The Indian World of George Washington Read online

  I have presented parts of the material in this book at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conferences in Austin, Texas, and in Washington, DC; the Boston Athenaeum; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; George Washington’s Mount Vernon; the David Library of the American Revolution; the University of Georgia; George Washington University; the Norwich, Vermont, Historical Society; the Vermont Humanities Council; and Yale University.

  At Oxford University Press, I have benefited from the support, professionalism, and expertise of many people. Timothy Bent and Niko Pfund demonstrated early enthusiasm and sustained commitment to the project. Tim’s expert editing helped tighten the book and saved readers from my fondness for too many overlong quotations. Alyssa O’Connell was enormously helpful in the early stages of securing permissions; Mariah White picked up where Alyssa left off and saw the manuscript into production; and production editor Janet Foxman steered it expertly to completion. In addition, I am grateful to India Cooper for her careful and thoughtful copy editing, to Jeffrey Ward for his excellent maps, and to Meg for her help with the jacket design.

  Of course, any errors, omissions, or misstatements are nobody’s fault but my own.

  Book dedications expressing love and gratitude to my family have become routine, and I would not have it any other way. Marcia has been there since my very first book; Graeme and Meg grew up with me writing books. Having these three people as my world makes me think I have been rather more fortunate than anyone deserves to be.

  Plates

  Plate 1. George Washington, by Charles Willson Peale, 1772. The forty-year-old Washington posed for his first portrait wearing his old French and Indian War uniform. Gift of George Washington Curtis Lee, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.

  Plate 2. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted this portrait of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, also known as Judd’s Friend and Outacite, during his visit to London in 1762. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Plate 3. In 1790 Washington subscribed and made partial payment for copies of John Trumbull’s painting of The Death of General Montgomery. In March 1798 Trumbull sent him proofs of his first engraving and then four copies. PGW, Ret. 3:14, 361. Yale University Art Gallery.

  Plate 4. Trumbull sketched Louis Cook (Atiatoharongwen), whom he identified as an Oneida, and used him as the model for the Indian warrior in The Death of General Montgomery. Yale University Art Gallery.

  Plate 5. Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), by Gilbert Stuart, 1786. The famous Mohawk had his portrait painted several times and twice by Stuart. This one was formerly owned by the Duke of Northumberland.

  Plate 6. Portrait of Ki-on-twog-ky (Cornplanter), by F. Bartoli, 1796. The Seneca chief was a central figure in Washington’s dealings with the Six Nations. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

  Plate 7. Henry Knox, by Charles Willson Peale, c. 1784. Knox was Washing­ton’s secretary of war and the chief architect of the first president’s Indian policy. Courtesy of Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

  Plate 8. John Trumbull painted the seventy-five-year-old Onei­da chief Good Peter (Agwerondongwas) in 1792, the year before his death. Yale University Art Gallery.

  Plate 9. Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the Northwest Territory and the general defeated by the Northwestern Indian Confederacy in 1791. Portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1782. Courtesy of Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

  Plate 10. Timothy Pickering, by Charles Willson Peale, c. 1792. Pickering served as U.S. treaty commissioner, secretary of war (briefly), and secretary of state under Washington. Courtesy of Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

  Plate 11. Indians were a common sight on the streets of the nation’s capital during Washington’s administration, as illustrated in this view by English engraver William Birch, who came to Philadelphia in 1794. The City of Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania, North America, as it appeared in the Year 1800, consisting of twenty eight plates drawn and engraved by W. Birch & Son. Published by W. Birch, 1800. Dartmouth College Library.

  Plate 12. Washington enlisted the Seneca chief Sagoyewatha or Red Jacket as an intermediary in his negotiations with the Northwestern Confederacy. Red Jacket wears the peace medal Washington gave him. Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: E. C. Biddle, 1836).

  Plate 13. Apotheosis of Washington or Commemoration of Washington, by John James Barralet, 1802. Lady Liberty and an Indian figure mourn as Father Time and an angel carry Washington to heaven, where, apparently, Handsome Lake encountered him in his vision. Collection of Fraunces Tavern Museum, New York City.

  Introduction

  On monday afternoon, february 4, 1793, President George Washington sat down to dinner at his official home on Market Street in Philadelphia. Washington’s dinners were often elaborate affairs, with numerous guests, liveried servants, and plenty of food and wine. On this occasion Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Governor of the Northwest Territory Arthur St. Clair, and “the Gentlemen of the President’s family” dined with him because they were hosting an official delegation. Six Indian men, two Indian women, and two interpreters, representing the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, and Mascouten Nations, had traveled more than eight hundred miles from the Wabash and Illinois country to see the president. Before dining, they made speeches and presented Washington with a calumet pipe of peace and strings of wampum. Thomas Jefferson took notes.1

  Just one week later, Monday, February 11, Washington’s dinner guests included several chiefs from the Six Nations—the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois—a Christian Mahican named Hendrick Aupaumut, and Akiatonharónkwen or Atiatoharongwen, the son of an Abenaki mother and an African American father, who had been adopted by Mohawks but now lived in Oneida country, and who was usually called “Colonel Louis Cook” after Washington approved his commission for services during the Revolution. Before dinner the president thanked his Indian guests for their diplomatic efforts in carrying messages to tribes in the West.2

  Indian visits halted when yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793. Five thousand people died, and twenty thousand fled the city, including, for a time, Washington, Jefferson, Knox, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who survived a bout of the fever. A Chickasaw delegation on its way to see the president turned back on hearing of the epidemic in the fall.3 But the visits resumed the next year. On Saturday afternoon, June 14, 1794, Washington welcomed a delegation of thirteen Cherokee chiefs to his Market Street home in Philadelphia. They were in the city to conduct treaty negotiations, and the members of Washington’s cabinet—Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox, and Colonel Timothy Pickering—were also present. In accordance with Native American diplomatic protocol, everyone present smoked and passed around the long-stemmed pipe, in ritual preparation for good talks and in a sacred commitment to speak truth and honor pledges made. The president delivered a speech that had been written in advance. Several of the Cherokee chiefs spoke. Everyone ate and drank “plentifully of Cake & wine,” and the chiefs left “seemingly well pleased.”4 Four weeks later, Washington met with a delegation of Chickasaws he had invited to Philadelphia. He delivered a short speech, expressing his love for the Chickasaws and his gratitude for their assistance as scouts on American campaigns against the tribes north of the Ohio, and referred them to Henry Knox for other business. As usual, he puffed on the pipe, ate, and drank with them.5

  The image of Washington smoking and dining with Indian chiefs does not mesh with depictions of the Father of the Nation as stiff, formal, and aloof, but it reminds us that in Washington’s day the government dealt with Indians as foreign nations rather than domestic subjects. The still-precarious republic dared not ignore the still-powerful Indian nations on its frontiers. In dealing with the Indians, Henry Knox advised the new president, “every proper expedient that can be d
evised to gain their affections, and attach them to the interest of the Union, should be adopted.”6 Deeply conscious of how he performed in his role as the first president, and an accomplished political actor, Washington engaged in the performative aspects of Indian diplomacy, sharing the calumet pipe and exchanging strings and belts of wampum—purple and white beads made from marine shells and woven into geometric patterns that reinforced and recorded the speaker’s words. New York Indian commissioners explained it was Indian custom when meeting in council to “smoke their Pipes together, and to open their Minds to each other.”7 The most powerful man in the United States followed the custom of his Indian visitors.

  These Indian visits were not isolated events, and the Indians were not unwelcome dinner guests. Tribal delegations were a regular sight on the streets of Philadelphia and other colonial cities before the Revolution, and they continued to visit the new nation’s new capital in order to conduct diplomacy or just, as the missionary Rev. Samuel Kirkland put it, “to get a peep at the great American Chief.”8 Formal dinners were not just an occasion to share a meal but a form of political theater essential to establishing relationships between hosts and guests, providing an opportunity for the host to demonstrate hospitality, display wealth, and assert status through food and wine, seating arrangements and manners, and the meanings attached to all those things.9 In his first term in office, Washington dined, often more than once, with Mohawks, Senecas, Oneidas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks. In some cases, they came to Philadelphia because he had personally invited them. In later years, Washington occasionally hosted Indian dinner guests at Mount Vernon, and he continued to dine with Indian delegates to the very end of his presidency: in the last week of November 1796, he dined with four groups of Indians on four different days.10

  Washington’s entire Indian policy and his vision for the nation depended on the acquisition of Indian territory, but in 1793–94 he insisted that no one talk to the visiting Indians about buying their lands.11 These were perilous years for the young nation: hostile foreign powers, Britain in the North and Spain in the South, threatened American borders and interests; a powerful Indian confederacy north of the Ohio River had defeated one American army, destroyed another, and remained defiant; and what Washington called “the momentous occurrences in Europe” threatened to embroil the United States in conflict between Britain and Revolutionary France.12 Washington knew that Indian lands were vital to the future growth of the United States, but, as his gag order on talk of buying land illustrates, he also knew that Indians were vital to the national security, and on occasion the very survival, of the fragile republic.

  American history has largely forgotten what Washington knew. Narratives of national expansion and Indian conquest often neglect the complexity of Indian relations and ignore the reality of Indian power in the very formative years of the nation. Historians of the early Republic who focus on creating a new nation, the rivalry between Hamilton and Jefferson, and the challenges posed by relations with Britain and Revolutionary France often treat Indian affairs as tangential or even irrelevant.13 In fact, federal officials devoted much time, attention, and ink to conducting diplomatic relations with Indian politicians who, as the Moravian Rev. John Heckewelder observed, “display[ed] as much skill and dexterity, perhaps, as any people upon earth” in “the management of their national affairs.”14 Indian nations figured alongside European nations in the founding fathers’ thinking about the current and future state of the union. Indian leaders were adept at playing on American fears of British and Spanish backing for Indian resistance. Debates over the sovereignty of the United States and struggles over the extent and limits of federal authority and states’ rights centered on Indian treaties, and Indian issues, wars, and land policies were critical in developing a strong central government.15

  Multiple books tell us how Washington forged the nation, and how he handled partnerships and rivalries between various founding fathers, but nothing was more central than the relationship between the first president and the first Americans. From cradle to grave Washington inhabited a world built on the labor of African people and on the land of dispossessed Indian people. Indian people were not as ubiquitous in his daily life as the enslaved men, women, and children who planted, tended, and harvested his crops, cut his wood, prepared and served his food, washed his laundry, cleaned his house, and attended to his every need. Nevertheless, Indian people and Indian country loomed large in Washington’s world. His life intersected constantly with them, and events in Native America shaped the direction his life took, even if they occurred “offstage.” Indian land dominated his thinking and his vision for the future. Indian nations challenged the growth of his nation. A thick Indian strand runs through the life of George Washington as surely as it runs through the history of early America.

  Probably more books have been written about Washington than about any other American, but few of them pay much attention to Indians, let alone consider the role they played in his life. Certainly none of Washington’s biographers have shown any particular interest or expertise in Indian history. It would command more attention if biographers recounting Washington’s schemes to acquire and develop territory beyond the Appalachians replaced the term “western land”—which implies that it was an unclaimed resource—with “Indian land”—which acknowledges that it was someone’s homeland. Washington spent much of his adult life surveying and speculating in Indian lands. The Virginia of his youth was very much a British colony—linked to the mother country across the Atlantic by ties of loyalty, taste, and economy—but Virginians who ventured a hundred miles or so into the interior of the continent quickly found themselves in Indian territory. Virginia was at the forefront of colonial expansion westward, and Washington was at the forefront of Virginian expansion. Washington was ambitious, for himself and for his nation.16 His ambition led him down many paths, but it always led him back to Indian country.

  Washington’s first trips westward were as a surveyor, and he looked on Indian lands with a surveyor’s eye for the rest of his life. Surveyors transformed “wilderness” that disoriented and threatened settler colonists into an ordered landscape they could understand and utilize. In colonial Virginia surveyors enjoyed status; in Indian country they met with suspicion if not outright hostility. Armed with compass, chains, and logbooks, surveyors were the outriders of an advancing settler society intent on turning Indian homelands and hunting territories into a commodity that could be measured and bounded, bought and sold, and Indians knew it. When the frontier trader Christopher Gist did some surveying near the Delaware town of Shannopin, on the southeast side of the Allegheny River, in the fall of 1750, he did so on the quiet: “I . . . set my Compass privately, & took the Distance across the River, for I understood it was dangerous to let a Compass be seen among these Indians.”17

  Washington and his fellow Virginians speculated, surveyed, and encroached upon western lands on the assumption that permission from a king, governor, or council gave them the right to do so, and they often acted as though any Indians could cede the land of all Indians. But Indian people had something to say about it, and were intent on defending their rights and the territory that colonial governments and land companies carved up so cavalierly. “That it is a difficult matter to discover the true owner of any lands among the Indians is a gross error, which must arise from ignorance of the matter or from a cause which does not require explanation,” Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs in the North, observed to the Lords of Trade in 1764. “Each nation is perfectly well acquainted with its exact original bounds.”18 Indian country was a mosaic of tribal homelands and hunting territories, where individual nations guarding their own interests created a complicated landscape of multiple foreign policies, competing agendas, and shifting strategies. Speculating, surveying, and making land deals in Indian country required knowledge, quick learning, and fast footwork. It was no place for a novice.

  As a novice in Indian
country, Washington misread situations and mishandled Indian allies, and in the process sparked a war that in turn set in motion developments that led directly to the American Revolution. Blessed and blinkered by hindsight and Washington’s future role, historians of earlier generations often put the best face on his diplomatic and military expeditions into the Ohio country in 1753 and 1754, respectively. One described Washington’s journal of the first expedition, which he hurriedly wrote on his return and which was widely published, as “a testimonial to his maturity and capacity for leadership.”19 Another, glossing over the debacle of the second expedition, pronounced: “It is thus obvious that Washington was already demonstrating those qualities of courage and leadership indicative of his future greatness.”20 In reality, young Washington found himself out of his depth in a complex world of rumors, wampum belts, and tribal agendas. As events spiraled out of his control, he received a crash course in Indian diplomacy, intertribal politics, and frontier conflict under the tutelage of a formidable Seneca named Tanaghrisson.