to us is of no value" com­ pared to the power that came from land ownership. The authors suggested the United States instead use their treaty funds to remove white settlers and compensate them for their property. They also denied that the Americans were making a concession when they guaranteed the Indians their right to the soil, saying that this was merely doing "justice after having long and injuriously withheld it." " [You] seem to expect," the federationists chided, "that because you have at last acknowledged our independence we should for such a favor surrender to you our country." The message ended by as­ serting that while the Northwest Indians only wanted "the peaceable pos­ session of a small part of our once great Country," they would fight rather than retreat any further.82 The federationists' message left the American commissioners no room to negotiate. They broke off their discussions and returned to Philadelphia. The Washington administration's diplomatic campaign had ended.83 Yet if the peace offensive of 1792-93 had failed to attain its publicly de­ clared objective, its designers had achieved their unstated goals. The Vin­ cennes and Sandusky conferences had not yielded ratified treaties, but they did give Washington a response to critics who claimed that his administra­ tion would not negotiate with Indians. They also allowed federal officials to believe they had acted as humane gentlemen, giving the Northwest " ban­ ditti" a last chance to mend their ways before the U.S. Army killed them and burned their towns.

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For the diplomatic offensive had also bought General Wayne enough time to raise and train his Legion of the United States, and to reinforce the Army's frontier posts. In October, shortly after Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph returned from Upper Canada, the general moved his headquar­ ters to the post of Greenville, six miles north of Fort Jefferson. The War Department would soon make good use of his services.84

T H E F E D E R AT I O N I S T S

'

S O U T H E R N O F F E N SIVE

The Federalists' diplomatic campaign had achieved one other success: it had brought the war between Kentuckians and Northwest Indians to a vir­ tual end. In 1792, one or two parties of rangers crossed the Ohio in search of Indian horse thieves, but otherwise Kentuckians obeyed the federal ban on offensives during the peace negotiations. Meanwhile, though federationist warriors made a few desultory raids into Kentucky, most directed their at­ tacks against the more exposed settlements north of the Ohio. In addition, many Shawnee warriors were bypassing Kentucky to participate in a Creek and Cherokee campaign against the American settlements in the Tennes­ see and Cumberland Valleys, an attempt by these nations' warriors to rep­ licate the victories of 1790-91 in the South.8s The federationists' southern campaign originated with North Carolina's cession of its Tennessee Valley counties to the Union, and Congress's sub­ sequent creation of the Southwest Territory. While the act creating the ter­ ritory was identical to the Northwest Ordinance (apart from permitting slavery), the two regions had little in common. By 1790, the Southwest Ter­ ritory had over thirty thousand white and black inhabitants, a half-dozen growing towns, burgeoning exports of tobacco and food, and a small local elite of merchants and land speculators.86 In August 1790, President Washington named William Blount of North Carolina as the governor of the new territory. Blount, who owned over one million acres of Tennessee land, subsequently appointed dozens of local settler-speculators as clerks, justices of the peace, and militia officers; his appointments i ncluded John Sevier as brigadier general of militia. From the standpoint of Native Americans, such choices were disastrous. Andrew Pickens told the Cherokees "that a worse man for them [than Blount] could not have been appointed." Yet Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson knew the federal government could not govern such a large set­ tler population without appointing officials who had the "esteem and confi­ dence" of local whites. The alternative was military occupation, and Wash-

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ington and Knox knew that was impossible, given the pressing need for troops elsewhere.87 Blount's backers claimed that he firmly supported the Federalist admin­ istration, but it soon became clear that he was willing to sacrifice its policies to settlers' interests. Early in 1791, the War Department instructed Blount to negotiate a new treaty with the Cherokees, a sequel to the recent treaty with the Creeks. Governor Blount replied that the government should rec­ ognize whites' effective occupation of the eastern Tennessee Valley, scrap the Treaty of Hopewell, and annex the Holston-French Broad region, pay­ ing for the cession with an annuity of one thousand dollars . Knox pro­ tested that Blount's demands would anger the southern Indians and upset the Georgians, who would resent a land grab by a federal government that had just halted their own expansion. He insisted that the purpose of pay­ ing an annuity to the Cherokees was to ensure their "dependenc [y] and . . . gratitude," not to buy land.88 Blount finally decided that he could better assess local needs than the Philadelphia government. When in June 1791 the governor opened his treaty conference on the banks of the Holston River, he told the twelve hundred chiefs, warriors, and women in attendance that the Hopewell Treaty was a dead letter. Seated in a marquee flanked by territorial officers, Blount in­ formed the Cherokees that their new father in Philadelphia had sent him to end the "confusion" that had led to war in the 1780s. He explained that the way to end that confusion was by "straighten[ing]" the 1785 boundary, and declared that the chiefs must sell the land between the Clinch and French Broad Rivers and a twenty-five-mile-wide tract south of the French Broad. Presuming that these lands were only valuable to the Cherokees as hunting grounds, Blount claimed that white settlers had despoiled them of game, and promised the government would pay the Cherokees "not . . . as little faithless states used to do in promises or a few worthless articles," but one thousand dollars every year.89 The chiefs replied that their young men would never accept so large a cession. Bloody Fellow suggested the Americans only take the lands south of the French Broad, while Nontuaka asked that the Cherokees retain the territory between the Holston and Clinch Rivers. When Blount rejected these proposals, the chiefs complained that he was trying to "cross us in every thing." The Creek Linguister, who acted as the chiefs' translator, said that Blount was behaving like the former Franklinites who had long " been wrangling for the land."90

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On July 1, however, Cherokee leaders changed course. Chickamauga leader John Watts told Blount that they accepted his terms. The next day, 41 Cherokees signed the Treaty of Holston, whereby their nation again ac­ cepted the United States as its sovereign, agreed to forego retaliation for crimes and return captives, and relinquished 2.6 million acres of land. In return, the Cherokees would receive protection from intruders-though they were skeptical that the pledge would be enforced-a resident agent, gifts, and an annuity.91 Why the chiefs changed their minds is hard to determine. Some may have divined an implicit threat in Blount's declaration that if they didn't sign the treaty, the entire country would know that they and the whites were not friends. Some supported the treaty after Blount suggested that the Cherokees terminate the deadlocked conference and send a delegation to Philadelphia to deal directly with the president. They may have feared they would henceforth be excluded from the peace-making process and suffer a loss of prestige.92 Others hoped that if they signed the treaty and ceded land, Washington would thereafter treat them as equals and give them effective protection. The Creek Linguister alluded to this hope when he told Blount that the Cherokees were not merely "a poor broken nation." "Though we are red we think we was made by the same power [as you] and certainly we think we have as much right to enjoy our property as any other human being that inhabit[s] the earth." After the chiefs signed the treaty, Badger's Nephew asserted that Indians and whites now stood together "on this ground which has been a common mother to us both" and would both "keep our young men from going over the line."93 Cherokee leaders kept this promise for the rest of the year, even though the magnitude of the cession continued to rankle. In January 1792, six chiefs accepted Blount's proposal to go to Philadelphia, where they assured Knox and Washington that they would keep the peace. They also asked the War Department to raise their annuity to fifteen hundred dollars and send troops to drive squatters off of Cherokee territory. Knox urged the president and Senate to grant these requests because, in the wake of St. Clair's defeat, conciliatory measures would "be the mean of attaching more cordially the southern tribes to the United States and of rendering them active in our service."94 "Our service" meant military service. The U.S. Army had employed Sen­ eca and Chickasaw scouts in 1791, and Knox believed the other southern

1 54

'Red yentlemen and <White- Savages

Indians might serve in the same capacity if the government met their de­ mands. "I am apprehensive," he told Blount, "that their passion for war will constrain them to join the other side, if they do not ours." He proposed that the southern Indians contribute five hundred warriors to Wayne's army, so that they might consider the war in the Northwest "a common cause . . . with the United States."95 The Cherokees returned from Philadelphia with gifts, medals, and in one case a new name-Knox gave Bloody Fellow the name Clear Sky, in emula­ tion of the Woodland Indian practice of adoptive renaming. In the spring, Blount held another conference with the Cherokees at Coyatee, where he distributed presents to two thousand people and agreed to delay running the new boundary line. A few months later, in August 1792, Blount met two hundred Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees at Nashville, and asked them to provide military assistance to the United States. His recruitment efforts failed, however, because the chiefs and captains at the conference were less concerned with fighting the federationists than with partitioning their common hunting preserve in central Tennessee. The Chickasaws were especially eager to divide the commons, fearing that the Cherokees might otherwise lose the territory in a war with white settlers. "The Cherokees," Piomingo insisted, "never go out but they bloody their weapons in the white people, and I know the whites in retaliation would take their land."96 Piomingo referred to the decision of some southern Indians to return to war with American settlers. In the winter of 1791-92, even before learning of St. Clair's defeat, Chickamauga war parties raided farms in the Cumber­ land Valley and western Virginia. One attack took the lives of two of John Sevier's nephews. Shortly thereafter the Chickamaugas held a war dance on Lookout Mountain to celebrate the Northwest federationists' victory. The followers of Cheeseekau, a Shawnee federationist who had brought one hundred and fifty of his kinsmen to settle with the Chickamaugas, joined the celebration. Cheesekau's warriors would soon join Chickamaugas and disaffected Creeks in a campaign against the Americans.97 In the spring and summer of 1792, Indian raiders waylaid travelers and burned white settlements throughout the Southwest Territory. In August, John Watts, whom Blount had called a "champion of peace," went to Span­ ish Pensacola and returned with seven packhorses laden with gunpowder and shot. Upon Watts's return, the Cherokees held a council in Wills town, where federationist captains like Doublehead (Chuquilateague) urged all the warriors of the South to fight against the white intruders. Clear Sky urged his nation's young men to consider the presents Washington had given them

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and the military might of the Thirteen Fires, but his words were ineffectual. Many warriors knew they could more easily enrich themselves by stealing horses than by waiting to receive a few kettles and strouds from their chiefs. Moreover, the defeat of St. Clair's army had eased the southern Indians' fears of American retaliation, and the Treaties of New York and Holston gave warriors an opportunity to challenge the authority of chiefs who had traded land for peace. "There is ever among them," Blount observed, "young warriors wishing to rise into consequence, and nothing so like to effect it as complaining against chiefs for having sold their hunting grounds. This at once pulls down the chiefs [and] makes way for themselves."9B Thus the southern federationists' campaign continued. On Septem­ ber 30, 1792, several hundred Chickamauga, Creek, and Shawnee warriors marched on Nashville but failed to penetrate its defenses. In October and November, other war parties attacked a blockhouse on the Little Tennes­ see and defeated a forty-two-man militia company heading for the Cum­ berland settlements. During the first four months of 1793, warriors killed several whites and stole dozens of horses in the Holston and Clinch River Valleys.99 Increasing numbers of Creek warriors were joining battle with the United States. Some participated in the Shawnees' and Chickamaugas' campaign. Others became followers of the returning British adventurer William Bowles, who had established a town of insurgent Creeks on the Gulf coast in 1791 and declared himself the Director General of the na­ tion of Muskogee. Still others were retaliating for white Georgians' viola­ tions of the boundary line established by the Treaty of New York: in the spring of 1793, Creek warriors attacked plantations in Georgia and raided Robert Seagrove's store on Saint Mary's River, killing five people and taking two thousand pounds worth of merchandise.JOo Since 1791, the principal federal agent to the Creeks, Alexander McGil­ livray, had found it difficult to discourage Creek opposition to the United States. The Lower Creeks resented him for engineering the Panton & Les­ lie trade monopoly, and Spanish officials were pressuring the Beloved Man to renounce his allegiance to the Thirteen Fires, which he finally did in July 1792. Six months later, McGillivray died in Pensacola, and a coalition of Creek leaders told federal agents that they would try to restore peace with the United States. One warned, however, that if Americans' "mad men" continued to strike the Creeks, "nothing can be expected but revenge, strengthened by rage and desperation." lO l The War Department responded to the southern Indians' offensive by

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'Red yentlemen and rWhite- Savages

sending weapons to William Blount and Governor Edward Telfair of Geor­ gia, and by secretly ordering General Wayne to ship muskets and powder to Piomingo's Chickasaws, who had just begun another war with the Creeks. Knox recognized that these were limited measures, but the Washington administration was unwilling to authorize a federal military expedition. Public outrage over St. Clair's defeat was still cooling, and Knox wrote that another war "would be considered . . . by the mass of the citizens of the mid­ dIe and eastern states as an unsupportable evil." Moreover, by 1793, Spain was reinforcing its forts on the Mississippi River and signing new treaties of alliance with the southern Indians. The Spanish government now seemed ready to fight the United States in the event of a federal campaign against the Creeks or Cherokees.102 Absent federal authorization for an offensive, white frontiersmen in Ten­ nessee and Georgia simply counterattacked Native Americans without the War Department's approval. White settlers were more interested in settling personal scores than in breaking the back of the federationist movement, and made no distinction between hostile and friendly Indians-indeed, they preferred the latter as easier targets and proxies for their federal pro­ tectors. In November 1792, Georgia militia destroyed the neutral Cherokee town of Estatoe in western South Carolina. The following spring a white man killed the Chickasaw John Morris in Knoxville. Since the Chickasaws were American allies, Governor Blount held an official funeral for the slain warrior and marched in the procession.103 Blount also invited the Cherokees to send another delegation to Phila­ delphia, but in June 1793, while Cherokee chiefs were meeting at Coyatee, territorial militia raided the town and killed fifteen people. Acting Gover­ nor Daniel Smith wrote Hanging Maw to deny responsibility for the raid and to urge him to go to Philadelphia, but the wounded chief (whose wife had died in the attack) angrily replied that his fellow chiefs were either dead or injured and that he no longer trusted the Americans. As if to confirm Hanging Maw's mistrust, a court martial declined to punish the party's commander, John Beard, for his conduct.104 Meanwhile, Georgia militia attacked a party of Creeks who were travel­ ing to a meeting with their federal agent. David Cornell, whose father Alex­ ander was a Creek chief, shouted for the Georgians to stop, but this merely caused them to kill and scalp Cornell and a Creek boy. A court of inquiry later ruled that the patrolmen had correctly fol lowed their orders, and that David Cornell was "so desperate & obnoxious a character" that the Creeks

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had deserved the attack for having the gall to employ him as a diplomat. In September 1793, another Georgia militia party raided the Creek town of Little Okfuskee, killing six men they suspected of horse-stealing.105 Creek and Cherokee chiefs had conditionally renounced the principle of retributive justice in their treaties with the U.S. government, but few captains and clan matrons would accept any compensation but blood for such blatant attacks. Consequently, the Southwest Territory endured an­ other cycle of violence. In August 1793, Cherokee warriors attacked several more Tennessee Valley settlements and dismembered or beheaded the set­ tlers they captured. The next month two Tennessee militia captains led one hundred and eighty riflemen over the Smoky Mountains to North Carolina, where they burned six Cherokee towns, killed fifteen men and took sixteen prisoners. That September, Creek and Cherokee captains assembled a thousand -man army to destroy every white settlement in the Holston-French Broad region. The warriors burned several farms and killed thirteen settlers, but aborted an attack on Knoxville because gunfire from the town (actually a morning salute by the garrison) convinced them they had lost the ele­ ment of surprise, without which their assault had little hope of success. Daniel Smith and John Sevier then counterattacked: in October 1793, ter­ ritorial militia took the Cherokee town of Etowah by storm, feinting down the Coosa River to draw off defenders and then flanking and dislodging warriors entrenched outside of town. The militia killed one hundred men, took several dozen captives, slaughtered three hundred cattle and burned the town.106 Henry Knox did not approve of Smith's and Sevier's attacks, but he did not censure the officials. He knew they were responding to the attack on Knoxville, and that the federal government lacked the means to punish Southwest territorial officials for disobeying its orders. The case was dif­ ferent in Georgia, where militia attacks on Indians provoked censure from the president and Congressional refusal to compensate the state for its mo­ bilization. Attacks on Creek villages might have provoked retaliation from their Spanish allies in nearby Florida. Moreover, the U.S. Army had several hundred soldiers in Georgia who could enforce federal laws, as opposed to only seventy-five in the Southwest Territory.107 The southern Indian war of 1792-93 did not so much reveal the weak­ ness of the federal government as it did the limits of Indian federationists' power. The defeat of St. Clair's army had energized Creek and Cherokee

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'Red gentlemen and White- Savages

warriors, and Spanish officials had armed them for an offensive. Federa­ tionist captains had organized sizable forces and led them against the two principal American towns in the Southwest. Yet, despite these advantages, the southern federationists failed to attain their objectives, for they lacked critical elements of white Americans' military technology and organiza­ tion. Without artillery, Native American warriors usually could not take a fortified town or blockhouse, and without the discipline of a European army, Indians found it difficult to hold a position against a determined as­ sault. This is why, despite roughly equal numbers of Indian warriors and American gunmen in the Tennessee Valley, American towns like Knoxville were still standing at the end of 1793, and Cherokee towns like Etowah were in ashes. lOB "The difficulty of deciding between lawless settlers and greedy specula­ tors on one side," Washington wrote in August 1792, "and the jealousies of the Indian nations and their banditti on the other, becomes more and more obvious every day." On the southern frontier, Washington's admin­ istration chose to defer that decision until it had resolved its dispute with the Northwest Indians. White frontiersmen would not wait, and ultimately gave Indian federationists their first serious blow since St. Clair's defeat. There would be others.109 A T T H E E N D OF 1793, an observer might have concluded that the federal government had again lost control of the frontier. Southern Indians had repudiated treaties, Northwest federationists had destroyed two armies and killed American envoys, Spanish officials were negotiating new Indian alli­ ances and building forts on American soil, and British agents were support­ ing the northern federationists. Appearances were deceptive. St. Clair's defeat had shocked Federalist officials, but the failed diplomatic campaign of 1792-93 had dispelled many of their illusions. What remained were the assets that the U.S. government had been accumulating since George Washington's inauguration. By 1794, the United States had recruited and trained a three-thousand-man profes­ sional army and had raised sufficient revenue to maintain it. Thanks to the Federalists' diplomatic efforts the national government now had several competent treaty commissioners and intermediaries, like Timothy Pick­ ering and Hendrick Aupaumut. Thanks to the Federalists' willingness to accommodate and bribe Indian leaders, a growing number of chiefs and captains were willing to negotiate with the United States. The patient accu-

War and :7fppeasement

1 59

mulation of power and influence would allow the Philadelphia government to exploit the first favorable contingency that occurred: the preoccupation of the federationists' British and Spanish allies with a European warYo Thereafter, the Federalists learned that the tools of negotiation and co­ ercion that worked so well with Native Americans were of almost no use in dealing with their disaffected white frontier neighbors.

7

Musket, f2!!, ill, and Calumet, 1794-1799

l·,r-

n the North American frontier, 1794 was a militarily decisive year. In western Pennsylvania, George Washington led a militia army , against farmers opposed to the federal whiskey excise. In the Ohio country, Anthony Wayne's Legion of the United States fended off a massive Indian attack on Fort Recovery and routed Northwest Indian federationists at Fallen Timbers. In the Tennessee Valley, a 550-man militia expedition destroyed several Chickamauga towns. Unlike previous campaigns against disaffected white farmers and Native American federationists, these offen­ sives proved effective, particularly against the latter group. There would be little Indian resistance to American political authority for the next fifteen years.l Federalist officials in Philadelphia, however, knew that muskets were not the sole guarantors of order in the West, and sought to secure the peace with diplomacy and laws. New treaties with Britain and Spain removed their posts from American soil and reduced British and Spanish influence within Native American communities. Skillfully negotiated compacts with the Iroquois, the Northwest Indians, the Creeks, and the Cherokees estab­ lished those peoples' boundaries with the United States and gave their lead­ ers incentives to stay on good terms with the Fifteen Fires. A new network of public trading houses started to bring the fur trade under federal control. The Trade and Intercourse Act of 1796 routinized the distribution of agri­ cultural hardware, spinning wheels, and livestock to Native American men and women, while missionaries and agents began offering Indians instruc­ tion in the arts of American civilization.2

Musket; Quill, and Calume� Concurrently, the u.s. government's policies improved the fortunes of white frontier settlers. Army supply contracts had enriched farmers and merchants in the Ohio Valley, while the end of the Northwest Indian War and Spain's opening of the Mississippi River produced a surge in immigra­ tion and commerce. During the last five years of the decade the non-Indian population of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory grew from 250,000 to 380,000. Commercial agriculture flourished, and flatboats car­ ried American flour, tobacco, and cotton to New Orleans; by 1801 the value of American trade through that port exceeded $3.6 million.3 Nonetheless, frontier settlers' resentment of the national government continued to simmer. In their view the administration in Philadelphia had not graciously helped them but had merely begun to protect those rights­ lives, property, access to markets-that it should have secured for them ten years earlier. Their continued disaffection would manifest itself both in the Whiskey Rebellion and in less dramatic protests throughout the decade, and would ultimately contribute to the Federalists' ouster in 1800.4

T H E A N T I C L I M AC T I C WAR

The American offensives against the Northwest confederation and the Chickamaugas commenced as those Indian nations' European allies were also bracing for war with the United States. After the French Republic declared war on Britain and Spain, the British government had attacked France's colonies in the West Indies. In the fall of 1793, the Royal Navy in­ terdicted American trade with French Caribbean ports, seizing over two hundred and fifty merchant ships without warning. The sweeping action struck Americans as an act of piracy. Angry crowds mobbed British officers in Philadelphia, while Congressmen demanded trade sanctions, seizure of British assets, and enlargement of the army and navy.s Alarmed officials in Canada took defensive measures that fanned the flames. In February 1794, Lord Dorchester informed the Indian communi­ ties near Montreal that Britain and the United States would certainly go to war in the near future, and that the Northwest Indians could use the conflict to drive the Americans back to the Ohio River. That spring, Lieu­ tenant Governor John Simcoe authorized the construction of a new post, Fort Miami, on the Maumee River, and encouraged the Iroquois to take up arms against the Fifteen Fires. Matthew Elliott and Alexander McKee con­ currently supplied the Northwest Indians with food, tobacco, and ammuni­ tion, and ordered tens of thousands of black wampum beads for war belts.6

162

'Red (jentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages

Northwest Indian federationists, reassured that their British fathers would support another offensive against the Americans, issued stern warn­ ings to American settlers and soldiers north of the Ohio River. Joseph Brant and Cornplanter, united (for the moment) by their opposition to Pennsyl­ vania's settlement of the Erie Triangle, began stockpiling weapons and warned Americans to keep off of their lands. In the spring of 1794, Seneca warriors attacked white settlers in northern Pennsylvania, and at a confer­ ence that summer, Allegheny Seneca boys insulted Pennsylvania surveyor John Adlum by interrupting him with "an universal roar, vulgarly known as farting. " Seneca captains held a war dance for Adlum, and Corn planter gave him a pair of moccasins to wear, saying " [I] expect you will do your part as becomes a man . . . when you come out to fight US."7 Meanwhile, Spanish officials were predicting American attacks on Loui­ siana and Florida. Their fears were justified. In 1793, the French minister to the United States, Edmond Genet, had commissioned George Rogers Clark and Elijah Clarke to organize military expeditions against New Orleans and St. Augustine. Washington and Jefferson declared Genet persona non grata for his violation of American neutrality and secured his recall, but the damage had been done. By early 1794, Clark was raising volunteers for his descent on New Orleans, while Clarke had moved several hundred militia to the Oconee River for his attack on Florida.s The new governor of Spanish Louisiana, Fran<;:ois-Louis Hector de Ca­ rondelet, moved quickly to shore up his province's defenses. In November 1793, he negotiated new treaties of alliance with Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek leaders. The governor proposed to John Simcoe a joint Spanish-British offensive against American settlements, and sent a speech to the Shawnees congratulating them on their resistance and assuring them that Spain and the southern Indians would soon help them "strike our com­ mon enemy." Meanwhile, Spanish troops built Fort Confederaci6n on the Tombigbee River and Fort San Fernando at Chickasaw Bluffs, and Caronde­ let built a fleet of galleys to patrol the Mississippi River.9 Faced with all these warlike preparations, the Washington administra­ tion proceeded with caution. Agent Israel Chapin invited Six Nations chiefs to Fort Franklin to discuss the Erie Triangle cession. When the Six Na­ tions declined and ordered Pennsylvania to stop its surveys, Washington asked Governor Thomas Mifflin to comply, and sent Timothy Pickering to hold another treaty with the Iroquois. In the South, Henry Knox rejected Tennesseans' request for a campaign against the Chickamaugas and asked

:Musket; QuilL, and Calume� Governor Telfair of Georgia to halt militia attacks on the Creeks. To placate the Indians' European allies, Washington dispatched John Jay to London to negotiate with Whitehall, and sent Thomas Pinckney to Madrid to negoti­ ate with the Bourbons.1O Concurrently with these negotiations, the War Department prepared to draw the sword against the Northwest Indians. Washington told Congress in December 1793 that the federationists had rejected "amicable negotia­ tion" and that therefore "the troops have marched." More specifically, Gen­ eral Wayne had moved his headquarters to Greenville and sent eight com­ panies of infantry and artillery to Fort Recovery, on the site of St. Clair's defeat. Federationist captains at The Glaize learned of Wayne's advance and the large force he had assembled (forty-five hundred regulars and militia). Some attempted to parley, but Wayne insisted that he would only meet the Northwest Indians if they returned their captives and convened a general council. Thereafter, two thousand Chippewa, Delaware, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Wyandot warriors met at Fort Miami and re­ solved to drive Wayne's army back to Cincinnati.ll The federationist offensive began in June 1794. On 29 June, the North­ west Indian army reached Fort Recovery, and the warriors resolved to at­ tack the fort. (Their alternatives-besieging the post or bypassing it and leaving several hundred soldiers in their rear-were even more risky and unappealing.) After capturing a supply convoy outside the fort and killing or wounding fifty soldiers and drivers, the warriors began a mass fusillade against the Fort Recovery blockhouses, which continued for the next two days. Some tried to find the cannons they had taken from St. Clair three years earlier and buried, not knowing that Wayne's men had already dug up the field guns and moved them inside the stockade. Without surprise or artillery, the Indians were unable to take the fort, and on July 1, they withdrew.12 Despite the federationists' light casualties (thirty-five to sixty men), the abortive attack dealt a fatal blow to their military strength. After the engagement, the Chippewa and Ottawa warriors who comprised most of the federationist army went home, because the attack had, in Alexander McKee's words, "accomplished the cord of their [war] belts." The northern Lakes Indians had joined the offensive not to help defend an Ohio River boundary-an unimportant issue to them-but to obtain prestige, scalps, and prisoners, which they had now done. In any event, the Ottawa and Chippewa captains had not been strong supporters of the Northwest Indian

'Red gentlemen and rWhite- Savages offensive in the first place, as their kinsmen had belonged to the moderate faction of federationists and had only reluctantly supported the militants' call for action. Of the militants who did remain in the field after the Battle of Fort Recovery, many split into smaller war parties and headed south to raid farms and steal horses, further diluting the federationists' strength. Only a few hundred warriors straggled back to the Maumee to oppose Wayne's armyP General Wayne was now in a strong position. Since St. Clair's defeat, Congress had tripled federal military expenditures, and by 1794, it was spending nearly a million dollars per annum on the Legion of the United States, giving Wayne a well-paid and amply supplied body of soldiers. He also had the luxury of time: whereas Harmar and St. Clair had been under pressure to strike the Northwest Indians hard and fast, in 1792-93 Con­ gress had pressured the War Department not to fight until diplomacy had been exhausted. The delay had given Wayne time to train his soldiers, to fortify his line of advance, to interrogate captured warriors, and to hold his offensive until the summer.14 On July 28, Anthony Wayne marched north from Greenville. His men crossed the eighty miles to The Glaize in twelve days, finding on their arrival that the inhabitants had fled and left behind vast fields of corn, beans, and potatoes. Wayne paused for a week at "the grand emporium of the hostile Indians of the west," ordering his men to build a new post (Fort Defiance) and allowing them to replenish their supplies from Indian storehouses. IS Wayne sent an ultimatum to the federationists gathered downstream near Fort Miami, informing them that he held their towns and hinting he would burn their homes if they did not come to terms. Little Turtle advised his associates seriously to consider Wayne's offer, but the other warriors and captains expected that British troops at Fort Miami would help them fight Wayne's gunmen, and they rejected his ultimatum. They informed the general "they were on their feet to meet your army" if he advanced or tried to fortify The Glaize. Wayne picked up the federationists' gauntlet and or­ dered his men to advance to the mouth of the Maumee.16 On August 15, one thousand American regulars and several hundred Kentucky militia marched or rode downriver. Meanwhile, five hundred Northwest Indian federationists and a few Canadian militia arrived at the Place of Fallen Timbers, a patch of tornado-felled trees five miles from Fort Miami, where they paused to fast and prepare for Wayne's arrival. At 9 AM on Wednesday, August 20, an American advance guard reached

Musket; Quill, and Calume�

16 5

Fallen Timbers and ran into Ottawa and Potawatomi warriors, who re­ pelled the soldiers with withering gunfire. The Indians then fell back to a position with more cover. As they did so, Generals Wayne and Wilkinson came up with the rest of the army, attacking the Indians on both flanks with Kentucky dragoons and bayonet-wielding infantry. Some warriors stood to fight, but most fledY The Battle of Fallen Timbers lasted barely an hour, and may have cost its Native American participants only forty fatalities. Wayne's force sustained one hundred and thirty-three casualties. What followed was more impor­ tant than the battle itself. As the retreating federationists approached Fort Miami, the commanding officer William Campbell, who was under orders not to provoke an American attack, closed and barred the fort's gates. The stunned warriors had no choice but to disperse. The symbolic magnitude of Campbell's action should not be underestimated, for Britain's forts on the Great Lakes had been the most visible symbol of the Crown's willingness to aid its Indian allies. The closure of Fort Miami gave the lie to British of­ ficials' promises of support, and notified the Northwest federationists that their ally was withdrawing from the war. Northwest Indians still remem­ bered it with bitterness a decade later. In 1807, Potawatomi chief Nanaume told William Hull that "when we pass the banks of the [Maumee], we see the ruins of the old British fort. It reminds us . . . of the ingratitude of the British, how they shut the gates against us when we were flying to them for protection. Father, we never will again place any dependence on them."18 On August 21, Wayne fired the Indian houses and British stores around Fort Miami, then advanced to the fort's breastworks and ordered Major Campbell to withdraw from American soil. Campbell refused and warned Wayne off but did not take further action. Two days later, the soldiers of the Legion buried their dead and returned to The Glaize, where they proceeded to " lay waste the villages and cornfields for about fifty miles on each side of the [Maumee]," eliminating the Northwest Indian federationists' food sup­ ply. In mid-September, the general took his army to the abandoned Miami towns at Kekionga, where he completed Harmar and St. Clair's unfinished mission: building a permanent American post. He called it Fort Wayne.19 In October, Matthew Elliott, who had witnessed the Fallen Timbers de­ bacle, assembled thirty-five hundred Indians for a war council and prom­ ised the warriors food and ammunition. However, the federationists were unwilling to resume their offensive without the aid of British troops, and as this was not forthcoming, the captains of the confederacy asked General

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'Red (jentlemen and '"White- Savages

Wayne for a truce and a treaty council. The victorious general consented, and the Northwest Indian War was over.20 The news of Fallen Timbers produced jubilation in Philadelphia, where men attending a retirement party for Knox and Hamilton toasted the Le­ gion's triumph as "the means of introducing Peace, Civilization, and Hap­ piness among our Savage Enemies." It was also welcome news to Timothy Pickering, who received word of the battle during his fourth mission to the northern Indians. Accompanied by four Quakers, Pickering arrived at Canandaigua, New York, on September 19 to find that his Six Nations Coun­ terparts were reluctant to meet him and wanted to move the conference to Buffalo Creek. The chiefs claimed they could not spare the time for travel during harvest season, but Pickering suspected they wanted to meet near Fort Niagara so that they could receive British advice and support.21 The first reports of the American victory on the Maumee reached Canandaigua the day after Pickering did, and the commissioner, realizing that he was bargaining from strength, insisted that the Iroquois meet him on the ground he had chosen. Believing that British agents had stymied the Sandusky conference, Pickering was determined not to repeat the ex­ perience. After the meeting began, he insisted that the Iroquois bar Brit­ ish agent William Johnson from the treaty ground, which they eventually agreed to do.22 The men, women, and children attending the conference took several weeks to arrive, with the last party-Cornplanter's Senecas-not reach­ ing Canandaigua until October 16. Pickering and his counterparts spent the first few weeks in diplomatic niceties. They listened to hymns sung by Samuel Kirkland's Oneida congregants, watched the warriors fire salutes as each new party came in, and attended condolence rituals for several re­ cently deceased Delawares and Oneidas. At one ceremony, Pickering dem­ onstrated his mastery of condolence metaphors by using fifteen wampum strings figuratively to wipe away the tears of the decedent's relatives, cover their graves, and create a permanent path between the Six Nations and the Fifteen Fires.23 The Iroquois also heard a long sermon by Jemima Wilkinson, a lay preacher who wore men's clothing and who had attracted a devoted fol­ lowing. On October 23, the Seneca matrons asked that they "be allowed the same liberty" as Wilkinson, and through their spokesmen Red Jacket they urged the whites "to repent & turn from their evil deeds" and stop "hemm[ing] in" the Six Nations with land purchases. Land, which had been

Musket; Quill, and Calumet' a peripheral issue at Pickering's previous conferences with the Iroquois, proved the central issue at Canandaigua.24 In speeches and private conversations, Seneca chiefs claimed that their nation retained all lands between the Allegheny and Muskingum Rivers, and Cornplanter told Pickering that the Senecas had never legitimately ceded this territory to the United States. These assertions grew out of two years of meetings between the Senecas and the Grand River Mohawks, meetings that the U.S. government had facilitated when it asked Mohawk and Seneca leaders to work together as its agents to the Northwest confederation. Both now decided to use their collective bargaining power and the prospect of British assistance to annul the disputed treaties of 1784 and 1789.25 Pickering responded with legal disquisition and a few concessions. He observed that the Senecas had sold the Erie Triangle to Pennsylvania in 1789, and had surrendered their claims between that tract and the Muskingum at Fort Stanwix. The commissioner conceded that the Fort Stanwix treaty had been flawed and that Butler, Lee, and Wolcott had acted with unbecoming arrogance, but he asked Iroquois warriors "whether in times of success in military enterprises they did not feel their minds to exult and grow proud." (He reminded the Iroquois that they had claimed to have "made women" of the Delawares fifty years earlier.) Pickering also conceded that Congress had misinterpreted the Treaty of Paris as a British cession of Indian land, but the Washington administration now acknowledged that Britain had only given the United States a preemption right. The federal government would now affirm the Six Nations' ownership of their remaining lands and restore to them a million acres of land between the Buffalo Creek meridian and the western border of New York. It would also pay the conferees ten thousand dollars in gifts and triple their civilization annuity to forty-five hundred dollars in return for their compliance.26 The chiefs and captains took several days to respond to Pickering's offer. Some were debating his terms, and others were consulting with the Quakers (who advised them to accept), but most were merely delaying the inevitable signing of the treaty. For there really were no other practical options: the new Seneca-Mohawk resistance movement had depended on the assistance of the Northwest Indians and the British, and Wayne's defeat of the one and neutralization of the other had destroyed the Iroquois militants' credibility. The Six Nations also were not united among themselves: most of the chiefs at Canandaigua were seeking the best deals they could get for their indi­ vidual towns, and viewed the Mohawks' and Allegheny Senecas' bellicosity

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'Red yentlemen and 1fJhite- Savages

as grandstanding by Brant and Cornplanter. Pickering had widened these divisions by sending conference invitations to individual towns, rather than to the Six Nations as a whole, and by excluding Cornplanter from a formal dinner after the war leader protested Johnson's expulsionP Eventually, the majority of the Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga chiefs at Canandaigua agreed to accept the cession of the Erie · Triangle, while pressing Kanehsadeh for additional concessions. On November 2, Red Jacket told Pickering that the chain of friendship still had a rusty spot: the four-mile-wide strip linking Fort Schlosser to Buffalo Creek, which the Iroquois had ceded in 1784 but which the Buffalo Creek Senecas wanted to retain. The chief asserted "there are many of your people here now, watch­ ing with their mouths open to take up this land; if you are a friend to us, then disappoint them." Pickering eventually conceded the land in exchange for a road easement around Niagara Falls.28 Pickering also conceded a rhetorical point to Cornplanter and his al­ lies. On November 9, when the commissioner produced copies of the writ­ ten treaty for the chiefs and captains, Cornplanter refused his assent and declared he and his warriors would leave the conference. The war captain, who had signed the humiliating Treaty of Fort Stanwix, was outraged by Pickering's suggestion that his government was partially repudiating that treaty. Pickering, recognizing that the Allegheny Senecas wanted more to save face than to retain the Erie Triangle, agreed to change the wording of the cession agreement: rather than formally give land to the United States, the Iroquois would merely acknowledge that they no longer claimed lands outside of their new boundaries. Cornplanter and his kinsmen could then argue that the Fifteen Fires had not really taken anything from them.29 With these concessions in hand, on November 11, fifty-nine Iroquois joined Pickering in signing the Treaty of Canandaigua. The agreement confirmed to the Cayugas, Oneidas, and Onondagas the reservations New York had established for them, and guaranteed to the Senecas their lands between the Phelps-Gorham Purchase line and the western boundary of New York. In contrast to earlier treaties, the Canandaigua accord explicitly identified these lands as the respective nations' property. The treaty also increased the Six Nations' civilization annuity to forty-five hundred dollars and gave them ten thousand dollars worth of goods. A separate treaty gave the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Stockbridges six thousand dollars to cover Revolutionary War losses and rebuild their church.3D In exchange, the United States received benefits that appeared less sub-

Musket; Quill, and Calumet stantial than those it gave the Six Nations-but which were just as impor­ tant. The Iroquois guaranteed American citizens' access to the Niagara portage road and to all Great Lakes harbors within Seneca territory. The Senecas confirmed their cession of the Erie Triangle to Pennsylvania. More subtly, the treaty widened the divisions among the Six Nations by excluding the Grand River Iroquois from its annuity payments, which helped break the Seneca-Mohawk alliance. The enlarged annuities would help secure the Iroquois chiefs' loyalty to the federal government. While later generations of Iroquois would call the Treaty of Canandaigua the cornerstone of their sovereignty, both Pickering and his superiors viewed it as a device to ensure the Six Nations' division and dependency.31 Concurrently with Wayne's campaign and Pickering's negotiations, fed­ eral and local authorities were trying to bring order and security to the United States' southern frontier. In the spring of 1794, Henry Knox rejected the new Southwest Territorial Assembly's application for military assistance against the Chickamaugas. Instead, he invited thirteen Cherokee chiefs to Philadelphia to negotiate a new treaty. The accord, which Knox signed on June 26, reaffirmed the Treaty of Holston and increased the Cherokees' an­ nuity to five thousand dollars, though it reduced annuity payments by fifty dollars for each horse that Cherokee men stole from white settlers and did not return.32 Absent from the Philadelphia treaty council were the leaders of the Chickamauga towns, whose warriors raided white farms and waylaid trav­ elers that summer. In September, the militia general James Robertson learned from Shawnee and Chickasaw sources that the Chickamaugas and Creeks were amassing nine hundred men to attack the Cumberland settle­ ments. Both sources were biased and unreliable: the Shawnees probably hoped for a southern Indian offensive to complement the northern federa­ tionists' campaign, while Piomingo's faction of Chickasaws may have been trying to provoke an American attack on their Creek adversaries. True or not, Robertson decided to accept the reports, and sent five hundred and fifty militia to destroy the towns of Nickajack and Running Water. Seventy Chickamauga warriors died defending their homes.33 Henry Knox disavowed the attack, while Governor William Blount warned Kentucky militia general Benjamin Logan not to make a follow­ up raid and warned the Cherokees not to retaliate. By year's end, however, Blount was able to report to Knox that he had signed a truce with the Chick­ amaugas and that white refugees were returning to their farms. Robertson's

17 0


raid, combined with news of Fallen Timbers, had apparently broken the southern federationists' resistance.34 The Georgia frontier remained calm, after federal agent James Seagrove arranged a truce with Creek micos and captains in November 1793. His de­ ' livery of one hundred and sixty packhorse loads of gifts demonstrated to the Creeks the advantages of alliance with the United States, which could now spend more on diplomacy than Spain. Georgia militia disrupted the truce with two attacks on Creek chiefs, but Washington and Alexander Hamilton (then acting as secretary of war) rebuked the Georgians for their "irregular and improper conduct."35 Moreover, Governor George Mathews took an action that confirmed Georgia's commitment to order on the frontier: sending state troops across the Oconee River to expel the partisans of the "Trans-Oconee Republic." This short-lived pseudo-state was the creation of Elijah Clarke, whom Ed­ mond Genet had commissioned to lead an invasion of Florida. After the French government recalled Genet, Clarke decided instead to invade Creek territory with several hundred gunmen and establish a private fiefdom. Knox and Washington asked the governor to remove the intruders, and in September 1794, Mathews sent state militia across the river, dispersed Clarke's followers, and broke up his settlements.36 The suppression of the Trans-Oconee Republic helped secure the fragile peace on the southern frontier, and showed that state and federal govern­ ments could work together to control their own citizens. This was also a lesson of the other great frontier insurrection of 1794, the Whiskey Rebel­ lion. The uprising originated with the federal whiskey tax of 1791, which backcountry Pennsylvania farmers saw as a corrupt transfer of wealth from western distillers to eastern bondholders. Freeholders in western Pennsyl­ vania publicly denounced the tax, mobbed excisemen, and in August 1794 destroyed the home of excise inspector John Neville and organized a militia demonstration outside Pittsburgh.37 At the request of Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Mifflin, President Washington proclaimed Washington and Allegheny Counties in rebellion, and assembled thirteen thousand militia from Pennsylvania and neighbor­ ing states to defeat "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Public meetings and newspaper editors throughout the eastern states expressed their support for the fed­ eral government and denounced the rebels as opponents of the republican principle of majority rule. The insurgents decided not to fight against such

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unfavorable odds; when Washington's army reached Pittsburgh, it found that the rebels had dispersed. Most of the region's freeholders subsequently took a federal loyalty oath, and Washington then pardoned, or federal juries acquitted, the few leaders who had not fled to Kentucky. White frontiersmen had not customarily deferred to the opinions of easterners or supported the national government, but for the moment, those in western Pennsylvania (at least) were inclined to submit to a government that had overwhelming force and majority support.38

T H E S E T T L E M E N T,

1 79 5-17 9 6

As Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have noted, by 1795 white frontiers­ men could begin to assume that the national government was protecting their interests. Treaties or conferences with the Creeks, Cherokees, and Iroquois secured the good offices of those nations' chiefs, and Anthony Wayne's 1794 campaign broke the Northwest Indian confederacy and de­ moralized its allies. The federal treasury had borne the expense of both treaties and troops-over thirty thousand dollars for the former, about one million dollars for the latter-and in a year of heavy fighting, Anthony Wayne's soldiers had done more bleeding than any other belligerent. The Legion of the United States sustained over one hundred and sixty casualties at Fort Recovery and Fallen Timbers, as against a hundred or so North­ west Indians killed or wounded in the same battles, seventy Chickamaugas slain at Nickajack and Running Water, twenty Kentucky militia casualties in Wayne's campaign, and perhaps a dozen white settlers killed by Indians in Tennessee and the Northwest. Just as importantly, American diplomats had signed European trea­ ties that brought great benefits to Trans-Appalachian settlers. In Novem­ ber 1794, John Jay and George Grenville completed a treaty of commerce and navigation between the United States and Great Britain. Jay's Treaty, as Americans called it, was a conciliatory agreement because both govern­ ments needed to reconcile their differences. The Washington administra­ tion relied on British imports for tariff revenue, and Whitehall was endur­ ing military reversals against France and did not want to add an American war to its troubles. The treaty appointed joint arbitration committees to resolve private citizens' claims, admitted smaller American merchant ships to British West Indies ports, and permitted fur traders of either nationality free passage across the Canadian border.39

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Jay's Treaty was too conciliatory for many Americans, who protested Jay's failure to protect and extend American shipping rights. Opponents of the agreement rioted against Federalist officials in eastern cities, and Re­ publicans in the House of Representatives tried to block funding for the treaty. However, settlers in western New York and Pennsylvania strongly supported the treaty because Jay had secured a crucial concession: the sur­ render to the United States of the Great Lakes forts that Britain had oc­ cupied since 1783, and from which British officials had given supplies and advice to the Northwest Indian federationists.40 While the Senate and President Washington prepared to ratify Jay's Treaty, Thomas Pinckney was signing an equally important treaty with Spanish foreign minister Manuel de Godoy. Pinckney had arrived in Ma­ drid in June 1795 to find Godoy in a pliant state of mind, as Spain (like Britain) was locked in a damaging war with France and wanted to avoid antagonizing the United States. The American minister was thus able to obtain virtually all of the terms the State Department wanted: free naviga­ tion of the Mississippi, the right of deposit at New Orleans, and a Florida boundary at the thirty-first parallel. Both parties also agreed to end their military alliances with the southern Indians and to deter them from future wars. The Treaty of San Lorenzo, or Pinckney's Treaty, won quick approval from the U.S. Senate, the president, and American citizens.41 A third diplomatic breakthrough came at Anthony Wayne's headquar­ ters at Greenville on August 3, 1795. This was the Treaty of Greenville, which formally "restore[dl harmony and friendly intercourse" between the U.S. government and the Northwest Indians. Federationist captains had agreed to an armistice in January 1795, and in June, the first small parties of Delawares, Potawatomis, Chippewas, and Miamis began arriving at Green­ ville for a peace conference. The new secretary of war, Timothy Pickering, instructed General Wayne to adopt a conciliatory posture and not to press American land claims beyond the Fort Harmar Treaty boundary. Wayne agreed, and took pains to define himself as a peacemaker-a civil chief.42 Wayne welcomed Indian leaders on June 16 and used both traditional and new metaphors to sacralize the treaty ground. He kindled the council fire on the "unstained ground" of Greenville, declared that the "clear sky and refreshing breeze" bespoke the Great Spirit's favor, took his guests by the hand, smoked the calumet and exchanged white wampum with them. To those who might find the Legion's parades and artillery salutes alarm­ ing, Wayne offered assurances that these martial displays were in the ser-

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17 3

vice of peace. He told the Indians that his guns would roar "into the heav­ ens" on July 4th as an expression of joy for American independence, that the flag of the Fifteen Fires would fly to celebrate peace, and that the American eagle would more fully extend his olive branch. On July 15, nearly a month after his first address, Wayne closed these preliminaries and opened nego­ tiations by reading his commissions and citing the Treaty of Fort Harmar as the foundation for the forthcoming treaty.43 Wayne's Native American counterparts also expressed their earnest de­ sire for peace, using the same metaphors and exchanges. Tarhe, the only Sandusky Wyandot captain to have survived Fallen Timbers, used a length of white wampum metaphorically to wipe the blood from Wayne's body and sweep the council ground clear, and spoke the words of requicken­ ing from Iroquois condolence ceremonies. The Sun, a Potawatomi leader, combined Wayne's eagle metaphor with an Iroquois image, declaring that the olive branch in the eagle's extended claw was the branch of the tree of peace. Most of the captains present addressed Wayne as "Elder Brother" and thanked him for the road belts he had sent them; several gave Wayne calumets and wampum belts from the northern Lakes Indians. The Sun, Agushaway (Ottawa), and Masass (Chippewa), whose nations had belonged to the moderate faction of the federationist movement, claimed that the war was primarily the responsibility of the British and "the three people[s] who lived at the Miami Villages" (the Miamis, Shawnees, and Delawares). They proclaimed they would now act as peacemakers and bury the hatchet permanently.44 The speakers' pacific metaphors masked their individual political con­ cerns. Most sought to promote their own nations' interests and ensure that their kin derived maximum political advantage from the treaty. Thus, Tarhe proposed that no "particular nation . . . speak for the whole" at Green­ ville, so as to prevent the more numerous Miamis, Delawares, and Potawat­ omis from dominating the proceedings. The Shawnee captain Blue Jacket claimed that the Shawnees were undertaking their own demobilization and that their captains were, for the first time in two decades, resuming their place behind their chiefs in councils. The chiefs of the Potawatomis, Chip­ pewas, and Ottawas insisted that they had not supported the federationists and chided other nations who claimed to be their "masters."45 The one prominent leader who urged the Indians at Greenville to resist Wayne's demands was Little Turtle, the forty-eight-year-old Miami captain who had helped engineer the defeat of Harmar and St. Clair. Little Turtle

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directly challenged Wayne's demand for a land cession, declaring that the Miamis and their neighbors had an uncontestable claim to the lands be­ tween the Scioto and Chicago Rivers. He presented the general with pa­ pers from Washington-probably sent during the diplomatic campaign of 1792-93-guaranteeing the Miamis their towns and hunting grounds. He suggested that Wayne change the western boundary of the proposed cession, from the southwest diagonal that the general had drawn between Fort Recovery and the mouth of the Kentucky River, to a southward vertical linking Fort Recovery and Fort Hamilton. This would increase the North­ west Indians' territory by about 2,500 square miles. Little Turtle also said that many of the posts the United States claimed by virtue of French and British cession had never been given away by the Miamis, and that in any case American traders could safely travel into Indian country without forts to protect them. The Miami captain might have hoped that other nations would support his position, but they did not.46 Wayne dismissed Little Turtle's demands. He informed his "younger brothers the Miamis" that all the other nations at Greenville had assented to the boundary he delineated-indeed, Masass had acknowledged Wayne as the conqueror of the Northwest Indians and proclaimed that his victory superseded all earlier tribal claims. He said that Little Turtle's proposed boundary would be too "crooked" to mark, and noted that his own pro­ posed border was quite clear because its endpoints were obvious. Wayne dismissed the Miami captain's objections to the forts that the general de­ manded beyond the treaty line, reading the articles of Jay's Treaty which gave the British posts on the Lakes to the United States. In any case, Wayne asserted that the immense sum the United States was paying the Northwest Indians would compensate them for the land, and reminded his counter­ parts that they would retain the right to hunt in all ceded territories while the game lastedY There was no further opposition. On August 3, General Wayne and ninety chiefs and captains of the Chippewa, Delaware, Kickapoo, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wea, and Wyandot nations signed the treaty. Under its terms the signatories made peace with the United States, accepted federal jurisdiction over interethnic crimes, and surrendered ten hostages until they had remanded their captives to American officials. They ceded all land south of the Fort Harmar Treaty line and west to Wayne's Fort Recovery-Kentucky River line, affirmed French land grants in Illinois and the Wabash Valley, and confirmed George Clark's one hundred and

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fifty thousand-acre grant at the Falls of the Ohio. The Northwest Indians also ceded sixteen small reservations north and west of the treaty line for forts and trading posts, and guaranteed American citizens safe passage be­ tween them. In return, the signatory nations received hunting rights within the cession, a guarantee that they could peacefully enjoy their remaining lands, twenty thousand dollars in trade goods, and about one thousand dol­ lars each in annuities.48 The treaty seemed like a surrender of Indian land and sovereignty, but Tarhe, who had strongly favored conciliating the Americans, was also de­ termined to use the conference to redefine the Northwest Indians' relation­ ship with the United States. On August 7, while Wayne was distributing treaty goods, Tarhe informed the general that with the completion of the treaty the Indians wished to accept Washington's invitation to adopt them as his fictive children, and to acknowledge him as their "father." This did not imply that they intended to obey their new father's every command; quite the contrary. To the Northwest Indians, political fathers had no co­ ercive power; their role was to furnish their "children" with the necessities of life and resolve disputes among them. Such had been their relationship with French and British "fathers" in the past, and such they hoped would be their relationship with the American Father in Philadelphia.49 To ensure that the Americans understood their new responsibilities, the chiefs spent several days teaching Wayne his paternal duties. Equi­ table treatment of his charges was one duty. "An impartial father," Tarhe observed, "equally regards all his children, as well those who are ordinary, as those who may be more handsome; therefore, should any of your chil­ dren come to you crying, and in distress, have pity on them, and relieve their wants." Protection was another: The Sun, for example, asked the new American father to protect his people from unscrupulous traders. Trust in one's children was yet another duty, and Wayne expressed it by releasing his ten hostages and sending them home to collect the Northwest Indians' captives. 50 That political fatherhood imparted more responsibility than power was a point some chiefs soon reiterated. In September 1796, the Territorial Sec­ retary Winthrop Sargent invited the northern Lakes Indians to Michili­ mackinac so that they could witness the post's transfer to the United States. Addressing one hundred and forty Ottawas and Chippewas in the council house, Sargent enjoined his audience to keep the peace, warning that "fool­ ish young men" who attacked whites would be "severely punished by your

'Red yentlemen and rwhite- Savages fathers." In reply, Ottawa chiefs informed Sargent that they wanted their new fathers to be charitable and indulgent, like their French and British predecessors. The Americans should send traders, smiths, and priests to their Indian clients, that they might be more comfortable and enlightened, and they must remember that "it is not in our powers at all times to govern our young men." The Chippewa Grand Sable concurred, and added that the Chippewas "wish you to take back something you said: you said yesterday you would punish our foolish young men if they did mischief; we hope you will not." To be a political father was to be a provider and mediator, not a punisher of wrongdoers.51 In a sense, the 1,130 Indians who came to Greenville had not come to surrender or to disband their confederacy. They had already fulfilled those unpleasant duties the previous winter, when their captains agreed to attend Wayne's peace council. Instead, the Northwest Indians attended the confer­ ence to reestablish the independence of each nation in the confederacy, and to define a new relationship between those nations and the United States. Within the new framework of fictive kinship, General Wayne and General Washington would not be conquerors but providers, and the Americans' new responsibilities would counterbalance their new powers over the In­ dians. The Northwest federationists had lost the long war; now they began making the best of the peace.52

L E G I SLAT I N G O R D E R IN T H E B O R D E R L A N D

With the end of hostilities west of the Appalachians, the federal govern­ ment resumed building a legal and institutional foundation for order and civilization on the frontier. In May 1796, Congress passed a new Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, which incorporated provisions of the treaties the War Department had negotiated earlier in the decade. It established a statutory boundary line between white settlements and Indian country, and prohibited whites from traveling through Native American territory without a passport or hunting or settling on Indian land. The law stipulated fines and imprisonment for whites who committed crimes against Indians' persons or property, and the death penalty for citizens who killed an In­ dian. Articles 15-17 gave federal courts jurisdiction over cases arising from its violation and authorized the army to apprehend whites found on Native American territory.53 The new Trade and Intercourse Act placed private fur traders under

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heavy restrictions. They could not trade without a license or purchase dip­ lomatic gifts, horses, or land from the Indians. President Washington, Sec­ retary of State Timothy Pickering, and newly appointed Secretary of War James McHenry viewed these restrictions as temporary measures, because they believed that the Indian fur trade, as a fundamentally political enter­ prise, should be a government monopoly. George Washington had urged the Continental Congress to create a system of public Indian "truck houses" at the end of the Revolutionary War, and renewed his call in his annual mes­ sages to Congress, arguing that federal employees freed from the profit mo­ tive could conduct the fur trade "without fraud [and] without extortion."54 In April 1796, Congress authorized the president to establish federal trading factories at his discretion, using a newly created one hundred and fifty thousand dollar capital fund and an eight thousand dollar annual ap­ propriation for salaries. Secretary of War Pickering had already authorized experimental trading posts for the Cherokees at Tellico and for the Creeks at Coleraine, and ordered the first two federal traders (or factors), James Byers and Edward Price, to treat Indian hunters with kid gloves. He speci­ fied that they pay prevailing local prices for furs and sell their wares to the Creeks and Cherokees at cost. In any case, the traders must pay steady prices for furs, lest their customers become "excited by the apprehension of unfair dealing." Such apprehensions do not appear to have afflicted the factories' Creek and Cherokee customers, who by the end of the century were regularly visiting the trading houses to smoke, drink, gamble, and buy merchandise.55 While supporting the old fur trade, Washington, his secretaries of war, and their allies in Congress also continued to support the gradual "civiliza­ tion" of the Trans-Appalachian Indians. They believed the federal govern­ ment should encourage the Indian nations to adopt commercial agricul­ ture, acquire English literacy, and create written laws and representative governments. The 1796 Trade and Intercourse Act routinized the U.S. gov­ ernment's periodic gifts of livestock and agricultural tools by providing fif­ teen thousand dollars per annum in civilization grants. 56 To provide the Creeks and Cherokees with examples of advanced agri­ cultural techniques, Benjamin Hawkins, principal agent to the southern In­ dians from 1796, established a two-hundred-acre model farm at his agency. He also created a public market for Creek women's agricultural produce­ maize, hickory nut oil, butter-and encouraged the factors to pay Creek and Cherokee women high prices for homespun cloth. In this way, the U.S.

'Red gentlemen and 'lflhite- Savages government would teach southern Indian men about agriculture and en­ courage them and their female relatives to adopt stock raising and textile production. 57 The civilization policy increased the War Department's dependence on the Quakers as adjunct Indian officials. Philadelphia Quakers helped the War Department place twenty Creek, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Stockbridge children with rural families by 1800. The Indian Committee of the Phila­ delphia Yearly Meeting paid the pupils' foster parents for their upkeep, and in return the children's mentors taught boys to read, write, plow a field, and shoe a horse and girls to spin and sew.58 In 1796, a party of Quaker missionaries, armed with a letter of introduc­ tion from Timothy Pickering, established a mission in the Oneida nation. Three years later, the Philadelphia Friends' Indian Committee moved the mission to the Seneca town of Genisenguhta. At both stations the Quaker residents built schools and model farms, and paid Iroquois men and women premiums for wheat, flax, cloth, and other "civilized" produce. 59 The close relationship between the Quakers and the War Department is less surprising .when one considers that Knox had hoped to employ "mis­ sionaries of excellent moral character" as U.S. Indian agents. His prototype was Samuel Kirkland, the Congregational minister who helped forge the United States' alliance with the Oneidas during the Revolutionary War. Quaker missionaries would now help demonstrate the federal government's peaceful intentions-hence their presence at treaty conferences from 1791 to 1794-and would make the Indians more peaceful by teaching them or­ derly habits.60 Conversely, federal Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins acted as a kind of secular missionary to the southern Indians. In addition to opening a model farm and a market at his agency, Hawkins convinced Creek town chiefs to establish a national legislature and encouraged them to replace clan ven­ geance with coercive laws. Initially, though, the Creeks' national council served more as a diplomatic conference than a government, a place where micos could make complaints to their agent or request more gifts. It passed few laws in the 1790S and rarely enforced them.61 Overall, the Federalists' peacetime Indian policy engendered little Na­ tive American resistance. Indians did not object to federal laws designed to protect them from intruders and squatters. Southern Indian hunters made good use of the federal factories at Tellico, Coleraine, and Fort Wilkin­ son, just as the northern Indians had used Army forts on the Ohio River

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as trading posts. The Federalists' civilization policy did not strike most as a dangerous innovation because most of the Woodland Indians had been selectively adopting European technology for over a century, and because by the 1790S a growing number were also adopting European lifeways. Hun­ dreds of Wyandot, Delaware, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek families were raising livestock and making cloth, and gifts of plows and spinning wheels only accelerated an adaptive process that Native Ameri­ cans had started on their own. Finally, while Indian children may have been reluctant to board with white families, their relatives believed that the skills they learned would help their kinfolk negotiate the uncertain social terrain of peacetime.62 While chiefs and women embraced cultural adaptation as the key to survival, most warriors stopped fighting white settlers and sought alternative roads to wealth and glory. Some Cherokees continued to steal set­ tlers' horses, but others emulated Choctaws and Kaskaskias by undertaking hunting expeditions and raids west of the Mississippi River. These sojourns engendered two intertribal wars in 1797-98, one between the Kaskaskias and Missouri Shawnees, the other between the Choctaws and Caddoes. When captains of these nations asked the Mississippi territorial governor Winthrop Sargent for help, he declined, as Pinckney's Treaty obliged the United States to prevent Indian war parties from crossing into Louisiana. Sargent did, however, give his Choctaw petitioners food and tobacco, and declined to restrain them from their Trans-Mississippi raids, lest they turn instead against white settlers l iving near Natchez.63 Such expeditions deflected Woodland Indian warriors from the farms of white Americans, while memories of the debacle of 1794 deterred them from forming new confederacies. American officials, to be sure, continued to worry about Indian federationism. In 1797, a rumor (probably started by French habitants) drifted through the Native American communities of the Mississippi Valley that agents of the French Republic, then in a state of quasi-war with the United States, would soon assemble an Indian army to attack American settlements. In September 1798, Winthrop Sargent re­ ported that the Creeks and Choctaws were discussing the possible French reoccupation of Louisiana, and later that year Chippewa, Ottawa, and Po­ tawatomi chiefs told James McHenry and Arthur St. Clair that unidenti­ fied agents had sent them "a strange three-coloured Flag with a war belt" and urged them to "take up the hatchet on account of the French." Yet the southern Indians' musings on a French return to North America remained

•

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'Red yentlemen and 'lflhite- Savages

merely rumors, and the Lakes Indians who had received the war belt and flag assured U. S. officials that they had no intention of fighting for their old fathers. Betrayed once too often by European allies, the Woodland Indians had decided, for the moment, to give their new American fathers the benefit of the doubt.64 The Federalists' desire to play the role of fathers, combined with their contempt for white frontiersmen, led Congressional Federalists to propose restrictions on white settlers' land claims and political rights in the mid1790S. These restrictive proposals began in January 1795, when the governor of North Carolina asked Congress to compensate citizens claiming land that the Hopewell Treaty had returned to the Cherokees. Joseph McDowell asked if Congress was willing to strip veterans of property they had bought with their wartime pay and give it to Indians who had recently "imbrue[ed] their hands in the blood of innocent women and children." William Blount added that in his view the Cherokees never possessed a lawful right to the lands in question, for "to walk across a country, and to shoot in it, was dif­ ferent from an occupation."65 However, Federalist congressmen like William Vans Murray and Elias Boudinot disagreed, saying it would violate precedent and justice to deny Native American land rights on the basis of usage. "The Indian tribes held certain tracts of land," Murray noted, "[but] as to the mode in which they found it most rational to use the land, it was nothing against their right to say its exercise differed from our mode." The House eventually voted fifty­ six to fourteen to deny the governor's request.66 Federalists' desire to restrict white settlers' claims and rights resurfaced in 1796, during debates over the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, the pub­ lic land law, and Tennessee statehood. Apropos of a proposed clause in the Trade and Intercourse Act which mandated the forfeiture of whites' land claims west of the Indian boundary, several Republican congressmen ar­ gued that Native Americans had no natural right to their land and that whites should not have to forfeit real estate they claimed on the Indian side of the line. Federalists replied that customary and statutory rights trumped those based on natural laws. James Hillhouse argued that "though the In­ dians were men in uncivilized life, and differed in their customs and habits from ourselves, yet they were justly entitled to the lands which they pos­ sessed," an entitlement "expressly recognized by the United States in the treaties they had made with them."67 Theodore Sedgwick concurred, asserting that "wherever the natives of a country had possession, there they had a right, and not because they did

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not dress like us, were not equally religious, or did not understand the arts of civilized life, were they to be deprived of their possessions." He suggested that those who opposed the Indians' land titles were neither enlightened nor gentlemen, and urged his colleagues to defeat a doctrine " destructive of all security in property." Ultimately, though, several Federalist congress­ men joined with Republicans to defeat the forfeiture clause.68 The principle that law and custom determined land ownership benefited not only Native Americans, but also the white speculator-developers who claimed large tracts of frontier real estate-men such as Henry Knox, Rob­ ert Morris, and New York congressman William Cooper. Yet, these land­ lords did not feel safe basing their land claims merely on legislative grants; under pressure from critics who insisted that public lands should serve the public good, they increasingly stressed their service as promoters of settle­ ment and development. Many tried to lure settlers to their properties with advertisements, pamphlets, and public meetings. Some allowed emigrants to swap their old farms in the east for land in the west; others offered new settlers reduced rents or loans to help them survive the first years of sub­ sistence. Many built mills, warehouses, and roads for new arrivals. These strategies, landlords argued, benefited the public by encouraging settle­ ment and increasing the number of freeholders and taxpayers. (Of course, they also increased the value of developers' lands.)69 Congress continued to favor developers over smallholders, and expressed this tendency in its 1796 land law. The statute raised the price of public land to $2.00 an acre and required purchasers to pay half the purchase price within thirty days, giving them a year to finish payment. It also directed the Treasury Secretary to sell federal lands in large lots: half in 640-acre sec­ tions, the rest by 5,760-acre quarter-townships. Albert Gallatin and Wil­ liam Findley argued that Congress should favor settlement over revenue by selling some land in 320-acre lots, thereby creating both "a wholesale [and] a retail store," and by raising the price of public land, thereby discouraging speculation. William Cooper and other Federalists retorted that buyers of public land tended to make large speculative purchases and that Congress should not discourage them. They might have added that they wished to make no more concessions to plebeian buyers in a bill intended to favor patrician developers?O Congressional Federalists also sought to limit the political power of frontiersmen-and to deny Thomas Jefferson three or four additional Elec­ toral College votes in the 1796 election-by trying to block the Southwest Territory's application for statehood. In May 1796, fifteen Federalist sena-

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tors and thirty Federalist representatives voted against admitting Tennes­ see to the Union, arguing that the territory's petition violated the Southwest Territorial Act, that its constitution was poorly drawn, and that the terri­ tory was really two distinct societies, not one. In the final vote, however, northern Republicans united with southern Federalists to approve admis­ sion. As shown by the rejected forfeiture clause in the Trade and Inter­ course Act, the growing electoral power of western representatives in the House obliged the Federalists to make concessions to them, even when the Federalist Party enjoyed a majority in Congress and control of the executive branch?!

NAT IONAL P O L I C Y A N D L O C A L C I R CU M ST A N C E S

Moreover, while Congress and the War Department could prescribe poli­ cies in Philadelphia, those policies did not necessarily translate into reality on the frontier, where federal and state officials, white settlers, Indian chiefs and warriors still set the actual political agenda. In Georgia, the govern­ ing document of Indian-white relations in the late 1790S was not an act of Congress but the Treaty of Coleraine, which Benjamin Hawkins, George Clymer, and Andrew Pickens negotiated with the Creeks in June 1796. The Washington administration sought to secure Creek consent for federal posts on their land and the surveying of an international boundary line through their territory. Georgia's governor, meanwhile, had received per­ mission to ask the Creeks for another land sale, as stipulated by the 1793 Trade and Intercourse Act (which allowed states to buy Indian land under federal supervision) and sent James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms to negotiate with the Creeks.72 The conference became a theater of humiliation for the Georgians. Cly­ mer, Hawkins, and Pickens barred the state commissioners' militia escort from the treaty ground, and promised the Creeks compensation for the Georgia militia's 1793 attacks. For their part, the Creeks laughed at Geor­ gia's demand for compensation for stolen livestock, and refused to sell any more land. The federal commissioners tried to adopt a balanced pose, but failed: they were predisposed to regard white frontiersmen as aggressors and Indians as victims, and in any case it was more practical for the na­ tional government to restrain white Georgians than to threaten the power­ ful Creek confederacy.73 In the end, Georgia received nothing from the Creeks but a renewed commitment to return captives and runaway slaves and to keep the peace.

Musket; Quill, and Calume� The nation's micos found it difficult to enforce the latter promise. In the late 1790S, Creek warriors terrorized Georgia farmers, killed several Ten­ nesseans, and attacked federal surveyor Andrew Ellicott on the Flint River, while in 1800, hundreds of disaffected Creeks rallied to the standard of returning adventurer William Bowles, helping him capture Fort St. Marks in Florida?4 Georgia's government did not long protest the Coleraine debacle be­ cause by the end of the 1790S it was trying to complete an important deal with the federal government: the cession of the state's land claims west of the Chattahoochee River. Four out-of-state companies (the second Yazoo Companies) had in 1794 bribed the state legislature into selling them those claims-35 million acres at 1.4 cents per acre-but angry voters denounced, and a new legislature repealed, the fraudulent sale. In 1798, a state constitu­ tional convention approved the cession of Georgia's trans-Chattahoochee lands to the Union, provided Congress paid compensation and extinguished the remaining Indian land claims in Georgia; Congress, meanwhile, autho­ rized the president to negotiate such a cession as part of an act creating Mississippi Territory. While the negotiations were underway, Georgia offi­ cials preferred not to antagonize the U.S. government over Indian policy?5 In Georgia, political conflict within the white population and the pres­ ence of the powerful and unbowed Creek confederacy obliged frontier set­ tlers to submit to federal authority. These conditions did not pertain else­ where on the frontier in the late 1790S, and in Tennessee, Kentucky, the Northwest Territory, and New York, local residents pressured U.S. officials into changing their policies, or openly defied federal authority. Tennesse­ ans began to confront the administration immediately after statehood. In 1797, Andrew Jackson, one of the state's first congressmen, refused to sign Congress's farewell tribute to George Washington, claiming that the presi­ dent had allowed the Creeks and Cherokees to terrorize his constituents. Jackson and William Claiborne then submitted payment claims for the mi­ litia who had fought in Sevier and Robertson's campaigns against the Cher­ okees. The Committee on Claims and Secretary of War James McHenry urged Congress to reject the petition, lest it encourage militia officers to disobey federal orders, but in 1798, Congress paid the twenty thousand dol­ lar claim because rejection might encourage militiamen to disobey their officers' orders?6 While Andrew Jackson successfully confronted the administration in Philadelphia, his constituents in Tennessee were sowing the seeds of an­ other war by grazing livestock and raising corn on Cherokee land, in viola-


Musket; Quill, and Calume�

18 5

Kentucky and Ohio settlers took equal liberties with Indians' lands. Mi­ ami and Delaware chiefs complained that intruders were poaching game from their White River hunting grounds, while Arthur St. Clair reported that whites were trying to claim real estate "along the [Ohio] river and a considerable distance inland" by girdling trees and erecting crude cabins. In some cases, land speculators actively encouraged these encroachments in order to fatten their own purses. John Symmes, for instance, illegally sold Indian land north of the Virginia Military District to white farmers. When territorial officials warned the squatters off, Symmes urged them to petition the legislature for redress, and, if they did not receive it, to resist ejectment by force.8l Arthur St. Clair plaintively wrote to Kentucky Governor John Brown that he had tried to "give the people [of the Northwest] such a direction as might contribute to make them virtuous and of course happy and a use­ ful part of the United States when they shall be entitled to it." Few white settlers in the Northwest Territory, however, wanted St. Clair's guidance. They wanted instead to enjoy the rights they believed they had won in the Revolution and that the national government withheld from them: the right to claim land through settlement and cultivation, the right to self­ government, and the right to personal security, which to them included the right to kill an Indian in (purported) self-defense.82 St. Clair wrung his hands over whites' violations of Indian rights but said he was unsure whether federal treaties allowed him to arrest white intruders on Native American land. St. Clair probably lacked the power to apprehend trespassers, since the War Department had moved the army from the Ohio Valley to posts on the Great Lakes. His uncertainty about his authority to do so, however, suggests that he was more unwilling than unable to protect the Northwest Indians.83 The U.S. government was also slow to fulfill its material obligations to the Great Lakes nations. The War Department delivered few treaty goods to the 1799 distribution at Fort Wayne, and sent none at all in 1800 due to floods and the departmental purveyor's illness. That same year, Secretary McHenry recommended that garrison commanders stop giving rations to Indian visitors, lest they "encourage the Indians in idleness." Anthony Wayne had promised at Greenville that the United States would be a gener­ ous "father" to its Indian children, but within five years American officials had become indifferent parents.84 Meanwhile, in New York, the federal government allowed the state

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government to wring more land cessions out of the Iroquois. In 1793-94, Governor Clinton and state agents requested additional cessions from the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, declaring that the annuities they were offering would make the ceded lands "productive to you after not even a striped squirrel shall remain thereon." Oneida chiefs rejected the initial of­ fer, while the Cayuga and Onondaga towns on Buffalo Creek and Grand River blocked their eastern kinsmen's promise of a new cession, claiming that the Finger Lakes Iroquois did not speak with "the voice of the nation." In 1795, the new Federalist governor of New York, John Jay, pressed the is­ sue, holding treaty conferences with all three nations and cozening them into selling several hundred more square miles of land. Secretary of War Pickering and Attorney General William Bradford protested the purchases as infringements on federal sovereignty, but eventually decided to drop the matter-probably to avoid embarrassing Governor Jay.8S In May 1796, New York officials held a federally sanctioned treaty with the St. Regis Mohawks in New York City. Under the approving eye of federal commissioner Abraham Ogden, state agents pressed four chiefs and cap­ tains to surrender virtually all of their people's lands in exchange for £1,233 in state currency, an annuity of £213, and a 6-square-mile reservation on the Saint Lawrence River. The Mohawks protested that the state was offer­ ing them too little money, and that they wished to retain a 300-square-mile strip on the south bank of the St. Lawrence. One reminded the commis­ sioners that his people had been U.S. allies during the Revolution, and that the Fifteen Fires had been more generous in recognizing the land claims of their Indian enemies. "It seems before a nation can get justice of an­ other they must first go to war and spill one another's blood," said another speaker. Unable to resist New York's demands and lacking a neutral arbiter to whom they could appeal, the St. Regis chiefs signed the treaty on May 31. New York had already sold their lands-about 3.6 million acres-to Alex­ ander Macomb, one of George Clinton's cronies.86 The next year, state and federal agents helped liquidate the last major Ir­ oquois land claim in New York: that of the Senecas. In 1797, Thomas Morris, representing his father Robert, sought to purchase nearly all of the Senecas' remaining lands for one hundred thousand dollars in Bank of the United States stock. Robert Morris had acquired the Phelps-Gorham company's preemption claim in 1790, and had then sold it to the Holland Land Com­ pany on condition that he extinguish the Indian claim at his own expense. After several years of importuning, Morris finally brought Seneca war-

Musket; QuilL, and Calumet: riors, matrons, and chiefs together at Big Tree (near present-day Geneseo, New York), and sent his son with fifteen thousand dollars worth of blan­ kets, knives, lead, powder, vermilion, kettles, food, liquor, and tobacco to sweeten the deal.S? Claiming to speak for the nation, Red Jacket declined Morris's offer, noting that when the Onondagas and Oneidas sold their lands "they had lost their consequence." Morris, however, had promised several chiefs and captains personal annuities for their cooperation, and on September 4, the financier's principal ally, Cornplanter, declared that he and the other cap­ tains would leave the conference unless the chiefs approved the sale. The federal commissioner Jeremiah Wadsworth "expressed his sorrow that a division in their councils had taken place . . . it was no uncommon thing among the white people and from that source arose all their difficulties." Morris, however, did not concur with Wadsworth's remark, because he in­ tended to use the Senecas' divisions to his own advantage.ss Two days after Cornplanter's threat, Thomas Morris convened a sepa­ rate meeting with the warriors and matrons, reminded them of the gifts and cash he had promised the chiefs, and obtained their separate consent to the cession. The chiefs recognized that the treaty was a fait accompli and signed it on September 16, conveying forty-five hundred square miles of land to Robert Morris and leaving the Senecas with three hundred and ten square miles divided among eleven reservations in New York and Penn­ sylvania. In return, each of the fifteen hundred Senecas received about ten dollars in presents and four dollars each year in bank stock interest.89 The Treaty of Big Tree was actually one of the most generous Indian land-purchase agreements of the eighteenth century, but it brought the Senecas neither prosperity nor security. It would have been cold comfort for them to learn that Robert Morris was in more difficult straits. Between 1795 and 1797, Morris and his partner John Nicholson had spent their fortunes on land in six states, which they planned to develop by building mills and roads and hiring tradesmen to settle there. A financial depression dried up available sources of capital, and Morris and Nicholson's North American Land Company went bust; by late 1797, Morris was hiding from his credi­ tors in Philadelphia and had to send his son to negotiate with the Senecas. The man whom the Iroquois called "the great eater with a big belly" had eaten too much, and the Big Tree sale did not aid his financial digestion, for he had already sold the Senecas' lands. In February 1798, Morris's creditors finally caught him and sent him to debtors prison.90

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'Red gentlemen and "White- Savages

It is worth asking why the Washington and Adams administrations ap­ proved the St. Regis and Big Tree land sales. The U.S. Treasury would re­ ceive no revenue from either land cession, and there were few farmers clam­ oring to settle on the Mohawks' and Senecas' lands. On the other hand, the treaty councils would cost the federal government very little, since the state of New York and Thomas Morris were funding them. The land ces­ sions might aggrieve the Indians, but since the St. Regis Mohawks and the Senecas were American allies they were unlikely to resist the sales by force. Both cessions would benefit land speculators who promised to develop and settle their tracts, which was consistent with the Federalists' pro-developer land policy. Moreover, there was a potential cost associated with failure to approve the cessions: the chance that New York and Morris might simply buy the lands from the Iroquois without federal authorization. By sending commissioners to stamp each land cession with a federal seal, Washing­ ton and Adams would avoid losing another jurisdictional conflict with New York and at the same time affirm the United States' constitutional oversight of Indian land sales.91 IF T H E R E WAS A COMMON THREAD tying together Federalist frontier poli­ cies in the late 1790S, it was avoidance of conflict. More specifically, offi­ cials, congressmen, and presidents sought to resolve disputes by siding with whichever party dominated a particular region. In the lower South, federal commissioners sided with the Creeks, both because they believed Indians had a right to keep their lands and because a disaffected and well-armed Creek confederacy seemed a greater threat than disgruntled Georgians. For similar reasons, the Mississippi Territorial Governor Winthrop Sargent ad­ opted a public policy of "courtesy [and] fair words" toward the Choctaws, even though he wished he could speak to them "in plain & honest language," cease giving presents, and "whip imprison or hang" those who trespassed on white settlers' lands or stole their property. The Choctaws were more powerful than Sargent's government and the whites he governed, and thus officials had to treat them with "more than common decency."92 Conversely, in New York, Tennessee, and the Ohio Valley, it was expedi­ ent to side with settlers and speculators because they now held the balance of power in those regions. Congress sided with Tennessee militia against the War Department; Washington and Adams pressured or encouraged the Cherokees, Senecas, and St. Regis Mohawks to sell their lands; and Arthur St. Clair stood pat while white settlers attacked friendly Indians. Where in

::Musket; Quill, and Calumet the 1780s, American nationalists had hoped to give the federal government power over the Trans-Appalachian region, by the late 1790S, Federalist of­ ficials were content to affirm the exercise of power by whoever really held it-Southern Indians, white settlers, or well-connected land barons. The Federalists' policy of acquiescence did not reflect lack of concern for the frontier. Jay's Treaty, Pinckney's Treaty, Wayne's military campaign, and Congress's 1796 trade and land laws give the lie to that notion. The federal government's disengagement in the late 1790S stemmed instead from the preoccupation of president, Cabinet, and Congress with a foreign crisis­ an incipient war with France-and with using that crisis as an opportunity to expand federal powers and suppress domestic criticism of their policies. The Federalists hoped that long-term legal and institutional processes, like defined boundaries, licensing laws, education, and trade, would alter the behavior of Indians and white frontiersmen and turn them into support­ ers of the national government. Unfortunately, politics in a republic was a short-term game, and in the short term, the Federalists were winning no friends in frontier white communities and losing them in Indian country. And in the eastern states, where most voters lived, the Federalists' policies at the end of the decade ensured that they would have no say over anyone's fate in the long term.

Conclusion THE REVOLU TION OF 1 8 0 0 IN INDIAN COUNTRY

1_"

he Federalists' frontier triumphs of 1794-95 were partly byproducts of the Wars of the French Revolution. Because Britain's war with France made the Crown unwilling to risk a second war with the United States, British officials abandoned the Northwest Indian confed­ eracy and Britain's posts on the Great Lakes. Similarly, the Spanish govern­ ment signed Pinckney's Treaty to avoid antagonizing the U.S. government while French armies were invading Spain. It is ironic that the French Re­ public should also have been party to the foreign policy crisis that caused the Federalists to lose control of the American national government. In 1796, after accumulating a string of grievances against the United States government, the French government severed diplomatic relations and authorized French privateers to attack American ships. The following year, President Adams sent to Paris a three-man commission charged with reconciling the two nations' differences. When the commissioners arrived, agents of the French Foreign Ministry informed them that before negotia­ tions could begin, the United States would have to assume all French debts and claims owed to American citizens, loan the Directorate thirty-two mil­ lion florins, and pay a bribe to Minister Tallyrand and his subordinates. The agents, whom the commissioners labeled "X, Y, and Z," believed that these terms were suitable chastisement for a wayward ally. The commis­ sioners refused to meet these conditions, and one, John Marshall, returned to Philadelphia for further instructions.l In the meantime, Adams had submitted the commissioners' dispatches

19 2

'Red yentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages

to Congress, and several newspapers had published the details of the "XYZ Affair." American citizens erupted in protest against France's attack on their sovereignty, organizing anti-French demonstrations and inundating the president with supportive petitions. In 1798, emboldened Federalists and bellicose Republicans in Congress passed a series of war measures that suspended all relations with France, enlarged the army and navy, and im­ posed direct taxes on houses, land, and slaves.2 More controversially, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, au­ thorizing the president to deport enemy aliens without trial and outlawing the defamation of federal officials. Federalists aimed the measures at Repub­ lican editors and radical Irish emigres, whom they viewed as French sup­ porters and opponents of "Adams and Liberty." Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, formerly the Senecas' Hill of Peace, now became the "Scourge of Jacobinism," scanning newspapers for seditious libel and directing district attorneys to prosecute the government's foes. Fourteen men faced federal sedition charges by 1800.3 Responding to resolutions of the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures that declared the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional, Federalists in Con­ gress insisted that the new laws were necessary to defend the republic "not only against the usual consequences of war, but also against . . . the subver­ sion of religion, morality, and government." The report clarified a funda­ mental difference between the nationalists who led the Federalist Party and the moderate farmers, merchants, and mechanics who had been its base of support. The former believed that a strong national government should promote order by building social institutions and forcibly suppressing op­ ponents. The latter believed that the purpose of the national government was to solve specific political problems-promote trade, pay public debts, defend the nation from attack-and not to reshape society. These moderates accepted higher taxes and a larger army because of the imminent threat of war. When that threat failed to materialize, voters' support for Federalist war measures evaporated.4 By the end of 1799, the Federalists' one-sided prosecution of Republicans and overwrought suppression of a bloodless Pennsylvania tax revolt (Fries's Rebellion) had driven thousands of voters into opposition. President John Adams then alienated the nationalist High Federalists by disbanding the army's new regiments and firing Timothy Pickering and James McHenry, thereby splitting the Federalist Party. Meanwhile, Republican leaders used correspondence, outdoor meetings, and patronage to build a national party

Conclusion

193

apparatus and take control of the New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina legislatures. These legislatures then gave Thomas Jefferson thirty-two of his seventy-three Electoral College votes in the 1800 election. The frontier states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, whom the Feder­ alists had estranged with their Indian policy, contributed eleven more. The Republicans also took control of Congress, with sixty-five of one hundred and six congressmen and eighteen of thirty-two senators. The Federalists never regained control of either the presidency or national legislature.5 Thomas Jefferson would later call the election the "Revolution of 1800." The change in government did not, however, produce immediate changes in federal Indian policy. President Jefferson retained the Federalists' fledg­ ling Indian service and one of its principal agents, Benjamin Hawkins. Jeffersonian officials continued using lavishly ceremonial treaty confer­ ences, annuity payments, and personal patronage to negotiate with Native Americans and secure the good offices of their leaders. In March 1802, the Republican-controlled Seventh Congress renewed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, which guaranteed the Indians protection from squatters and unlicensed traders and added a ban on liquor sales that many chiefs had requested. The new act would remain in effect until 1834. Jefferson also expanded Washington's system of publicly managed fur trading posts, authorizing the construction of twelve factories during his two terms in office. The trading houses, Jefferson believed, would "have more powerful effects than so many armies" in promoting American influence in Indian country.6 The new president was also a strong supporter of the Indian civilization project. Thomas Jefferson agreed that Native Americans were intellectually capable men and women, and believed that a benevolent government could lead them to adopt commercial agriculture, the English language, and con­ stitutional governments. Ultimately, he imagined that the white population of the United States could absorb the Woodland Indians through intermar­ riage. In 1808, Jefferson told a party of Indian visitors that "Temperance, peace, and agriculture will raise you up to be what your forefathers were, will prepare you . . . to mix with us in society, and your blood and ours united will spread again over the great island."7 The Jefferson administration thus enlarged the Federalists' Indian civi­ lization program. Congress renewed a fifteen thousand dollar annuity for livestock and agricultural implements in the 1802 Indian Trade and Inter­ course Act, and new treaties with the Sauk, Fox, Cherokee, and Creek na-

19 4

'Red (jentlemen and White- Savages

tions encouraged them to take such goods as payment for land cessions. An 1804 treaty gave the Delawares a six hundred dollar annuity for livestock, tools, and agricultural and vocational instruction, while an 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskias paid for the salary of a priest to "instruct as many of their children as possible in the rudiments of literature." The War Department also gave three hundred dollars to Presbyterian missionary Gideon Black­ burn to build a school for Cherokee children.s At the same time that they sought to civilize Indians, however, Repub­ lican officials committed themselves to the steady reduction of the Wood­ land Indians' land base. Jefferson and other members of his administra­ tion believed that a sturdy and virtuous yeomanry, spurred to industry by expanding markets for their produce, was the social bedrock of a republic. Prospective settlers were quick to agree. Whereas the Federalists had advo­ cated gradual expansion, accompanied by economic diversification and the construction of churches, schools, and courts, the Jeffersonians sought to open new land to white farmers as swiftly as possible.9 To this end, two Republican policymakers, Albert Gallatin and William Henry Harrison, had as congressmen drafted the 1800 Land Act. The law reduced the minimum purchase size for federal land from 640 to 320 acres, offered 4 years of credit to buyers, and opened 3 new land offices in the Northwest Territory. The Eighth Congress subsequently (1804) reduced the minimum tract size to 160 acres.IO Republicans opposed on ideological grounds the Federalist policy of allowing white landlords and Native Americans to retain large tracts of undeveloped land. Jefferson had once remarked "Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." The Republi­ can legislatures of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts incorporated this idea into new state land laws in 1801 and 1807, permitting squatters to remain on absentee proprietors' lands for minimal payment. The same natural-right principles could be applied to Native Americans, who in the view of many whites had "omitted those pursuits required by the Laws of nature as the bases of property." Better that their hunting grounds should be "compactly settled by honest, respectable yeomanry" than allowed to lie fallow.l1 Two political events accelerated the Jefferson administration's drive for Indian land. One was the cession of Georgia's western land claims, completed in April 1802. Under the terms of its compact with the Union, Georgia ceded the land west of the Chattahoochee River in exchange for

Conclusion

195

$1.25 million dollars and a federal guarantee to extinguish all Indian land titles within Georgia's post-cession boundaries "as early as the same can be peaceably obtained." The War Department directed Benjamin Hawkins and Andrew Pickens to leave the Mississippi Territory, where they had just finished negotiating treaties with the Chickasaws and Choctaws, and go to Georgia to fulfill the administration's promiseP In June 1802 and November 1805, federal commissioners negotiated two treaties with the Creek confederacy, whereby they purchased for Georgia all the lands between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers. Georgia's gover­ nor praised the administration, but Creek chiefs were less enthusiastic, complaining that the federal government had shortchanged them and had failed to fulfill its promise to protect them from intruders. They balked at Hawkins's requests for land cessions in 1803 and 1804, and only by bringing a party of chiefs to Washington and paying them a high price-$241,000 plus a $3,000 annuity-could Jefferson quiet their protestsP The second event was Spain's retrocession of Louisiana to France, which became a crisis for the U.S. government in 1802 when the intendant of New Orleans suspended the American privilege of deposit there. Federal­ ist congressmen called for the seizure of New Orleans, but Jefferson, who had reduced the army as an economy measure, believed that diplomacy and defensive measures were the government's only feasible options. While ordering Robert Livingston and James Monroe to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans from Napoleon, Jefferson began preparing a defensive bulwark. He planned to purchase several million acres of Indian land on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, resettle the district with well-armed American frontiersmen, and use them to defend the republic from a French attack-and to separate the Trans-Appalachian Indians from intriguing French agents. "The occupation of New Orleans . . . by the French," Jeffer­ son told Indiana Territorial Governor William Harrison, "is already felt like a light breeze by the Indians . . . We had better, therefore, do at once what can now be done."14 Following Jefferson's directive, Harrison negotiated a land cession and road-easement treaty with the Delawares, Shawnees, and Miamis, and pur­ chased much of the future state of Illinois from the tiny Kaskaskia nation. American commissioners were less successful in convincing the Chicka­ saws and Choctaws to sell their lands, but in August 1803, James Wilkinson purchased from the Choctaws an 853,000-acre tract "between the Tombig­ bee, Mobile, and Pascagoula Rivers" for 150 blankets and £250. Two years

'Red yentlemen and 'lVhite- Savages later, in the Treaty of Mount Dexter, the Choctaws sold 4.1 million acres of land in present-day Mississippi for $50,500 in debt assumption and a $3,000 annuity. The cession provided the United States with another defensive buf­ fer, as the tract abutted Spanish West Florida.ls While accelerating the acquisition of Native American land, the Jef­ ferson administration gradually subordinated other elements of its Indian policy-the civilization program and the trading factories-to the goal of expansion. Jefferson believed that there was a natural coincidence between the effects of Indian civilization and the demands of white settlers. As Na­ tive Americans abandoned their traditional economy for capital-intensive agriculture, their need for extensive hunting ranges would decrease, while their demand for manufactured goods would concurrently increase. Once Native Americans learned of this inevitable change, U. S. officials could induce them to sell their "surplus" lands to pay for improvements on the remainder and for the commodities of civilization. "A coincidence of inter­ ests will be produced," Jefferson explained to Benjamin Hawkins, "between those who have lands to spare, and want other necessaries, and those who have such necessaries to spare, and want lands." Confining Native Ameri­ cans to a limited territory would presumably also make it easier for chiefs to govern their warriors, and thereby make the frontier more secure.16 Another felicitous effect of Indian acculturation, in the eyes of land­ hungry Jeffersonians, was the tendency of Native Americans to buy trade goods on credit. Choctaw hunters had racked up a forty-six thousand dollar debt with the Panton & Leslie Company by the turn of the century, and in the late 1790S, the Fort Wilkinson factory began offering credit to Creek hunters, who quickly overextended themselves. In 1802, the Jefferson ad­ ministration made a land-for-debt deal with the Creeks: the Treaty of Fort Wilkinson set aside ten thousand dollars of the funds paid to the Creeks for their land cession "to satisfy certain debts" they owed the factory. The next year, Jefferson proposed institutionalizing the practice: "We shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run into debt, because . . . when these debts get beyond what the indi­ viduals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands." The new factories in the South extended thousands of dollars in credit to Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders, while in 1805 the United States procured large land cessions from both nations in exchange for the liquidation of debts owed to private traders, including Panton & LeslieP For Indians who did not want to participate in the civilization program, Jefferson proposed a peaceful alternative to assimilation: voluntary emigra-

Conclusion

197

tion. During the Louisiana crisis, he observed that several hundred Choc­ taw and Cherokee families had settled in Arkansas, and in the summer of 1803, Jefferson prepared a draft constitutional amendment that would have authorized him to negotiate an exchange of territory between whites living west of the Mississippi River and Indians living east of it. Jefferson soon shelved the amendment, but continued to explore the possibility of volun­ tary population exchange. In 1804, he ordered Meriwether Lewis and James Wilkinson to ask white settlers in Missouri and Louisiana about their will­ ingness to move east, and four years later, he urged Cherokees wishing to "continue the hunter's life" to move to Arkansas. Thomas Jefferson was not the first American to propose Indian removal, but his plan, involving a ne­ gotiated exchange of lands and the ostensibly voluntary relocation of Na­ tive Americans to the Louisiana Purchase, would serve as a model for the Jackson administration.l s Most Woodland Indians, including former adversaries of the United States, adapted to the Jeffersonians' policies as they had adjusted to the Federalists'. Civil chiefs attended the United States government's treaty councils and tried to negotiate favorable land deals. They and many of their kinfolk welcomed the administration's expanded civilization program. Southern Indian families accepted federally funded plows, livestock, and spinning wheels, and sought to improve their finances by selling corn, pork, and cotton instead of deerskins. The Mekoche Shawnees raised livestock, built mills and a forge, and asked the Quakers to open a school for them,19 Indian acculturation was, as always, selective, and those who adopted new lifeways sought to blend them with traditional religious beliefs and social structures. To take one example, the Allegheny Senecas incorpo­ rated the civilization program into a new syncretic religion preached by Cornplanter's brother Handsome Lake, who claimed to have made a se­ ries of journeys to heaven and to have received a new gospel in 1799-1800. The prophet instructed the Senecas to revive old ceremonies-the white dog sacrifice, annual bowl games, and songs of thanksgiving-and aban­ don witchcraft and alcohol. The new faith resembled the teachings of eighteenth-century nativist prophets, but Handsome Lake also urged his fol lowers to adopt the white man's tools and customs: plows, spinning wheels, frame houses, and English literacy. Most did so, and the new faith, or Gaiwaio, fostered both religious and economic renewal within the Seneca nation.20 The Jefferson administration's feverish pursuit of land, however, gener­ ated opposition from some chiefs and many warriors, particularly those

'Red yentlemen and White- Savages who declined to participate in the civilization program or did not benefit from annuity payments. During Jefferson's presidency, U.S. commissioners negotiated thirty treaties with Native Americans, which added two hundred thousand square miles of land to the public domain. The administration's determination to "press on the Indians, as steadily and strenuously as they can bear, the extension of our purchases" was most visible in the North­ west, where William Harrison negotiated fifteen treaties and obtained title to much of present-day Indiana and Illinois.21 The Northwest soon became the center of a nativist movement that grew into a new military confederacy. In 1805-6, a Shawnee prophet named Tenskwatawa (the Open Door) introduced another set of revelations from the Master of Life to the Great Lakes Indian communities. Tenskwatawa instructed his followers to divest themselves of European goods, refrain from fighting one another, and stop their chiefs' land sales. By 1807, Ten­ skwatawa, Tecumseh, and the Ottawa prophet Le Maigouis had recruited hundreds of followers and effected "a little revolution" in the Northwest. By 1811, the Open Door's adherents were at war with Indiana's governor and settlers, while in the south Tecumseh was recruiting several thousand disaffected Creeks, later known as the Red Sticks, into his brother's nativist confederacy.22 This confederacy would have posed a nearly unanswerable challenge to the early Washington administration. By the second decade of the nine­ teenth century, however, the United States had sufficient manpower to crush both the Northwest Indians and their Creek allies. Harrison deliv­ ered the coup de grace to Tecumseh's followers in October 1813, while vol­ unteers led by Ferdinand Claiborne and Andrew Jackson killed over fifteen hundred Red Sticks at Eccanachaca (December 1813) and Horseshoe Bend (March 1814). Regular Army soldiers comprised part of each expedition­ ary force, but a majority of the American combatants in those battles were either frontier militia or Native American warriors allied with the United States. Twelve hundred Kentucky militia and two hundred and sixty Dela­ wares, Shawnees, and Wyandots fought alongside Harrison, while several thousand Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi militia and over fifteen hun­ dred Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and loyal Creeks helped crush the Red Stick movement.23 The army could tap this reservoir of militia and Indian auxiliaries as a result of the Jeffersonians' frontier policies. Settler-friendly land laws and the purchase of New Orleans opened the floodgates of western migration,

Conclusion

199

and by 1810 over one million white and black Americans lived west of the Appalachians. Where frontier states had only been able to muster a few hundred gunmen in the 1780s, they could now recruit thousands of militia to fight Indian insurgents. Meanwhile, the Federalists' and Jeffersonians' Indian policies had given thousands of Woodland Indians incentives to support the federal government and to oppose insurgents like Tecumseh. Formal treaty councils allowed Native American chiefs and captains to par­ ticipate in the u.s. government's policy decisions, while annuity payments and civilization grants gave many a stake in peaceful relations. On the eve of the War of 1812, elder statesmen like the Miami captain Little Turtle and Choctaw leader Pushmataha denounced Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa as opportunists and warned that their call for war "forebodes nothing but destruction." Shortly thereafter, they would help smash a federationist movement that they now perceived to be as much a threat as land-hungry whites.24 The defeat of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa's confederacy removed the last significant obstacle to the United States' conquest of the Trans­ Appalachian West. During the 15 years following the War of 1812, the re­ gion's non-Indian population swelled to 3.3 million people, and 16 Senators and 47 Representatives would represent western voters in the United States Congress; by 1829 a westerner, Andrew Jackson, occupied the White House as well. Once marginalized and derided by eastern gentlemen, these west­ ern leaders now controlled national frontier policy, and set to work disman­ tling their predecessors' accommodating Indian policies. Men like Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Cass, and Andrew Jackson closed the federal fur trad­ ing factories, denounced the civilization policy as a failure, and enacted a coercive Indian Removal program that expelled most of the Woodland Indians from their homelands.25 IN JULY 1789, H ENRY KNOX R E P O R T E D to President Washington that "all the Indian tribes once existing in those states now the best cultivated and most populous have become extinct." He warned that without federal in­ tervention, "in a short period the idea of an Indian on this side the Mis­ sissippi will only be found in the page of the historian." Forty years later, his prediction was on its way to becoming reality-and the federal govern­ ment, which Knox had hoped would shield the Indians from the ill effects of American expansion, was instead becoming the foremost agent of their dispossession and removaJ.26

200

'Red yentlemen and rWhite- Savages

The Revolutionary War, Knox observed, left the people of the United States "in the possession of sovereignty and an extensive territory." The na­ tionalists of the 1780s and the Federalists of the 1790S had sought to secure both sovereignty and territory by creating a strong central government, led by educated gentlemen (themselves), who would have the power to curb the violent excesses of a newly free people. On the Trans-Appalachian frontier, officials would use courts, armies, and regulated land sales to curb white frontiersmen's appetite for Indian land and Indian blood. They would then control Native Americans with treaty ceremonies, which would appeal to Indian leaders' self-importance; annuity payments, to appeal to their self-interest; "civilizing" gifts, to appeal to their presumed desire for self­ improvement; and the threat of military reprisal, to appeal to their sense of self-preservation.27 This was the theory. In practice, the federal government created in 1787 lacked the power to impose order on the inhabitants of the western fron­ tier. Its blandishments could not turn Shawnee, Miami, Creek, and Chicka­ mauga warriors away from their quest for individual prestige and collective self-defense, and so the Indian war of the 1780s continued and intensified. The Federalists had to fight a long, ruthless war to subdue the Northwest Indians and their Creek and Cherokee allies, and even then the War De­ partment needed help from frontier militias and the distraction of the fed­ erationists' European allies to achieve victory. Western whites, who ultimately helped the U. S. government defeat In­ dian federationists, proved equally unreceptive to federal control. Through­ out the 1790S, "frontier white savages" squatted on Indian land, launched il­ legal attacks on Native American hunters and towns, and grew in numbers, particularly after the defeat of the Indian confederacy that had been the only effective barrier to white settlement. By the end of the century, it was clear to officials on the ground that a few local bureaucrats backed by 3,000 soldiers could not hope to govern 380,000 disaffected frontiersmen. The Federalists had hoped that they could increase the national govern­ ment's prestige in the West by introducing the symbols and institutions of command: flags, army garrisons, courts, churches, and schools. Such politi­ cal theatrics did not, however, command the respect of people who believed that the Federalists were abridging their rights, and who had learned dur­ ing the Revolution that they did not have to yield to the demands of distant governments. Thanks to the Northwest Ordinance, which allowed western settlers to create new states coequal with the old, they could soon express their dissatisfaction with the Federalists at the ballot box.28

Conclusion

201

After the Federalists lost power, their Jeffersonian successors found the West no easier to govern, despite their repeal of the hated whiskey excise and their less restrictive land policies. They did learn, however, that their predecessors had laid the groundwork for domination of the Woodland In­ dians: the Northwest Indian War, coupled with the Federalists' treaty con­ ferences, annuity payments, and trading houses, had dramatically increased the United States' prestige in Indian country. By the end of Thomas Jeffer­ son's presidency, Republican officials had used Federalist policies to turn thousands of Native Americans into federal clients. During James Madi­ son's presidency, several thousand Indian captains and warriors proved the point by fighting alongside white Americans against Indian federationists. In 1818, Secretary of War John Calhoun could claim that the Woodland Indians were no longer "independent nations," and argue that "our views of their interest, not their own, ought to govern them." A decade later, the governing interest would be that of the frontiersmen who had vexed the Federalists. They would use removal treaties and military force to drive the remaining Woodland Indians across the Mississippi and fulfill Knox's . prophecy. 29 This was hardly consistent with the Federalists' vision for the West. They had imagined a "great, respectable, and flourishing empire," where white and red gentlemen would lead their followers down the paths of enlightenment and civilization, until a future date when the nation could assimilate the surviving Indians as citizens. Their success, however, depended on making their vision appealing to both whites and Indians, for both had inherited a political tradition in which power and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed, rather than the innate excellence or fearsomeness of the governors. The Federalists' talk of fatherhood and guidance resonated with some Native Americans who believed they could turn the metaphor to their advantage. It did not appeal to federationists trying to defend their land and independence, nor did it interest western American farmers who wanted political equality and cheap land. The latter group's vision of an "empire for liberty" would replace the Federalists' "respectable empire" after 1800, and would trump Native Americans' quest for sovereignty after 1815.30 The Federalists failed not merely because their Jeffersonian rivals had a more appealing vision of the nation's future. They also lost power because their view of the science of government was incompatible with the function­ alist approach favored by their erstwhile subjects. Knox, St. Clair, Washing­ ton, and others believed that the best form of government for an extensive republic was a wise and virtuous patriciate that would use extensive federal

202

'Red yentlemen and 1Vhite- Savages

powers to develop a prosperous society. Their rivals believed the reverse: that society should use the federal government to serve specific and limited political needs. Most white westerners supported the Jeffersonians' vision of government, but also believed that the Jefferson and Madison adminis­ trations should employ the resources that the Federalists had bequeathed them to fulfill their own ambitions-including the seizure of Native Ameri­ can land and the ethnic cleansing of the eastern United States.31 This was not the first time that a democratic majority would tyrannize an unpopular minority. It would certainly not be the last.


In references to multi-volume printed works, or to bound manuscript collections, the volume number appears before the colon, followed by the page number(s). In refer­ ences to microfilm collections, the reel number appears before the colon, followed by the page or document number(s). In citations to the Josiah Harmar Collection, outgoing correspondence is bound in letter books identified by a capital letter, while incoming correspondence is bound in volumes identified by a number. The Lyman Draper Manuscripts, while consulted in their microfilm version, are referenced here by volume and page number. Reels 164 and 165 of the Papers of the Continental Congress (PCC) reproduce man­ uscript pages that are bound in separate volumes. Since this affects pagination, refer­ ences to these reels give three numbers: reel number:volume number:page number

ABBREVIATIONS

Am. St. P.: For. AJf. Am. St. P. : Ind. AJf. Am. St. P.: Mil. AJf. ASCP Bevan MSS

BLP Draper MSS "Emlen Journal" "Evans Journal" GDAH

American State Papers: Foreign Affairs American State Papers: Indian Affa irs American State Papers: Military Affa irs Arthur St. Clair Papers, Ohio Historical Society Joseph Vallance Bevan Collection, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah Benjamin Lincoln Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Lyman Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison William Fenton, ed., "The Journal of James Emlen" Halleck Roup, ed., "The Journal of Griffith Evans" Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta

:Notes t(f Pages 1-3

204 Harmar MSS HCPSM IALT JCC Knox Papers LDC LMC

NYPCRI PAH PCC PGw, PS PYMICC

RPaRG SCP SRNC TPP TPUS WGW WSC

Josiah Harmar Collection, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Historical Collections ofthe Pioneer and Historical Society of Michigan Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties Journals of the Continental Congress Henry Knox Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Letters ofDelegates to Congress Edmund Burnett, ed., Letters ofMembers of the Continental Congress New York Assembly Petitions, Correspondence, and Reports Relating to Indians, 1783-1831, New York State Archives, Albany The Papers ofAlexander Hamilton Papers of the Continental Congress, National Archives, Washington, DC The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series Philadelphia Friends Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Collec­ tions, Quaker Manuscripts, Department of Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, PA Records of Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Governments, 177S-90, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg Susquehannah Company Papers State Records ofNorth Carolina The Timothy Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers ofthe United States The Writings of George Washington The Winthrop Sargent Collection, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus

I NTRODUCTION: T H E O R I G I NS OF AN UNEASY ALLIANCE 1. Davis, The Campaign That Won America, 289, 308; Smelser, The Winning ofInde­ pendence, 327-33. 2. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 271-7S; Calloway, The American Revo­ lution in Indian Country, 172-73, 20S-7, 229-30. 3. A recurring theme in Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, and Skaggs and Nelson, The Sixty Years' Warfor the Great Lakes. 4. Sadosky, "Rethinking the Gnaddenhutten Massacre"; Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder, 189-98; Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 14S-S3. S. Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder, 232 (quote); Sadosky, "Rethinking the Gnaddenhutten Massacre," 187; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 272. 6. Sadosky, "Rethinking the Gnaddenhutten Massacre," 191-200. 7. Dann, The Revolution Remembered, 314; George Washington to Sir Guy Carleton, 7 April 1783, WGw, 26: 30S-6 (first two quotes); Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heck­ ewelder, 232 (third quote).

205

:Notes to' Pages 3-9

8. LDe, 18:448n-449n; Richard Butler to John Bayard. 5 June 1786. PCC. 69:181; David Zeisberger to Josiah Harmar. 13 July 1786 and 25 Feb. 1787. Harmar MSS. 3:81 and 5:44; Congressional Committee Report. 17 Aug. 1786. fCe, 31:526; Resolutions of 20 May 1785. 24 Aug. 1786 and 27 July 1787. fCe, 28:381. 31:562-63. and 33:429-30. 9. Waring. The Fighting Elder. 16-17 (quote). 104-6. 112-19; Calloway. The American Revolution in Indian Country. 197-98. 203. 10. Waring. The Fighting Elder, 40-41. 104-5. 111-12 (first quote). 124-25 (second quote); Klein. Unification ofa Slave State. 78-108; Ward. Between the Lines. 189-202. 11. Nobles. American Frontiers, 103-4 (quote. 104). 12. Ward, Between the Lines, 3-8. 17-32. 51-68. 103-16. 135-51. 169-85. On frontier settlers as banditti. see Robert Patterson to Walter Finney, 12 July 1786. PCC. 164:524. 13. Senate Instructions to the State Indian Commissioners. 20 March 1783. NYPCRI, 1:5-6; Graymont. The Iroquois in the A merican Revolution; Philip Schuyler to John Hanson, 21 Sept. 1782. PCC. 173:593-94. 14. Belleisles. Revolutionary Outlaws; Manley. The Treaty ofFort Stanwix. 24-25 (quote. 24); Onuf. The Origins ofthe Federal Republic, 126-45. 15. Resolutions of 29-30 Oct. 1782. fCC, 23:694-96; Schuyler to Hanson, 21 Sept. 1782, PCC. 173:594-95. 16. Speech of Six Nations to Schuyler. 21 July 1783. PCC. 173:609-10; Schuyler to the President of Congress. 29 July 1783. PCC. 173:601-7 (quote. 606); Manley, The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 31. 17- Bush, "Philip Schuyler"; Kelsay. Joseph Brant. 189. 209-10. 214, 347-48; Man­ ley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 32; George Washington to James Duane. 7 Sept. 1783. WGw, 27:133-40. 18. Crane. The Southern Frontier, 135-36. 272-75; Calloway, The American Revolu­ tion in Indian Country, 213-19. 19. Calloway. New Worldsfor All, 42-49, 99-105; H ickerson. "Trade. Mediation. and Political Status in the Hasinai Confederacy"; St. Jean. "Trading Paths"; Dowd. A Spir­ ited Resistance, 9-16. The term "fictive kinship" is from Anderson. Kinsmen ofAnother Kind, 29-57. 20. White. The Roots ofDependency. 69-96; Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 121-38; Snapp, fohn Stuart and the Strugglefor Empire on the Southern Frontier, 35-36. 21. Calloway. The American Revolution in Indian Country. 221-30; Cruzat to Esteban Miro. 8 Aug. 1782. and Report on Paulous's Peace Mission. Sept. 1782. both in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:49-50. 53-54. 57. 22. Vicente Zespedes to Bernardo Galvez. 16 Aug. '1784. in Kinnaird. Spain in the Mississippi Valley. 2:109 (quotes); BouJigny to Miro. 22 Aug. 1785. ibid 2:137. 23. Calloway. The American Revolution in Indian Country, 230-34; Weber. The Spanish Frontier in North America. 282; Message of the Chickasaw Chiefs to Congress. 28 July 1783. in Calloway. The World Turned Upside Down, 164-66. 24. Richter, Facing Eastfrom Indian Country, 164-66 (quotes. 166). See also White, The Roots ofDependency. 34-68. 25. Message of the Chickasaw Chiefs, in Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down, 164-65 (quotes). 26. Message of the Chickasaw Chiefs. ibid 165-66; Rohrbough, The Trans­ Appalachian Frontier, 15-16; Hopewell Treaty Journal, 11-12 Jan. 1786. Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:51-52. .•

.•

206

J\{otes t(J' Pages 9-15

27. Joseph Brant to Henry Glen, 21 July 1784, Public Papers of George Clinton, 8:327; Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 17 Oct. 1784, Craig, Olden Time, 2:419 (quotes). See also Chapter One, n. 4, below. 28. Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years; Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy; Sheehan, Seeds ofExtinction; Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 139-53; Jones, Licensefor Empire. 29. Hoxie, A Final Promise, xiv-xv. 30. Allen, "The Federalists and the West"; Cayton, The Frontier Republic, 12-16; Calloway, New Worldsfor All, 122-23. 31. Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, 3-4, 43-44, 65-69, 115-21, 127-28; DeMallie, '''Touching the Pen"'; Calloway, New Worldsfor All, 127-133; Merrell, Into the Ameri­ can Woods, 253-76. 32. Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma," 124-29; Hickerson, "Trade, Media­ tion, and Political Status in the Hasinai Confederacy," 150-57; Carson, Searchingfor the Bright Path, 13-15, 17-19; Barbe-Marbois, Our Revolutionary Forefathers, 195-98; Military Journal ofEbenezer Denny, 60-61, 64, 71-72. 33. Mason, The English Gentleman, 15-69; Wood, The Americanization ofBenjamin Franklin, 35-41; Elias, The Court Society, 52-68, 94-103; Bushman, The Refinement of America, xiv-xx, 42-55, 76-89; Elkins and McKitrick, "The Founding Fathers," esp. 202-6; Marston, King and Congress, 13-34, 298-99. 34. Turner, The Ritual Process, 96-97, 128-29, 167-68, 201-3; Thompson, Customs in Common, 45-47; Cayton, '''Noble Actors' upon the 'Theatre qf Honour,'" 239; "Evans Journal," 18 Oct. 1784, 214 (quote). 35. Diary entry for 24 Jan. 1776, in The Works ofJohn Adams, 2:431 (first quote); Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 99; "Em len Journal," 304; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 81 (second quote); Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 131 (third quote); Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 9 March 1788, Harmar MSS, C:31-32 (last quote). 36. Knouff, "Soldiers and Violence on the Pennsylvania Frontier"; Hinderaker, Elu­ sive Empires, 214-24. 37. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 16; Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebel­ lion, 46-60; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 58, 70. 38. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, xviii-xxi, 16-33; Richter, Facing Eastfrom Indian Country, 179-81, 193-98. 39. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 33-64; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 344-46; Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 59-62, 109-29; Merrell, "Declarations of Indepen­ dence." I have separated the terms "nativist" and "federationist" because one cannot always apply them to the same individuals. Some nativists, like Red Jacket, opposed pan-Indian federationism, while some federationists, like Blue Jacket, embraced Eu­ ropean culture. (See Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 90-91; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 54, 80, 284m6.) 40. Hopewell Treaty Commissioners to the President of Congress, 2 Dec. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aft., 1:39; Jacob Springer to Thomas Hutchins, 13 Sept. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:27. 41. Blacksnake, Chainbreaker, 196-201; Taylor, "Captain Hendrick Aupaumut," 447-48; St. Clair to George Washington, 2 May 1789, in Smith, The St. Clair Papers,

:JI[otes tif Pages 15-21

20 7

2:112; John Hamtramck to Josiah Harmar, 13 Oct. 1788, Harmar MSS, 8:132; Sargent, "Winthrop Sargent's Diary," 249-250, 254-55. 42. Cayton, "Radicals in the 'Western World,'" 86-94; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 289. 43. Wallace, fefferson and the Indians, 206-317. 44. Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, 6-8. For the term "kinship state" see Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 37. 45. Richter, The Ordeal ofthe Longhouse, 22; Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 234-39; Hickerson, "Trade, Mediation, and Political Status in the Hasinai Confed­ eracy," 150-55; Galloway, "'The Chief Who Is Your Father'''; Fogelson, "Cherokee Notions of Power," 187-88, 190-92; White, The Middle Ground, 37-39, 325-26; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 6-16; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 17-37, 52-56; Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land, 27, 37-39; Tooker, "Women in Iroquois Society." 46. White, The Middle Ground, x-xi; Aron and Adelman, "From Borderlands to Borders"; Aron, American Confluence, xiv-xviii, 245-46.

1. POST-REVOLUTIONARY POLYPHONY, 1783-1785

1. Definitive Treaty of Peace between the United States and His Britannic Majesty (3 Sept. 1783), in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 8:81-82. 2. Talk of the Indians to British Officials, 15 May 1783, quoted in Snapp, fohn Stuart and the Strugglefor Empire on the Southern Frontier, 205; Calloway, Crown and Calu­ met, 10-12; Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Southern Department, 28 May 1784, fCC, 27:454. 3. Jones, Licensefor Empire, 148-60. 4. Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 5 Feb. 1784, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 70; Message of the Chickasaw Chiefs to Congress, 28 July 1783, in Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down, 165 (first quote); Hopewell Treaty Journal, 23 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:41 (remaining quotes). 5. Rakove, The Beginnings ofNational Politics, 333-59; Rakove, "From One Agenda to Another"; Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit, 9 Jan. 1790, PAH, 6:86; Amendment to Indian Affairs Committee Report, 14 Oct. 1783, fCC, 25:677-80. 6. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 70-89; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 244-45, 272; Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic, 74-125; Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson, 21 Oct. 1783, in Thomson and Thomson, Congress at Princeton, 82-83; Acknowledgment of Deed of Cession, 1 March 1784, fCC, 26:112-17· 7. Resolution of 21 April 1783, fCC, 24:264; Col. George Morgan to Shaquiandaque and Riandewane, 14 Aug. 1784, HCPSM, 11:380-81; Report of Ephraim Douglass to the Secretary at War, 18 Aug. 1783, Pennsylvania Archives, First Series, 10:83-90. 8. Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, 15 Oct. 1783, fCC, 25:683-88 ("accommodate" at 683) ; Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Southern Department, 28 May 1784, fCC, 27:455-58 ("Generosity, Clem­ ency, and Mercy" at 455) ; Monroe to Brant, 5 Feb. 1785, in Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 102-3 (final quote).

208

']I[otes to' Pages 22-25

9. Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, fCC, 25:683 (quote), 688-90; Resolutions of 24 Oct. 1783 and 29 April 1784, fCC, 25:747 and 27:389, respectively. The Report for the Southern Department used nearly identical language. 10. Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Southern Department, 28 May 1784, fCC, 27:460; Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the North­ ern Department, fCC, 25:690 (quotes). See also Message to the Governor of Virginia, 3 Aug. 1784, fCC, 27:625-26. 11. George Washington to James Duane, 7 Sept. 1783, WGw, 10:307. 12. Resolutions of 3 Oct. 1783 and 29 April 1784, fCC, 25:642 and 26:315-17; Commit­ tee Report of 22 Oct. 1783, fCC, 25:717-18 (quote, 718) ; Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson, 23 Oct. 1783, in Thomson and Thomson, Congress at Princeton, 85-86. 13. Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution, 155-56; Governor James Bowdoin to the General Court, 4 Oct. 1786, in Baxter, Documentary History of the State ofMaine, 21:236-38; Fort Schuyler Council Minutes, 31 AUg.-lO Sept. 1784, Public Papers of George Clinton, 8:349-78; Fort Herkimer Treaty Journal, 23-29 June 1785, in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affairs, 1:84-108 (quote, 106) ; Campisi, "The Oneida Treaty Period," 50-5114. Cotterill, "The Virginia-Chickasaw Treaty of 1783"; Treaty with the Cherokees, 31 May 1783, and Treaty with the Creeks, 1 Nov. 1783, both in Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land in Georgia, GDAH, 109-11, 129-30; Alexander Martin to the North Carolina Congressional Delegation, 8 Dec. 1783, SRNC, 16:919-20; Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, 50-54. 15. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 33-40, 53-68; Benjamin Lincoln and Henry Knox to the Penobscots, 4 Sept. 1784, Knox Papers, 17:122. (first quote); Benjamin Hawkins and Hugh Williamson to Alexander Martin, 26 Sept. 1783, SRNC, 16:888-89 (second quote); Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson, 1 Oct. 1783, in Thomson and Thomson, Congress at Princeton, 82-83 (last quote); Fort Herkimer Treaty Journal, 25 June 1785, in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affairs, 1:95-99. 16. Resolution of 30 Oct. 1783, fCC, 25:764-67 (quote); Samuel Attlee and Francis Johnston to the President of the Executive Council, 17 May 1784, RPaRG, 21:145-46; Correspondence of James Finley, 18 March 1783, Pennsylvania Archives, 10:42; Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic, 49-73; John Dickinson to the Surveyor General of Pennsylvania, June 1783, Pennsylvania Archives, 10:54. 17. "General Knox's Estimate of the Indian Population of the United States," Jan. 1791, TPP, 69:7; Smyth, A Tour in the United States ofAmerica, 1:343-44 (quote, 343 ) ; Green, "The Expansion of European Colonization to the Mississippi Valley," 462-65; Jones, Licensefor Empire, 66-68. 18. Speech of Captain Johnny, 18 May 1785, Native American Collection, Clements Library (first quote); Old Tassel to Joseph Martin, 10 Oct. 1784, SRNC, 17:175 (remain­ ing quotes); John Habersham to Eneah Mico, 9 April 1784, and Speech of the Tallassee King, 22 Sept. 1784, both in Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land, GDAH, 134-35, 162; Speech of Unsuckana ii, Hopewell Journal, 23 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:4119. Report of Ephraim Douglass to the Secretary at War, 18 Aug. 1783, Pennsylvania Archives, 10:87 (quotes); Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 33-35; Congressional Resolution of 6 Feb. 1784, and Indian Affairs Committee Report, 28 May 1784, both in fCC, 26:71-72, 454.

:Notes to' Pages 25-29

20 9

20. Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 17 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:418; Cal­ loway, New Worldsfor All, 115-33; Memorandum of the [Tallassee] King's Proposals and Complaints, Nov. 1783, Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land in Georgia, GDAH, 117 (quote). 21. Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 19-20; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 52-56; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 343-46. 22. Philip Schuyler to the President of Congress, 29 July 1783, PCC, 173:603; Penob­ scot Treaty Minutes, Aug. 1784, Knox Papers, 17:119 (quote); Samuel Parsons to Wil­ liam Samuel Johnson, 27 Oct. 1785, in Hall, The Life and Letters ofSamuel Holden Parsons, 474-75; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 34-53; Silver, A New Face on the Coun­ tryside, 40-66; Nabokov, "Native Views of History," 20-23. 23. Talk of the Second Man of the Cussetas to Gov. Houston, 14 July 1784, and Houston to the Second Man of the Cussetas, 15 July 1784, both in Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land, GDAH, 146-47, 149; Speech of Rev. Petrus, 25 June 1785, Fort Her­ kimer Treaty Journal, in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affairs, 1:92-94 (quotes). 24. Benjamin Lincoln to James Bowdoin, 9 Nov. 1786, and Daniel Little to Benjamin Lincoln, 26 June 1788, both in BLP, 7:547-48, 9:155-56. 25. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 25-46; Joseph Martin to Gov. Alexander Martin, 11 Jan. 1784, SRNC, 16:924; Peter Muhlenberg to the President of Congress, 5 July 1784, PCC, 69:114; Entry for 14 Sept. 1784, Diaries of George Washington, 4:21; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 52-53. 26. Joseph Martin to Patrick Henry, 26 March 1785, in Henry, Patrick Henry, 3:283-84; Smith, "A Letter from Kentucky," 91-95; Report to James Robertson, 10 July 1784, SRNC, 17:83; Memorial of the French Inhabitants of Kaskaskia, 2 June 1786, in Alvord, Kaskaskia Records, 382; Joseph Martin to Charles Thompson [Thomson], 5 Jan. 1787, PCC, 69:187. 27. Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 77n6; Franyois Barbe de Marbois to the Comte de Vergennes, 30 Sept. 1784, in The Emerging Nation, 2:451 (quote); "Evans Journal," 22 Sept. 1784, 206. 28. Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 63-64; Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 12 Oct. and 17 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:416, 418; Marbois to the Comte de Vergennes, 14 Oct. 1784, The Emerging Nation, 2:473 (quote). 29. Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 23 Sept. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:406; Marbois to Vergennes, 30 Sept. 1784, in The Emerging Nation, 2:451-52; Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 33-35; Potts, Arthur L ee, 81, 254-55, 267-70 (quote, 270) . 30. Gottschalk, Lafayette Joins the American Army, 143-45; Graymont, "The Onei­ das and the American Revolution," 37-38; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 17 Oct. 1784, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 1:347-48. 31. Address of Lafayette to the Six Nations, 10 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:428-29 (quotes); Madison to Jefferson, 17 Oct. 1784, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 1:348-49. On the covenant chain and "Onondio," see Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 131-42, 208-13. 32. Wolcott, Butler, and Lee to Lt. John Mercer, 5 Oct. 1784, and Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 4-5 and 11-12 Oct. 1784, both in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:409, 408-9, 412-15 (first quote, 411); "Evans Journal," 5 Oct. and 11 Oct. 1784, 208 and 211 (second quote).

210

')\fotes to' Pages 29-35

33. "Evans Journal," 12 Oct. 1784, 211; Address of the U.S. Commissioners to the Six Nations, 12 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:413 (quote). 34. Lee and Butler to the Chairman of the Committee of States, 20 July and 4 Aug. 1784, PCe, 69:119-20, 129-30; Marbois to Vergennes, 30 Sept. 1784, in The Emerging Nation, 2:451; Madison to Jefferson, 11 Oct. 1784, in Jefferson and Madison, The Re­ public ofLetters, 1:346; Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 12 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:416 (quote). 35. Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 17 Oct.-18 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:418-23 (first three quotes, 418-19, 422); "Evans Journal," 17 Oct. 1784, 212 (last quote). 36. Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 20 Oct. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:423-26. 37. Ibid., 20-21 Oct. 1784, 2:427-28; "Evans Journal," 21-23, 26 Oct. 1784, 214-15; Barbe-Marbois, Our Revolutionary Forefathers, 205. 38. Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 98-99; D. 1. to Josiah Harmar, 10 July 1785, and Mich Huffnagle to Harmar, July 1785, both Harmar MSS, 2:97, 104; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 234; Speech of Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Great Tree, 1 Dec. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:140-41 (quote). 39. Manley, The Treaty ofFort Stanwix, 95, 105-6; "Evans Journal," 19 Oct. and 22-23 Oct. 1784, 213-15; Committee of Indian Affairs Report, 25 Aug. 1784, and Attlee, Johnston, and Maclay to John Dickinson, 15 Nov. 1784, both RPaRG, 21:496, 904-5; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 367. 40. Fenton, "Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty­ Making," 18-21; Cayton, "'Noble Actors' upon 'The Theatre of Honour,'" 236-37; Journal of Arthur Lee, 24 Dec. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:341-42; Cornplanter to Richard Butler, 11 Sept. 1786, PCC, 164:2:9-11. 41. "Evans Journal," 1 Nov. 1784-2 Jan. 1785, 218-32; Journal of Arthur Lee, Nov.­ Dec. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:334-44; Fort McIntosh Treaty Census, TPP, 59:126A; Denny, Military Journal, Jan. 1785, 55. 42. "Evans Journal," 8 Jan. 1785, 232; Fort McIntosh Treaty Journal, 8 and 13 Jan. 1785, TPP, 59:119-22. 43· Josiah Harmar to John Dickinson, 15 Jan. 1785, Journal of Captain Jonathan Heart, 53; Fort McIntosh Treaty Journal, 15 and 19 Jan. 1785, TPP, 59:122A-23A (quotes); Potts, Arthur Lee, 272. 44. Fort McIntosh Treaty Journal, 20-21 Jan. 1785, TPP, 59:124-26 (quotes); "Evans Journal," 22-24 Jan. 1785, 233; Abiel Foster and Pierse Long to Meshech Ware, 27 Feb. 1785, LMe, 8:46. 45. Petition of Katherine Grenadio to Congress, ca. Jan. 1785, PCC, 69:169-70; Jour­ nal of Richard Butler, 30 Sept. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:436 (first two quotes); John Doughty to Henry Knox, 21 Oct. 1785, in Journal ofJonathan Heart, 88-90; Message of the Shawnees and Mingoes to Col. Alexander McKee, 20 March 1785, Na­ tive American Collection, Clements Library (last quote). On Katherine Grenadio, see Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 98. 46. Jacob Springer to Thomas Hutchins, 13 Sept. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:27 (quotes); DeMallie, "'Touching the Pen,'" 39-40. 47. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 151-52; Merrell, "Declarations of Independence," 200-201; Franc;ois Barbe de Marbois to Vergennes, 14 Oct. 1784,in The Emerging Nation, 2:472; Fort Stanwix Treaty Journal, 12 and 17 Oct. 1784, in Craig,

:Notes t(f Pages 35-39

211

The Olden Time, 2:413-14, 417-18; Fort McIntosh Treaty Journal, 21 Jan. 1785, TPP, 59:124A-25. 48. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 133-62, 399-400, 725-32 (quote, 139); "Evans Journal," 18 Oct. 1784, 214 (quote). The Senecas and Oneidas also held a condo­ lence ceremony at Fort Stanwix to bury their wartime divisions; see Barbe-Marbois, Our Revolutionary Forefathers, 205-7. 49. Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, 15 Oct. 1783, in jCc, 25:686-87; Fort McIntosh Treaty Journal, 21 Jan. 1785, TPP, 59:123A-24. 50. "Evans Journa!," 31 Oct. 1784, 217 (first quote); Peter Muhlenberg to the Presi­ dent of Congress, 5 July 1784, PCe, 69:115; George Rogers Clark to Gov. Harrison, 22 May 1783, quoted in White, The Middle Ground, 412 (second quote); Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 48, 53-55.

2. T H E EVAPORATION OF FEDERAL AUTHO R I TY ON T H E FRONTIER, 1785-1786

1. Resolution of 23 April 1784 and Ordinance of 20 May 1785, JCC, 26:275-279 and 28, 375-381, respectively; Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 8-10; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 148-150; Knox to the Marquis de Chastellux, 27 September 1785, Knox Pa­ pers, 18:95 (quote). 2. Resolution of 3 June 1784, and Report of Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay to Congress, 5 September 1785, both in jCc, 27:530-37, 29:679-80; Harmar to the Presi­ dent of Congress, 1 May 1785, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:3-4; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 54-72. 3. Resolutions of 15, 18, and 21 March 1785, in JCC, 28:159-62, 180-81, and 183-84. 4. Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 57-67, 79-86; White, The Middle Ground, 339-96; Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 85-89. 5. Speech of Captain Johnny, 18 May 1785, Native American Collection, Clements Library (first quote); Account of Samuel Montgomery, Sept. 1785, and Daniel Elliot and James Rinkin to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 28 October 1785, both PCC, 69:241 (second quote), 275-77; Joseph Ashton to Harmar, 23 Oct. 1785, Harmar MSS, 2:129 (third quote). On the Ohio Cherokees, see Tanner, "Cherokees in the Ohio Coun­ try" and Major Finley's Estimate of Western Indians, 6 Dec. 1785, PCC, 164:155-56. 6. Obadiah Robins to Josiah Harmar, 17 May and 28 August 1785, both Harmar MSS, 2:66 and 113; Journal of Richard Butler, 30 Sept., 11 Oct. and 13 Nov. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:436, 444, and 464; Resolution of 29 June 1785, in JCC, 28:486-487; Denny, Military journal, 22 Oct. 1785, 59; John Doughty to Harmar, 30 Nov. 1785, Harmar MSS, 2:138 (quote). 7. Petition of George Rogers Clark, 27 May 1780, in Robertson, Petitions of the Early Inhabitants ofKentucky, 58-59; Peter Muhlenberg to the President of Congress, 5 July 1784, PCC, 69:114; Journal of Richard Butler, 13 Oct. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:446-47; Samuel Parsons to Henry Knox, 15 April 1785, Knox Papers, 18:20; Hall, The Life and Letters ofSamuel Holden Parsons, 498-502, 529. 8. Speech of Captain Johnny, 18 May 1785, Native American Collection, Clements Library; Denny, Military journal, 24 Nov. and 20 Dec. 1785, 60, 63; Journal of Richard

212

:Notes to' Pages 39-44

Butler, 29 Oct. 1785, 25 Nov. 1785, and 18 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:457 (quote), 486-87, and 516. 9. Journal of Richard Butler, 14 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:512-13 (quotes); Denny, Military Journal, 8 Feb. 1786, 74. On calumet dances, see Springer, "An Ethnohistoric Study of the Smoking Complex," 221-24. 10. Denny, Military Journal, 14 Jan. 1786, 69 (first quote); Journal of Richard Butler, 14-15 Jan. and 17 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:513-14 and 515 (second quote; Butler's emphasis). While men who dressed and lived as women held an accepted place in Woodland Indian societies, they were often figures of fun for their kinsmen, whose gibes affirmed the social and spiritual importance of gender boundaries. See Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 8; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 37-39. 11. Journal of Richard Butler, 26-28 and 30 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:518-19, 521-22. 12. Ibid., 29 and 30 Jan. 1786, 520 (first two quotes), 522 (remaining quotes). 13. Ibid., 30 Jan. 1786, 523-24. 14. Smith, "Wampum as Primitive Valuables," 227-29; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 148-49. 15. Smith, "Wampum as Primitive Valuables," 229-39; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 149-52; Denny, Military Journal, 73. 16. Denny, Military Journal, 27 Jan. 1786, 73 (first quote); Journal of Richard Butler, 25 Nov. 1785, 28 and 30 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:486, 519, 524-25 (second and third quotes, 524-25). 17. Daniel Elliot and James Rinkin to the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 28 Oct. 1785, PCc, 69:251-52; Sugden, Blue jacket, 8-9, 70-71; Howard, Shawnee!, 26-27, 106-9; Denny, Military Journal, 14 Jan. and 27 Jan. 1786, 70-71, 73 (quote); Journal of Richard Butler, 14 Jan. and 29 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:513 and 520. 18. Speech of Chief Molunthy, 20 March 1786, PCC, 164:265 (quote); Denny, Mili­ tary Journal, 24 and 27 March, and 13 June 1786) , 80-81, 86-87. See also Report of Tatopocsha, John Dowdy, and Big Cat, 18 June 1786, Knox Papers, 18:171. 19. Journal of Richard Butler, 30 Sept. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 436; Major Finley's Estimate of Western Indians, 6 Dec. 1785, and Orders of the Secretary of War to Harmar, 12 May 1786, both PCc, 164:155-56, 338-39 (quote). 20. Journal of Richard Butler, 31 Oct. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:459 (quotes); Henry Knox to Washington, 22 Nov. 1785, Knox Papers, 18:113; Major Wyllys to Knox, 24 April 1786, PCC, 164:301-2; Report of Great Miami Treaty Commissioners, 19 June 1786, in JCC, 30:350; Report of William North, 23 Aug. 1786, PCc, 164:2:25-26. 21. Journal of Richard Butler, 1 Oct., 9 Oct., 9 Nov., 14 Nov., and 7-10 Dec. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:437, 442-43, 462, 481 (quote), and 493-96; Denny, Military Journal, 21 Dec. 1785, 64. 22. Journal of Richard Butler, 17 Dec. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:499 (first quote); Report of Great Miami Treaty Commissioners, 21 June 1786, in JCC, 30:350 (second through fourth quotes); Robert Patterson to Captain Walter Finney, 12 July 1786, PCC, 164:524 (last quote). 23. David Duncan to Thomas Hutchins, 28 March 1786, Knox Papers, 18:148. 24. American officials estimated a southern Indian population of 63,000 to 71,000 (Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh to the President of Congress, 2 Dec. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:39; Knox's Estimate of Indian Population, Jan. 1791, TPP, 59:7.)

:Notes ta' Pages 45-48

213

25. Committee Report of 4 March 1785, and Resolutions of 11 and 15 March 1785, both in fCC, 28:118-20, and 137-38, 160-62; Rufus King to Elbridge Gerry, 24 March 1785, in LMC, 8:72 (quote). 26. Resolutions of 15 March and 12 July 1785, JCC, 28:160-62 and 29:690-91; O'Brien, "The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered," 46-47; Hawkins, Pickens, and Martin to Richard Caswell, 19 June 1785, in SRNC, 17:473-74. 27. Waring, The Fighting Elder, 124-25, 130; Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier, 22-23, 33, 35; Jackson, Lachlan McIntosh and the Politics ofRevolutionary Georgia, 60-70, 138-39; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 217-21. 28. Joseph Martin to Patrick Henry, 21 May 1783, in Henry, Patrick Henry, 3:244; Whitaker, "The Muscle Shoals Speculation," 365-66; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 260-61, 288-89; Jones, Licensefor Empire, 151. 29. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 289; Joseph Martin to Alexander Martin, 11 Jan. 1784, in SRNe, 16:925; Joseph Martin to Patrick Henry, 26 March 1785, in Henry, Patrick Henry, 3:283; George Maxwell to Joseph Martin, 9 July 1788, PCC, 165:3:409-10 (quote). 30. Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 32-36; Hawkins to Thomas Jefferson, 14 June 1786, in LMC, 8:385n (first quote); Benjamin Hawkins to Al­ exander McGillivray, 8 Jan. 1786, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 101-2 (second quote). 31. William Blount to the Commissioners, 28 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:44; Gov. Caswell to the North Carolina Congressional Delegation, 3 April 1786, in LMC, 8:344n; North Carolina House of Commons Journal, 6 Jan. 1787, in SRNe, 18:462-64. On North Carolina's treaty goods, see Alexander Martin to Richard Beresford, 4 June 1784, in SRNC, 17:76-n 32. Act Creating Bourbon County, 7 Feb. 1785, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:120-22; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 288-89; Houston to Elbert, 2 April 1785, in LMe, 8:81-82; Hopewell Treaty Journal, 28 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:43; Jackson, Lachlan McIntosh and the Politics ofRevolu­ tionary Georgia, 139. 33. U.S. Commissioners to Charles Thomson, 17 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:17-18; Treaty of Galphinton, 12 November 1785, Knox Papers, 18:108; Benjamin Hawkins to McGillivray, 8 Jan. 1786, in Caughey, McGillivray ofthe Creeks, 101-2. 34. Memo of the [Tallassee] King's Proposals and Complaints, Nov. 1783, and Speech of Mr. Barnard to the Cussetas and Half-Way House, 2 June 1784, both Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land in Georgia (GDAH), 117, 141-42; "Questions to the Tal­ lisee King," 6 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:120. 35. Georgia Commissioners' Talk with the Creeks, June 1785, Knox Papers, 18:54 ("small mistake"); Alexander McGillivray to Estevan Miro, 1 May 1786, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 106-7; "Questions to the Tallisee King," 6 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:120 (remaining quotes). 36. Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh to the President of Congress, 2 Dec. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:39; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 16-18, 105-7, 113-19, 133-34; Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 163-64; Hopewell Treaty Journal, 23 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:41 (quotes). 37. Springer, "An Ethnohistoric Study of the Smoking Complex," 220-21; Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 353-55; Speech of Kitanokey, 4 Aug. 1786, Harmar MSS,

214

:Notes t(J' Pages 48-52

3:113; Talk of Governor Zespedes with Yntipaya Masla. 29 May 1786. in Caughey. McGillivray of the Creeks. 116-1738. By the treaties of DeWitt's Corner and Long Island of Holston. the Cherokees ceded five million acres to Virginia and North and South Carolina (Calloway. The American Revolution in Indian Country, 199-200; Prucha, American Indian Treaties. 35-36.) On Henderson. see Smith. "'This Idea in Heaven.'" 79-81. and Hopewell Treaty Journal. 26 November 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A/f.. 1:42 (quote). 39. Hopewell Treaty Journal. 23-24 Nov 26 Nov. 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f., 1:41-43 (quotes. 42-43). 40. Hopewell Treaty Journal. 22 and 26 Nov. 1785 and Commissioners to the President of Congress. 2 Dec. 1785. both Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f.. 1:41 and 42 (quotes) 1:39; Rohrbough. The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 16. 41. Hopewell Treaty Journal. 26 Nov. 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f., 1:43. 42. Commissioners to the President of Congress. 2 Dec. 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f.. 1:39 (quotes). On overtures by the Spanish and the northern Indians. see Joseph Mar­ tin to Alexander Martin, 11 Jan. 1784. in SRNC, 16:924; Talk of the Second Man of the Cussetas. 14 July 1784. Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land. GDAH. 145-46. 43. Hopewell Treaty Journal. 28-29 Nov. 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f.. 1:43; Mohr. Fed­ eral Indian Relations, 189-90; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 134-35. 44. Journal of Joseph Martin. 28-29 Dec. 1785. Draper MSS. 14U:56-58; Commis­ sioners to the Secretary of Congress. 2 and 30 Dec. 1785. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f.. 1:39 and 49; Carson. Searchingfor the Bright Path, 86-87. On the Creek-Choctaw War, see O·Brien. "Protecting Trade through War." 45. Journal of Joseph Martin. 31 Dec. 1785 and 3 Jan. 1786. Draper MSS. 14U:66-67 and 76-82; O·Brien. "The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered." 53-58. .. 46. Galloway. '''The Chief Who is Your Father. 263-73; Black-Rogers. "Varieties of .. 'Starving. · esp. 366-70; Hawkins. Pickens. and Martin to the President of Congress. 4 Jan. 1786. Am. St. P.: Ind. A./f., 1:50 (quote). 47. Journal oE Joseph Martin. 2 Jan. 1786. Draper MSS. 14U:75-76. 48. Journal oEJoseph Martin. 5 Jan. 1786. Draper MSS. 14U:84-89; O·Brien. "The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered." 52-53. 62-64; Treaty of Hopewell. 3 Jan. 1786. in IALT, 2:12-13. 49· Journal oE Joseph Martin. 5 Jan. 1786. Draper MSS, 14U:87 (first quote). 90; White. The Roots ofDependency. 121-38; Jones. Licensefor Empire, 150; Message of Franchimastabbe. 8 May 1784. Indian Treaties and Cessions of Land. GDAH. 138 (second quote); Gov. John Houston to Mingohoopoie. 17 July 1784. Creek Indian Let­ ters. Talks. and Treaties. GDAH. 1:59-60. 50. Journal of Joseph Martin. 5 Jan. 1786. Draper MSS. 14U:91; John Pittslaw to Wil­ liam Davenport. 5 Sept. 1786. Creek Indian Letters. Talks. and Treaties. GDAH. 1:136; Henry Knox to Franchimastabbe. 27 June 1787. and Knox to James White. 28 June 1787. both Harmar MSS. 6:19. 21; O'Brien, "The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered." 68-69. 51. Luigi Castiglioni's Viaggio. 132-33. 52. Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 18 March 1786; O·Brien. "The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered." 63; Edward Telfair to Benjamin James. 27 Aug. 1786. in "Letters of Governor Telfair." 149-50. 53· Waring. The Fighting Elder. 135; Hopewell Treaty Journal. 9 Jan. 1786. Am. St. P.: .•

• •

•

•

:Notes trY Pages 53-57

215

Ind. AjJ., 1:51 (quotes); Journal of Joseph Martin, 9 Jan. 1786, Draper MSS, 14U:94-101; Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 235-36. 54. Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 264-65; Mohr, Federal Indian Relations, 188-89; Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 24 July 1785, in Corbitt, "Papers Related to the Georgia-Florida Frontier, 1784-1800," 20:364; Joseph Martin to Charles Thomson, 5 Jan. 1787, PCC, 69:187· 55. Piomingo to Joseph Martin, 15 Feb. 1787, cited in Mohr, Federal Indian Rela­ tions, 189. See also Martin to Charles Thomson, 5 Jan. 1787, PCe, 69:186-87; Henry Knox to Chief Chamby, 27 June 1787, Harmar MSS, 6:18. 56. Talk with the Chickasaws, Aug. 1784, in SRNC, 17:85-87; Chachere to Francisco Bouligny, 7 Nov. 1785, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:151 (first quote); Hopewell Treaty Journal, 11-12 Jan. 1786, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:51-52 (second quote, 52); Treaty of Hopewell, 10 Jan. 1786, in IALT, 2:25 (third quote). 57. Hopewell Treaty Journal, 12 Jan. 1786, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:52; Journal of Joseph Martin, 10-12 Jan. 1786, Draper MSS, 14U:102-7; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 135-36. 58. Treaties with the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, 18 April 1786, in jCC, 30:187-95; Circular Letter of the Secretary of Congress to the States, 23 April 1786, in LMC, 8:343-44. 59. North Carolina House of Commons Journal, 6 Jan. 1787, in SRNC, 18:462-64; William Blount to John Steele, 5 May 1789, in The Papers ofjohn Steele, 1:41-42; Tassel and Hanging Maw to Joseph Martin, 5 Sept. 1786, PCe, 69:417 (quote). 60. Charles Nisbet to Alexander Addison, 7 Dec. 1787, quoted in Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 166.

3. UN RULY YOUNG M E N

1. Walter Finney to Josiah Harmar, 21 March 1786, PCC, 164:249-50; David Duncan to Harmar, 16 May 1786, Harmar MSS, 3:48; Entries for 23-28 May 1786, Denny, Military journal, 84-85; William Irvine to Knox, 25 May 1786, and Robert Patterson to Walter Finney, 12 July 1786, both PCC, 164:341-43, 523-24. 2. Information of Abner Hammond, 20 April 1786, Bevan MSS, 10:82; Alexander McGillivray to Benjamin Hawkins, 30 July 1786, in The Papers ofLachlan McIntosh, 141-42; Edward Telfair to William Houstoun and William Few, 20 Aug. 1786, in "Let­ ters of Governor Telfair," 147; Anthony Bledsoe to Richard Caswell, 1 June 1787, in SRNe, 20:712; Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 74-75, 99-101. 3. Henry Knox to Josiah Harmar, 27 June 1786, Harmar MSS, 3:66; Resolutions of 22 and 30 June 1786, in jCe, 30:353 and 381; Charles Pettit to James Wilson, 2 July 1786, in LMC, 8:398-99 (quote); Board of Treasury to Knox, 14 June 1786, PCe, 164:361; Thomas Hutchins to Harmar, 2 Nov. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:78. 4. Resolutions of 9 Aug., 6 Oct., and 10 Oct. 1786, in jCe, 31:507, 747, and 759-60, respectively. 5. Indian Department Ordinance, 7 Aug. 1786, in jCe, 31:488-93; Richard Butler to Henry Knox, 7 Jan. and 1 Nov. 1787, PCC, 164:2:148-49 and 3:27-28, respectively. 6. Letter from Molunthy, 8 June 1786, PCe, 164:431-32 (first quote); Journal of Joseph Martin, 5 Jan. 1786, Draper MSS, 14U:89 (second quote). 7. James Manning to Hezekiah Smith, 17 May 1786 ("lawless banditti"), and Rufus

216

:Notes t()' Pages 57-60

King to Elbridge Gerry, 8 June 1786 ("vagrant Indians"), both in LMC, 8:362, 384; Reports of the Secretary at War to Congress, 6 April and 14 May 1786, and Report of Butler and Parsons, 19 June 1786 (third and fourth quotes), all in ICe, 30:155-57, 343, 350; William Grayson to William Short, 15 June 1785, and Richard Henry Lee to George Washington, 8 Sept. 1786 (last two quotes), both.in LMC, 8:141, 463. 8. There is a substantial literature on eighteenth-century crowd action and insur­ gency. Examples include Rude, The Crowd in History; Thompson, Customs in Common, 185-58; and Huppert, After the Black Death, 80-100. For America, see Nash, "Social Change and the Origins of Pre-Revolutionary Urban Radicalism"; Hoerder, "Boston Leaders and Boston Crowds"; Maier, "Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America"; and Slaughter, The W/tiskey Rebellion. 9. Taylor, "Agrarian Independence"; Williams, History of the Lost State ofFranklin; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 59-60, 93-95. 10. Entry for 4 Oct. 1784, The Diaries of George Washington, 4:66. See also "Charles Pinckney's Speech . . . on the Question of a Treaty with Spain," 16 Aug. 1786, in fCC, 31:944· 11. Smith, "A Letter from Kentucky," 93-94; Journal of Richard Butler, 19 Nov. and 17 Dec. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:483, 499 (quote, 499); Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 19 May 1787, Census of Emigration at Fort Harmar, 1 June-9 December 1787, Report of John Doughty, 16 May 1788, all PCC, 164:2:360, 165:3:68, 165:3:225. 12. Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 15; Darlington, "Peopling the Post­ Revolutionary New York Frontier," 346-47; Young, The Democratic-Republicans of New York, 258-59; Higginbotham, The War ofAmerican Independence, 320; U.S. Cen­ sus Bureau, Historical Statistics ofthe United States, 27-35. 13. Smith, "A Letter from Kentucky," 93 (first quote); Richard Henry Lee to James Madison, 20 November 1784, in The Papers oflames Madison, 8:145; Lockridge, "Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society"; Abiel Foster and Pierse Long to Meshech Weare, 24 May 1785, in LMC, 8:130; Caleb Wallace to Madison, 12 July 1785, in The Papers oflames Madison, 8:321 (second quote). 14. Henretta, "Families and Farms"; Bushman, "Markets and Composite Farms in Early America;" Friend, "'Work & Be Rich.'" 15. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 376-80; Morgan, Inventing the People, 153-60. 16. Nobles, American Frontiers, 107-8. 17. Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 39-41; McNall, An Agricultural His­ tory of the Genesee Valley, 11-13; McDonald, We the People, 43-44n. 18. Phillips, "A Frontier Interlude," 51-52; Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, SO-54; Jones, "The Public Lands of Tennessee," 15-16. 19. Land Ordinance of 20 May 1785, in ICC, 28:377-78; Journal of Richard Butler, 10 Oct. 1785, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:443-44 (quote); Resolution of 10 July 1787, in ICC, 32:311-13; Edward Carrington to Thomas Jefferson, 23 Oct. 1787, in LMC, 8:660-61; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 156-62. 20. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 70-72; Hitz, "Georgia Bounty Land Grants"; McLendon, History of the Public Domain of Georgia, 40-65, 119-20; Samuel Parsons to his children, 7 Jan. 1786, in Hall, The Life and Letters ofSamuel Holden Parsons, 480-81 (quote); Journal of Richard Butler, 2 Jan. 1786, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:507.

:Notes tcr Pages 61-64

217

21. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 78-79; Goodstein, "Leadership on the Nashville Frontier," 182; Patterson, "Ebenezer Zane, Frontiersman," 14-15, 29-30. 22. Washington to John Witherspoon, 10 March 1784, and Advertisement, 10 March 1784, both in WGw, 27:348-51, 353-56; Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colon ial New York, 169-234; Taylor, William Cooper's Town, 97-114; Wyckoff, The Developer's Frontier, 9-20, 42-63. 23. Knox to Capt. and Mrs. Flucker, 3 Aug. 1784, Knox Papers, 17:107; William Grayson to James Madison, 27 June 1785, in LMC, 8:155; John Doughty to Henry Knox, 30 Nov. 1785, and Harmar to Knox, 12 July 1786 and 14 May 1787, all PCC, 164:143-44, 164:411-12, and 164:2:363-64. 24. Jennings, The Invasion ofAmerica, 3-14, 128-45; Locke, Two Treatises ofGov­ ernment, 290-97; Vattel, The Law ofNations, 92, 158-59; Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth ofDemocracy, 214; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 65-70 (quote). Bibli­ cal precedents included God's commandment to "fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28) and the stories of Jacob and Esau and of Isaac and Ishmael (Genesis 25-27). 25. Countryman, "Out of the Bounds of the Law," and A People in Revolution, 55; Slaughter, The Wh iskey Rebellion, 28-60; Taylor, "Agrarian Independence," 226-28. 26. Deposition of Amos and Nathan Ogden, 25 May 1770; Deposition of Aaron Van Campen, 11 Jan. 1771; James Hamilton to John and Thomas Penn, 20 Aug. 1771; and William Scrull et al. to Governor Penn, 30 Dec. 1775,all in SCp, 4:73-75, 151-52, 248-50, 6:425-26; Resolution of 15 April 1776, in fCC, 4:283 (quote). 27. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity, 134-40, 149-58, 163-64; Arbuckle, Pennsylvania Speculator and Patriot, 7-9; Petition of Nathan Denison et al. to the Pennsylvania As­ sembly, 18 Jan. 1783, in SCP, 7:254-55 (quote); Committee Report Regarding Petition of Zebulon Butler, 23 Jan. 1784, in fCC, 26:45-46. 28. Deposition of John Seely, 24 June 1782, and Deposition of Silas Taylor, 22 Aug. 1782, both in SCp, 7:103-4,118-19; Pearce, The Annals ofLuzerne County, 80-89; Ste­ fon, "The Wyoming Valley," 151-52; Bouton, "A Road Closed," 875-76. 29. Barnhart, Valley ofDemocracy, 50-51, 58-59 (first two quotes, 51) ; Jones, "Her­ man Husband," 288-89; Notice of Constitutional Convention, 12 March 1785, in Smith, St. Cla ir Papers, 2:5n (quote); Slaughter, The Wh iskey Rebellion, 61-74; entry for 20 Sept. 1784, Diaries of George Washington, 4:27-28, 28-30n2. 30. Petitions of 30 May 1782 and Oct. 1785 in Robertson, Petitions ofthe Early Inhabitants ofKentucky, 62-65, 80-82; John Harvie to Arthur Campbell, 30 Nov. 1785, Campbell Papers, Filson Club; Arthur St. Clair to John Jay, 13 Dec. 1788, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:102; Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 15 Dec. 1788, Harmar MSS, E:lO; Barnhart, Valley ofDemocracy, 54-57, 66-76 (quote, 54) . 31. David Campbell to Arthur Campbell, 27 Dec. 1784, Campbell Papers, Filson Club; John Sevier to Alexander Martin, 22 March 1785, in SRNC, 17:624-25; Joseph Martin to Patrick Henry, 26 March 1785, in Henry, Patrick Henry, 3:283-84; Evan Shelby to Richard Caswell, 21 March 1787, in SRNC, 20:646; Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 29-43, 58-59. 32. Proclamation of Governor Martin to the Inhabitants of Washington, Sullivan, and Greene Counties, 25 April 1785, and Senate Committee on Petitions from Wash­ ington, Sullivan, and Greene Counties, 14 Dec. 1786, both in SRNC, 17:441-45 (quote), 18:85-86; Williams, History of the Lost State ofFranklin, 109; Thomas Hutchins to

218

:Notes tcr Pages 64-67

Richard Caswell, 1 April 1787, and Governor Johnston to Judge Campbell, 29 July 1788, both in SRNC, 20:656, 21:484; Martin to Henry Knox, 23 Aug. 1788, PCC, 165:3:362. 33. Plan for Temporary Government of the Western Territory, 1 March 1784, in fCC, 26:118-20; Williams, History of the Lost State ofFranklin, 39-40; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 306-43. 34. Act of Pennsylvania Assembly, 13 March 1783, in SCp, 7:270-71; Pearce, The An­ nals ofLuzerne County, 80-85; Barnhart, Valley ofDemocracy, 71. 35. Taylor, '''A Kind of Warr,'" 26; Countryman, "Out of the Bounds of the Law," 47. John Armstrong did report a skirmish between Franklinites and North Carolina loyalists that left four dead. (Armstrong to John Wyllys, 28 April 1788, Harmar MSS, ?:75.) 36. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 131 (quote); Merrell, Into the American Woods, 285-88; McConnell, A Country Between, 270-79; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 45, 75-78. 37. Proceedings of the Governor of Virginia in Council, 15 May 1786, Resolution of Kentucky District Officers, 2 Aug. 1786, and Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 15 Nov. 1786, all PCC, 164:2:37-38 (quote), 38-39, 163-64; Walter Finney to Harmar, 31 Oct. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:73. 38. Walter Finney to Josiah Harmar, 6 Dec. 1786, and Harmar to Brig. Gen. Irvin, 10 Dec. 1786, both Harmar'MSS, 4:99 B:25-26; Address of Cornplanter, 31 Jan. 1787, PCC, 164:2:267; Congressional Committee Report, 30 Oct. 1786, in fCC, 31:916-1739. Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 87; John Hamtramck to Josiah Har­ mar, 31 Aug. 1788, and Harmar to Hamtramck, 15 Feb. 1789, both Harmar MSS, 8:80, E:51; Joseph Valliere to Esteban Mira, 12 Jan. 1790, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:292-94. 40. Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 77-81 (quote); Hopewell Treaty Journal, 23 Nov. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:41; Old Tassel to the Governors of North Carolina and Virginia, 19 Sept. 1787, in SRNC, 20:779-80. 41. Old Tassel to Joseph Martin, 10 April 1786, Martin to Richard Caswell, 11 May 1786, and Chota and Coyatee Conference Proceedings, 31 July and 3 August 1786, all in SRNC, 18:595-96, 604-5, 696-99. 42. Williams, History of the Lost State ofFranklin, 140-41, 212-13; James Martin to Richard Caswell, 25 March 1787, and Thomas Hutchings to General Martin, 11 July 1788,both in SRNC, 20:653, 165:3:401. 43. Report of Officers of the Washington District, 3 June 1788, and Richard Winn to Knox, s Aug. 1788, both PCC, 164:2:435, 165:3:369-70; Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 214-17; Justices of the Court of Abbeville County (SC) to the People Living on Nolechucke, French Broad, and Holstein, 9 July 1788, PCC, 165:3:349-52; Alexander McGillivray to Andrew Pickens, Richard Winn, and George Matthews, 12 Aug. 1788, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:29. 44. Edward Telfair to William Few, 19 Oct. 1786, "Letters of Governor Telfair," 153; Shoulderbone Conference Journal, Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register, 4 Nov. 1786; Alexander McGillivray to Peter Favrot, 8 Nov. 1786, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:189; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 Oct.1t Nov. 1787, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 1:507; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 143, 146-47, 150-51; Green, "Alexander McGillivray," 53. 45. Smyth, A Tour in the United States ofAmerica, 1:344-45 (quote); Vaughan,

:Notes t(f Pages 68-71

219

"From White Man to Redskin," 941-44; Knouff, "Soldiers and Violence on the Pennsyl­ vania Frontier," 177-78. 46. Smyth, A Tour in the United States ofAmerica, 1:341; Richter, "War and Cul­ ture," esp. 535-38; Axtell and Sturtevant, "The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalp­ ing?"; Ewald, Diary ofthe American War, 167; Joseph Martin to Alexander Martin, 25 Jan. 1784, in SRNC, 17:11-12; Obadiah Robins to Captain Ferguson, 25 Sept. 1786, and Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 19 July 1787, both Harmar MSS, 4:43, F:21 (quote). 47. Nobles, American Frontiers, 105-6, 109-10; Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heck­ ewelder in Frontier America, 193; Knouff, "Soldiers and Violence on the Pennsylvania Frontier," 185-88. 48. Josiah Harmar to Thomas Hutchins, 5 Dec. 1786, and John Hamtramck to Har­ mar, 31 Aug. 1788, both Harmar MSS, B:11-12 (quote), 8:80. 49. Reply of the Half-King and Captain Pipe to Richard Butler, 3 Sept. 1787, PCC, 164:2:550-51. 50. Garrison, The Legal Ideology ofRemoval, 38; Albers and Kay, "Sharing the Land," 57-63; Speech of Canasatego, 12 July 1742, in Kalter, Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations, 80; Tanner, "The Glaize in 1792"; Nashville Conference Journal, 8 Aug. 1792, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:285 (quote). 51. Speech of Ducoigne to the People of Illinois, 14 Aug. 1797, WSC, 5:453 (first quote); Aron, "Pigs and Hunters," 185-89; Speech of Reverend Petrus, 25 June 1785, in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affairs, 1:92-94; Alexander McGil­ livray to William Panton, 20 May 1789, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia­ Florida Frontier," 21:286 (second quote). 52. Speech of Unsuckanail, 23 Nov. 1785, Hopewell Treaty Journal, and Speech of Piomingo, 11 Jan. 1786, all Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:41, 51-52; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 127-47; Rountree, "The Powhatans and Other Woodland Indians as Travelers," 39-41; Crevecoeur, Lettersfrom an American Farmer, 99-100. 53. Council of the Hurons, Ottawas, Chippewas and Potawatomis, 20 Sept. 1785, in HCPSM, 11:465-66; Cornplanter to Richard Butler, 10 Sept. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:24; Address of the United Indian Nations to Congress, 28 Nov. and 18 Dec. 1786, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:8-9; Detroit Indian Council Minutes, 24 Dec. 1786, in HCPSM, 11:470-71; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 403. 54. Joseph Martin to Charles Thomson, 5 Jan. 1787, PCC, 69:185-86 (first quote); Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 4 April 1787, 20 June 1787, and 12 July 1787, all in Caughey, McGillivray ofthe Creeks, 147, 153 (second quote), and 158-59; Green, "Alexander McGillivray," 49-52; McGillivray to William Panton, 20 May 1789, in Cor­ bitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:285-86 (third quote). 55. Fogelson, "Cherokee Notions of Power," 187-91; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 9-16; Denny, Military Journal (21 Jan. 1786), 71-72; William Blount to Henry Knox, 5 May 1792, in TPUS, 4:148-49. 56. Speech of Minavavana to Alexander Henry, in Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down, 136; White, The Middle Ground, 76-77; Reid, A Law ofBlood, 96-108; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 51-53 (quote); Richter, Facing Eastfrom Indian Country, 64-66. 57. Williams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 212-13; Richard Winn to Gov­ ernor Johnston, 9 Aug. 1788, in SRNC, 21:490; Joseph Martin to Henry Knox, 23 Aug. 1788, PCC, 165:3:361.

220

;Notes to' Pages 71-74

58. Joseph Martin to Richard Caswell, 11 May 1786, in SRNC, 18:604-5; Message from the Detroit Council to the Nations South of Lake Erie, 20 Sept. 1785, in HCPSM, 11:467; Green, "Alexander McGillivray," 48-50; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 379-439; White, The Middle Ground, 435. 59. Alexander McGillivray to William Panton, 21 May 1789, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:286. 60. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 363-71. 61. John Adams to John Jay, 21 Jan. and 25 May 1786, in The Emerging Nation, 3:74 and 179; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, British Indian Agent, 53-56; Bartolomei Tardiveau to Josiah Harmar, 6 Aug. 1787, Harmar MSS, 6:53a; Alexander McKee to Sir John John­ son, 25 Feb. 1786, and Detroit Indian Council Minutes, 24 Dec 1786, both in HCPSM, 11:482 (quote), 470-72. Britain's Treasury dispersed over £100,000 for Indian presents between 1784 and 1788. (Allen, The British Indian Department and the Frontier in North America, 35.) 62. Luis de Unzaga to Martin Navarro, 20 Sept 1776, Patrick Henry to the Governor of Louisiana, 14 Jan. 1778, and Thomas Jefferson to Bernardo de Galvez, 8 Nov. 1779, all in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1:234, 248-49, and 363-64; Kaplan, Colo­ nies into Nation, 119-23; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 266-73. 63. Madison to Jefferson, 12 Aug. 1786, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic of Letters, 1:431; "Mr. Charles Pinckney's Speech . . . on the Question of a Treaty with Spain," 16 Aug. 1786, in JCC, 31:935-48; McCoy, "James Madison and Visions of Ameri­ can Nationality in the Confederation Period," 239-43; Thomas Green to Anthony Bled­ soe, 10 Sept. 1785, in Burnett, "Papers Relating to Bourbon County, Georgia," 334-35; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 279-81. 64. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 280-81; Report of Americans Arriving at Natchez, 5 July 1788, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:257-58; Josiah Harmar to Arthur St. Clair, 9 May 1789, Harmar MSS, E:84; St. Clair to John Jay, 13 December 1788, in Smith, The St Clair Papers, 2:103-5; Carlos de Grand-Pre to Esteban Mir6, 14 April 1790, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:323-25. 65. Esteban Miro to Intendant-General Martin Navarro, 16 Sept. 1785, and Disposi­ tion of Martin Navarro in Favor of William Panton, 16 Sept. 1785, both in Corbitt, "Pa­ pers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:76, 77; Vicente Manuel de Zespedes to the Conde de Galvez, 16 Aug. 1784, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:108-12; James Robertson to Richard Caswell, 2 July 1787, in SRNC, 20:730-31. 66. Esteban Mir6 to Don Francisco Cruzat, 5 March 1786, Carlos de Grand-Pre to Mir6, 1 June 1787, and Marios de Villiers to Mir6, 30 Aug. 1787, all in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:170, 210, 233-34; Anthony Bledsoe and James Robertson to Richard Caswell, 12 June 1787, in SRNe, 20:721-22; McGillivray to Navarro, 7 Nov. 1785, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:76 (quotes). 67. Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 1 Jan. 1784 and 8 Nov. 1785, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 65 and 99; McGillivray to O'Neill, 24 July 1785, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 20:365 (quote). 68. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 12 Aug. and 4 Dec. 1786, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 1:431 (quote) and 454-55; Whitaker, "The Muscle Shoals Speculation," 380-83; George Nicholas's Speech in Virginia Ratifying Con­ vention, 10 June 1788, in Jensen et aI., Documentary History ofthe Ratification of the Constitution, 9:1129. Mir6 rejected the diplomatic advances.

'Notes tif Pages 75-79

221

69. Edward Telfair to Patrick Henry, 27 May 1786, Telfair to William Moultrie, 30 May 1786, Telfair to William Houston and William Few, 20 Aug. 1786, and Telfair to Robert Dixon and Stephen Jett, 27 Aug. 1786, all in "Letters of Governor Telfair," 145-48; George Matthews to General Cocke, 8 Nov. 1787, Governor's Letter Book (Mat­ thews) GDAH, 123. 70. Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 12 Aug. 1788, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 192; Sevier to McGillivray, 29 Dec. 1788, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:288; Anthony Bledsoe to Richard Caswell, 1 June 1787, and James Robertson to Caswell, 2 July 1787, both in SRNC, 20:712-13, 730-31. 71. Richard Caswell to James Robertson, 13 Aug. 1787, in SRNC, 20:758-59; Wil­ liams, History ofthe Lost State ofFranklin, 173-74. 72. Alexander McGillivray to Benjamin Hawkins, 30 July 1786, in The Papers of Lachlan McIntosh, 141-42; Address of the United Indian Nations, 28 Nov./18 Dec. 1786, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:8-9. " " 4. THE R EAL AM ER ICANS D R A F T A GOVERNMENT, 1786-1788

1. Jensen, The New Nation, 313-45; Ferguson, The Power of the Purse; Rakove, The Beginnings ofNational Politics, 345-54; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 154-57. 2. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 4-13; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 168-71; Rakove, "From One Agenda to Another," 94-99. 3. Elkins and McKittrick, "The Founding Fathers." 4. Ferguson, "The Nationalists of 1781-1783 and the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution"; Banning, The Sacred Fire ofLiberty, 15-39; Report of the Secretary of Congress, 4 Jan. 1786, in ICC, 30:7-10. 5. Jensen, The Making ofthe American Constitution, 30; McDonald, We the People, 324-38; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 475-83; Szatmary, Shays' Rebel­ lion, 124-26; Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 53-68, 128-37. 6. Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion, 44-84; Starkey, A Little Rebellion, 28-31, 57-67, 76-79, 90-91, 97-101; Reports of the Secretary at War to Congress, 20 Sept. 1786, 1 Oct. 1786, and 6 Oct. 1786, all in ICC, 31:675-76, 739-40, and 751-53; Henry Knox to John Jay, 3 Oct. 1786, Knox Papers, 19:23 ("annihilat[e]"); Knox to Washington, 23 Oct. 1786, Knox Papers, 19:33 ("12 or 15 thousand"). 7. Richard Henry Lee to James Madison, 25 Oct. 1786, in LMC, 8:492 (quote); Henry Knox to Lafayette, 13 Feb. 1787, Knox Papers, 19:164; Lienesch, "Reinterpreting Rebellion"; Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 125-32; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 177, 177-78n62. 8. Henry Knox to Samuel Parsons, 19 Nov. 1786, Knox Papers, 19:21; Edward Car­ rington to Edmund Randolph, 8 Dec. 1786, in LMC, 8:516; Washington to Knox, 26 Dec. 1786, in WGw, 27:121-24; Knox to Stephen Higginson, 28 Jan. 1787, Knox Pa­ pers, 19:142; Adair, "'That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science"'; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 497-518. 9. William Johnson to Roger Sherman, 20 April 1785, in LMC, 8:102 (quotes); White, The Federalists, 507-10; Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 6; Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government. 10. Cayton, The Frontier Republic, 12-16; Cayton, "Radicals in the 'Western World,'" 77-80; Allen, "Justice for the Indians."

222

::Notes to' Pages 80 -83

11. Knox to Harmar, 23 Nov. 1786, Speech of Cornplanter to Richard Butler, 10 Sept. 1786, Butler to Harmar, 13 Feb. 1787, all Harmar MSS, 4:94, 24, 5:37. 12. Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 18 April 1787, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 149-51 (quote, 150n); James White to Richard Caswell, 1 June 1787, in LMC, 8:603. 13. Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 6-15; Report of the Secretary at War, 9 March 1787, in ICe, 32:105-6; Harmar to Jonathan Heart, 9 April 1787, and Heart to Harmar, 25 June 1787, both Harmar MSS, B:69-71, 6:16. 14. Journal of Arthur Lee, 26 Dec. 1784, in Craig, The Olden Time, 2:342; Josiah Harmar to John Dickinson, 8 Feb. 1785, inlournal of Captain Ion athan Heart, 58; Harmar to Knox, 3 July 1786, and John McDowell to Knox, 22 July and 25 July 1786, all Knox Papers, 18:175, 178, 19:2; Harmar to William Ferguson, 6 Nov. 1786, and Ebenezer Frothingham to Harmar, 6 Dec. 1788, both Harmar MSS, B:1-2, 9:42. 15. John McDowell to Henry Knox, 25 July 1786, Knox Papers, 19:2; William North to Josiah Harmar, 29 July 1786, and Edward Spear to Harmar, 4 Dec. 1788, both Har­ mar MSS, 3:98, 9:40; David Zeigler to Knox, 14 April 1786, PCC, 164:240-41 (quotes); Walter Finney to Harmar, 22 Aug. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:6. 16. Walter Finney to the Ottawas, 9 Aug. 1786, Jonathan Heart to Josiah Harmar, 1 June 1787, and Frothingham to Harmar, 27 Oct. 1788, all Harmar MSS, 3:113, 5:106, and 8:141; Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 277. 17- Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 38-39, 44-45; Ward, The Department of War, 89-91. 18. Henry Knox to Winthrop Sargent, 5 March 1786, WSC, 1:19-20 (first quote); Or­ ders of the Secretary at War to Colonel Harmar, 12 May 1786, PCc, 164:338-39 (second quote). 19. Report of the Secretary at War to Congress, 6 April 1786, and Reports of the Sec­ retary at War, 14 May and 19 June 1786, all in ICC, 30:155-57 (first two quotes),342-43 (third quote), 346-47. 20. Henry Knox to Josiah Harmar, 23 Nov. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:94; Reports of the Secretary at War, 13 Dec. 1785, 11 May, 22 May, and 13 July 1786, all in ICC, 29:903, and 30:257-58, 297-98, 401-2 (quote, 402); Knox to Franchimastabbe, 27 June 1787, Har­ mar MSS, 6:19; Report of the Secretary at War, 18 July 1787, in ICC, 32:368-69. 21. Committee Report of 20 Oct. 1786, and Resolution and Secret Journal of 21 Oct. 1786, both in ICe, 31:891-93 (first quote), 893-96 (second quote); Charles Pettit to Benjamin Franklin, 18 Oct. 1786, in LMe, 8:487; William North to Knox, 26 Oct. 1786, Knox Papers, 19:36 (third quote). 22. Report of the Secretary at War, 6 April 1786, in ICe, 30:156 (quote); Samuel Osgood to John Adams, 14 Nov. 1786, in Works oflohn Adams, 8:420-21; Anthony Bledsoe to Richard Caswell, 27 March 1787, in SRNC, 20:655; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 180-83; Banning, The Sacred Fire ofLiberty, 98-107. 23. Henry Knox to Benjamin Lincoln, 14 Feb. 1787, Knox Papers, 19:166; Starkey, A Little Rebellion, 130-45; Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion, 90-114; Congressional Resolution of 9 April 1787, and Correspondence of the Virginia and North Carolina Delegates, 13 April 1787, both in ICC, 32:158-60, 189n-91ll. 24· Knox to Wadsworth, 28 Feb. 1787, and Jackson to Knox, 14 April 1787, both in Knox Papers, 20:6, 50; Deposition of Daniel Neeves, 20 Dec. 1786, T. Marshall et al.

'Notes to' Pages 84-88

223

to the Governor of Virginia, 22 Dec. 1786, and Resolution of 24 April 1787, all in JCC, 32:192n, 190n-92n, 231; Knox to Harmar, 26 April 1787, Harmar MSS, 5:67. 25. Report of the Secretary at War to Congress, 10 July 1787, in JCC, 32:327-28. 26. Report of the Secretary at War to Congress, 10 July 1787, in JCe, 32:330-32 (quotes, 330). 27. Report of the Secretary at War to Congress, 10 July 1787, in JCC, 32:328-30. 28. Resolution of 21 July 1787, in JCC, 33:385-86. 29. Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 14 May 1787, and Harmar to Knox, 11 Aug. 1786, both PCC, 164:2:363 (first quote), 164:547-48 (second, third, and fourth quotes); Harmar to J. M. P. Le Gras and Franc;:ois Bosseron, 19 June 1787, in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 23-24 (last quote). 30. Knotel and Seig, Uniforms ofthe World, 435-36; Pierre Gibault to the Bishop of Quebec, 6 June 1786, in Alvord, Kaskaskia Records, 534-43; Denny, Military Journal, 25 July 1787, 101-2 (quote); Harmar to Knox, 9 Dec. 1787, PCC, 165:3:67; Cayton, Fron­ tier Indiana, 112-13. 31. Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, Pce, 165:3:89-92 (quote); Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:32. 32. Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, PCC, 165:3:92 (first quote); Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:34-35 (second quote); Memorial of Barthelemi Tardiveau, 15 Sept. 1787, i n Alvord, ed., Kaskaskia Records, 447-48; Resolution o f 2 9 Aug. 1788, i n JCC, 34:472-74. 33. Harmar to Knox, 9 Dec. 1787, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:32. See also John Ed­ gar to George Rogers Clark, 7 Nov. 1785, in Alvord, Kaskaskia Records, 376. 34. Tardiveau to Harmar, 6 Aug. 1787, Harmar MSS, 6:53a; Rice, Barthelemi Tardi­ veau, 1-8. 35. Tardiveau to Harmar, 6 Aug. 1787, Harmar MSS, 6:53a (first two quotes); Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:33 (remaining quotes). 36. Denny, Military Journal, 28 July and 5 Sept. 1787, 103 (quote) and 105; Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:33. 37. Harmar to Knox, 7 Aug. 1787, and John Armstrong to Harmar, 8 Aug. 1787, both in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 37, 42; Speech of Harmar to the Wabash Indians, 7 Sept. 1787, PCe, 165:3:81-83 (quotes, 82); Knox to Harmar, 4 Oct. 1787, Harmar MSS, 6:86. 38. Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:33-34; Denny, Mili­ tary Journal, 8 Sept. 1787, 106 (quote). 39. Harmar to Knox, 24 Nov. 1787, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:33-34 ("admired," 33); Denny, Military Journal, 8 Sept. 1787 ("fathers") and 10 Sept. 1787 ("we did not come"), 106; Harmar to Richard Butler, 22 Dec. 1787, Harmar MSS, B:154 ("highly satisfied"). 40. John Hamtramck to Josiah Harmar, 1 Jan. 1788, in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 61; Hamtramck to Harmar, 13 Oct. 1788, and Harmar to Hamtramck, 15 Feb. 1789, both Harmar MSS 8:132, E:53-54; Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 94-95; Hamtramck to Harmar, 14 Aug. 1789, Harmar MSS, 11:16 (quote). 41. Ordinance for the Government of the Territory . . . North West of the Ohio, 13 July 1787, in JCC, 32:334-43; Richard Henry Lee to Washington, 15 July 1787, in LDe, 24:357·

224

:;Votes to' Pages 88-92

42. Northwest Ordinance, in JCC, 32:340-41; Horsman, Expansion and Ameri­ can Indian Policy, 37-38; Berkhofer, "Americans vs. Indians"; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 44-66. The "just and lawful wars" clause may have been intended to preserve Congress's claim to the Fort McIntosh cession, rather than to license future wars of conquest. 43. Washington to James Duane, 7 Sept. 1783, in WGw, 27:133-40; Cutler and Cutler, The Life, Journals, and Correspondence ofManasseh Cutler, 1, 181-86; Potts, "Manasseh Cutler, Lobbyist," 106; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 155-60. 44. Potts, "Manasseh Cutler, Lobbyist," 108-22; Cutler and Cutler, Life, Journals, and Correspondence ofManasseh Cutler, 1:203-31, 237, 302-5; Report of the Car­ rington Committee, 23 July 1787, and Manasseh Cutler et at. to the Board of Treasury, 26 July 1787, both in JCC, 33:399-401, 427-29 (quote, 429). 45. Sargent to Benjamin Gilman, 30 June 1798, WSC, 1:777 (first quote); Remarks of Arthur St. Clair, 18 Aug. 1786, in LMC, 8:439-40 (second quote); Cutler and Cutler, Life, Journals, and Correspondence ofManasseh Cutler, 1:300-301; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 273. 46. Murrin, "Escaping Perfidious Albion," 108-11, 139-40; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 81-85; Maier, "The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation"; Cayton, "Radicals in the 'Western World,'" 80; Edward Carrington to Thomas Jefferson, 23 Oct. 1787, in LMC, 8:660-61. 47. Richard Henry Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, 14 July 1787, and Nathan Dane to Rufus King, 16 July 1787, both in LDC, 24:354, 359; Address of the United Indian Na­ tions, 28 Nov. and 18 Dec. 1786, Am. St. P: Ind. AjJ., 1:8-9; Report of Superintendent Richard Butler, 20 March 1787, and Report of the Secretary at War, 20 July 1787, both in JCc, 32:166, 33:388-91 (quotes, 389). 48. Rufus King to Elbridge Gerry, 19 Oct. 1786, in LMC, 8:488; Report of the Com­ mittee on Indian Affairs, 9 Aug. 1787, in JCC, 33:477-81 (quotes). 49. Resolutions of 5 Oct., 22 Oct., and 26 Oct. 1787, all JCC, 33:610-12, 696-97, and 711-13· 50. Frazier, The Mohicans ofStockbridge, 211; Arthur St. Clair to Henry Knox, 27 Jan. 1788, and St. Clair to Knox, 14 March 1788, both in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:41 (first quote), 43 (second quote). 51. St. Clair to Knox, 27 Jan. 1788, and St. Clair to Richard Butler, 15 July 1788, both in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:40-41, 53; John Hamtramck to Harmar, 13 April and 21 May 1788, both in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 67-69 and 77-78. 52. Harmar to Knox, 23 July and 4 Sept. 1788, and St. Clair to Knox, 13 July 1788, all in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:64, 87, and 50-51; Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heck­ ewelder in Frontier America, 224. For other attacks on federal troops, see Edward Spear to Harmar, 2 June 1788, Harmar MSS, 7:109; Denny, Military Journal, 20 Oct. 1788, 127· 53. Denny, Military Journal, 28 May 1788, 119-20; Harmar to Knox, 15 June 1788, Harmar MSS, C:66-67 (second quote); Samuel Parsons to Manasseh Cutler, 16 July and 11 Dec. 1788, both in Hall, The Life and Letters ofSamuel Holden Parsons, 529 and 544 (first quote); Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder in Frontier America, 225; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 179-81. 54. Cutler and Cutler, The Life, Journals, and Correspondence ofManasseh Cutler,

:Notes t(f Pages 93-96

225

1:420-21; St. Clair to Knox, 17 Aug. and 14 Sept. 1788, and St. Clair to Governor of Virginia, 1 Sept. 1788, all in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:82-83, 88-91 (second quote, 90n), 84-85. 55. Accounts of the Federal Convention are numerous; a good summary is Jensen, The Making ofthe Federal Constitution. 56. James Madison to James Monroe, 27 Nov. 1784, in The Papers ofjames Madison, 8:156-57; Madison, Notes ofDebates in the Federal Convention, 142, 477, 574; "Federal­ ist No. 42," in Hamilton et aI., The Federalist Papers, 215; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 68m. 57. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 306-43; Speech by Benjamin Gale, 12 Nov. 1787, Pittsburgh Gazette, 17 Nov. 1787, Samuel McDowell to William Fleming, 20 Dec. 1787, and Speech of George Nicholas, Virginia Ratifying Convention, 10 June 1788, all in Jensen et aI., Documentary History of the Ratification of the Consti­ tution, 3:428, 2:286; 8:255 (quote), 9:1129. 58. Madison, Notes ofDebates in the Federal Convention, 505; Letter from Georgia, 15 Oct. 1787, Charleston Columbian Herald, and Joseph Clay to John Pierce, 17 Oct. 1787, both in Jensen et aI., Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 3:223, 232. 59. Cashin, "Georgia: Searching for Security"; Washington to Samuel Powell, 18 Jan. 1788, in WGw, 29:385 (quote). 60. An Act for Suppressing the Violences of the Indians, 31 Oct. 1787, and Act of Cession 1 Feb. 1788, both in Watkins and Watkins, A D igest of the Laws of the State of Georgia, 365-70, 370-71; Jensen, The New Nation, 323; Paine Wingate to Samuel Lane, 2 June 1788, in LMC, 8:745-46. Georgia also requested $171,000 for its western lands. 61. North Carolina Delegates to Governor Caswell, 18 April 1787, in LMC, 8:583-84. 62. Report of the Secretary at War, 18 July 1787, and Committee Report of 3 Aug. 1787, both in jCC, 32:365-69 (quotes, 366, 368), 33:455-64; Instructions to the Com­ missioners Negotiating a Treaty with the Southern Indians, 26 Oct. 1787, in The Papers ofjohn Steele, 1:19. 63. Legislature's Instructions to John Steele, 4 Dec. 1788, in The Papers ofjohn . Steele, 1:22-24; Jensen, The Making of the American Constitution, 146. North Carolin­ ians initially rejected the Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights. 64. Fort Schuyler Conference Journal, 28 AUg.-12 Sept. 1788, Treaty of Fort Schuy­ ler, 22 Sept. 1788, and Treaty of Albany, 25 Feb. 1789, all in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affairs, 1:176-207 (Onondaga), 2:306-12 (Oneida and Tusca­ rora), 2:306-12; Albany journal, 29 Sept. 1788; Sachems, Chiefs, and Warriors of the Six Nations to President Washington, 2 June 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:165-66. 65. Hough, Proceedings of the Commiss ioners ofIndian Affa irs, 2:119n-22n; Memo­ rial of Stephen Paddock et aI., 1 March 1788, NYPCRI, 1:27-28; "A Citizen," Albany journal, 9 Feb. 1788; Fort Schuyler Treaty Journal, 4 Sept.-9 Sept. 1788, in Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners ofIndian Affa irs, 1:184-95 (quote, 184). 66. James Bowdoin to George Clinton, 18 July 1785, Public Papers of George Clinton, 8:393-95; Hartford Conference Agreement, Nov. 1786, in JCC, 33:619-29; Sachems, Chiefs, and Warriors to Washington, 2 June 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:166-69; McNall, An Agricultural History ofthe Genesee Valley, 11-14. 67. Denny, Military journal, 19 Oct. 1788, 126; Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 12 Jan. 1789, Harmar MSS, £:21.

226

1Votes to' Pages 96-102

68. Josiah Harmar to Arthur St. Clair, 24 April 1788, Harmar MSS, C:51. 69. Alexander McGillivray to Andrew Pickens, 2 Jan. and 25 Feb. 1788, cited in War­ ing, The Fighting Elder, 145-47. 5. " T H E S E HAUGH T Y R EPUBLICANS ": T H E ILLUSIONS ' O F A G ENTLEMEN S GOVERNMENT, 1789-1790

1. Josiah Harmar to Henry Knox, 8 May 1789, and Harmar to Elliott and Williams, 17 July 1789, both Harmar MSS, F:2, 17-18; Sloan, "Hamilton's Second Thoughts"; Ka­ plan, Colon ies into Nation, 192. 2. Journal of William Maclay, 29 April, 1 May, and 4-9 May 1789, 6-7, 12, 18-28; Ellis, "The Persistence of Antifederalism after 1789," 297-300. North Carolina ratified the Constitution on 21 November 1789; Rhode Island, on 29 May 1790. 3. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 442-43; letter from Green County, North Carolina (19 Jan. 1789), Albany Journal, 20 April 1789; Resolution of North Carolina Senate, 27 Nov. 1788, in SRNC 20:553-54. 4. St. Clair to Knox, 26 Oct. and 4 Nov. 1788, in Smith, St. Cla ir Papers, 2:92-94 and 95-96; Edward Spear to Josiah Harmar, 4 Dec. 1788, and Harmar to Thomas Mifflin, 12 Dec. 1788, both Harmar MSS, 9:40, E:6 (quote); Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heck­ ewelder in Frontier America, 227-28; Andrew Pickens and Henry Osborn to George Washington, 30 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:34. 5. Pickens and Osborn to Alexander McGillivray and the Chiefs of the Creek Na­ tion, 20 April 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:31 (quote); Report of the President to the Senate, 10 Aug. 1789, and House Resolution of 23 Sept. 1789, both in Annals of the Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 1:62, 947. 6. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 15 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:13; Knox to Harmar, 13 Dec. 1789, Harmar MSS, 11:114. 7. Charles Thomson to Arthur St. Clair, 2 July 1788, and Report of the Governor of the Northwest Territory to the President, 2 May 1789, both Am. St. P. : Ind. Aff., 1:9,10; White, The Middle Ground, 445. 8. Jacob Springer to Thomas Hutchins, 13 Sept. 1786, Harmar MSS, 4:27. 9. Denny, Military Journal, 9 Sept. 1788, 123; Cutler and Cutler, The Life, Journals, and Correspondence ofManasseh Cutler, 1:420-21; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 170-71; Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder in Frontier America, 227· 10. White, The Middle Ground, 445-46; Journal of Antoine Gamelin, 29 April 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:94 (quote). 11. White, The Middle Ground, 445; Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder in Frontier America, 229; Tanner, Atlas ofGreat Lakes Indian History, 171-73; St. Clair to Knox, 3 Dec. and 13 Dec. 1788, both in Smith, St. Cla ir Papers, 2:99-100 and 102-3 (quote). 12. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 13-14 Dec. 1788, Draper MSS, 23U:75-79 (quote, 79; my emphasis); Denny, Military Journal, 13-15 Dec. 1788, 127. 13. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 14, 15, and 19 Dec. 1788 and 4 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:80-91 (quote 84), 110-13, 128-29. 14. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 15-16 Dec. and 18-19 Dec. 1788, Draper MSS, 23U:89, 91, 93-94, 96-99, 103-8 (quote 107).

:Notes to' Pages 102-105

227

15. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 20-23 Dec. and 29 Dec. 1788, Draper MSS, 23U:113-14, 116-19 ("the first" and "nephews"); Denny, Military Journal, 29 Dec. 1788, 128 ("don't know"). On the "ox hide trick," see Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down, 38; on the Walking Purchase, see Jennings, Benjamin Franklin, Politician, 49-58. 16. Denny, Military Journal, 29 Dec. 1788, 128 (quote); Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 28-29 Dec. 1788 and 4 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:114-1s, 120-23, 125-27. 17. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 4-6 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:129-3s (first quote); Denny, Military Journal, 6 Jan. 1789, 129-30 (second quote); Treaty of Fort Harmar, 9 Jan. 1789, in IALT, 2:20; Governor's Report to the President, 2 May 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:10. 18. Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 7 and 11 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:136-37, 142-43; Remembrance and Separate Article of Treaty of Fort Harmar (9 Jan. 1789), in IALT, 2:22; St. Clair to President Washington, 9 May 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:10. 19. Denny, Military Journal, 9 Jan. 1789, 130; Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 11 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:139-40; Treaty with the Six Nations, 9 Jan. 1789, in IALT, 2:23-25; Pennsylvania Treaty with the Six Nations, 9 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:ls4-s7; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 171. The Erie Triangle was the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania fronting Lake Erie. 20. George Morgan to Samuel Adams, 15 Feb. 1792, quoted in Mohr, Federal Indian Relations, 137n; Fort Harmar Treaty Journal, 11 Jan. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:l43. 21. The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder in Frontier America, 242; Charles Morison to John Askin, 15 June 1789, in John Askin Papers, 1:321. 22. St. Clair to Knox, 18 Jan. 1789, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:108-9 (quote); Speech of Shandotte, 19 Dec. 1789, WSC, 5:417-18. 23. IALT, 2:20-25; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 57. 24. Proclamation of 24 Jan. 1789, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:108n; Arraignment Order for Lewis Weitsel, 26 Aug. 1789, and Harmar to Hamtramck, 13 Jan. and 27 Aug. 1790, all in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 1787-1791, 208, 215, 250; Kentucky Gazette, 10 Sept. and 24 Oct. 1789. Congress had made Harmar a brevet brigadier general on 31 July 1787 (fCC, 33:440). 25. Hamtramck to John Wyllys, 26 May 1789, Harmar MSS, 10:49; Account of Depredations Committed in the District of Kentucky since the 1st of May 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:85; Denny, Military Journal, 2 1 Aug. 1789, 133; Thomas Mifflin to Wash­ ington, 10 March 1790, PGw, PS, 5:212-13n; Joseph Asheton to Harmar, 10 July 1789, Harmar MSS, 10:107; Address of the General Assembly of Yirginia to the President of the U.S., 30 Oct. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:85. 26. Knox to Harmar, 23 May 1789, Harmar MSS, 10:43 (first quote); Report of the Secretary of War, 15 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:13 (remaining quotes); Statement of the Anticipation of the Taxes of the Superintendent of Finance, 25 Sept. 1789, in PAH, 5:405-6. 27. Report of the Secretary of War, 15 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:13-14 (first two quotes); Knox to Harmar, 19 Dec. 1789, Harmar MSS, 11:113-14 (remaining quotes). 28. Minutes of Fort Harmar Conference, 19 Dec.-22 Dec. 1789, WSC, 5:417-23 (first quote 420); St. Clair to Washington, 24 Aug. 1789, and Washington to Congress, 16 Sept. 1789, both in Annals ofthe Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 1:928 (second quote), 1:927·

228

:Notes to' Pages 106-1 1 0

29. Harmar t o Captain Pipe, 1 3 Aug. 1789, Harmar t o Knox, 1 2 Sept. 1789, Harmar to Joseph Ashton, 3 Nov. 1789, Harmar to Tarhe, 11 Nov. 1789, and Harmar to Knox, 14 Feb. 1790, all Harmar MSS, F:29-30 (first quote), 46, 71 (second quote), 81-82, and G:6-7. 30. Resolution of 3 Oct. 1787, in fCC, 33:707-11; Richard Winn to Henry Knox, 25 June 1788, PCC, 165:3:469-72; John Steele to Samuel Johnston, 19 Feb. 1789, in The Papers offohn Steele, 1:34; Articles of Truce of Upper War Ford (16 June 1789), Pennsyl­ vania Gazette, 12 Aug. 1789; Pickens and Osborn to Washington, 30 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:34. 31. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 7 July 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:53-54. 32. President Washington to the Senate, 22 Aug. 1789, PGw, PS, 3:521-25. 33. Knox to Washington, 28 July 1789, Am. St. P: Ind. Ajf., 1:33 (first quote); Wash­ ington to Lincoln, 11 Aug. and 20 Aug. 1789, and Washington to the Senate, 22 Aug. 1789, all in PGw, PS, 3:419-20 (second quote), 502-3, and 521-25; Statutes at Large of the United States (20 Aug. 1789), 1:54; Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln, 185-91. Griffin was from Virginia, Humphreys from Connecticut, and Lincoln from Massachusetts. 34. House Journal, 11-12 Aug. 1789, Annals ofthe Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 1:720-26. 35. House Journal, 11-12 Aug. 1789, Annals of the Congress, 1St Cong., 1st sess., 1:720-30 (quotes, 720, 726); Bass, Gamecock, 7-16, 38-41, 144-45; Mohr, Federal Indian Relations, 174-75. 36. fournal of William Maclay, 22 Aug. 1789, 128-31 (quotes 130-31). 37. Ibid., 131-32; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 76-78; Elkins and McKittrick, The Age ofFederalism, 55-58. 38. Instructions to the Commissioners, 29 Aug. 1789, in PGw, PS, 3:551-58. 39. Harmar to John Hamtramck, 25 Oct. 1789, Harmar MSS, F:64; David Hum­ phreys to George Washington, 21 Sept. 1789, in PGw, PS, 4:61-62; Waring, The Fight­ ing Elder, 160. 40. McGillivray to Mir6, 10 Aug. 1789, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 244 (quote); Green, "Alexander McGillivray," 41-42, 54; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 159-60. "Beloved Man" meant "official" or "councilor" (Shoemaker, A Strange Like. ness, 39). 41. James Folch to Esteban Mir6, 2 July 1789, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 242; Instructions to the Commissioners, 29 Aug. 1789, in PGw, PS, 3:556; Deposition of John Loverd, 17 Dec. 1788, Bevan MSS, 10:90; Leslie to Alexander McGillivray, 11 Dec. 1788, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:282. 42. McGillivray to William Panton, 20 May 1789, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:286-87 (quotes). 43. Rock Landing Conference Memoranda, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:73; Humphreys to George Washington, 26 Sept. 1789, in PGw, PS, 4:86-87 (quotes 86). The Creeks used white birds' wings as emblems of peace and civil authority (Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 257, 326). 44. Humphreys to George Washington, 26 and 27 Sept. 1789, PGw, PS, 4:87, 92-93; Leslie to McGillivray, 11 Dec. 1788, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 21:282-83; Waring, The Fighting Elder, 161-62.

J'Votes tif Pages 1 10-114

229

45. Rock Landing Treaty Journal, 24 Sept. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:73; Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 226-29; Address to the Chiefs and Warriors of the Creek Nation and Draft Treaty, 24 Sept. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:74-75 (quote); Washing­ ton's Instructions to the Commissioners, 29 Aug. 1789, and Humphreys to Washing­ ton, 26 Sept. 1789, both in PGw, PS, 3:554-58, 4:87. 46. Humphreys to Washington, 26 Sept. 1789, in PGw, PS, 4:87. 47. Humphreys to Washington, 26 and 27 Sept. 1789, both in PGw, PS, 4:88, 91-93 ' (quotes, 92). 48. Humphreys to Washington, 26 and 27 Sept. 1789, both in PGw, PS, 4:88 ("slov­ enly"), and 94 ("pecuniary emolument"); McGillivray to William Panton, 8 Oct. 1789, in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 251-55 ("puppy"). On grounds for a duel, see Freeman, Affa irs ofHonor, 159-98. My thanks to John Franklin for this point. 49. Commissioners to McGillivray, 26 Sept. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:75; Hum­ phreys to Washington, 27 Sept. 1789, PGw, PS, 4:91-93 (quotes 93); Waring, The Fight­ ingElder, 162. 50. Humphreys to Washington, 27 Sept. 1789, in PGw, PS, 4:94-95; McGillivray to the Commissioners, 27 Sept. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:76. 51. Rock Landing Conference Memoranda, 3 Oct. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:78; Walton to Lincoln, Griffin, and Humphreys, 4 Oct. 1789, Bevan MSS, 11:91; Commis­ sioners' Report to Congress, 10 Nov. 1789, and Commissioners to the Secretary of War, 20 Nov. 1789, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:79, and 78-79; Journal of William Maclay, 11-12 Jan. 1790, 174-75 (quote 175). 52. Report of the Secretary of War, 4 Jan. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:59-60; Knox's Notes on the State of the Frontier, Jan. 1790, and Knox to Washington, 6 April 1790, both in PGw, PS, 5:80-81,317; Harmar to Richard Call, 8 March 1790, Knox to Harmar, 12 April 1790, both Harmar MSS, G:67 (quote), 12:74. 53. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 236-37; McGillivray to Arturo O'Neill, 12 July 1787, and McGillivray to Esteban Mira, 24 June 1789, both in Caughey, McGillivray ofthe Creeks, 158-59, 239-40; Rock Landing Conference Memo­ randa, 29 Oct. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:77 (quote); Address of the Virginia Assembly to Washington, 30 Oct. 1789, in PGw, PS, 5:95n. 54. John Doughty to Harmar, 14 Jan. 1790, Joseph Asheton to Harmar, 26 March 1790, Doughty to Harmar, 17 April 1790, and Doughty to Knox, 17 April 1790, all Har­ mar MSS, 12:7, 61, 7779, and 84. 55. Doughty to Knox, 17 April 1790, and Harmar to Lt. Melcher, 5 July 1790, both Harmar MSS, 12:81-83 (quotes 83), and H:4. 56. Harmar to Knox, 20 Feb. 1790, Doughty to Harmar, 17 April 1790, and Doughty to Knox, 17 April 1790, all Harmar MSS, G :47, 12:77, and 82-84. 57. Report of the Secretary of War, 4 Jan. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:59-61. 58. William Dowell to John Brown, 4 April 1790, and Deposition of Charles John­ son, 29 July 1790, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:86, and 87; Rufus Putnam to Washington, 24 July 1790, in The Memo irs ofRufus Putnam, 233; John Hamtramck to Harmar, 16 May 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:105; Deposition of Joseph Barnett, 8 June 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:90 (quote). 59. St. Clair to Washington, 24 Aug. 1789, Annals of the Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess., 1:928 ("They are in the habit"); Report of the Secretary of War, 4 Jan. 1790, and

23 0

;Notes t(f Pages 115-118

Harry Innes to Knox, 7 July 1790, both Am. St. P.: indo Ajf., 1:60 ("all bearing"),88 (re­ maining quotes). 60. St. Clair to the Secretary of War, 1 May 1790, Am. St. P.: indo Ajf., 1:87. Cf. Put­ nam to Washington, 24 July 1790, in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 233. 61. John Hamtramck to Harmar, 17 March 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:50; Journal of Antoine Gamelin, 5-18 April 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:93 (first two quotes); St. Clair to Washington, 1 May 1790, in PGw, PS, 5:371 (third quote). 62. Journal of Gamelin, 23-29 April 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:93-94 (quotes 94); Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 141-43; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 95-97. 63. Knox to Harmar, 18 May 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:107; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 189-92; Hamtramck to Harmar, 17 March 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:49; Knox, "Causes of the Existing Hostilities between the United States and Certain Tribes of Indians" (26 Jan. 1792), Annals ofthe Congress, 2nd Cong., 1st sess., 3:1049; Fry, "Women on the Ohio Frontier," 66-67. 64. Knox to Washington, 27 May 1790, PGw, PS, 6:362n ("strike terror"); Knox to Harmar, 7 June 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:130-32 ("extirpate"). 65. Harmar to Knox, 9 June 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:91; Denny, Military Journal, 21 April 1790, 137-38; Harmar to Joseph Howell, 9 June 1790, and Harmar to Richard Graham, 6 March 1790, both Harmar MSS, G:81-82 ("cure the disorder"), 64-65 ("savages will continue"). By 1792, the Scioto pirates had killed or captured 250 people (Wallace, The Travels ofJohn Heckewelder in Frontier America, 267). 66. Military Establishment Act, 29 Sept. 1789, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:96; Washington to St. Clair, 6 Oct. 1789, in Smith, St. Clair Papers, 2:125; St. Clair to Harmar, 1 Oct. 1790, Harmar to John Hamtramck, 15 July 1790, and Harmar to John Hardin, 18 Aug. 1790, all Harmar MSS, 13:102, H:1O, 36-37. 67. Robert Elliott to Harmar, 1 Aug. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:45; Denny, Military Journal, 18-19 Sept. 1790, 26 Sept.-17 Oct. 1790, 139-40 ("raw and unused"), 141-45; Hamtramck to Harmar, 20 April 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:89; St. Clair to Knox, 1 May 1790, Am. St. P.: indo Ajf., 1:87. 68. Knox to St. Clair, 23 Aug. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:98-99; John Doughty to Harmar, 11 Sept. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:87; Denny, Military Journal, 17 Oct. 1790, 145; Malone, Jefferson and the Rights ofMan, 315. 69. Harmar to Gov. Thomas Mifflin, 4 Sept. 1790, Harmar MSS, H:58; Harmar's General Orders, 17 and 20 Oct. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:105; Denny, Military Jour­ nal, 17 Oct.-19 Oct. 1790, 145-46; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 107-8. 70. Harmar's General Orders, 18 Oct. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:105; Denny, Military Journal, 20-21 Oct. 1790, 147 (quote); Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 108-9; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 103. 71. Denny, Military Journal, 21-22 Oct. 1790, 147-49; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 103-6. 72. Denny, Military Journal, 23 Oct.-4 Nov. 1790 and 7 Sept. 1791, 149-50 and 152-53; Harmar to Matt Ernest, 12 Nov. 1790, and Harmar to James Wilkinson, 29 Nov. 1790, both Harmar MSS, H:67 (first quote), and 75-77 (second quote 77). 73. Hamtramck to Winthrop Sargent, 1 Nov. 1790, WSC, 1:144-46; Hamtramck to Harmar, 2 Nov. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:114-16. 74. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 106-11; Levi Todd and Robert Johnson to Harmar, 20 Nov. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:119; Harmar to Hamtramck, 15 Jan. 1791, in Harmar and Hamtramck, Outpost on the Wabash, 272; Conversation with George Beckwith and

'.Notes to' Pages 118-124

231

William Macomb, 31 Jan. 1791, in PAH, 7:612; Rufus Putnam to Knox, 8 March 1791, in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 251-52. 75. Journal of William Maclay, 27 Jan., 16 Feb., and 26 Feb. 1791, 380, 395 (quote), and 406. 76. Knox to Washington, 15 Feb. 1790, in PGw, PS, 5:140-43· 77. Willett, A Narrative ofthe Military Actions of Colonel Marinus Willett, 96-101. 78. Ibid., 101, 103-4, 106-8. 79. Ibid., 101-5, 107-10; McGillivray to Leslie, 20 May 1790, and McGillivray to Esteban Mira, 2 June 1790, both in Caughey, McGillivray ofthe Creeks, 263-65 (quote), 265-67. On diplomatic journeys as spiritual pilgrimages, see Helms, Ulysses' Sail, 49-53, 198-202. 80. Willett, A Narrative ofthe Military Actions of Colonel Marinus Willett, 111-12 (quotes); William Knox to Henry Knox, 14 July 1790, Knox Papers, 26:100. 81. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 316; Deloria, Playing Indian, 49-55 (quotes 54-55) ; Journal of William Maclay, 12 May 1790, 260; Willett, A Narrative of the Mili­ tary Actions of Colonel Marinus Willett" 112-13. 82. Gazette of the United States, 18 Aug. 1790; Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, 68-108; Sheehan, Seeds ofExtinction, 15-44. 83. F. C. Van Berckel to Knox, 25 July 1790, Knox Papers, 26:108; Gazette of the United States, 28 July 1790; Questions for the Tallisee King, 6 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:120. 84. Draft Letter to Washington, 7 ,Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:122. 85. Draft Letter to Washington, 7 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:122. 86. Treaty of New York, 7 Aug. 1790, in IALT, 2:26-28 (quotes); Washington to the Senate, 4 Aug. 1790 in, WGw, 31:74. 87. Additional Secret Articles of the Treaty with the Creeks (Nos. 1, 3-4) , 7 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:130. 88. Mohr, Federal Indian Relations, 195-97; Committee Report, 8 Oct. 1783, in JCC, 25:660-61; White, The Middle Ground, 360-62, 380-85. 89. Washington to the Senate, 7 Aug. 1790, in WGw, 31:74; Rock Landing Confer­ ence Commissioners to the Secretary of War, 20 Nov. 1789, and Report of the Secretary of War, 7 July 1789, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:79, 54; Washington to the Rock Landing Commissioners, 29 Aug. 1789, in PGw, PS, 3:557-58 (quote). 90. William Knox to Henry Knox, 14 July 1790, Knox Papers, 26:100; Carlos Howard to Juan de Quesada, 24 Sept. 1790, in Caughey, McGillivray ofthe Creeks, 285; Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 16 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:101. 91. Jefferson and Madison to Washington, 12 July 1790, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 1:658; Washington to Lafayette, 11 Aug. 1790, in WGw, 31:86-87; Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 199; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederal­ ism, 214-15. 92. Nichols, "Land, Republicanism, and Indians," 208; Petition of Zachariah Cox, Dec. 1789, Bevan MSS, 11:96; Clark and Guice, Frontiers in Conflict, 70-72; John Doughty to Knox, 17 April 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:84; Anthony Wayne to Knox, 12 May 1790, Knox Papers, 26:51; IALT, 2:27; Proclamations by the President, 26 Aug. 1790 and 19 March 1791, both in WGw, 31:99 and 250; Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 551. 93. Indian Trade and Intercourse Act (22 July 1790) , in Statutes at Large of the

232

:Notes to' Pages 124-130

United States, 1:137-38; Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 4 Jan. 1790, . Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff , 1:60-61 ("conceded"); Toasts at the First Dinner Meeting of the Combined Society, Augusta Chronicle and Gazette ofthe State, 25 Sept. 1790 ("Knoxonian"). 94. Lamplugh, Politics on the Periphery, 65; Nichols, "Land, Republicanism, and Indians," 215-16 (quotes). 95. Speech of the Commissioner to the Creeks, 7 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:128; Gazette ofthe United States, 14 Aug. 1790; Proclamation by the President Regarding the Treaty of New York, 14 Aug. 1790, in WGw, 31:92. 96. Speech of Representative Carnes, 29 Jan. 1795, Annals ofthe Congress, 3rd Cong., 2nd sess., 4:1156. 97. Report of the Secretary at War, 10 July 1787, in TPUS, 2:31-35; Reports of the Secretary of War, 15 June, 7 July 1789, and 4 Jan. 1790, allAm. St. P. : Ind. AjJ., 1:13, 52-54, and 59-60 (quote, my emphasis); Knox's Draft Letter to Washington, 7 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:122. 98. Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 121-38, 170-188; Rock Landing Commissioners to Knox, 20 Nov. 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:79; John Doughty to Knox, 17 April 1790, Harmar MSS, 12:85; Gazette of the United States, 14 Aug. 1790. 99. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 13-86. 100. Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 157-58; Jonathan Jones to John Hamtramck, 19 Oct. 1789, Harmar MSS, 11:65. 101. See n. 59, above.

6. WAR A N D APPEASEMENT, 1790-1793

1. Morgan, Inventing the People, 13 (quote); Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 100-101, 120-23· 2. Jones, Licensefor Empire, 34-35. 3. Washington to Timothy Pickering, 4 Sept. 1790, TPP, reel 61; John Jeffers to Har­ mar, 1 Oct. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:103. 4. Conference between Richard Butler and Cornplanter, 31 March 1786, and Butler to the President of Congress, 25 April 1786, both PCC, 69:349-58, and 341-44; Resolu­ tions of 28 April and 5 May 1786, in ICC, 30:212-13 and 235-36; Diary of Thomas Rod­ ney, 2 May 1786, in LMC, 8:348-49 (quote, 349). 5. Cornplanter to Richard Butler, 10 Sept. 1786, Butler to Harmar, 13 Feb. 1787, Jona­ than Heart to Harmar, 2 Jan. and 13 May 1788, and Ebenezer Frothingham to Harmar, 27 Oct. 1788, all Harmar MSS, 4:24, 5:37, 7:20, 85, and 8:141. 6. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic, 116-18; Seneca Chiefs to the President and Council of Pennsylvania, 12 Aug. 1790, TPP, reel 61; John Jeffers to Harmar, 15 Sept. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:95 (quote); Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 172. 7. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic, 10-74. 8. Journal of a Tour into the Great Woods of Pennsylvania, 20-21 Aug. 1786, TPP, reel 57; Pearce, The Annals ofLuzerne County, 80-90; Philips, "A Frontier Interlude," 50-54. 9. Journal of Timothy Pickering, 11 and 22 Jan. 1787, and Pickering to John Clark,

:Notes to' Pages 130-134

233

11 Oct. 1786, all in TPP, 57:47-49, 63-66, and 5:395; Pearce, The Annals ojLuzerne County, 90-92; Phillips, "A Frontier Interlude," 54-57; Price, "A Study of a Frontier Community in Transition," 90-94. 10. Journal of Timothy Pickering, 17 Jan. 1787, Journal of a Tour into the Great Woods of Pennsylvania, 18 Aug. 1786, Pickering to John Clark, 11 Oct. 1786, and Journal of Timothy Pickering, 29 Jan. 1787, all TPP, 57:55-56, reel 57 (first quote) 5:395 (second quote), and 57:77-78 (third through fifth quotes). 11. Pearce, The Annals oJLuzerne County, 93-99; Timothy Pickering to John Picker­ ing, 17 Nov. 1787 and 4 Aug. 1788 (quotes), TPP, reel 35. 12. Pickering to Hamilton, 19 Nov. 1789 and 6 April 1790, Timothy to Rebecca Pickering, 6 Sept. 1790, and Pickering to Nathaniel Pearlee and Mary Sargeant, 20 Feb. 1791, all TPP, reels 35, 2, and 35 (quote); Pickering to Washington, 4 Dec. 1790, in PGw, PS, 7:27-28. 13. Timothy to Rebecca Pickering, 15 Nov. 1790, Pickering Expense Book, Oct.-Nov. 1790, Pickering to Seneca Chiefs, 30 Oct. 1790, Addresses to Chiefs, Sachems, and Warriors of the Six Nations, 15 Nov., 18 Nov. (quote), and 20 Nov. 1790, and Pickering to the Seneca Matrons, 22 Nov. 1790, all TPP, reel 2, 61:38-41, and reel 61; Pickering to Washington, 23 Dec. 1790, in PGw, PS, 7:112. 14. Buffalo Creek Council Proceedings, 7 Sept. 1789, Draper MSS, 23U:172 (quote), 178; Jeffers to Harmar, 1 Oct. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:103; Speech of Farmer's Brother, 23 Nov. 1790, TPP, reel 61. 15. Speech of Red Jacket, 21 Nov. 1790, and Journal of Timothy Pickering, 23 Nov. 1790, both TPP, 61:87-88, and reel 61 (quote). 16. Speech of Farmer's Brother, 15 Nov. 1790, Addresses of Farmer's Brother and Red Jacket, 19 Nov. and 21 Nov. 1790, and Journal of Timothy Pickering, 24 Nov. 1790, all TPP, reel 61, 61:70-72, 87-88; Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 635. 17. Pickering to Nathaniel Pearlee and Mary Sargeant, 20 Feb. 1791, TPP, reel 35 (first three quotes); Pickering to Washington, 4 Dec. 1790, in PGw, PS, 7:27-28 (remaining quotes). The court acquitted Doyle because he had only been the accomplice of the actual murderers (PGw, PS, 7:29n6). 18. Cornplanter, New-Arrow, Half-Town, and Great Tree to Washington, 17 March 1791, and Journal of Thomas Proctor, 6 April 1791, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Aif., 1:145,153; Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic, 124-26. 19. Speech of Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Great Tree to Washington, 1 Dec. 1790, and Washington to Cornplanter et aI., 29 Dec. 1790, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Aif., 1:140-42, 142-43 (quote). 20. Journal of Thomas Proctor, 9 April 1791, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aif., 1:153; Henry Knox to Pickering, 9 April 1791, TPP, 61:172-73 (quotes). 21. Pickering to Washington, 8 Jan. and 15 Jan. 1791, and Pickering to Samuel Hodgedon, 28 Feb. 1791, all TPP, 61:165 ("I cannot admit"), 167, and reel 35 (remaining quotes). 22. Pickering to Samuel Kirkland, 4 Dec. 1791, and Pickering to Washington, 8 Jan. 1791, both TPP, 61:304 (second quote), and 164-65 (remaining quotes). 23. Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and McIntosh to the President of Congress, 2 Dec. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aif., 1:39 (first quote); Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs, 9 Aug. 1787, in JCC, 33:477-81; Treaty of New York, 7 Aug. 1790, in lALT, 2:28; Addi,

23 4

:Notes t(J Pages 134-138

tional Secret Articles of the Creek Treaty, 7 Aug. 1790, Knox Papers, 26:130; Corn­ planter et a!. to Washington, 1 Dec. 1790, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:141-42 (second quote); Washington to Pickering, 20 Jan. 1791, TPP, 61:128. 24. James, A People among Peoples, 286-315; diGiacomantonio, "'For the Gratifica­ tion of a Volunteering Society.'" 25. Journal of Timothy Pickering, 28 MaY-ll June 1791, Pickering to Jasper Parrish, 16 June 1791, and Timothy to Rebecca Pickering, 1 July 1791, all TPP, 61:180-81, 434, and reel 2; Phillips, "Timothy Pickering at His Best," 173-74. 26. Report of the Secretary of War, 15 June 1789, and Henry Knox to Pickering, 2 May 1791, both Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:13 and 166; Newtown Conference Journal, 13 July 1791, and Pickering to Knox, 16 July 1791, both TPP, reel 60 (quotes); Phillips, "Timothy Pickering at His Best," 176. 27. Speech of Red Jacket, 23 Nov. 1790, TPP, reel 61; Densmore, Red Jacket, 32, 35-36 (quotes). 28. Hendrick's Narrative, 21 July 1791, TPP, 59:8; Frazier, The Mohicans ofStock­ bridge, 198-99, 232-33, 240-41; Taylor, "Captain Hendrick Aupaumut," 432-43. 29. Seaver, Narrative ofthe Life ofMrs. Mary Jemison, 109-16; Memorandum on Grant to Mary and Chloe Allen, July 1791, Robert Morris to Timothy Pickering, 12 June 1791, and Lease Agreement between Cayugas and John Richardson, 16 July 1791, all TPP, 61:255, 289, and 253-54. 30. Pickering to Knox, 16 Aug. 1791, TPP, 61:267-68 (quotes 267). 31. Seaver, Narrative ofthe Life ofMary Jemison, 116-17; Abraham Hardenbergh to Pickering, 22 July 1791, John Richardson to Pickering, 30 July 1791, Pickering to Wash­ ington, 27 Aug. 1791, and Joseph Kinney to Pickering, 24 Oct. 1791, all TPP, 61:257, 266 (quote), reel 6, and 61:278-79A. In 1792, Clin.ton granted the Cayugas the temporary right to lease their land (Richardson to Pickering, 21 Feb. 1792, TPP, 62:6). 32. Newtown Journal, 4 July 1791, and Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 12 Aug. 1791, both TPP, 61:244-45, and reel 2. 33. Knox to Washington, 22 Feb. 1791, in PGw, PS, 7:402-3; Act for Raising and Adding Another Regiment to the Military Establishment, 3 March 1791, Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:222-24; and see also Benjamin Hawkins to Washington, 10 Feb. 1792, in McPherson, "Unpublished Letters from North Carolinians to Wash­ ington," 163-64. 34. Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Great Tree to Washington, 10 Jan. 1791, and Knox to Proctor, 11 March 1791, both Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:144 and 146. 35. Knox to Washington, 22 Feb. 1791, in PGw, PS, 7:406-10 (quotes 409-10) ; Knox to Charles Scott, 9 March 1791, Am. St. P : Ind. Ajf., 1:129-30. 36. Journal of Thomas Proctor, 12 April-12 May 1791, Am. St. P: Ind. AjJ., 1:153-59 (quote 157) ; Densmore, Red Jacket, 34-35; John Jeffers to Harmar, 17 Dec. 1790, Harmar MSS, 13:133. 37. Journal of Proctor, 15-21 May 1791, and Gordon to Proctor, 18 May 1791, both Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:159-62 (quote) and 164; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 444-45; Conver­ sation with George Beckwith, 15 May 1791, PAH, 8:342; Dorchester's Speech to the Iroquois, Ottawas, et a!., 1 Aug. 1791, BLP, 12:92. 38. Hendrick's Narrative of His Journey in July, August, September, and Octo­ ber 1791, TPP, 59:8-8A.

:Notes t(f Pages 138-142

23 5

39. Hendrick's Narrative of His Journey in July, August, September, and Octo­ ber 1791, TPP, 59:8A-lOA (quotes); Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 450. 40. Charles Scott to Henry Knox, 28 June 1791, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:131-33. 41. Alexander Hamilton to Rufus King, 8 July 1791, PAH, 8:532 (quote); The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 114-15; Wilkinson to St. Clair, 24 Aug. 1791, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:134-35· 42. "Causes of the Failure of the Expedition against the Indians," 8 May 1792, Am. St. P.: Mil. Ajf., 1:37; Denny, Military Journal, 7 AUg.-2 Nov. 1791, 152-62; "Winthrop Sargent's Diary While with General St. Clair's Expedition," 239-40, 246; St. Clair to Knox, 1 Nov. 1791, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:137. 43. Denny, Military Journal, 11 Oct., 26 and 28 Oct., 3-4 Nov. 1791, ISS, 157, 160, 164-67 (quote, 166-67); "Winthrop Sargent's Diary While with General St. Clair's Expedition," 258-62; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 117-24. 44. Denny, Military Journal, 4-6 Nov. 1791, 167; St Clair to Knox, 9 Nov. 1791, Am. St. P. : Ind. Ajf., 1:137-38; "Winthrop Sargent's Diary While with General St. Clair's Expedition," 265; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 457. 45. "Winthrop Sargent's Diary While with General St. Clair's Expedition," 255, 271-72 (quote); Winthrop Sargent to St. Clair, 8 Feb. 1792, ASCP, 4:34-35; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 106-7; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 124-27. 46. "Winthrop Sargent's Diary While with General St. Clair's Expedition," 242 (first quote); Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 30 Dec. 1791, TPP, reel 2; Ward, The Department of War, 117; Clarfield, "Protecting the Frontiers," 445-47; Cayton, "The Meanings of the Wars for the Great Lakes," 384-87 (second quote). 47. Act for Making Farther and More Effectual Provision for the Protection of the Frontiers, s March 1792, Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:241-43; Clarfield, "Protecting the Frontiers," 449-51, 457-63. 48. Proceedings of 1 February and 27 March 1792, Annals ofthe Congress, 2nd Cong., 1st sess., 3:355 and 489-94; "Causes of the Failure of the Expedition," Am. St. P.: Mil. Ajf., 1:36-39; Report on the Defeat of St. Clair, 15 Feb. 1793, Annals of the Congress, 2nd Cong., 2nd sess., 3:1309-17; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 272-78. 49. Washington to Congress, 12 Dec. 1791, in PAH, 10:564; Knox, "The United States and the Indian Tribes," 1792, Knox Papers, 53:164 (first two quotes); Knox, "Causes of the Existing Hostilities between the United States and Certain Tribes ofIndians," 26 Jan. 1792, Annals ofthe Congress, 2nd Cong., 1st sess., 3:1046-52 ("unprovoked," 1048). 50. Henry Knox to William Blount, 22 April 1792, in TPUS, 4:138-39. 51. Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 20 Dec. 1791 (first quote), 22 March 1792, and 29 March 1792 (second quote), all TPP, reel 2; Knox to Samuel Kirkland, 7 March 1792, Knox to Chapin, 23 April 1792, and George Washington to the Del­ egation of the Five Nations, 25 April 1792, all Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:229, 231, and 231; Gazette ofthe United States, 17 and 24 March 1792. On Kirkland, see Ronda, "Reverend Samuel Kirkland and the Oneida Indians." 52. National Gazette, s April 1792 (first quote); Pickering to Washington, 26 April 1792, and Instructions to the Sachems and Chiefs of the Five Nations, 30 April 1792, both TPP, 62:24-25A, (second quote), 28.5A; Knox to Rufus Putnam, 22 May 1792, in

:Notes to' Pages 142-146 The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 258-59. On Jefferson's plan for new states, see Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 412-14. 53. Knox to Alexander Trueman, 3 April 1792, Speech from the Secretary of War to the Sachems and Warriors of the Tribes . . . Southward of the Lakes, 4 April 1792, and Instructions to Hendrick Aupaumut, 8 May 1792, all Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:229-30, 230 (quote), and 233; Knox to Putnam, 22 May 1792, in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 262-64; Edmunds, "'Nothing Has Been Effected,'" 24-25. 54. Knox to Putnam. 22 May 1792. in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 259-67 ("bless­ ings." 261). 55. Washington to Gouverneur Morris. 21 June 1792. in WGw, 32:62-63 (first two quotes); Knox to Wayne. 22 June and 29 June 1792. in Anthony Wayne, 22 and 25; Kel­ say. Joseph Brant, 470-72 ("meet . . . his approbation." 471) . 56. Knox to Wayne. 15 June 1792.; Wayne to Knox. 20 July. 3 and 17 Aug and 14 Sept. 1792. all in Anthony Wayne, 23. 45, 55-57. 67-68. and 98; Putnam to Knox. 5 June and 11 July 1792. in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 268 and 293; Washington to Knox. 5 Aug. and 3 Sept. 1792. in WGw, 32:107 and 139; Edmunds. "'Nothing Has Been Effected.'" 25. 57. Estimate of Indians at Vincennes Conference. Putnam to Knox. 14 July and 1 Aug. 1792. and Journal of the Proceedings at a Council Held with the Wabash and Illinois Indians (hereafter. Vincennes Conference Journal). 24 Sept. 1792. alI in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 121. 296. 322-23 (quotes). and 337. 58. Estimate of Indians at Vincennes Conference. and Vincennes Conference Journal. 24-26 Sept. 1792. in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 121. 335-36. 340, 342-52. 355-57. 363 (first quote. 340; second quote. 342; "older brother." passim; last two quotes. 347 and 348); Edmunds. "'Nothing Has Been Effected.'" 28-29. 59. Vincennes Conference Journal, 26 Sept. 1792, in' The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 353-56 (quotes. 354) . 60. Vincennes Conference Journal. 27 Sept. 1792. and Treaty of Vincennes. both in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 360-62. 363-66 (first two quotes. 365) . The sections of the Treaties of Fort Stanwix. Fort Mclntosh, Hopewell. and Fort Finney. which refer to "allotted" territory. are in lAL T, 2:5-6. 7. 9. 12. 14. 17- The sections of the Treaties of Fort Harmar. New York. and Holston. which refer to "guarantees" and "quitclaims." are in lALT, 19. 23-24, 27. and 30. 61. Vincennes Conference Journal. 24 Sept. 1792. in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 340; Edmunds. "'Nothing Has Been Effected.'" 30-31. 34-35. 62. Washington to the Senate. 13 Feb. 1793. in WGw, 32:343; Senate Resolution of 9 Jan. 1794, U.S. Congress. Journal ofthe Executive Proceedings of the Senate. 1:146; Prucha. American Indian Treaties. 90-91; Edmunds. "'Nothing Has Been Effected.'" 31-34. 63. Knox to Wayne. 22 June. 12 Oct and 9 Nov. 1792. all in Anthony Wayne. 22. 114. and 132; Tanner. "The Glaize in 1792"; Israel Chapin to Knox, 17 July 1792, in The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 317; Dowd. A Spirited Resistance, 103-5; Blacksnake. Chain­ breaker, 196-98. 64. Blacksnake. Chainbreaker, 197-98 (quotes. 198) ; Densmore, Red Jacket, 39. "Town Destroyer" was the Iroquois' epithet for George Washington. 65. Kelsay. Joseph Brant, 478-80 (first quote, 479); Blacksnake. Chainbreaker, 198-201 (remaining quotes. 199-200) . .•

.•

:Notes to' Pages 146-151

237

66. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 105-8; Taylor, "Captain Hendrick Aupaumut," 447-48. 67. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 481-82 (quote). 68. Densmore, Red Jacket, 39-40 (quote, 40). 69. Jefferson, The Anas, (10 Dec. 1792, 25 Feb. 1793) in The Writings of Thomas Jef­ ferson, 1:325, 338-39. 70. Ibid., 340-42 (first two quotes, 341-42; remainder 340-41); and see also Knox to Wayne, 7 Sept. 1792, in Anthony Wayne, 83-84. 71. Washington to Edmund Randolph, 12 Feb. 1793, and Washington to Knox, 5 April 1793, both in WGw, 32:341, 407; K nox's Instructions to the Commissioners, 26 April 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:340-41; Taylor, "Captain Hendrick Aupaumut," 449-50; Edmunds, '''Nothing Has Been Effected,'" 33-34. 72. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 1793, BLP, 10:57-69; Journal of the Commission­ ers of the United States to the Sandusky Conference, 25-26 May, 4-7 June 1793, and Benjamin Lincoln et al. to Henry Knox, 20 June 1793, all Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:344, 347, 347-48; Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 20 June 1793, TPP, reel 2; Phillips, "Timothy Pickering at His Best," 185-87. 73. Journal of the Commissioners, 29 June-5 July 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. A/f., 1:349; Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 5-8 July 1793, and Benjamin to Mary Lincoln, 9 July 1793, BLP, 10:72-74 (quote, 73), 10:48; Commissioners to Knox, 10 July 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:351; Anthony Wayne to Knox, 9 May and 27 May 1793, both in Anthony Wayne, 234-35 and 242; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 496-97· 74. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 9 July 1793, BLP, 10:74 (quotes). 75. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 29 July 1793, BLP, 10:79-80; Speech of Carry-One­ About, 29 July 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:352. 76. Journal of the Commissioners, 8-9 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:88-89; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 150-51; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 498-99; Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 160-61, 163-67. 77. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 31 July 1793, BLP, 10:81-85 (first three quotes, 83; last 84); Phillips, "Timothy Pickering at His Best," 189-90. See also Pickering to Cap­ tain Hendrick, 4 June 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:346. 78. Knox's Instructions to the Commissioners, 26 July 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:341-42. 79. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 1 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:85; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 84-85. 80. Jefferson, The Anas (11 March and 12 Dec. 1792), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1:298-99 and 326; Lord Grenville to Hammond, 17 March 1792, in Mayo, Instructions to the British Ministers to the United States, 3:25-27 (quote 25); Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 160-62. 81. Nelson, A Man ofDistinction among Them, 163-67; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 70-91. 82. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 2 Aug-9 Aug. 1793, and Speech of the Wyandots, Seven Nations, Delawares, et al. to the American Commissioners, 13 Aug. 1793, both in BLP, 10:86-89, 95-98 (quotes, 97-98). 83. Journal of Benjamin Lincoln, 16-17 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:99. 84. Wayne to Knox, 8 Aug. 1793, in Anthony Wayne, 260-61; Wayne to Knox, s and 23 Oct. 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:360-61; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 122-24.

']I[otes t(J Pages 151 -155 85. James Wilkinson to Rufus Putnam, 28 Aug. 1792, The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam, 326; Sugden, Tecumseh, 64-68. 86. Act of Acceptance of North Carolina Cession, 2 April 1790, in TPUS, 4:16; Wil­ liams, History of the Lost State ofFranklin, 275-78; Southwestern Territorial Census Report, 19 Sept. 1791, in TPUS, 4:81; Bartholomei Tardiveau to Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, 25 Aug. 1789, Tardiveau Letters, Filson Club; Goodstein, "Leadership on the Nashville Frontier," 182, 185. 87. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 542-43; Goodstein, "Leadership on the Nashville Frontier," 180, 184-85; Information of Captain Wellbank, 13 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:102 ("a worse man"); Hugh Williamson to Washington, 28 May 1790, and Knox to William Blount, 18 Aug. 1791, both in TPUS, 4:19-20 ("esteem"), 76-77. 88. Williamson to Washington, 28 May 1790, and Knox to Washington, 10 March 1791, both in TPUS, 4:20, 50-52 (quote, 52). 89. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 86-87; Holston Treaty Minutes, 26-28 June 1791, and Blount's Speech to the Cherokees, 28 June 1791, both Draper MSS, 15U:7-1O ("confusion" and "straighten," 8-9), 27-29 ("faithless states," 29). 90. Holston Treaty Minutes, 29 June-1 July 1791, Draper MSS, 15U:13-14, 17-18 ("the people," 14; remaining quotes, 18). 91. Reply of the Creek Linguister, 28 June 1791, and Holston Treaty Minutes, 1-3 July 1791, both Draper MSS, 15U:35-36, 18-20, 25; Treaty of Holston (2 July 1791), in IALT, 2:29-32; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 26-29. 92. Holston Treaty Minutes, 28 June-1 July 1791, Draper MSS, 15U:12-13, 15-1793. Reply of the Creek Linguister, 28 June 1791, and Holston Treaty Minutes, 28 June and 1 July 1791, all Draper MSS, 15U:36 (first two quotes), 15U:9-1O, 20-21 (remaining quotes); Cumfer, "Local Origins of National Indian Policy," 26-27. 94. Knox to Washington, 17 Jan. 1792, in TPUS, 4:111-14 (quote, 114); Additional Article to the Treaty between the United States and the Cherokees, 17 Feb. 1792, in IALT, 2:32-33; Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Frontier," 31. 95. Knox to Blount, 31 Jan. and 22 April 1792, both in TPUS, 4:115-16 ("apprehen­ sive") and 142 ("common cause"). 96. Knox to Washington, 17 Jan. 1792, and Knox to Blount, 31 Jan. 1792, both in TPUS, 4:114, 116; Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwest­ ern Frontier," 31-32; Nashville Conference Journal, 7-9 Aug. 1792, Am. St. P.: Ind. A/J., 1:284-87 (quote, 286). 97. Blount to Knox, 20 March 1792, and Blount to James Robertson, 1 April 1792, both in TPUS, 4:129-30, 132-34; Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Frontier," 32-33; Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 561-62; Sugden, Tecumseh, 13-16, 57, 67-68. 98. Blount to Daniel Smith, 27 April 1792, Blount to Knox, 16 May 1792, and Knox to Washington, 28 July 1792, all in TPUS, 4:144, 151, 159-60 (first quote); James Carey to Blount, 3 Nov. 1792, and Blount to Knox, 14 Jan. 1793, both Am. St. P.: Ind. A/J., 1:327-29, 432 (second quote). 99. Knox to Wayne, 12 Oct. and 9 Nov 1792, both in Anthony Wayne, 115-16 and 132; Information of Governor Blount, 5 Nov. 1792, Am. St. P.: Ind. A/J., 1:331; Ramsey, The

'Notes tif Pages 155-161

239

Annals of Tennessee to the End ofthe Eighteenth Century, 566-67, 571-75; Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Frontier," 35-37. 100. James Seagrove to Edward Telfair, 17 March 1793, Deposition of James Akin, 3 May 1793, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:272, 300-303; James Jackson to James Seagrove, 9 May 1793, in Hawes, "The Letter Book of General James Jackson, 1788-1796," 37, 239; Downes, "Creek-American Relations," 354-55, 362-63; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 57-66. 101. Affidavit of David Shaw, 2 June 1792, Creek Indian Letters, Talks, and Trea­ ties, GDAH, 1:247; Information of Captain Wellbank, 13 Aug. 1793, BLP, 10:101; Green, "Alexander McGillivray," 58; White Lieutenant to James Seagrove, 23 June 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:401 (quotes); Downes, "Creek-American Relations," 355-56, 364-66. 102. Knox to Blount, 15 Aug. 1792, in TPUS, 4:163-64 (quote 163); Knox to Wayne, 27 April and 17 May 1793, both in Anthony Wayne, 227-28 and 241; Knox to Edward Telfair, 9 March and 30 May 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:363-64; Jefferson, The Anas (recollection of 4 Sept. 1793), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1:397; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 284-85. 103. Edward Telfair to Henry Gaither, 14 Nov. 1792, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:334; Ram­ sey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End ofthe Eighteenth Century, 576-77. 104. Report of the Secretary of War, 13 Dec. 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:363; Sy­ monds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Frontier," 37-39. 105. James Jackson to Edward Telfair, 8 April 1793, in Hawes, "The Letter Book of General James Jackson," 231; Timothy Barnard to James Seagrove, 3 July 1793, Deposi­ tion of James Kirby, 22 July 1793, and Court of Inquiry, 25 Oct. 1793, all Creek Indian Letters, GDAH, 1:326, 338-39, 348 (quotes); Report of the Secretary of War, 16 Dec. 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:362. 106. Daniel Smith to Knox, 27 Sept. 1793, and John Sevier to William Blount, 25 Oct. 1793, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:468, 469-70; Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End ofthe Eighteenth Century, 580-81, 584-89; Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Frontier," 39-43. 107. Symonds, "The Failure of America's Indian Policy on the Southwestern Fron­ tier," 43-44; Knox to Edward Telfair, s Sept. 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:365; Cayton, "'Separate Interests' and the Nation-State," 61; Thomas Jefferson to Judge Campbell, 1792, in TPUS, 4:130-31. 108. White, The Middle Ground, 407, 455. 109. Washington to Knox, s Aug. 1792, in WGw, 32:107. 110. Cayton, '''Separate Interests' and the Nation-State," 54.

7. MUSKET, QU ILL, A N D CALUMET, 1794-1799

1. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 139-73; Henry Knox to William Blount, 29 Dec. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:634; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 112. 2. Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 216-58; Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 85-86, 213-18. 3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics ofthe United States, 27-35, 1168; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 841nl90; Downes, "Trade in Frontier Ohio," 472-82; Wade, The Urban Frontier, 40-41.

24 0

1'lotes to- Pages 161-165

4. Cf. Elkins and McKittrick, The Age ofFederalism, 483-84. 5. Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 230-35; Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 6 May 1794, WSC, 4:448; Madison to Jefferson, 2 and 12 March 1794, both in Jefferson and Madi­ son, The Republic ofLetters, 2:831-32, 835-36. 6. Joseph Chew to Thomas Coffin, 27 Feb. 1794, Lt. Col. John Butler to Joseph Chew, 27 April 1794, and Alexander McKee to Chew, 8 May 1794, all in HCPSM, 20:331, 342-43, 351; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 92-98; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 506-8. 7. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 508-9; Israel Chapin to Henry Knox, 29 April 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:480; Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 4 July 1794, WSc, 4:462; Murray, Forked Tongues, 39 (first quote); John Adlum to Governor Thomas Mifflin, 31 Aug. 1794, James Schoff MS, Clements Library (second quote). 8. Turner, "The Origin of Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas"; Washington to the House and Senate, 20 Jan. 1794, in WGw, 33:245; Kukla, A Wilder­ ness So Immense, 164-77; Coulter, "Elijah Clarke's Foreign Intrigues and the 'Trans­ Oconee Republic,'" 262-66. 9. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 284-85; Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 535-36; Kukla, A Wilderness So Im­ mense, 173-74, 180-81; Three Nations of the Glaize to Alexander McKee, 6 May 1794, in HCPSM, 20:347-49; Wayne to Pickering, 19 Sept. 1795, in Anthony Wayne, 456. 10. Buffalo Creek Council Minutes, 7-8 Feb. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:479-80; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 326-27; Phillips, "Timothy Pickering at His Best," 193-94; Coulter, "Edward Telfair," 122; Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 236, 253. 11. Henry Knox to the Sachems, Chiefs, and Warriors of the Six Nations, 24 Dec. 1793, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:479 ("deaf to the voice"); Fifth Annual Message to Congress (3 Dec. 1793), in WGw, 33:167-68 (remaining quotes); Wayne to Knox, 8 and 18 Jan. 1794, and Wayne to Knox, 3 March 1794, all in Anthony Wayne, 298-99, 306; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 331-33. 12. Journal of a Campaign under Major General Charles Scott, 16-17 Oct. and 30 Oct. 1793, Filson Club; Alexander McKee to Joseph Chew, 7 July 1794, in HCPSM, 20:364; Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 16 July 1794, WSc, 4:477-78; Wayne to Knox, 7 July 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:487-88. 13. McKee to Chew, 7 July 1794, in HCPSM, 20:364 (quote); Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 31 July 1794, WSC, 4:481-82; Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 12 Aug. 1794, Wayne Papers, Clements Library; White, The Middle Ground, 466-67. 14. Act Making Appropriations for the Support of the Military Establishment, 21 March 1794, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:346-47; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio, 325-26. 15. Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 28 JuIY-9 Aug. 1794, 1-6, Wayne Papers, Cle­ ments Library; Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, 14 Aug. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:490 (quote); Journal of a Campaign under Major General Charles Scott, 8-13 Aug. 1794, Filson Club. 16. Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 16 Aug. 1794, 11-12, Wayne Papers, Clements Library (quote); Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 133; Wayne to the Delawares, Miamis, Shaw­ nees, and Wyandots, 13 Aug. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:490. 17. Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 15 Aug., 18-20 Aug. 1794, 11-15, Wayne Papers, Clements Library; Journal of a Campaign under Major General Charles Scott,

:Notes t(]' Pages 165-169

24 1

20 Aug. 1794, Filson Club; Wayne to Knox, 28 Aug. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:490; Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 3 Sept. 1794, WSC, 4:491; Hurt, Ohio Frontier, 132-35. 18. Alexander McKee to Joseph Chew, 27 Aug. 1794, in HCPSM, 20:370-72; Wayne to Knox, 28 Aug. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:491; Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 13 Oct. 1794, 34-35, Wayne Papers, Clements Library; Speech of Nanaume, Nov. 1807, in HCPSM, 40:249 (quote); Sugden, Blue Jacket, 179-80. Estimates of Indian fatalities on August 20th ranged from 19 (McKee's) to 266 (Wayne's). They included two Ottawa and eight Wyandot captains. 19. Campbell to Wayne, 22 Aug. 1794, and Wayne to Campbell, 22 Aug. 1794, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:492; Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 21-26 Aug., 14-18 Sept. 1794, 16-18, 22-24, Wayne Papers, Clements Library; Journal of a Campaign under Major General Charles Scott, 21-24 Aug. 1794, Filson Club. 20. Journal of Captain Edward Miller, 19 Sept., 12-13 Oct. and 26 Oct. 1794, 24, 32, 35, and 45-46, Wayne Papers, Clements Library; Horsman, Matthew Elliott, 106-12; Wayne to Knox, 23 Dec. 1794, in Anthony Wayne, 369-70; White, The Middle Ground, 468; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 181-87. 21. Philadelphia Aurora, 23 Feb. 1795, quoted in Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 141 (quote); Campisi and Starna, "On the Road to Canandaigua," 479; Timothy Pickering to Re­ becca Pickering, 20 Sept. 1794, TPP, reel 2. 22. Campisi and Starna, "On the Road to Canandaigua," 479-81; Proceedings of 25 Oct. 1794, TPP, 60:233-41; "Emlen Journal," 308-11. 23. Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 15 Oct. 1794, TPP, reel 2; "Emlen Jour­ nal," 12-20 Oct. 1794, 299-304; Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 672. 24. "Emlen Journal," 21-23 Oct. 1794, 304-6 (quotes 306); Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 24 Oct. 1794, TPP, reel 2. 25. "Emlen Journal," 23 Oct. 1794, 306-7; Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 674-75· 26. Memorandum of Oct. 1794, TPP, 62:97; "Em len Journal," 23 and 28 Oct. 1794, 307 (quote), 313-16; Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 674-76, 684-85. On the Six Nations' claim to having "made women of" the Delawares, see Merritt, "Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding," 77-81. 27. Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 24 Oct. and 7 Nov. 1794, TPP, reel 2; "Emlen Journal," 28 Oct. 1794, 313; Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 682-83, 701-4· 28. Densmore, Red Jacket, 42-43 (quote, 43); Fenton, The Great Law and the Long­ house, 686-87, 691-95. 29. Proceedings of 9 Nov. 1794, TPP, 60:206-8; Campisi and Starna, "On the Road to Canandaigua," 483-84; Treaty of Canandaigua, Article IV, in IALT, 2:35. 30. Timothy Pickering to Rebecca Pickering, 12 Nov. 1794, TPP, reel 2; Treaty of Canandaigua, 11 Nov. 1794, Treaty of Oneida, 2 Dec. 1794, both in IALT, 2:34-37, 37-39. 31. Treaty of Canandaigua, Articles III, V-VII, in IALT, 2:35-36; Timothy Pickering to Wayne, 15 April 1795, in Anthony Wayne, 406-7; Campisi and Starn a, "On the Road to Canandaigua," 467-68, 485-87. 32. Cayton, '''Separate Interests' and the Nation-State," 62; Treaty of Philadelphia, 26 June 1794, in IALT, 2:33-34. 33. R. J. Waters to John Easten, 13 Sept. 1794, James Robertson to Blount, 8 Oct.

242

:J.[otes to' Pages 170-174

1794, and Robertson to John Watts, 20 Sept. 1794, all Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:530, 531; Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 602-17. 34. Blount to Doublehead, 29 Oct. 1794, Blount to Benjamin Logan, 1 Nov. 1794, and Blount to Knox, 10 Nov. 1794, all Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:532-33, 533, and 535; Knox to Blount, 22 Dec. 1794, quoted in Annals of the Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess., 8:1523; Ar­ thur Campbell to unknown, 25 Nov. 1794, Campbell MSS (Filson Club), box 1, folder 7. 35. James Seagrove to James Burges, 28 Nov. 1793, in Corbitt, "Papers Relating to the Georgia-Florida Frontier," 24:80-81; Report of Constant Freeman, 1 Jan. 1794, and Hancock County Court of Inquiry, 22 July 1794, both Creek Indian Talks, Letters, and Treaties, GDAH, 2:352, 392-93; Downes, "Creek-American Relations," 369-72 (quote 371) . 36. Constant Freeman to Henry Knox, 29 Sept. 1794, Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:500; Murdoch, "Citizen Mangourit and the Projected Attack on East Florida in 1794"; Coulter, "Elijah Clarke's Foreign Intrigues and the 'Trans-Oconee Republic.'" 37. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion, 109-24, 143-57, 175-89; Bouton, "A Road Closed," 880-82. 38. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 461-83; Slaughter, The Whiskey Re­ bellion, 190-209; Presidential Proclamation, 7 Aug. 1794, and Washington to Charles Thruston, 10 Aug. 1794, both in WGw, 33:457-61 (quote), 464-66; Edmund Randolph to John Jay, 11 Aug. and 12 Sept. 1794, Am. St. P.: For. AiJ., 1:482-83 and 485. 39. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 403-14; John Jay to Edmund Randolph, 13 Sept. and 29 Oct. 1794, in Am. St. P.: For. AiJ., 1:485-90 and 500; Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between His Britannic Majesty and the United States, 19 Nov. 1794, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 8:116-29. 40. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 415-22, 431-49; Timothy Picker­ ing to Anthony Wayne, 1 Aug. 1795, and Wayne to Pickering, 9 Aug. 1795, both in Anthony Wayne, 440-41, 444. 41. Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 242-54; Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 188-94; Treaty of Friendship, Limits, and Navigation between the United States and Spain, 27 Oct. 1795, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 8:138-52. 42. Preliminary Peace Articles, Jan. 1795, and Treaty of Greenville, 3 Aug. 1795, both Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:559, 562 (quote); Wayne to Knox, 12 Feb. 1795, Pickering to Wayne, 8 April and 29 June 1795, all in Anthony Wayne, 384, 400-403, and 431-33; Cayton, '''Noble Actors' upon the 'Theatre of Honour,'" 240, 255-56. 43. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 16 June, 3 July, and 15 July 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:564 ("unstained" and "clear sky"), 566 ("into the heavens"), and 567. 44· Greenville Treaty Minutes, 18 July, 21-23 July, 28 July 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:567-72, 574-75 ("three people," 574); Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 103, 122. 45. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 18 July, 21 July, 23 July, 2 Aug. 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:568 (first quote), 569 ("masters"), 571 ("uncles" and "grandfathers"), 579; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 203. 46. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 148-65; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 205; Greenville Treaty Minutes, 21-22 July, 27 July, 29-30 July, Am. St. P.: Ind. AiJ., 1:570-71, 574, 576-77. 47. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 24 July and 30 July 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:573 and 577-78.

JIlotes tif Pages 175-179

2 43

48. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 30 July and 3 Aug. 1795, Am. St. P. : Ind. AjJ., 1:578-79; Treaty of Greenville, 3 Aug. 1795, in IALT, 2:39-45. 49. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 7 Aug. 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:580; White, The Middle Ground, 17-19, 36; Merritt, "Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding," 74. On the northern Indians' identification of the British as their fathers, see Speech of Kauviata, 1792, and Speech of Kimenechaug, 8 Sept. 1796, both WSc, 5:434, 443-44. 50. Greenville Treaty Minutes, 7-10 Aug. 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:580-82 (quote, 580). 51. Michilimackinac Council Minutes, 6-8 Sept. 1796, WSc, 5:439-46 (quotes 439, 441, 445-46). 52. Return of the Numbers of the Different Nations of Indians present at . . . Green­ ville, 7 Aug. 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:582. 53. Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes, 19 May 1796, in Statutes at Large of the United States, 1:469-74; Proceedings of 11 and 13 April 1796, Annals ofthe Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., 5:904-5, 939. 54. Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse, in Statutes at Large of the United States, 1:471-72; Washington to the President of Congress, 17 June 1783, and Fifth and Sixth Annual Messages to Congress, 3 Dec. 1793 and 19 Nov. 1794, all in WGw, 27:17 ("truck houses"), 33:168 ("without fraud"), and 34:36. 55. Act Establishing Trading Houses with the Indian Tribes, 18 April 1796, in Statutes at Large of the United States, 1:452-53; Report of the Secretary of War, 12 Dec. 1795, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:583-84; Timothy Pickering to Edward Price, 26 Nov. 1795, in Wright and Macleod, "William Eaton, Timothy Pickering, and Indian Policy," 397-98 (quote); Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 120-21; Louis-Philippe, Diary ofMy Travels in America, 78-83. 56. Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:472. 57. Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 58-59, 120-22, 130; Saunt, " 'Domestick Quiet . . . Being Broke,'" 164-65; "Sketch of the Creek Country in 1798 and 1799," in The Letters, Journals, and Writings ofBenjamin Hawkins, 1:309 (quote). 58. Philadelphia Friends Indian Committee to Benjamin Hawkins, 24 Oct. 1796, Jacob Taylor to Indian Committee, 7 Feb. 1798, Joseph Trimble to Indian Committee, 2 June 1799, Nathan Coope to Indian Committee, 17 Dec. 1800, and Joseph Clark to Stockbridges, 12 Oct. 1801, all in PYMICC, box 1, folder 2 (1-2), 5-1, 2-1, 2-1, and 2-2. 59. Timothy Pickering to the Chiefs and Warriors of the Six Nations, 15 Feb. 1796, John Peirce et al. to John Elliott, 1 July 1796, Jacob Taylor et al. to Indian Committee, 23 Feb. 1797, Joshua Sharples et al. to Cornplanter Senecas, 22 May 1798, and Halliday Jackson et al. to Indian Committee, 16 June 1799, all PYMICC, box 1, folder 2, 4-2, 5-1, 4-4, and 4-4; Kelsey, Friends and the Indians, 94-103. 60. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 7 July 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:54 (quote); Washington to Lincoln, Griffin, and Humphreys, 29 Aug. 1789, in PGw, PS, 3:557-58. 61. Benjamin Hawkins to James McHenry, 6 Jan. 1797, and "Sketch of the Cree� Country in the Years 1798 and 1799," both in The Letters, Journals, and Writings ofBen­ jamin Hawkins, 1:63,317; Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 98-99, 108; Green, The Politics ofIndian Removal, 33-38. 62. Gipson, The Moravian Indian Mission on White River, 60; Benjamin Hawkins

244

:Notes tif Pages 179-183

et al. to the President of Congress, 2 Dec. 1785, Am. St. P.: Ind. A/f., 1:39; Gazette of the United States, 14 Aug. 1790; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 115-34; Merrell, The Indians' New World, 240-42. 63. Carson, "Horses and the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians," 500-502; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 123-24; Ducoigne to St. Clair, 7 March 1797, Speech of Winthrop Sargent to the Kaskaskias, 10 Oct. 1797, and Concord House Con­ ference Journal, 19 Oct. 1798, all WSC, 5:454, 457, 4:352-53. 64. Winthrop Sargent to Timothy Pickering, 11 Sept. 1798, WSC, 2:67; Speech of James McHenry to the Chiefs and Warriors of the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa Nations, 24 Dec. 1798 (first quote), and Arthur St. Clair to the Chiefs of the Potawat­ om is, Chippewas and Ottawas, 3 Dec. 1799 (second quote), both Lewis Cass Papers, Clements Library, Vol. 1. 65. Proceedings of 28-29 Jan. 1795, Annals ofthe Congress, 3rd Cong., 2nd sess., 4:1147-59 (quotes, 1159 and 1153). 66. Proceedings of 29-30 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1795, Annals of the Congress, 3rd Cong., 2nd sess., 4:1152-62 (quote, 1155). 67. Proceedings of 9 April 1796, Annals ofthe Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., 5:895-903 (quote, 898). 68. Proceedings of 9 April 1796, Annals ofthe Congress, 4th Cong., 1St sess., 5:899-900; Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes, 19 May 1796, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:470, 473. 69. Taylor, William Cooper's Town, 97-114; Wyckoff, The Developer's Frontier, 9-20, 42-63; McNall, An Agricultural History ofthe Genesee Valley, 18-25; Arbuckle, Penn­ sylvania Speculator and Patriot, 3; Robert Morris to William Temple Franklin, 22 April 1795, Papers of Robert Morris, reel 9, 205-10. 70. Proceedings of 3 March and 5 April 1796, in Annals of the Congress, 4th Cong., 1St sess., 5:408-14, 858-64; Act Providing for the Sale of the Lands of the United States, 18 May 1796, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:464-69; Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 15-19 (quote, 16); Allen, "The Federalists and the West," 324-26. 71. Proceedings of 5 May 1796, in Annals ofthe Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., 5:1300-1312; Allen, "The Federalists and the West," 323-24; Statutes at Large of the United States, 1:491-92. 72. Coleraine Treaty Journal, 12-22 and 30 May 1796, Am. St. P: Ind. AjJ., 1:587-90. 73. Coleraine Treaty Journal, 26 and 30 May, 5-10 June 1796, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:589, 591, 594-95; Treaty of Coleraine, 29 June 1796, in IALT, 2:47-49; Ferguson, "Con­ frontation at Coleraine." 74. James Jackson to James McHenry, 15 Feb. 1798, Governor's Letter Book (Jack­ son), GDAH, 1:106-8; Fort Wilkinson Treaty Journal, 12 June 1802, Am. St. P.: Ind. AjJ., 1:676-77; Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 114, 124-71. 75· McLendon, History of the Public Domain of Georgia, 71-99, 183-200; Abernethy, The South in the New Nation, 136-53; Lamplugh, "'Oh the Colossus! The Colossus!'''; Repeal of the Supplementary Act, 13 Feb. 1796, Bevan MSS, 12:121; Saye, "Journal of the Georgia Constitutional Convention of 1798," 370-72; Act for Amicable Settlement of Limits with the State of Georgia, 7 April 1798, in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:549-50. The second Yazoo sale encompassed 35 million acres of land. Mississippi Territory, a quadrilateral bounded by the Chattahoochee and Mississippi Rivers and

:Notes t(J' Pages 183-187

2 45

by 31° and 32° 20' North latitude, comprised land that Spain ceded to the United States in 1795. 76. Remini, Andrew jackson, 37; Speeches of Andrew Jackson, 29-30 Dec. 1796, and Debate on the Petition of Stephen Cantrill, 23 April 1798, both in Annals of the Congress, 4th Cong., 2nd sess., 6:1738, 1742, and 5th Cong., 2nd sess., 8:1522-24; Brad­ ley, "William C. C. Claiborne, the Old Southwest, and the Development of American Indian Policy," 265-66, 268-69. 77. Journal of the Proceedings of the U.S. Boundary Commissioners, 15 April 1797, in The Letters, journals, and Writings ofBenjamin Hawkins, 1:76-77; Prucha, Ameri­ can Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 154-55; Louis-Philippe, Diary ofMy Travels in America, 99. On Tennessee merchants' objections to the Tellico factory, see Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 114. 78. Louis-Philippe, Diary ofMy Travels in America, 74-75; James McHenry to Al­ fred Moore, George Walton, and John Steele, 30 March 1798, and Speech of President Adams to the Chiefs, Warriors, and Children of the Cherokee Nation, 27 Aug. 1798, both Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:639-40,640-41 (quote); Arthur Campbell to John Steele, 17 May 1798, Campbell Papers, box 1, folder 8; Treaty of Tellico, 2 Oct. 1798, in IALT, 2:51-54. 79. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion, 109-24; Wayne to Pickering, 17 June 1795, in Anthony Wayne, 426; Kentucky Resolutions, 10 Nov. 1798, in The Portable Thomas jef ferson, 281-89; James Ross to Arthur St. Clair, s July 1798, in ASCP, 4:566-68 (quote). 80. Journal of Winthrop Sargent, 8-10 September, and 20 September 1794, WSc, 4:494-95, 498; N. R. Hopkins to Arthur St. Clair, 19 Sept. 1794, and St. Clair to Anthony Wayne, 11 June 1795, both in ASCP, 4:234-35, 343-44; Pickering to Wayne, 8 April 1795, in Anthony Wayne, 403 (quote); Joseph Gilman to Sargent, 27 Oct. 1798, WSC, 2:242; James McHenry to St. Clair, 29 March 1799, ASCP, 4:658. 81. St. Clair to Unknown, Jan. 1796, St. Clair to Robert Benton, 19 Sept. 1796, St. Clair to Timothy Pickering, 8 July 1799, and St. Clair to James McHenry, 15 July 1799, all in ASCP, 4:414 (quote}.445, 680-82,686. 82. St. Clair to John Brown, Oct. 1798, in ASCP, 4:599; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 67-87· 83. St. Clair to Unknown, Jan. 1796, in ASCP, 4:414; Wayne to McHenry, 11 July and 20 Sept. 1796, in Anthony Wayne, 498-99 and 525-26. 84. St. Clair to McHenry, 15 July 1799, McHenry to St. Clair, 25 April 1800, both in ASCP, 4:686-91, 5:45-46. 85. Proceedings of Oneida and Onondaga Councils, Nov. 1793, Minutes of Iroquois Meetings with Governor Clinton, Albany, 29 Jan.-17 Feb. 1794, Conference with Buf­ falo Creek and Grand River Cayugas and Onondagas, March 1794, NYPCRI, 1:120-46 (first quote, 145-46), 155-97, 225-40 (second quote 236); Campisi, "The Oneida Treaty Period," 59. 86. Minutes of New York City Treaty Council, 23 May 1796, NYPCRI, 1:301 (quote), 305; Treaty with the Seven Nations of Canada, 31 May 1796, in IALT, 2:45-46; Taylor, William Cooper's Town, 113-14. The usual exchange rate in the 1790S was £1 New York currency $2.50 U.S. currency. 87. Thomas Morris, "Pioneer Settlements," O'Reilly Papers, 15:38, New York Histori­ cal Society; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 179-80. 88. Thomas Morris to Robert Morris, 29 May 1797, and Big Tree Conference Memo=

Jl/otes t(} Pages 187-194 randa, 2-4 Sept. 1797, both in O'Reilly Papers, 15:36A, 55-56, New York Historical Society. 89. Contract between Robert Morris and the Seneca Nation, 15 Sept. 1797, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:627; List of Seneca Reservations, 16 Sept. 1797, and Thomas Morris, "Pioneer Settlements," both in O'Reilly Papers, 15:73, 15:44 (quote), New York Histori­ cal Society; Robert Morris to Theophilus Cazenove, 23 Sept. 1797, Papers of Robert Morris, reel 10, 580; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 181-202. 90. Robert Morris to William Temple Franklin, 22 April 1795, Papers of Robert Morris, reel 9, 205-10; Oberholtzer, Robert Morris, 312-13; Wallace, The Death and Rebirt� ofthe Seneca, 180-81 (quote 181) . 91. Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:626-27. 92. Sargent to Pickering, 10 Feb. 1800, and Sargent to John McKee, 9 July 1800, WSC, 2:631-33 ("plain & honest" and "whip imprison or hang"), 3:63 (other quotes).

CONCLUSION: T H E R EVOLUTION OF 1800 IN INDIAN COUNTRY

1. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 509-11, 537-79; Kaplan, Colonies into Nation, 273-76; Timothy Pickering to Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, 15 July 1797, and Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry to the Secretary of State, 22 Oct-3 Nov. 1797, both Am. St. P.: For. Ajf., 2:153-57, 157-65. 2. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age ofFederalism, 587-99; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 230-73. The relevant acts are in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 1:547, 552, 558-61, 565-66, 578, 597-604, and 604-5· 3. Miller, Crisis in Freedom, 8-9 (first quote), 39-73, 86-130 (second quote 89). For the Naturalization Act (18 June 1798), Alien Act (25 June), Alien Enemies Act (6 July), and Act Concerning Certain Crimes (14 July), see Statutes at Large ofthe United States 1:566� 69, 570-72, 577-78, and 596-97. 4. Committee Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts (21 Feb. 1799) , in Annals ofthe Congress, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., 9:2990. 5. Dauer, The Adams Federalists, 212-65; Elkins and McKittrick, The Age ofFederal­ ism, 691-754; Weisberger, America Afire, 227-57. On Fries' Rebellion, see Newman, "Fries's Rebellion and American Political Culture." 6. Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 562 (first quote); President Jefferson to Congress, 28 Jan. 1802, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:653; Indian Trade and Intercourse Act (30 March 1802), in Statutes at Large ofthe United States, 2:139-46; Jefferson to William Harrison, 28 April 1805, in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 1:127-28; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 207-12; Way, "The United States Factory System for Trading with the Indians," 224; Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, 21 Aug. 1808 in, TPUS, 14:220 (second quote). 7. Sheehan, Seeds ofExtinction, 6, 65-88; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 93-101; Boorstin, Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, 81-88; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 1-13; Address to the Miamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, and Chippewas, 21 Dec. 1808, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 16:439 (quote). 8. Statutes at Large of the United States, 2:143; Treaty of Saint Louis (3 Nov. 1804) , Treaty of Tellico (25 Oct. 1805), Treaty of Washington (14 Nov. 1805), Treaty ofVin-

:Notes to' Pages 194-197

2 47

cennes (18 Aug. 1804), and Treaty of Vincennes, 13 Aug. 1803, all in IALT, 2:67-68, 70, 74-75, 83, 86 (quote 68); Queener, "Gideon Blackburn." 9. McCoy, "An Unfinished Revolution," 137-40, and The Elusive Republic, 185-235; Cayton, "Radicals in the 'Western World,'" 83-89; Allen, "The Federalists and the West," 326. 10. William Harrison to his Constituents, 14 May 1800, in Esarey, Governors Mes­ sages and Letters, 1:13; Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 19-41; Statutes at Large of the United States, 2:73-78 and 277-83. 11. Jefferson to Madison, 28 Oct. 1785, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic of Letters, 1:390 (first quote); Taylor, "Agrarian Independence," 235-36; Draft Essay on Indian Land Tenure, October 1793, BLP, 10:125-32 (second quote); Speeches of Robert Rutherford, 3 March 1796, Annals ofthe Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess., 5:414 and 410 (third quote). Actually, planters and surveyors engrossed much of the land in frontier states by 1800. See Soltow, "Kentucky Wealth at the End of the Eighteenth Century," and "Inequality amidst Abundance." 12. James Madison, Albert Gallatin, and Levi Lincoln to Thomas Jefferson, 26 April 1802, in Jefferson and Madison, The Republic ofLetters, 2:1221-24 (quote); Waring, The Fighting Elder, 193-95. The treaties with the Chickasaws (24 Oct. 1801) and Choctaws (17 Dec. 1801) are in IALT, 2:55-58. 13. Treaty of Fort Wilkinson (16 June 1802), and Treaty of Washington (14 Nov. 1805), both in IALT, 2:58-59,85-86; Communication of Governor Milledge to the Georgia Legislature, 7 May 1803, Bevan MSS, 16:137, Georgia Historical Society; Speech of Efau Hadjo, 9 June 1802, Am. St. P.: Ind. Aff., 1:674-75; Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 123-24, 129-32. 14. Jefferson to Harrison, 27 Feb. 1803, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:371-73 (quote); Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 262-83; Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 225-34, 245-49. 15. DeRosier, The Removal ofthe Choctaw Indians, 28-32; Jefferson to William Claiborne, 24 May 1803, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:391-92; Treaties of Fort Wayne (7 June 1803), Vincennes (13 Aug. 1803), Hoe Buckintoopa (31 Aug. 1803), and Mount Dexter (16 Nov. 1805), all in IALT, 2:64-65, 67-70, 87-88. 16. Jefferson to Hawkins, 18 Feb. 1803, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 9:447 (quote); Treaty of Vincennes (18 Aug. 1804), in IALT, 2:70. See also Jefferson to Hand­ some Lake, 3 Nov. 1802, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 306-7. 17- Treaty of Fort Wilkinson, in IALT, 2:59 (first quote); Snapp, John Stuart and the Strugglefor Empire on the Southern Frontier, 38-42; Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 170-88; Jefferson to Harrison, 27 Feb. 1803, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:370 (second quote); Treaties with Chickasaws (23 July 1805) and Choctaws (16 Nov. 1805), both in IALT, 2:79 and 2:87-88; Usner, "American Indians on the Cotton Frontier," 299-304· 18. Jefferson to William Claiborne, 24 May 1803, in The Writings of Thomas Jeffer­ son, 10:394; Draft Louisiana Purchase Amendment, July 1803, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 10:6-7; Brown, "The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for the Govern­ ment of Louisiana, 1804," 359-61; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 254-59; Address of Thomas Jefferson to the Chiefs of the Upper Cherokees, 4 May 1808, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 16:435 (quote).

:Notes to- Pages 197-202 19. Usner, "American Indians on the Cotton Frontier," 305-6; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 70-85; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 118-34; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 38-63; Edmunds, "Forgotten Allies," 339-41. 20. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth ofthe Seneca, 239-302. 21. Jefferson to Claiborne, 24 May 1803, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:391-92 (quote 392); Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 128, 503; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 238; Owens, "Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground." 22. Speech of Le Maigouis, 4 May 1807, William Hull to Henry Dearborn, 25 July 1807, and Report of A. B. Woodward, 14 Aug. 1807, all in Hull Papers, HCPSM, 40:128-35, 160-61, 175 (quote); Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 130-47, 167-73. 23. William Harrison to Return Jonathan Meigs Jr., 4 Sept. 1813, and Harrison to John Armstrong, 9 Oct. 1813, both in Esarey, Governors Messages and Letters, 2:534-35, 562; Andrew Jackson to John Lowry, 7 November 1813, George Smith to Jackson, 22 Nov. 1813, and Jackson to Thomas Pinckney, 5 February 1814, all in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 1:342, 358-59, 457; DeRosier, The Removal ofthe Choctaw Indians, 34-36; Hickey, The War of 1812, 135-51. 24. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 67-69; Dowd, A Spirited Resis­ tance, 181-90; Edmunds, "Forgotten Allies," 340-41; Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, 317-18 (second quote). 25. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 123-27; Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 148-49; Way, "The United States Factory System for Trading with the Indians," 229-34; Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. 26. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 7 July 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:53. 27. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 15 June 1789, Am. St. P.: Ind. Ajf., 1:14 (quote). See also Washington's Circular Letter to the States, 8 June 1783, in WGw, 26:483-95. 28. Cayton, "Radicals in the 'Western World,'" 83-89; Morgan, "Conflict and Con­ sensus in the American Revolution." 29. Report of John Calhoun to Henry Clay, 5 Dec. 1818, in The Papers ofJohn C. Calhoun, 3:350; Nobles, American Frontiers, 125-130. 30. Federalist 14, in Hamilton et aI., The Federalist Papers, 66 (first quote); Morgan, Inventing the People; Taylor, "From Fathers to Friends of the People"; Horsman, "The Indian Policy of an 'Empire for Liberty"'; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 187-267. 31. McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 157-66, and The Presidency of Thomas jeffer­ son; Wood, The Radicalism of the A merican Revolution, 259-66, 293-98.

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1NDEX

"Treaty" refers both to individual treaty conferences and the signed treaty document(s) produced thereby. Subentry references to "southern Indians" can include both generic references to the region's Indian peoples and specific references to the Cherokee, Chicka­ mauga, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations. Subentry references to "Iroquois" can include both generic references to the Iroquois and specific references to the Mohawks, Oneidas, and Senecas. Native American individuals' names are generally alphabetized by the person'sfirst name or title; an exception is madefor Indians with European first names (e.g., Hendrick Aupaumut), who are alphabetized by their last name.

Adams, John, 12, 108, 124, 184, 188, 191-92 Adlum, John, 162 Agushaway, 173 alcohol, 29, 43, 59, 81, 102, 145; at confer­ ences, 101, 131, 135, 143, 187; opposition to, 193, 197; at trading factories, 177 Algonquians, 69 Alien and Sedition Acts, 184, 192 Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), 170 Allegheny River, 31, 33, 100, 102, 167 Allegheny Senecas, 100, 102, 103, 129, 131, 134; Handsome Lake and, 197; Treaty of Canandaigua and, 167, 168 Allegheny Valley, 58 Allen, Ebenezer, 135, 136 Allen, Sally, 136 alliances: of Delawares, 106; among fed­ erationists, 14, 27, 49; of Iroquois, 28, 29, 102, 137, 162, 167-68, 169, 178, 188;

of Mekoches, 66; of southern Indians, 8, 27, 50, 51, 52, 57, 74, 82, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124, 125, 156, 162, 170, 172; trade and, 7; and U.S. Indian policy, 10, 14, 15; of Weas, 87; of Wyandots, 106 Altamaha River, 46, 55, 108, 112 American Confederation, 20, 77, 81, 93, 107 Amherstberg, 148 annuity payments, 95, 141, 149, 198; Indian dependency and, 122, 125, 151, 199, 200, 201; to Iroquois, 167, 168, 169, 186; to Northwest Indians, 175; to southern Indians, 122, 152, 153, 169, 183, 196 Anti-Federalists, 93, 98 Arkansas, 197 Arkansas River, 7 Armstrong, John, 218n35

27 0

1ndex

Articles of Confederation, 9, 20, 23, 44, 77-78, 93 artillery, 38, 59, 140, 158, 163, 172-173 Attlee, Samuel, 28 Auglaize River, 145 Augusta, 23, 109, 112 Aupaumut, Hendrick, 135, 137, 138, 141, 147, 158; federationists and, 142, 145, 146 Aweecanny, 39 Badger's Nephew, 153 bandits (banditti): Indians described as, 42, 43, 82, 84, 105, 106, 119, 125, 127, 141, 150, 158; Kentuckians described as, 43, 56; of Revolutionary War, 4 Bank of the United States, 186 Barbary pirates, 114 Barbe de Marbois, Franc;ois, 28 Battle of Blue Licks, 1, 36 Battle of Fallen Timbers, 160, 164-65, 166, 170, 171, 241n18 Battle of Fort Recovery, 163-64, 171 Battle of Monongahela, 140 Battle of Yorktown, 1 beads, 47, 52, 125 Beard, John, 156 Beloved Man, 109, 111, 120, 123, 155; de­ fined, 228n40 Belpre, 118 belts, 11, 34, 70, 103, 131, 135; as mne­ monic devices, 144; of peace, 42, 142; at Treaty of Greenville, 173; of war, 27, 75-76, 161, 163, 179-180 Benton, Thomas Hart, 199 Big Tree, 187 Blackburn, Gideon, 194 black drink, 110 Bloody Fellow (Clear Sky), 152, 154 Blount, William, 45, 151; Knox and, 156, 169; southern Indians and, 152-53, 154, 155, 156, 169, 180; at treaty conferences, 46, 152-53 Blue Jacket, 115, 117, 173, 206n39 Board of Treasury, 89 Boone, Daniel, 60 Boston, 78, 89

"Bostonians," 87, 148 Boudinot, Elias, 180 boundaries, 40, 51, 142, 174; of Cherokee lands, 49, 152, 154, 160, 183; of Creek lands, 47, 108, 110-11, 155, 160; of Flor­ ida, 172, 182; Fort Harmar Treaty line, 146, 172; of Indian Country, 21, 25, 26, 30, 124, 176, 180, 189; of Iroquois lands, 167, 168; Muskingum River as, 99, 100, 102, 143, 148, 149, 150; negotiability of, 91, 102, 148, 149; Ohio River as, 26, 27, 70, 92, 100, 102, 138, 149, 150, 163; state governments and, 20, 21, 23-24 bounty lands, 61, 83, 146; pledged by Congress, 20, 37, 39; pledged by states, 21, 75 Bourbons, 163 Bowdoin, James, 83 Bowles, William, 109, 155, 183 Bradford, William, 186 Brant, Joseph, 21, 102, 140, 142; Aupau­ mut and, 138; on boundaries, 26, 99; Cornplanter and, 162, 168; federation­ ist leader, 71, 72, 148; U.S. officials and, 143, 146 Brant, Molly, 138 bribes, 126, 143, 149, 158, 187 Britain: American Revolutionary War and, 14, 72, 78; boundary proposals by, 26, 149-50; federationists and, 57, 72-73, 115, 149, 161, 164, 165, 171, 191; forts of, 30-31, 32, 37, 73, 93, 98, 102, 160, 161, 165, 174, 191; French Revolutionary Wars and, 159, 161, 171, 191; Georgia and, 108; gifts from, 73, 220n61; instiga­ tion of I ndian attacks, 40, 43, 73, 115, 173; Iroquois and, 96, 167; Jay's Treaty and, 160, 171; Knox and, 83, 90, 117; Loy­ alists and, 72; Mekoches and, 66; min­ ister to U.S., 143; Northwest Indians and, 43, 73, 83, 91, 138, 149; officials of, 26, 39, 87, 95, 138, 143, 150, 171; 1793-94 war crisis, 161; Shays's Rebellion and, 79, 83; soldiers of, 29-30, 32; southern Indians and, 7, 50-51, 113; Spain and, 108, 123; traders of, 27, 39, 50, 73, 95, 127 Brotherton Indians, 82

1ndex Brown, John, 185 Brown, Patrick, 68 Buckongehelas, 145, 148 Buffalo Creek, 70, 166, 167; conferences at, 70, 96, 146, 147; Iroquois of, 95, 131, 138, 168, 186 Butler, John, 138 Butler, Richard, 39, 68, 103, 140; on Brit­ ish traders, 43; diplomatic skills of, 34, 36, 40-41; Senecas and, 129; on Shawnees, 40; superintendent of In­ dian Affairs, 56, 80; treaties negotiated by, 28-30, 32-33, 35, 38-43, 44, 167; on white settlers, 43, 56, 58 Byers, James, 177 Byrd, William, 4 Cabinet, 105, 124, 146-47, 189 Caddoes, 179 Caesar, Julius, 79 Cahokia, 85 Calhoun, John, 201 calumets, 11, 50, 87, 144, 172, 173 Campbell, Arthur, 183 Campbell, William, 165 Canada, 14, 136, 149, 151, 171; British in, 57, 161; Loyalists in, 72; militia of, 164 Canandaigua, 141, 166 Captain Johnny (Kekewepellethe), 25, 38, 39-42, 148, 149 Captain Joseph, 102 Captain Pipe, 13, 68, 105-6 captains. See war captains captives, 42, 49, 55, 66, 70, 94; emissaries become, 38; Indians' treatment of, 7, 67-68; Native Americans as, 65, 101, 139, 143, 157, 164; returned by Indians, 31, 40, 105, 182; U.S. demands return of, 21, 29-30, 40, 45, 101, 110, 122, 143, 153, 163, 174 Carnes, Thomas, 125 Carondelet, Fran<;ois-Louis Hector de, 162 Carrington, Edward, 89 Carry-One-About, 148, 149 Cass, Lewis, 199

27 1

Caswell, Richard, 45 Cat's Eyes, 148 Caughnawagas, 12, 28 Cayuga Lake, 136 Cayugas, 95, 102, 103, 136, 167, 186 Chapin, Israel, 141, 162 Charleston, 52 Chatauga, 53 Chattahoochee River, 94, 121, 123, 183, 194, 244fl75 Cheeseekau, 154 Chenango River, 23 Cherokees: attacks by, 27, 54, 55, 66, 113, 157, 183; blood debts and, 71, 153, 157; boundaries of, 154, 160; chiefs, 67, 71, 153, 154, 156; civilization program and, 177, 179, 193; Continental Congress and, 9, 20, 38, 56, 95; education of, 178, 194; factory for, 177; federationists and, 27, 49, 54, 95, 151, 154, 157; Franklin settlers and, 63-64, 66-67, 71, 75, 99; horse-stealing by, 179; land cessions by, 23, 48-49, 66, 153, 184, 193-94, 214n38; "middle ground," 69, 154; mili­ tary strength of, 49, 51; Muscle Shoals and, 45, 53; North Carolina and, 23, 95, 96; peace messages of, 25; Revolu­ tionary War and, 1, 3, 24; St. Clair's defeat and, 157-58; Spain and, 156, 162; southern Indians and, 53, 57, 70, 154; Sumter and, 108; towns destroyed, 1, 3, 66, 71, 156, 157, 158; treaties with U.S. government, 44, 47-49, 152-53, 160, 169, 180, 184; truce with Americans, 99, 105, 126; in War of 1812, 198; west of Mississippi River, 179, 197; White and, 56, 80, 94; white settlers and, 25, 54, 55, 66, 183, 184 Chicago River, 174 Chickamaugas, 16, 66, 153, 169, 200; at­ tacks by, 27, 55, 154, 169; Creeks and, 109-10; federationists and, 70, 155; and Robertson's campaign, 162, 171, 183; Shawnees among, 154; Spain and, 74; towns attacked, 160, 161, 169; traders and, 74

272

1ndex

Chickasaw Bluffs, 53, 162 Chickasaws, 6-7, 8-9, 25; alliance with U.S., 112-13, 156; Britain and, 7, 113; "civilized" lifeways of, 179; Continen­ tal Congress and, 8-9, 20, 38; France and, 7, 9; Georgia and, 75; Knox and, 82, 113; land cessions by, 196; "middle ground," 69, 154; Nashville conference and, 154; Nashville settlers and, 53, 75, 112; in Northwest Indian War, 15, 140, 153, 183; southern Indians and, 53, 112-13, 156, 169; Spain and, 1, 8, 27, 74, 113, 162; trade of, 7, 53, 74, 113, 196; treaties of, 23, 44, 45, 52-54, 195; War of 1812 and, 198; Washington and, 123 Chief Grasshopper, 23 chiefs, 24-25, 87, 97, 149, 162; authority of, 16-17, 42, 47, 52, 56, 66, 80, 99-100, 101, 103, 111, 120, 151, 153, 155, 173; certifi­ cates for, 132, 144; civilization program and, 179; distinctions among, 82, 91; federationists and, 14-15, 100, 146; as intermediaries, 138, 142; land cessions and, 11, 153, 155, 197, 198; on political "fatherhood," 175; tobacco and, 48; trade and, 7, 47, 50, 77; treaty confer­ ences and, 11, 28, 39, 42, 50, 53, 67, 109, 110, 111, 143, 152, 166, 16h 168, 173, 186, 187, 197; U.S. Army and, 81; U.S. government and, 68, 77, 99, 169; U.S. of­ ficials as, 143, 172; warriors and, 31, 42, 53, 56, 66, 70, 71, 82, 126, 145, 183, 196; white settlers and, 13, 65-66, 71, 78, 156 Chilhowee, 71 Chippewas, 16, 32, 33, 101, 138, 142; federationists and, 148, 163; French and, 179; on political "fatherhood," 176; Sargent and, 175; Treaty of Greenville and, 172, 173, 174; Wayne and, 163 Choctaws: Caddoes and, 179; civiliza­ tion program and, 179; Continental Congress and, 38; Creeks and, 50, 52; diplomatic ceremonies of, 50; France and, 179; Georgia and, 52, 75; Knox and, 51, 82; land cessions by, 195, 196; "middle ground," 69, 154; Nashville conference and, 154; in Northwest

Indian War, 184; population of, 50; power of, 188; South Carolina and, 52; Spain and, 27, 51, 74, 162; trade and, 51-52, 196; treaties with U.S. govern­ ment, 44, 50-52, 195; in War of 1812, 198, 199; Washington and, 123; west of Mississippi River, 179, 197 Chota, 47, 48, 66 Cincinnati, 106, 115, 117, 139, 163, 184; in Northwest Indian War, 116, 148 citizenship, 57, 59, 68, 86 civilization program, 79, 91, 124, 134, 198, 200; applicability to whites, 79, 130, 189; Aupaumut and, 135; emigration and, 196-97; Hawkins and, 176, 177; Indians' views on, 100, 134, 135, 146, 179, 197, 199; Jefferson and, 193, 196; Knox and, 121, 141; land ownership and, 134, 136; Northwest Indians and, 142, 197; Pickering and, 133-34, 141; southern Indians and, 122, 123, 126, 197; Trade and Intercourse Acts and, 160, 177, 193; western settlers and, 196, 199 Claiborne, Ferdinand, 198 Claiborne, William, 183 Clark, George Rogers, 34, 36, 39, 86, 162; 1786 expedition of, 65, 83; treaties ne­ gotiated by, 32-34, 35, 38-40, 42, 44 Clark Grant, 147, 174-75 Clarke, Elijah, 46, 47, 162, 170 Clinch River, 152, 184 Clinton, George, 6, 23, 29, 95, 136, 186; Creeks and, 120, 121, 124 Clymer, George, 182 Cocke, William, 63, 66 Colbert, James, 7 Colbert family, 7-8 Coleraine, 176, 178 common law, 61 condolence ceremonies, 34-35, 131, 132, 166, 211n48; Northwest Indians and, 39, 101, 173 Conestogas, 65 Confirming Act, 130, 131 Connecticut, 24, 28, 62 conquest, right of, 21, 149, 174; asserted

1ndex by U.S. officials, 30-31, 33, 40, 103; Northwest Ordinance on, 88, 224n42 Continental Army, s, 32, 34, 77-78; officers of, 12, 39, 88, 119, 129, 135; veterans of, 20, 77, 89, 107 Continental Congress: described, 85, 99; emissaries of, 19, 21, 25; federation­ ists and, 70, 76, 91; habitants and, 85, 86; Indian commissioners of, 27-34, 35-37, 38-43, 44-54, 75, 84, 95; Indian lands demanded by, 29, 30-31, 33, 35, 40, 91, 100; Indian Ordinance, 56; Indian policy of, 21-22, 36, 56, 9091, 122; insurgents and, 62-63; Jay­ Gardoqui Treaty, 73, 74; Knox and, 82, 84; land sales by, 37, 60, 85, 89; Moravian Delawares and, 3; national­ ists and, 77-78; New York and, 4-5; Northwest Indian War and, 43-44, 90; Ohio Company and, 89-90, 91; Pennsylvania and, 24; Philadelphia Convention and, 93; power and weak­ ness of, 20, 23, 48-49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 65, 77-78, 80, 82, 88; Senecas and, 129; Shays's Rebellion and, 82, 93; south­ ern Indians and, 38, 95, 106; southern states and, 21, 23-24, 44-45, 46, 54, 55-56, 75, 94-95, 96; Spain and, 73; successor to George III, 9, 33, 48; trade and, 51-52, 53; troops authorized by, 37, 82-83, 99; white settlers and, 22, 43-43, 53, 62-63, 64, 76 conventions, 63, 64, 72, 93-94, 95 Cooper, William, 181 Coosa River, 157 Cornell, Alexander, 156 Cornell, David, 156-57 Cornplanter: Brant and, 102, 162, 168; civilization program and, 134; daugh­ ter of, 34; as federal intermediary, 137, 145, 146; Handsome Lake and, 197; on land cessions, 167; on Mekoches, 66; Pennsylvanians and, 131, 162; in Phila­ delphia, 129, 133, 134, 141; reservations given to, 31, 103; speech to Washing­ ton, 31, 133; at treaty conferences, 30, 31, 32, 100, 101, 102, 166, 168, 187

273

Cornstalk, 65 corruption, 90 Council Door, 33 courts, 176, 200; courts-martial, 104, 156; courts of inquiry, 118, 156; juries in, 184; state, 29, 62, 132, 233n17 Coyatee, 66, 154, 156 Crawford, William, 3, 36 Creek-Choctaw War, 50 Creek Linguister, 152, 153 Creeks, 16, 44, 46; assemblies of, 47, 119, 178; attacks by, 27, 54, 55, 66, 112, 154, 155, 183; boundaries, 47, 108, 110-11, 155, 160; Bowles and, 155, 183; chiefs, 13, 23, 27, 46-47, 67, 74, 109, 110, 111, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 170, 178, 195; civilization program and, 177, 179, 193; conference with Seagrove, 169, 170, 171; Continental Congress and, 38, 56, 95; diplomatic protocols of, 110, 228n43; education of, 122, 178; French and, 179; Georgia and, 23, 26, 46, 52, 54, 55, 67, 72, 75, 94, 107, 108, 112, 121, 155, 156, 200; Hawkins and, 46, 119; land cessions by, 23, 46, 108, 109, 121-22, 193-94, 195, 196; McGil­ livray and, 109, 111; "middle ground," 69; military power of, 112, 124, 182, 183, 188; Northwest federationists and, 27, 70, 95, 200; Red Sticks, 198; retributive justice and, 71, 110, 122, 157, 178; "respectable" settlers and, 69; Revolutionary War and, 25; right to expel intruders, 122, 123; Rock Land­ ing conference and, 106, 109-12, 119; southern federationist offensive and, 151, 154, 155, 157-58; southern Indians and, 50, 52, 57, 109-10, 112-13, 156, 169; Spain and, 27, 52, 74, 122, 123, 156, 157, 162; state of Franklin and, 75; trade of, 74, 122, 177, 196; treaties of, 23, 26, 46-47, 67, 119-24, 152, 160, 182; Treaty of Paris and, 19; truce with Americans, 106, 110, 112, 126, 170; U.S. government and, 96, 99, 107, 108, 112, 114, 119, 188; visit American towns, 120-21; White and, 56, 80, 94

274

1ndex

Cruzat. Francisco. 8 Cumberland Plateau. 9. 55. 69 Cumberland River. 53. 169 Cumberland Road. 58 Cumberland Valley. 151. 154. ISS Cutler. Manasseh. 89 Cuyahoga River. 32. 33 dances. 12. 35. 39. So. 134; war. 11. 87. 154. 162 Davidson County. 61. 75 debt. national. 20. 22 debts. of the states. 23 Delaware Indians (Delawares). 36. 65. 68. 81. 104; alliance with U.S 106; attacks by. 133. 143; civilization program and. 122. 179. 194; federationists and. 115. 118. 145. 148; history of. 102; Iroquois and. 28. 143. 166. 167; land cessions by. 37. 90. 195; lands of. 33. 96. 185; Mora­ vian. 1. 2-3. 68; proposed removal of. 137; Stockbridges and. 138; treaties with U.S. government. 32-34. 39. 99. 101. 172. 173. 174. 193; Treaty of Fort Finney and. 39. 41. 43. 44; in War of 1812. 198; Wayne and. 163; Wyandots and. 102 Demoiselle. 66. 81 Denny. Ebenezer. 40. 116 depression of 1797. 187 Detroit. 25. 66. 101. 142. 147; British in. 30. 39. 43. 115. 117. 127; as conference site. 39. 70. 70. 92 Deuentete. 101 Dickinson. John. 24 diplomatic metaphors. Native American. 11. 33. 40. 41. 87. 148; burying hatchets. 33. 42. 173. chain of friendship. 29. 30. 87. 106. 168; cleansing. 42. So. 110. 173; clear skies. So. 172; condolence. 35. 39. 101. 166; council fires. 101. 119. 172; "father." 9. 19. 33. So. 87. 96. 111. 125. 144. 145. 152. 162. 175. 176. 180. 185. 201; open roads. 87. 166; "starving." So; for Supreme Being. 30. 135. 144. 145. 149. 172; tree of peace. 173; whiteness. 47. 50. 52. 110. 228n43 .•

diplomatic "offensive." 141. 142. 143. 150. 151. 174 diplomatic protocols. Native American. 11-12; chiefs and. 41-42. 110; opening ceremonies. 39. 47. 101. 110; Sargent's views on. 188; of southern Indians. 47. So. 110. 125; U.S. officials and. 34-35. 86. 99. 103. 131. 143. 172; violation of. 103. 162 disease. 145 Dorchester. Lord (Guy Carleton). 149. 161 Doublehead. 154 Doughty. John. 38. 58. 113 Douglass. Ephraim. 25 Doyle. Samuel. 132. 233m7 dreams. 102 Ducoigne. Jean-Baptiste. 69. 86. 143. 144 duel. grounds for. 111 Duer. William. 89. 141 Dumplin Creek. 66 Duncan. David. 44. 91-92 Dunlap's Station. 118 Dunmore's War. 14 Durant. Alexander. 120 eagles. 47. So. 172. 173 Eccanachaca. 198 Eel Creek. 143 election of 1800. 15. 193 Electoral College. 181. 193 elite. 4. 22. 58. 64. 68. 91; Knox and. 81. 121; of New York. 95; Shays's Rebellion and. 78-79 Ellicott. Andrew. 183 Elliott. Matthew. 148. 149. ISO. 161. 165 Emerson. John. 63 Emlen. James. 13 "Empire of Reason." 120-21 Eneah Mico. 47. 111 Enlightenment. 121 environmentalism. 121 epidemics. 28. 98. 101 Erie Triangle. 96. 162. 167. 168. 169. 227n19 Estatoe. 156 Etowah. 157. 158

lndex Evans, Griffith, 12, 29, 30, 35, 36 extradition, 49, 51, 104, 174 Falls of the Ohio, 39, 175 "fatherhood," political. See diplomatic metaphors, Native American: " father"; kinship: metaphors Fayette County (Kentucky), 68 federal government, 12, 77-78, 92, 199; Creeks and, 96, 99, 188, 195; Federal­ ists' agenda for, 79; Georgia and, 188, 195; financial resources of, 149, 158; Indian commissioners describe, 99, 110, 152; Indian commissioners of, 99, 112, 129, 147, 158, 186, 187, 198; Indians' perceptions of, 9, 20, 97; Iroquois and, 129, 131, 132, 133, 167; Knox's views of, 82, 84; land claims of, 142; Louisiana and, 195; New York and, 185-86, 188; in Ohio Valley, 184, 188; power and weakness of, 15, 79, 88, 98, 158, 188, 200; preemption rights of, 145, 167; reputation of, 90, 105, 114; Southwest Territory and, 151, 157; Whiskey Rebellion and, 170-71; symbols of authority, 200; Tennessee and, 188; threatens state land claims, 44-45, 46, 96; treaty-making power of, 124, 147; white settlers and, 146, 161, 171, 188. See also Continental Congress Federal Hall, 108, 124 Federalists, 76, 96, 98, 200, 201; Alien and Sedition Acts and, 192; civilization program and, 160, 178-79; class biases of, 79; defined, 17, 79; diplomatic ef­ forts, 158, 160; electoral defeat, 15, 161, 191, 193; fears of anarchy, 56-57, 78-79; from frontier districts, 93-94; frontier policies of, 124, 188, 189, 194, 200, 201; Indian policy of, 176-81, 193, 199, 201; Jay's Treaty and, 172; land developers and, 181, 188; New Orleans and, 195; in New York, 186; Northwest Indian War and, 200; origins of, 78; party splits, 192; Tennessee and, 181-82; vision for frontier, 10, 22, 79, 125, 127, 128; white settlers and, 124, 132, 159, 180, 181, 184

275

federationism, 14, 102, 179, 206n39 federationists, 14, 70-71, 105, 146, 200, 206n39; battles against U.S. Army, 117, 160, 163, 164-65; Britain and, 72, 76, 115, 148, 149, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 172; conferences of, 14, 27, 38, 70, 73, 92, 99, 109-10, 138, 142, 145, 148, 149, 154, 165; Continental Congress and, 70, 76, 77, 91; defeated, 15, 165, 169, 170; Detroit and, 39, 70, 115; Federalists and, 201; general war, 54, 91, 95; Iroquois and, 30, 72, 131, 138, 142, 145; land cessions opposed by, 70, 91, 92, 109-10, 145, 148, 149, 150; Miamis and, 38; militant faction, 99, 145-46, 148, 163; military weaknesses of, 157, 158, 163; moderates, 99, 146, 148, 163, 173; motives of, 14, 57, 69-72, 74; neutralists and, 100, 103, 114; Ohio River boundary and, 26, 70, 92, 102, 115, 138, 148, 149, 162, 163; raids by, 27, 38, 55, 118, 151; 1786 message to Congress, 70, 90; Shawnees and, 27, 41, 154; southern Indians and, 49, 109; southern offensive, 151, 155, 158; Spain and, 72, 74, 76, 159; strengths of, 75, 127, 149; traders and, 73, 74; U.S. Army and, 99; U.S. government and, 82, 137, 142, 147, 165-66, 172, 176; victories of, 118, 139-40, 148, 149, 154; War of 1812 and, 198, 199, 201; Wayne and, 160, 163, 164; white settlers and, 55, 69, 98, 105, 118, 127, 164 Fifteen Fires, 160, 161, 166, 168, 173, 186 Findley, William, 181 Finger Lakes, S, 186 Finney, Walter, 39 firearms, 7, 8, 91, 92, 110, 117; sold to federationists, 73, 74; for southern Indians, 49, 52, 109 flags, 173, 179-80, 200; Indians and, So, 52, 65, 68, 101 Flint River, 183 Florida, 4, 8, 57, 73, 74, 123; boundary of, 172; Bowles and, 183; Clarke and, 162, 170; Panton & Leslie and, 109; West Florida, 196 Fort Confederaci6n, 162

27 6

1ndex

Fort Defiance, 164 Fort Finney, 39, 42, 56, 58; construction of, 37, 38, 43; Indian visitors to, 48, 81 Fort Franklin, 80, 81, 129, 162 Fort Hamilton, 139, 140, 174 Fort Harmar, 37, 106; Indian visitors to, 81, 101; treaty conference at, 92, 96, 100, 104 Fort Jefferson, 139, 140, 142, 143, 148, 151 Fort Knox, 80, 81, 85, 88 Fort McIntosh, 32, 37, 81, 100 Fort Miami, 161, 163, 164, 165 Fort Niagara, 5, 80, 138, 166 Fort Nogales, 73 Fort Oswego, 30 Fort Pitt, 31, 37, 45, 81 Fort Recovery, 160, 163, 174 Fort San Fernando, 162 Fort Schlosser, 168 Fort Stanwix, 27-28, 34-35, 102, 211n48; conferences at, 23, 27-32, 95; 1768 Treaty Line, 26, 30 Fort St. Marks, 183 Fort Washington, 106, 116, 117 Fort Wayne, 165, 185 Fort Wilkinson, 178, 196 forts: American, 27-28, 80, 84, 113, 165, 175; British, 30-31, 32, 37, 73, 98, 102, 138, 165, 172, 174, 191; French, 174; Spanish, 73, 113, 156, 158, 162; as trad­ ing centers, 73, 81, 97, 129, 178 Fox Indians, 193 France: American Revolutionary War and, 28; colonies of, 161; Directorate, 191; forts of, 174; French Revolution­ ary Wars and, 161; Gallipolis and, 115; Indians and, 7, 14, 144, 179-80, 195; land granted to settlers from, 144, 174; Louisiana and, 195; minister to U.S., 162, 170; officials of, 28; Quasi-War and, 179, 191, 192; traders from, 27, 73, 74, 85, 86, 127 Franchimastabbe, 51, 52 Franklin (putative state), 57, 63-64, 98, 152, 218n35; Georgia and, 75; militia of, 63-64, 66; war with Cherokees, 66-67, 71, 75

Franklin, Benjamin, 13, 65 Franklin, John, 130 Fredericksburg, 120 French Broad River, 23, 48-49, 66, 152, 157 French Revolutionary Wars, 159, 161, 191 Freneau, Philip, 142 Fries's Rebellion, 192 frontier, 75, 96, 131, 140, 160, 199; control of, 76, 182; defined, 17; Federalists and, 22, 79, 80, 125, 127, 128, 194; peace and order on, 10, 169; southern, 158, 169, 170; U.S. government and, 127, 158, 182 frontiersmen. See white settlers Gaiwaio, 197 Gallatin, Albert, 181, 194 Gallipolis, 115 Galphinton, 44, 46 Gamelin, Antoine, 115 Gardoqui, Don Diego de, 73 Genesee Company, 95-96, 100 Genesee Senecas, 129, 131, 135 Genet, Edmond, 162, 170 Genisenguhta, 178 gentlemen, 11-12; attitude toward Indians, 108, 121, 181; Indian diplo­ macy and, 12, 99, 100, 150; leaders of national government, 79, 200, 201 George III (king of England), 9, 19, 25, 29-30, 72, 99; Americans defeat, 49, 87; birthday of, 147 Georgia, 106; Continental Congress and, 46, 55-56, 75, 80, 94, 95, 96, 157; Constitution and, 94, 95, 96, 107, 121, 125; Creeks and, 23, 26, 46, 52, 54, 55, 67, 72, 75, 94, 107, 108, 112, 121, 124, 125, 126, 155, 156, 162; federal Indian treaties and, 45, 54, 124, 182-83; Jef­ ferson and, 193, 195; Knox and, 107, 121, 152; land claims of, 44, 45, 46, 55-56, 80, 94, 121, 123; land cession by, 183, 194, 195; land laws of, 60, 94; militia of, 1, 45, 57, 67, 121, 156, 157, 162, 170, 198; Muscle Shoals and, 45; population, 58; southern (non-Creek) Indians and, 9, 23, 51, 57, 75; state of Franklin and, 57, 75; Trans-Oconee Republic and, 170;

1ndex treaties negotiated by, 22, 23, 46, 67, 108-9, 121; Union and, 94, 108, 124; U.S. Army and, 112, 126, 141; U.S. gov­ ernment and, 124, 183, 188; U.S. Indian policy and, 124, 125; Washington and, 94, 157; Yazoo Companies and, 123, 183 gifts, 11, 51, 91, 109, 136, 177; American power and, 149, 170; British, 73, 91, 220n61; in civilization program, 91, 122, 123, 134, 179; Gamelin and, 115; Harmar and, 87, 105; as indemnities, 71, 122, 131; Knox and, 82, 113-14; to Iroquois, 34, 167, 168; to Northwest Indians, 34, 81, 142, 143, 149; payment for land, 90, 95, 99, 103, 105, 108, 153, 175, 187; prestige and, 50, 101; redis­ tribution of, 155; rejected by Indians, 40, 150; Sargent on, 188; to southern Indians, 49, 52, 53, 111, 125; Spanish, 73, 74 Girty, Simon, 149 Glaize, The, 145, 146, 164, 165 Gnaddenhutten massacre, 2-3, 65 Godoy, Manuel de, 172 Good Peter, 31 Gordon, Andrew, 138 Gorham, Nathaniel, 59-60, 96 Grand River, 72, 138, 148, 167, 169, 186 Grand Sable, 176 Great Lakes, s, 16, 19, 29, 43, 54; Ameri­ can troops near, 185; British forts on, 37, 93, 97, 165, 172, 174, 191; harbors on, 169; Indians residing near, 35, 69, 91, 126, 148, 163, 173, 175, 180, 185 Great Miami River, 33, 37, 38, 43, 60, 106, 118 Greensboro, 67 Greenville, 151, 163, 164, 172, 185 Grenadio, Katherine, 34 Grenville, George, 149, 171 Griffin, Cyrus, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 228n34 Gwinnett, Button, 45 habitants, 83, 85-86, 87, 97, 146, 147, 179 Half-King, 33, 34, 68, 82 half-share men, 62 Hallowing King, 119

277

Hamilton, Alexander, 12, 78, 131, 141, 146-47, 166, 170 Hammond, George, 143, 149 Hamtramck, John, 68, 88, 116, 118, 142 Handsome Lake, 197 Hanging Maw, 66, 156 Hannastown, 1 Hardenbergh, Abraham, 136 Hardin, Captain John, 142, 143 Hardin, Colonel John, 117 Harmar, Josiah, 80, 82, 88, 104, 106, 112; command of First Regiment, 84-85, 99, 227n24; on Constitution, 96; Creeks and, 113; defeat of, 116-18, 127, 128, 129, 137, 164, 165, 173; diplomacy of, 84, 86-87, 105-6; habitants and, 85-86; resigns, 118; St. Clair and, 116; Scioto pirates and, 116; view of Indi­ ans, 13, 84, 86, 99; white settlers and, 84-85, 86 Harris, John, 40 Harrison, William Henry, 194, 195, 198 Hawkins, Benjamin, 45-46, 121, 177; Creeks and, 46, 119, 178, 195; Jefferson and, 193, 196; Knox and, 119; treaties negotiated by, 44-45, 49, 50-51, 53, 182, 195 Heart, Jonathan, 113 Heckewelder, John, 2-3, 143 Henderson, Richard, 48-49 Hendricks, James, 182 Henry, Patrick, 55, 65, 124 Hill, Aaron, 9, 30, 32 Hillebee, 119 Hillhouse, James, 180 Holland Land Company, 186 Holston River, 23, 48-49, 66, 152, 157, 184 Holston Valley, 66 Hopewell, 44, 49, 120 horses, 58, 59, 109, 154, 157, 177; stolen, 7, 38, 43, 55, 66, 87, 114, 151, 155, 164, 169 Horseshoe Bend, 198 hospitality, 11, 12, 48, 69, 71, 81; to Creeks, 120-21; by Indians, 13, 119, 145; to Iro­ quois, 131, 138, 141; Simcoe and, 147; at treaty conferences, 34, 49, 50, 104, 110, 143; U.S. Army officers and, 81, 87, 185

1ndex hostages, 21, 36, 38, 40, 67, 105; offered by U.S. government, 142; Pickering as, 130; surrendered by Indians, 30, 31, 42, 101, 104, 174, 175 Houston, John, 26 Hull, William, 165 Humphreys, David, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 228n34 hunting and fishing rights, 33, 47, 69, 95, 103, 174, 175 Hutchins, Thomas, 37, 44, 55 Illinois, 16, 195, 198 Illinois Country, 8, 9, 85, 86, 144, 174 Illinois Indians, 142, 143 Indiana, 16, 198 Indian agents: American, 81, 107, 123, 129, 141, 160, 178; British, 40, 43, 83, 95, 148, 150, 158, 166; from Georgia, 67; McGil­ livray as, 74, 122, 155 Indian Charity School, 122 Indian education, 122, 133-34, 178, 179, 189, 194 Indian land cessions: Cherokees, 23, 4849, 153, 184, 214n38; Chickasaws, 196; Choctaws, 196; Continental Congress and, 21-22, 28, 30-31, 33, 100; Creeks, 23, 46, 108, 121-22, 193-94, 195, 196; Delawares, 90, 195; federationists on, 70, 91, 92; Iroquois, 23, 29-31, 33, 37, 90, 95-96, 132, 168, 169, 186-88; during Jefferson's presidency, 195, 198; jurisdiction over, 45, 125; Kaskaskias, 195; Miamis, 195; neutralists offer, 100; Northwest Indians, 33, 35, 37, 103, 104, 137, 149, 174, 175; payment for, 90, 115, 142, 149; Penobscots, 23; at 1768 Fort Stanwix conference, 102; Shawnees, 40, 90, 195; validity of, 26-27, 34, 47, 103, 121 Indian Ordinance of 1786, 56 Indian policy (of U.S.), 21, 56, 96, 178, 199; characterized as alliance-making, 10; conciliatory nature of, 105, 113-14; Georgia and, 124, 183; Indian client­ age, 100, 104, 122, 123; Knox and, 81-82, 83-84, 106-7, 124, 125; Repub-

licans and, 193, 201; Senate and, 108; in South, 118, 125-26; western settlers and, 68, 124, 183-84, 199 Indian Removal, 1, 137, 196-97, 199, 201 Innes, Harry, 114 insurgents, 4, 56, 57-58, 72, 78, 83, 216n8; federationists as, 71, 199; in Whiskey Rebellion, 170-71; white settlers as, 6165, 67, 68, 81; of Wyoming Valley, 130 Iroquois, 62, 69, 81, 146; boundaries of, 160, 168; condolence ceremony, 35, 166; Delawares and, 28, 167; divisions among, 167, 186; education of, 178; from Grand River, 72, 148, 166; land cessions by, 23, 29-31, 33, 37, 90, 95, 96, 133, 186-87; "mystique," 128; New York and, s, 188; Northwest federationists and, 104, 133, 134; Pickering and, 133, 134, 141, 142, 166; in Revolutionary War, S, 24, 32, 133; Robert Morris and, 187-88; Simcoe and, 161; treaties with U.S., 27-32, 103, 133, 160, 166; U.S. government and, 9, 36, 102, 137, 138, 145; war captains of, 162, 167, 168, 187. See also Six Nations Iroquois League, 35 Irvine, William, 2-3 Jackson, Andrew, 183, 197, 198, 199 Jackson, James, 107-8, 182 James, Benjamin, 67 Jay, John, 73, 163, 171, 172, 186 Jay-Gardoqui Treaty, 73. 74, 89 Jay's Treaty, 160, 171, 172, 174, 189 Jefferson, Thomas, 46, 162, 181; administration of, 194, 195, 197, 201, 202; civilization program and, 193, 196; elected president, 9, 193; on Indian debt, 196; Indian policy of, 193-95, 197-98; Indian removal and, 197; In­ dian rhetoric and, 12-13; on land and settlers, 194; Louisiana crisis and, 195; plan for western states, 64, 142; South­ west Territory and, 151; Spain and, 123; Washington and, 146-47 Jeffersonian Republicans, 172, 180, 181, 182, 192-93; frontier program of, 194;

1ndex Indian policy of, 15, 193-94, 199, 201; land laws of, 194, 198, 201; vision of government, 202; whiskey excise and, 201 Johnson, John, 26 Johnson, William, 79, 166, 168 Johnston, Francis, 28 Kanawha River, 39 Kaskaskia, 53, 85 Kaskaskia Indians, 69, 86, 143, 179, 194, 195 Kekionga (Miami Towns), 115, 116-18, 119, 137, 165, 173 I(enapacomaqua, 139 Kentucky, 21, 48, 49, 56, 75, 86; Alien and Sedition Acts and, 184, 192; Consti­ tution and, 93-94, 97; Indian raids into, 27, 55, 82, 83, 104, 114; Jefferson and, 193; land titles in, 60; militia of, 1, 15, 57, 63, 65-66, 84, 85, 87, 104, 115, 116-17, 118, 127, 137, 138, 164, 169, 171, 198; Mississippi River and, 73, 74; Northwest Indians and, 127, 139, 151; population of, 58, 161; raids on Indian towns, 65-66, 87-88, 97, 104, 114, 118, 127; separatism in, 63, 64, 73, 98; Shawnees and, 27, 69; Spain and, 73, 97; U.S. Army and, 55, 82-83, 104; U.S. government and, 74, 127, 139, 184; Whiskey Rebellion and, 171; white set­ tlers in, 13, 43, 48-49, 114, 127, 183, 185 Kentucky Gazette, 104 Kentucky River, 48, 174 Keowee River, 23 Kickapoos, 8, 34, 38, 92, 115; expeditions against, 116, 137, 139; federationists and, 99, 145; at Vincennes conferences, 86, 143; Treaty of Greenville and, 174 King, Rufus, 57 kinship: fictive, 69, 105, 132, 136; meta­ phors, 9, 19, 33, 50, 87, 96, 102, 111, 144, 148, 173, 174, 175, 180 Kirk, John, 71 Kirkland, Samuel, 141, 166, 178 Kitanokey, 48 Knox, Henry, 37, 59, 78, 124, 128, 166;

279

Britain and, 83, 90, 117; civilization program and, 121, 134, 141, 146, 178; Clinton and, 136; Continental Con­ gress and, 82; diplomatic offensive of, 141, 142, 143, 145, 150, 151; Georgia and, 121, 124, 152, 162-63, 170; Harmar and, 80, 82, 116, 141; Indian policy of, 81-84, 99, 106-7, 108, 113-14; 121, 125, 141; on Indian war, 90, 95, 105, 106, 113, 116, 121; on Indians' extinction, 199, 201; Iroquois and, 133, 134, 141, 142; lands of, 59, 181; Northwest Indians and, 84, 90, 95, 105, 115-16, 127, 133, 137, 141, 147; St. Clair and, 92, 116, 140, 141, 153; Shays's Rebellion and, 78-79, 82-83; southern Indians and, 51, 82, 95, 112, 113, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 152, 153, 155-56, 169; Southwest Territory and, 151-52, 157, 162, 169; as Superintendent at War, 81-84; Trade and Intercourse Acts and, 123-24; Treaty of New York and, 121, 123, 124; urges conciliation of Indians, 105, 141, 144, 153; view of white settlers, 56, 81, 84, 99; views of Indians, 56, 81-82, 84, 99, 106, 116; Washington and, 99, 105, 106-7, 108, 112, 146-47 "Knoxonian plan," 124, 127 Knoxville, 156, 157, 158 Lafayette, Marquis de, 28-29 La Gesse, 144, 145 Lake Erie, 33, 37, 91, 137, 148; navigation on, 138, 143, 147 land: civilization program and, 134, 136, 196; Federalists' policies, 125, 180, 200; habitants and, 85, 86; Indian views on, 26, 40, 57, 69, 70, 144, 149, 150, 153, 186; intertribal agreements on, 33, 41, 69; Jefferson on, 194; land laws, 60, 130, 181, 184; Northwest Ordinance on, 88; protection of Indians', 99, 185; restric­ tions on Indians' disposal of, 23-24, 96, 135-36, 144, 177; retrocession to Indians, 146-47, 167; rights to, 57, 61, 62, 63, 85, 96, 144, 145, 149, 16h I80, 181, 185, 217n24; states and, 20, 75,

280

1ndex

land (continued) 123, 182; white settlers' views of, 57, 59, 61, 68, 69, 130; whites' appetite for, 102, 138; women and, 138 Land Act of 1800, 194 land developers, 61, 90, 91, 181, 187, 188 Land Ordinance, Congressional, 37, 60, 64, 89 land speculators, 59, 60-61, 131, 140, 181, 188; Muscle Shoals and, 45; North Carolina and, 24, 60; in Nashville, 60-61, 151; Six Nations and, 133; squat­ ters and, 185; Washington on, 158 land surveys: in Cherokee country, 25, 48; federal, 34, 55, 80, 89; by Ohio Company, 90, 92; by Pennsylvania, 80, 162; surveyors as speculators, 60; Washington and, 63 L'Anse au Graise, 113 Latopoia, 53 Lee, Arthur, 28, 34, 36, 103, 167; treaties negotiated by, 28-32, 32-33, 35 Lee, Richard Henry, 78-79 Legion of the United States, 140, 151, 160, 163, 164, 165; toast to, 166; at Treaty of Greenville, 172 Le Gris, 101, 115 Le Maigouis, 198 Lewis, Meriwether, 197 Licking River, 106 Limestone, 104 Lincoln, Benjamin, 228n34; as Indian commissioner, 107, 109, 110-12, 147-48, 150-51; Piomingo and, 113 Little Miami River, 60 Little Okfuskee, 157 Little Tennessee River, 155 Little Turtle, 117, 164, 173, 174, 199 livestock, 4, 34, 53, 58, 59, 144; belonging to Indians, 157; ecological impact of, 69; gift to Indians, 122, 134, 160, 177, 193, 194, 197; graze on Indian land, 183; stolen, 182 Livingston, Robert, 195 Locke, John, 61 Logan, Benjamin, 65, 68, 169

Logan, John, 65 Lookout Mountain, 154 Louis XVI (king of France), 28 Louisiana, 73, 123, 162, 179, 195, 197 Louisiana Purchase, 195, 197 Louisville, 36, 43, 55, 80, 84 Lower Creeks, 80, 110, 119, 155 Loyalists, 4, 8, 12, 24, 72, 149 Maclay, William, 28, 98, 108, 112, 113, 118 Macomb, Alexander, 186 Madison, James, 28, 79, 93, 201, 202 Maine, 23, 58, 59 maps, 51, 142 Marietta, 92, 115, 118 Marshall, John, 191 martial theater, 39, 85, 86, 87, 166, 172 Martin, Alexander, 63 Martin, Joseph, 44-46, 51, 53 Masass, 173, 174 Mascoutens, 8, 143 Massachusetts, s, 22, 24, 59-60, 96, 194; Penobscots and, 23-24, 26-27; Shays's Rebellion in, 78, 83 Mathews, George, 75, 170 matrons, 28, 39, 47, 132, 145, 157; authority of, 17; land ownership and, 138, 166, 187 Maumee River, 33, 99, 137, 138, 145, 161; Battle of Fallen Timbers and, 164, 165, 166 McCurdy, William, 104 McDowell, Joseph, 180 McDowell, Samuel, 94 McGillivray, Alexander, 46, 66-67, 110, 119, 120, 155; American concessions to, 120, 122, 124; authority of, 70, 71, 72, 109-10, 111, 119; Creek chiefs and, 67, 70, 120; Humphreys and, 111; nephews of, 120, 122, 123; Panton & Leslie and, 109, 122; prospective allies of, 52, 75; Rock Landing conference and, 99, 106, 110-12; Spain and, 74, 109, 111, 123, 155; Treaty of New York and, 119, 120-22 McHenry, James, 177, 179, 183, 185, 192

1ndex Mcintosh, Lachlan, 44-45, 46, 49 McKee, Alexander, 73, 150, 161, 163 medals, 101; American, 52, 91, 108, 129, 141, 143; British, 33; Knox and, 51, 82, 154; Spanish, 74 Mekoches, 42, 65-66, 197 Mentor, 124 Mercer, John, 29 Miamis, 69, 85, 86, 92; attacks by, 55, 114; Brant and, 102; Continental Congress and, 38; denounce treaties, 34, 101; em­ issaries to, 38, 115, 142; Kekionga and, 115, 117, 165; Knox and, 84, 105; lands of, 137, 174, 185; Northwest Indian War and, 104, 117-18, 139, 145, 163, 200; Pacane's community, 66, 81; refuse to negotiate with Americans, 27, 34, 99, 100, 102, 138, 148; treaties with U.S. government, 172, 173, 174, 195; in War of 1812, 199; Wells and, 143 Michilimackinac, 43, 175 micas. See Creeks: chiefs of Mifflin, Thomas, 162, 170 militia, 15, 59, 93, 143, 200; attack Indian towns, 56, 65, 66, 71, 74, 75, 80, 114, 137, 138, 139, 156; compensation of, 183; federally employed, 105, 107, 114, 116, 137; of habitants, 85; indiscipline of, 116-17, 139; kill chiefs and neutral Indians, 65-66, 104, 114, 118, 133, 156; during rebellions and riots, 62, 78, 160, 170, 184; Territorial, 88, 151, 155; at treaty conferences, 38, 45, 182; in War of 1812, 198, 199 Mingatushka, 52, 53 Mingohoopoie, 51, 56 Mingos (Ohio Iroquois), 14, 39, 42, 65 Mira, Esteban, 73, 74, 109, 220n68 missionaries, 2, 13, 143, 147, 160, 178, 194 Mississippi River, 24, 91, 113, 142, 199, 244n75; American navigation on, 51-52, 73, 89, 98, 161, 172; Chickasaws and, 7-8; Harmar and, 85; Jefferson seeks land on, 195; Spain's defense of, 156, 162; white settlers and, 77; Wood­ land Indians and, 179, 197, 201

Mississippi Territory, 179, 183, 188, 195, 198, 244-45n75 Mississippi Valley, 179 Missouri, 85, 179, 197 Mobile, 8 Mobile River, 195 modern Indian politics, 8, 74 Mohawks, 9, 25, 26, 72, 102; of St. Regis, 186; Senecas and, 167; at Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), 28, 30, 31 Mohawk Valley, 58 Mohicans, 135, 138 Molunthy, 39, 42, 56, 65, 68 Monongahela Valley, 58, 62-63 Monroe, James, 21, 38, 195 Montgomery County (New York), 29 Montreal, 161 Moravians, 2, 143 Morgan, George, 74 Morris, John, 156 Morris, Robert, 60, 135-36, 181, 186-87 Morris, Thomas, 186, 187, 188 Moultrie, William, 52 Muhlenberg, Peter, 36 Murray, William Vans, 180 Muscle Shoals, 45, 53, 74, 75, 113, 123 Muskingum Falls, 91, 92, 101 Muskingum River, 37, 91, 92; as boundary, 99, 100, 102, 143, 148, 149, 150, 167 Muskogee Nation, 155 Nanaume, 165 Napoleon (Bonaparte), 195 Nashville, 53, 57, 58, 60-61, 74, 75; attacked, 155; Chickasaws and, 75, 112; conference at, 154 Natchez, 73-74, 179 national domain,. 37, 43, 60, 61 National Gazette, 142 nationalists, 11, 17, 54, 77-78, 189, 200 nativism, 14, 135, 197, 198, 206n39 natural rights, 57, 161, 185, 200; to land, 61, 130, 180, 185, 194; to self­ government, 57, 62, 185 neutralists, 15, 100, 114 Neville, John, 170

282

lndex

New England, 58, 78, 83, 92, 130; Anti­ Federalists in, 93, 98; criticism of Northwest Indian War in, 141, 147 New Jersey, 4, 60 New Madrid, 73-74 New Orleans, 73-74, 161, 162, 172, 195, 198 Newtown, 134-36 New York, s, 26, 29, 58; bandits in, 4; Genesee Company and, 95-96; Iroquois and, 5-6, 9, 23, 26, 93, 95, 96, 136, 167, 168, 186-87; Jay's Treaty and, 172; land developers in, 61, 181; land sales by, 186; Massachusetts and, s, 24, 59-60, 96; militia of, 121; Republican victory in, 193; U.S. government and, 185-86, 188; U.S. Indian policy and, 4-6, 22, 93, 96, 183 New York City, s, 13, 108, 112, 119; conferences in, 120-24, 186 New York Journal, 124 Niagara, 30, 147, 148 Niagara portage, 168, 169 Nicholson, John, 187 Nickajack, 169, 171 Nisbet, Charles, 54 Nontuaka, 152 Nootka Sound controversy, 123 North, Lord Frederick, 1 North American Land Company, 187 North Carolina, 48, 106, 119, 157; Cherokees and, 23, 95, 96, 214n38; Constitu­ tion and, 95, 98, 107, 225n63; Conti­ nental Congress and, 23-24, 55-56, 80, 94, 95; Franklin settlers and, 56, 57, 63-64, 78, 98, 218n35; lands of, 24, 44, 45, 55-56, 60, 63, 80, 94, 151, 180; militia of, 66, 75, 94; Nashville settlers and, 75, 94; Treaties of Hopewell and, 45, 54, 94; treaty conferences of, 22, 95 northern Indians, 3, 36, 37, 91, 102, 125; federation ism of, 26, 27, 49; indemnity payments and, 71; Pickering and, 166; treaties with, 147; U.S. Army and, 81, 178 Northwest Indians, 16, 39, 115, 139, 160, 176; Britain and, 73, 138, 150, 161, 165;

casualties, 118, 140, 145, 171, 241n18; confederacy of, 57, 70, 72, 91, 92, 99, 100, 104, 106, 114, 126, 145, 146, 149, 161, 162, 163, 191, 198; divisions among, 99, 101, 106, 127; food supply of, 104, 165; Harmar and, 86, 116, 164; Iroquois and, 128, 131, 142, 167; Kentuckians and, 65-66, 151; killed by white settlers, 184; land cessions by, 33-34, 174, 175, 195; lands of, 144, 147, 150; negotiations with, 141, 142, 144; Northwest Ordinance and, 88; political "fatherhood" among, 175; St. Clair and, 91, 92, 139-40, 154, 164, 185; southern federationists and, 70, 95; Stockbridges and, 135, 138; trade and, 43, 81, 97, 126-27; treaties of, 32-34, 44, 70, 90, 174-75; U.S. government and, 105, 125, 1 27, 149, 175, 176, 185; in War of 1812, 198; Washington and, 163, 176; Wayne and, 150, 174, 176; winter campaign of, 118, 133, 137 Northwest Indian War, 15, 114-18, 138-40, 161, 201; Britain and, 173; casualties of, 114, 115, 117, 118, 139, 140, 143, 163, 165, 171, 241m8; Federalists and, 200; Kentucky and, 64, 114; plans to end, 84, 90, 166; southern Indians and, 153-54 Northwest Ordinance, 88-89, 123, 151, 200 Northwest Territory, 21, 37, 43-44, 79; government and officials of, 22, 79, 88, 89-90, 92, 184, 185; Indian relations in, 104, 147, 198; land offices in, 194; legal settlers in, 115, 171, 183; population of, 161; U.S. authority in, 83, 88 Ochappo, 113 Ocmulgee River, 46, 109, 110, 195 Oconee River, 55, 110, 112, 126; as boundary, 23, 46, 122, 195; Clarke and, 162, 170 Ogden, Abraham, 186 Ogeechee River, 109 Ohio, 16, 21, 33, 185

lndex Ohio Cherokees, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43; attack soldiers, 143; Marietta and, 115; as river pirates, 113, 116 Ohio Company of Associates, 39, 60, 89, 103, 147; establish Marietta, 92; Indians and, 92, 97; plan of settlement, 89, 90 Ohio River, 7, 21, 33, 37, 91; American forts on, 178; American settlements north of, 92, 115, 148, 149, 151, 161, 162, 185; as boundary, 26, 27, 56, 70, 92, 100, 102, 115, 138, 144, 147, 148, 150, 163; control of, 114, 115; flatboats attacked on, 104, 114, 115, 116; as supply route, 32, 113, 139; war near, 55, 66 Ohio Senecas, 32 Ohio Valley, 15, 25, 43, 45, 89, 99; Indian raids in, 27, 38, 42, 100; lands of, 39; U.S. government and, 97, 100, 116, 128, 184, 188; U.S. troops in, 37, 80-81, 88, 97, 112, 185; war in, 56, 82, 84, 114, 126, 160; white settlers in, 38, 58, 63, 161 Okfuskee, 119 Old Tassel, 25, 47-49, 54, 66, 71 Old Testament, 61, 217n24 Oneidas, 5-6, 30, 31, 96, 141, 168; Kirkland and, 166, 178; Lafayette and, 28; Quak­ ers and, 178; in Revolutionary War, 28, 178; reservation of, 95, 168; Senecas and, 211n48; Stockbridges and, 135; treaties of, 23, 26, 95, 168, 186, 187 O'NeilL Arturo, 74 Onondagas, 95, 96, 168, 186, 187 Onondio (Onontio), 28 Ontario, 72, 148 Orono, Joseph, 26 Oseechee, 119 Oswego, 29 Otsiquette, Peter, 141 Ottawa River, 99 Ottawas, 14, 48, 142, 179, 198; attacks by, 55, 91-92, 115; battles with U.S. Army, 163, 165, 241m8; federationists and, 148, 163; Sargent and, 175, 176; treaties o£ 32, 33, 173, 174 Ouiatenon, 118, 139

Outlaw, Alexander, 66 Overhill Towns, 48-49 oxhide trick, 102 Pacane, 66, 81 Painted Pole, 145 Panton & Leslie, 74, 109, 122, 155, 196 Parsons, Samuel, 38-40, 42-43, 44, 56, 60, 89, 92 Pascagoula River, 195 Patterson, Alexander, 62 Paxton Boys, 65 Payamataha, 8, 74 Pennsylvania, 24, 61, 162; boundary disputes, 24, 62-63; buys Indian lands, 31, 33, 103; Constitution and, 93, 98; courts of, 62, 132; Erie Triangle and, 96, 162, 167, 169; Indian attacks in, 2, 104, 133, 162; Indian commissioners of, 28, 31, 101; Indian population of, 24, 33; Jay's Treaty and, 172; land sales and grants, 60, 61, 62; legislature of, 63, 96, 103, 129, 130, 131; militia of, 1, 84, 116, 170; rebellions in, 56, 62-63, 160, 162, 192; Republicans and, 193, 194; Senecas and, 28, 31, 100, 103, 129, 131, 133, 162, 187; treaty conferences of, 22, 24, 96; U.S. Army and, 24, 80, 84; white set­ tlers in, 13, 58, 62-63, 64, 78 Penobscots, 23-24, 26-27, 107 Pensacola, 8, 154, 155 Peorias, 143, 147 Phelps, Oliver, 59, 96 Phelps-Gorham Company, 59-60, 96, 135, 186 Phelps-Gorham Purchase, 100, 168 Philadelphia, 130, 149, 150, 161, 166, 187; federal government in, 146, 152, 159, 160, 161, 175, 183, 191; Indians and, 51, 120, 129, 133, 134, 141, 142, 143, 145, 153, 156, 169; Quakers of, 120, 134, 178 Philadelphia Convention, 92-93 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Indian Committee of, 178 Piankeshaws, 66, 68, 81, 86, 87-88, 115, 143

lndex Pickens, Andrew, 3, 4, 45, 111-12, 151; treaties negotiated by, 44-45, 46, 50-51, 53-54, 182, 195 Pickering, Timothy (Kanehsadeh), 129-31, 136, 166; Aupaumut and, 137, 142; diplomatic protocol and, 131, 166; on frontier justice, 132, 184; as Indian commissioner, 129, 131, 132, 133, 13436, 146, 147, 148-49, 150-51, 158, 162, 166-68, 169; Knox and, 133, 134; lands of, 60, 129; Quakers and, 134, 178; Red Jacket and, 135, 146; as Secretary of State, 177, 192; as Secretary of War, 172, 186; 1792 Philadelphia conference and, 141, 142; view of Indians, 132, 133-34; view of white settlers, 130, 132, 184 Pinckney, Thomas, 163, 172 Pinckney's Treaty, 172, 179, 189, 191 Pine Creek, 129 Piomingo (Mountain Leader), 8-9, 52-53, 112-13, 154, 156, 169 Pittsburgh, 32, 36, 44, 74, 80, 142, 171 "playing Indian," 120 Plutarch, 79 political theater, 32, 36, 64, 200 political theory, 79, 201-2 Polybius, 79 Pond, Peter, 142, 143 Pontiac's War, 14 Potawatomis, 15, 101, 143, 144, 163, 179; attacks by, 114; battles with U.S. Army, 117, 165; as federal intermediaries, 147; towns destroyed, 139; Treaty of Green­ ville and, 172, 173, 174 Prairie du Rocher, 85 Presbyterians, 194 Price, Edward, 177 Procto� Thomas, 138 prophets, 14, 16, 197, 198 public domain, 37, 88, 198 Pushmataha, 199 Putnam, Rufus, 142, 143, 144, 145 Quakers, 12, 120, 178, 197; at Indian con­ ferences, 134, 147, 166, 167, 178 Quebec, 138 Queshawsey, 104

Randolph, Beverley, 147-48, 150-51 Randolph, Edmund, 146, 147 Red Jacket (Keeper-Awake, Sagoyewatha), 132, 135, 138, 141, 146; federationists and, 145; nativism of, 135, 206n39; at treaty conferences, 166, 168, 187 Red Sticks, 198 republics, 79, 170, 189, 194, 201 Revolutionary War, 1-4, 32, 35, 36, 78, 200; Europe and, 14, 25, 28, 72, 73, 78; Federalists in, 77-78, 129, 143; Indians and, 1, 3, 5, 13, 14, 22, 24, 32, 51, 71, 122, 135, 168, 186; Northwest Indian War and, 68; responsibility for, 25, 40; rural rioters and, 62; white settlers and, 13, 22, 65, 68, 185, 200; Wyoming Valley and, 62 Rhode Island, 78, 98 Richardson, James, 136 Richmond, 63, 112, 120 Richter, Daniel, 8 riots, 57, 62, 64, 79, 192, 216n8; in Cincin­ nati, 184; Jay's Treaty and, 172; during Whiskey Rebellion, 170 roads, 168, 195 Robertson, James, 169, 183 Rock Landing, 106, 109, 110-12, 114, 119, 121 Running Water, 169, 171 Saint Augustine, 19, 27, 162 Saint Genevieve, 85 Saint Lawrence River, 186 Saint Louis, 53, 85, 127 Saint Mary's Creek, 139 Saint Mary's River, 46, 112, 126, 155 Salem (Moravian Delaware town), 2 Sandusky: abortive conference at, 146, 147, 150, 166; raid on, 3; federationist councils at, 14, 26, 30; smallpox in, 101; Wyandots of, 173 Sargent, Winthrop, 89, 140, 175, 176, 179, 184, 188 Sauk, 101, 193 Schuyler, Philip, 5-6 Scioto River, 66, 114, 115, 116, 174, 230n65 Scioto Valley, 38

1ndex Scott, Charles, 139, 143 scouts, 39, 117, 137, 184; Chickasaw, 140, 153; Seneca, 134, 143, 153 Seagrove, James, 170 Seagrove, Robert, 155 secessionists, 7, 62-64, 72, 74, 79, 98 Sedgwick, Theodore, 180 Senecas, 14, 81, 126; attacks by, 133, 162; captains, 28, 162, 187; chiefs, 167, 187; divisions among, 132, 187; as federal intermediaries, 15, 137, 138, 147; Hand­ some Lake and, 197; killed by white settlers, 129, 133; lands of, 135-36, 167, 168, 169, 186-87, 188; matrons, 166, 187; Mohawks and, 167; Northwest Indians and, 129, 131, 132, 143; Oneidas and, 211n48; Pennsylvania and, 28, 103; Pickering and, 131-32, 192; Quak­ ers and, 178; refugees at Fort Pitt, 31, 81; scouts, 134, 143, 153; treaties with land companies, 96, 100, 186-87; U.S. government and, 96, 100, 103, 129, 166, 168; Washington and, 145-46 Seven Ranges, 37, 89, 147 Seven Years' War, 61 Sevier, John, 63, 64, 75, 98, 151, 154; Cher­ okees and, 64, 66-67, 71, 75, 157, 183 Shandotte, 101, 102, 103 Shawnees: attacks by, 27, 38, 42, 43, 55, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116; captives of, 38, 40, 42; chiefs of, 40, 41-42, 56, 65, 173; denounce treaty signatories, 34, 131; desire for war, 40, 104, 138; federation­ ists and, 14, 15-16, 27, 38, 145, 148; Gamelin and, 115; Kaskaskias and, 179; Kekionga and, 115, 117, 118; Knox and, 84, 105; land cessions by, 40, 90, 137, 195; Miamis and, 69, 115, 118; Northwest Indian War and, 42, 55, 117, 163, 200; prophets, 16, 198; refuse to meet Americans, 27, 34, 39, 99, 100, 102; Richard Butler and, 39-42, 43, 140; southern Indians and, 27, 151, 154, 155, 162, 169; Spain and, 162; towns destroyed, 1, 36, 65-66; treaties with U.S. government, 38, 39-43, 44, 92, 173, 174; War of 1812 and, 198; white

285

settlers and, 25, 69, 115; Wyandots and, 66, 69, 101 Shays, Daniel, 78, 79 Shays's Rebellion, 78-79, 83, 93 Simcoe, John, 147, 161, 162 Simms, James, 182 Six Nations, 9, 23, 30, 166; chiefs of, 6, 25, 142; civilization program and, 134; di­ visions among, 167, 168, 169; Genesee Company and, 95; Massachusetts and, 24; Pennsylvania and, 96, 162; U.S. government and, 103, 136, 166, 169; Woodland Indians and, 30, 32, 102, 128. See also Iroquois Skiagunsta, 45 slaves, 91-92, 94, 110, 146, 182; captives as, 68 Slim Tom, 71 Smith, Daniel, 156, 157 Smith, John, 117 Smith, William, 120 Smyth, J.F.D., 24-25, 67 Society of Saint Andrew, 120-21 South Carolina, 107, 141, 156; civil war in, 4; Continental Congress and, 95; In­ dian conferences of, 45, 95; militia of, 1, 45; Republican victory in, 193; rural rioters and, 62; southern Indians and, 1, 48, 52, 214n38; Treaties of Hopewell and, 45 southern Indians, 21, 75; civilization program and, 126, 177, 178, 197; cohe­ siveness of, 126; conduct in warfare, 107-8; dependence on European goods, 7, 126; federationist offensives by, 151, 154-55, 157, 169; France and, 179; gifts to, 49, 51, 52, 53; jurisdiction over, 44-45, 56, 95, 106-7; Knox and, 82, 106-7, 152; "middle ground" of, 69, 154; Northwest Indians and, 49, 153-54; population, 44, 212n24; re­ tributive justice and, 51, 71; Shawnees and, 154-55, 162; Spain and, 49, 7374, 156; trading factories and, 178; U.S. Congress and, 97, 107; U.S. government and, 125, 158, 189; White and, 80

286

1ndex

gents and, 64-65; land claims of, s, 20, southern states, 9, 56, 73, 75, 80, 98; and 24, 44-45, 46, 55-56, 59-60, 80, 94, 96; Confederation-era Indian treaties, 38, land grants by, 59, 80; paper money of, 44-45, 54, 95, 106; Continental Con­ 60, 77, 94, 121; weakness of, 65, 78, 79 gress and, 94-95; jurisdiction of, 106 state land cessions, 21, 55-56, 80, 95; by Southwest Territorial Act, 182 Georgia, 22, 55-56, 94-95, 96, 107, Southwest Territory, 152, 156, 157, 169; 183, 194; by New York, 96; by North population of, 151; settlements at­ tacked, 154; statehood for, 181 Carolina, 22, 23, 55-56, 63, 94-95, 151; sovereignty: popular, 93; of the states, 23, by Virginia, 21 St. Clair, Arthur, 89, 105, 106, 114, 116, 93, 94; of the U.S., 19, 45, 48-49, 50-51, 141; defeat of, 139-40, 141, 151, 153, 154, 100, 110, 122, 153, 186, 192, 200; of the 156, 157, 163, 164, 173; federationists Woodland Indians, 10, 107, 144, 169, and, 101, 114-15; French intrigue and, 175, 201 179; governor of Northwest Territory, Spain: American Revolutionary War and, 89, 185, 188; Kekionga and, 137, 165; 1, 8, 73; Britain and, 8, 123, 162; diplo­ Northwest Indians and, 91, 92, 100, matic expenditures of, 170; federation­ 101, 103, 105, 115, 137, 185, 188; Ohio ists and, 57, 73-74; forts of, 73, 113, 156, Company and, 89, 92; plans expedition 158, 160, 162; French Revolutionary against Wabash Indians, 92, 116, 133, Wars and, 159, 191; Georgia and, 108; 134; threatens Indians, 100, 101, 102, Kentuckians and, 73, 97; McGillivray 103, 105; Treaties of Fort Harmar and, and, 74, 109, 123, 155; Mississippi River 91-92, 99, 100-104; white settlers and, and, 1, 8, 51, 73, 93-94, 98, 161; in 91, 114, 185, 186 Missouri, 85; Pinckney's Treaty and, Steedman, William, 142, 143 160, 172, 191, 245n75; policy toward Steele, John, 95, 106 American settlers, 73-74; potential Stockbridge Indians (Stockbridges), 15, war with U.S., 112, 123, 162; retroces­ 135, 137, 138, 168 sion of Louisiana by, 195; secessionists St. Regis Mohawks, 186, 188 and, 73, 74, 97; southern Indians and, Stuart, John, 7 1, 8, 27, 49, 51, 52, 73, 74, 113, 122, 154, Sullivan, John, 133 156, 157, 158, 162; traders of, 51, 52, 113; Sumter, Thomas, 107-8 Treaty of New York and, 122, 123 Sun, The, 173, 175 Spokohummah, 52 Superintendents of Indian Affairs, 56 Springer, Jacob, 34 Susquehannah Company, 62 Springfield (Massachusetts), 78, 83 Susquehanna Valley, 58, 60, 69, 129 squatters, 61, 83, 84, 85, 200; Cherokees Symmes, John, 60, 185 and, 153, 184; in northern backcoun­ Symmes Tract, 147 try, 57; in Ohio Valley, 43, 63, 83, 185; protection of Indians from, 178, 193; Tallassee, 47 Republicans and, 194; U.S. Army and, Tallassee Mico (king of Creeks), 25, 47, 37, 82 67, 111, 121 State Department, 172 . Tallyrand-Perigord (Tallyrand), Charles state governments, 4-5, 19-20, 22-23, 54; Maurice de, 191 Articles of Confederation and, 77, 78; Tammany Society, 120, 121 Blount on, 152; control of frontier, 182; Tardiveau, Bartholomei, 86 cooperate with U.S. government, 170; Indian policies of, s, 6, 65, 80; insurTarhe, 106, 173, 175

1ndex tariffs, 78, 98, 140, 171 Tate, David. See McGillivray, Alexander: nephews of Tecumseh, 15, 198, 199 Telfair, Edward, 75, 156, 163 Tellico, 177, 178, 184 Tennessee, 16, 21; Cherokees and, 126, 183; Indian raids into, 27, 54, 183; land ownership in, 69, 151, 154; militia of, 15, 157, 183, 188; population of, 58, 151, 161; presidential elections in, 181, 193; secessionists in, 98; Spain and, 73, 97; statehood, 181-82; white settlers in, 63, 97, 156, 171 Tennessee River, 7, 45, 53, 113 Tennessee Valley, 15, 27, 55, 63, 64; Indian towns destroyed in, 160; land sales in, 60; territorial government for, 128, 151; U.S. government in, 100, 128, 184; war in, 66, 96; warriors in, 158; white settlers in, 13, 25, 57, 58, 59, 151, 152, 157, 158 Tennessee Yazoo Company, 123 Tenskwatawa, 16, 198, 199 territorial government, 15, 22 theater, Indians attend, 120 Thirteen Fires, 27, 105, 115, 122, 129, 142, 145, 149; Indian leaders and, 9, 35-36, 119; unity of, 19-20; power of, 87, 154-55 Thomson, Charles, 54 Tinctimingo, 52 Tioga, 131-32, 133 tobacco, 11, 47-48, 110, 161, 177; as gift, 47, 105, 125, 179, 187 Toboca, 50, 51 Tombigbee River, 162, 195 torture, 67-68 Town Destroyer (George Washington), 145-46, 149 trade: Continental Congress and, 21, 51, 52, 77; debt and, 196; dependency and, 7-8, 51; diplomacy and, 53; endangered by war, 25, 113; European goods in, 8; Federalists and, 79; at forts in Ohio Valley, 81, 97; French-American, 161;

as "political engine," 113; regulation of, 51, 56, 93, 124, 177, 189; southern Indians and, 44, 50-51, 52, 53, 70, 74, 108, 109, 113, 122, 126; of the Trans­ Appalachian West, 161; U.S. govern­ ment and, 189, 192 Trade and Intercourse Acts: of 1790, 123-24, 131, 132; of 1793, 182; of 1796, 160, 176, 180, 182, 189; of 1802, 193 traders, 27, 45, 119, 171, 175; American, 44, 51, 53, 91-92; British, 39, 43, 73, 113; Chippewas and Ottawas request, 176; federationists and, 72, 74; French­ speaking, 53, 73, 74, 85; Little Turtle and, 174; plunder and, 70; regulation of, 176, 177; robbed, 48; Spain and, 52, 74, 113; in Vincennes, 87 trading factories, 160, 184, 193, 196, 199, 201 trading posts, 51, 53, 74, 112, 113, 121 Trans-Appalachian West, 1, 54; electoral power of, 182, 199; European diplo­ macy and, 19, 171; economy of, 161; federal Indian relations in, 113-14, 125; Federalist policies toward, 200; French-Indian relations in, 144, 179-80, 195; Indians in, 24-25, 70, 75; inhabitants' view of federal govern­ ment, 97, 98; military stalemate in, 75; peace in, 160, 176; population of, 199; Spanish influence in, 73-74; U.S. gov­ ernment's control of, 32, 36, 57-58, 80, 98-99, 100, 128, 158, 189, 199, 200 transgendered persons, 40, 166, 212n10 Trans-Oconee region, 121, 123 Trans-Oconee Republic, 170 Treasury Secretary, 181 Treaties of Augusta, 23, 46, 47, 121 Treaties of Fort Harmar, 31, 100-104, 129; boundary of cession, 146, 149, 172, 174; Indians refuse to attend, 99, 100, 101; Pennsylvania and, 96, 103; preparations for, 91-92; Rock Landing conference and, 110; read at Greenville conference, 173; Senecas and, 103, 142; validity of, 101, 104

288

1ndex

Treaties of Fort Schuyler (Stanwix; 1788), 95 Treaties of Hopewell, 44-54, 119, 152, 180 treaty conferences, 11, 12, 188, 193, 201; alternative to war, 90-91; chiefs and, 11, 39, 42, 50, 53, 67, 109, 110, 111, 143, 152, 166, 167, 168, 173, 186, 187, 197; and co-option of Indian leaders, 199, 200; expense of, 90, 105; Harmar and, ' 82, 84; as cover for military action, 84, 105; minutes of, 147; as political theater, 32, 36; federationists propose, 70; and public opinion, 147, 150; source of individual prestige, 101, 153; tobacco and, 47-48, 110; validity of, 26-27, 28, 34, 57, 66, 103; wampum and, 41; war­ riors and, 11, 39-40 Treaty of Albany, 95, 136 Treaty of Big Tree, 186-87, 188 Treaty of Canandaigua, 166-69, 171 Treaty of Coleraine, 182-83 "Treaty" of Coyatee, 66 Treaty of DeWitt's Corner, 214n38 Treaty of Dumplin Creek, 66 Treaty of Fort Finney, 38-44, 54, 65, 80 Treaty of Fort McIntosh, 32-34, 38, 99, 142; land cession in, 33, 35, 224n42; rejected by Indians, 44, 80; Shawnees and, 41 Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), 26, 102 Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), 12, 27-32, 33, 81, 168; Captain Johnny and, 38; confirmed by Iroquois, 103; Iroquois bitterness about, 31, 133, 168; Madison and, 93; Pickering on, 167; repudiated, 31, 80 Treaty of Fort Wilkinson, 196 Treaty of Galphinton, 46, 121 Treaty of Greenville, 172-76 Treaty of Holston, 152-53, 155, 169, 184 Treaty of Long Island of Holston, 214n38 Treaty of Mount Dexter, 196 Treaty of New York, 119-24, 134, 155 Treaty of Paris, 9, 19, 32, 75, 129, 167 Treaty of Philadelphia, 169, 171

Treaty of Shoulderbone Creek, 67, 121 Treaty of Vincennes, 144 treaty-making power, 93, 107, 124, 147 Trueman, Alexander, 142, 143 Trumbull, Jonathan, 13 Tuckabatchee, 119 Tuscarawas River, 33 Tuscaroras, S, 30, 95, 168 Tuskau Pataupau, 8 Twiggs, John, 46 Unadilla River, 23 Upper Creeks, 119 Upper War Ford, 106 U.S. Army: builds forts, 37, 43, 80; de facto Indian Department, 80-81, 82, 84; ejects squatters, 37, 61, 82; enlarge­ ment of, 140, 192; expeditions against Northwest Indians, 116-18, 139-40, 163-65; expense of, 140, 149, 171; First Regiment, 37, 80, 84; guarantor of order on frontier, 125, 176, 200; hospi­ tality of, 81, 185; Indians' perceptions of, 81, 97; movement of, 55, 112, 148, 163; opposition to white settlers' raids, 65-66; protection of Indians, 31, 68, 81, 84, 85, 99; role in Federalist Indian policy, 99, 125; Second Regiment, 140; Shays's Rebellion and, 82-83; short­ term levies in, 128, 137, 139; size of, 49, 158; in South, 109, 112, 157; supply and morale problems of, 80-81, 113, 115; supply contracts for, 141, 161; and trade with Indians, 81, 97, 113; at treaty conferences, 24, 28, 32, 109; uniforms of, 85; views of Indians, 42; War of 1812 and, 198 U.S. Congress, 98, 99, 122, 124; Alien and Sedition Acts of, 192; Britain and, 161; France and, 189, 192; frontier policy of, 182; Georgia and, 107-8, 157, 183; land laws of, 181, 189, 194; military expendi­ tures by, 140, 164; North Carolina and, 180; Northwest Indian War and, 103, 105, 116, 137, 140, 141, 164; Republicans and, 180-182, 193; southern Indians

1ndex and. 99. 107; Tennessee and. 183. 184. 188; Trade and Intercourse Acts and. 123. 177. 181; trading factories authorized. 177; Washington and. 183; westerners in. 199. See also federal government U.S. Constitution. 80. 92-94. 98. 124. 197; Federalists and. 17. 96; Georgia and. 94. 95. 121; North Carolina and. 95. 98. 107. 225n63; Trans-Appalachian West and. 97. 100; treaty-making power in. 93. 107. 124. 147 U.S. Senate. 107. 108. 145. 153. 172. 199 Varnum. James. 89 Vatte!. Emmerich de. 61 Venango. 80 Vermont. 5. 62. 79 Vincennes. 53. 86. 88. 118; Clark and. 20. 83; fur trade in. 87; habitants of. 83. 85. 86; Harmar and. 85-87; Indian attacks near. 104; Indian conferences at. 38. 86-87. 143-44. 150; Kentucky militia and. 83. 87-88; magistrates of. 85. 142; militia of. 116; popula­ tion of. 85; U.S. Army in. 68. 80. 83. 84-85 Virginia. 28. 65. 124. 147; Alien and Sedi­ tion Acts and. 192; Federalists from. 93; Kentucky and. 63; land claims of. 20. 21; land grants by. 61. 63; land laws of. 60. 61; militia of. 8. 84. 92; Pennsylvania and. 24. 62-63; pleas for military support. 55. 105; settlements attacked. 154; Vincennes and. 20. 83. 87; southern Indians and. 8. 23. 45. 48. 214n38; support for enlarged federal army. 140-41; Treaties of Hopewell and. 45 Virginia Military District. 21. 147. 185 Wabash Indians. 41. 56. 87. 115. 116; defined. 16; Iroquois and. 102. 133. 137. 138. 143; Kentuckians and. 104-5. 114. 118. 137. 139; military campaigns against. 84. 92. 105. 106. 114. 125. 127.

133. 137; negotiations with. 86-87. 105. 114. 115. 116. 142. 143; suspicions regarding Americans. 38. 91. 101; Wy­ andots and. 34 Wabash River. 87. 138; Indian communi­ ties on. 3. 16. 87. 88. 104-5. 116. 118. 137. 142 Wabash Valley. 16. 38. 138. 144. 174 Wadsworth. Jeremiah. 187 Waldo Patent. 59 Walking Purchase. 102 Wallace. Anthony. 103 Walnut Hills. 123 Walton. George. 112 wampum. 81. 86. 87. 101. 105; black. 40. 41. 161; in condolence ceremonies. 166; described. 41; as record. 144; significance. 41; white. 103. 115. 144. 172. 173 war: and federal power. 93. 112. 118. 140; function for Native Americans. 7. 57. 71. 163; function for white settlers. 57. 67-68; military conduct of whites and Indians. 22. 40. 71. 75. 107-8; opposed by easterners. 141. 147. 156; tactics of warriors in. 24. 67; women and. 107-8. 157; between Woodland and Trans­ Mississippi Indians. 179 war captains. 11. 16; authority of. 16-17. 70. 71. 72. 76; chiefs and. 42. 71; Eu­ ropean allies and. 72; federationist councils and. 14. 70. 109-10. 145. 154; justification for war. 57; Nashville conference and. 154; raiment of. 28; Sargent and. 179; southern federation­ ist offensive and. 157; U.S. government and. 77. 99; War of 1812 and. 199. 201; Wayne and. 163. 164. 173 Ward. Nancy. 47 War Department: under Confederation. 81. 90; Indian policy and. 90. 176. 182. 195; Northwest Indian War and. 118. 137. 151. 163. 164; Quakers and. 178; southern Indians and. 112. 119. 152. 155-56; Tennessee militia and. 188 War of 1812. 198-99

29 0

Index

warriors, 80, 182; attacks by, 52, 54, 55, 66, 68, 87, 91-92, 104, 113, 114, 115, 133, 139, 154, 157, 162, 183; Britain and, 165; chiefs' control of, 42, 53, 56, 66, 71, 82, 126, 145, 155; described as "young men," 7, 17, 40, 56, 101, 115, 124, 126, 134, 145, 152, 153, 175, 176; enthusiasm for war, 40, 134, 153, 167, 200; federa­ tionist captains and, 71, 72, 76, 110; federationist councils and, 70, 109-10, 146; motives of, 70, 76, 163, 200; in Northwest Indian War, 117, 163, 165; tactics and military conduct of, 24, 67, 71, 75, 107-8, 114, 139, 140, 141, 157; Trans-Mississippi expeditions, 179; treatment of captives, 7, 38; treaty con­ ferences and, 11, 28, 31, 39, 40, 41, 87, 152, 166, 168, 186-87; in War of 1812, 198, 201; Wayne and, 163, 164 Washington, George, 22, 98, 106, 183; administration of, 17, 99, 114, 115, 123, 125, 142, 150, 156, 162, 171, 188, 198; Brant and, 143, 146; Cabinet and, 14647; civilization program and, 134, 146, 177; Clinton and, 120, 124, 136; Corn­ planter and, 31, 133; on federal juris­ diction, 107; Genet and, 162; Georgia and, 94, 112, 170; Gnaddenhutten Mas­ sacre and, 3; Indian commissioners and, 107, 108-9, 147; Iroquois and, 6, 129, 133, 136, 142, 188; Jay and, 163; ·Jay's Treaty and, 172; Knox and, 59, 105, 108, 116; land claims of, 61, 63; Little Turtle and, 174; Northwest Indians and, 127, 137, 147, 163, 175, 176; Pickering and, 131, 136; Pinckney's Treaty and, 163, 172; St. Clair and, 115, 116, 137, 140; Senate and, 108, 145; southern Indians and, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 153, 158; Southwest Territory and, 151-52, 158; trading factories and, 177, 193; Whiskey Rebellion and, 160, 171; white settlers and, 57, 63, 123, 158 Washington City (District of Columbia), 195 Washington County (Pennsylvania), 170

Watts, John, 153, 154 Wayne, Anthony, 140, 141, 148, 149, 154, 172; campaign against Northwest Indians, 151, 160, 163, 164-65, 169, 171, 189; Chickasaws and, 156; consents to truce, 166, 176; Little Turtle and, 173, 174; Treaty of Greenville and, 172-75, 185; victory of, 166, 167 Weas, 34, 38, 115, 142, 143, 174; alliance with U.S., 87; attacked by Kentuck­ ians, 87-88, 104, 116, 118, 137, 139; at Vincennes conferences, 86, 87, 143, 145 Webster, Noah, 78 WeitzeL Louis, 104 Wells, William, 143 Westmoreland County (Pennsylvania), 133 Westsylvania, 62-63 Wheelock, Eleazar, 122 Whiskey Rebellion, 160, 161, 170-71 White, James, 56, 74, 80, 94 White Eyes, 65 White Eyes' Town, 81 WhitehalL 72, 150, 163, 171 White Lieutenant, 119 White River, 185 "white savages," 13, 17, 65, 130, 200 white settlers, 54, 63, 86, 182; attack Indi­ ans, 56, 65, 71, 78, 87-88, 96, 114, 118, 133, 156, 200; attacked by Indians, 54, 55, 68, 104, 114, 115, 133, 139, 154, 171, 183; Constitution and, 93-94, 97; Con­ tinental Congress and, 22, 53, 62-63, 72; economic activities of, 59, 69, 161; elite American attitudes toward, 4, 10, 13, 43, 54, 56, 65, 68, 78, 91, 130, 200; encroach on Indians' lands, 25, 54, 58, 69, 152, 185; European powers and, 7374, 75, 76, 93-94; Federalists' policy toward, 79, 80, 123, 125, 180, 182, 189; federationists and, 55, 69, 98, 146, 150; habitants and, 85-86; Harmar's views on, 84-85; Indians and, 34, 38, 43, 57, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 81, 85, 108, 114, 129, 132, 133, 184, 188; Jay's Treaty and, 172; Jefferson on, 194, 195; Knox and,

1ndex and, 81, 84; land speculators and, 6061, 181; migration of, 25, 58-59, 66, 197; motives of, 58-59, 67-68, 201; mutual­ aid alliances among, 57, 72, 76; popula­ tion, 58, 161, 198-99, 200; rebellion by, 62-65, 170-71; Republicans and, 194, 202; "respectable" class of, 69, 89, 92, 247m1; restrictions on settlement by, 123, 146, 176; Revolutionary War and, 13, 68; rights of, 13, 57, 180, 185; St. Clair and, 185, 188; southern Indians and, 48-49, 53, 66-67, 71, 179, 188; U.S. Army and, 37, 61, 65-66, 82; U.S. government and, 13, 15, 43, 68, 76-77, 78, 98, 161, 171, 188, 189, 201; views on Indians, 67-68, 108, ll4, 132, 156 Wilkes-Barre, 62, 130, 136 Wilkinson, James, 74, 139, 165, 195, 197 Wilkinson, Jemima, 166 Willett, Marinus, ll9, 120 Willstown, 154 Wingemund, 33 Wolcott, Oliver, 28-30, 32, 167 Wolf's Friend, 8 women, 52, 129, 135, 149, 156; and civiliza­ tion program, 177, 178, 179; at confer­ ences, 32, 34, 47, 50, 109, 131, 132, 134, 143, 152, 166; land ownership and, 136, 166; as metaphor, 167; warriors and, 40, 107-8, ll4, 180; white settlers, 23, 59 Woodland Indians, 7, 14, 16, 19, 25; adoptive renaming by, 154; civili­ zation program and, 179, 193, 197; economy of, 26, 179; elite American

29 1

views of, 43, 81-82, 84, 86, 90-91, 121, 182; European allies of, 74, 163, 200; Federalists and, 189; federationists, 14, 70; political authority among, 16-17, 48, 56, 86, 99-100, 126; population, 24; Republicans and, 193, 194, 197, 201; torture and, 67-68; U.S. government and, 9, ll, 199, 201; wampum and, 41; warfare and, 71 Woodmason, Charles, 4 Wyandots, 36, 37, 103, 142; attacks by, 133, 143; Chippewas and, 101; "civilized" lifeways of, 179; Delawares and, 102; federationists and, 102, 104, ll5, ll8, 138, 148, 163; history of, 102; lands of, 33, 96, 100-101, 103; Northwest Indian War and, 15, 100, 163, 241n18; proposed removal of, 137; St. Clair and, 101-3, 105, 106; Shawnees and, 41, 66, 69, 100-101, 103; treaties with U.S. government, 32-34, 39, 44, 92, 99, 100-102, 173, 174; Treaty of Fort Finney and, 39, 43; War of 1812 and, 198 Wyoming Valley, 56, 62, 78, 130, 131, 132 XYZ Affair, 191-92 Yankees, 56, 62, 64, 130 Yazoo Companies, 123, 183, 244n75 yeoman, 59 Ziegler, David, 81