The Indian World of George Washington Page 6
Virginia tobacco planters participated in an Atlantic exchange system that rendered them dependent on English merchants, and their fortunes were inextricably tied to European markets for their addictive crop.48 Great planters since the seventeenth century had relied on the consignment system: they shipped their tobacco to a merchant in England, who then sold the cargo on the planter’s account and purchased goods for the planter, charged to the account against the anticipated profits from the sale of tobacco. By the time young Washington was growing up and tobacco production was extending westward, Scots were getting in on the tobacco trade and changing the way business was done. Advantageously located for transatlantic trade on the west coast of Scotland, Glasgow merchants introduced direct trade: agents of the company purchased tobacco direct from the growers and then shipped it to Britain, where it was sold on the reexport market. The Glasgow firms established stores in Virginia, where planters could purchase goods with tobacco or on credit. The great Tidewater planters continued to operate on the consignment system to sell their large crops and to acquire the goods that marked their status, as well as the clothing, tools, and other supplies they furnished their slave labor force, but the direct-trade system suited smaller planters and farmers who were operating in the interior, and it came to dominate the tobacco industry as it extended westward.49
An indigenous plant from the Americas helped transform Glasgow from an old cathedral market town into an international financial and commercial center, and indeed an imperial city. It created a wealthy class of “tobacco lords.” Like Virginia planters, Glasgow tobacco lords were closely connected by marriage and kinship. Like George Washington, most bought landed estates, albeit in Scotland rather than the colonies, to give them economic security and entry into the lifestyle of the political and economic elite. One, George Buchanan, built “Virginia Mansion” on Virginia Street and purchased an estate in Lanarkshire called Mount Vernon.50
As Virginians negotiated deals with merchants across the Atlantic, they also had to negotiate with the Iroquois over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Surveyors and settlers in the Shenandoah Valley clashed with the Iroquois, whose right to travel west of the Blue Ridge had been confirmed at the Treaty of Albany in 1722. Lieutenant Governor Gooch continued diplomatic efforts to bring the Iroquois “to a nearer Correspondence, and a stricter alliance with this Country.”51 After a series of skirmishes threatened to produce open war, Virginia and the Six Nations (the Tuscaroras having joined the Iroquois League in 1722) met to resolve their issues in June and July 1744. Two hundred and fifty Iroquois men, women, and children traveled to the frontier town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to meet with commissioners William Beverley and Thomas Lee from Virginia, as well as representatives from Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was the first time the English held a major meeting with the Iroquois away from Albany.52 Six Nations chiefs and colonial officials discussed land disputes, frontier violence, and strengthening their relations. An Onondaga, Tachanoontia, announced: “All the World knows we conquered the several Nations living on Sasquehanna, Cohongoronta [the Potomac], and on the Back of the Great Mountains in Virginia.” By claiming dominion where their war parties had once ranged, the Iroquois created a fiction of conquest that the British readily embraced in their conduct of Indian affairs and their efforts to acquire other peoples’ lands. The Iroquois left Lancaster with £400 in goods and cash and assurances that they could travel unimpeded through Virginia into Catawba country. In return, they had signed a treaty that, on the basis of a dubious claim that they had conquered the original inhabitants of the area, ceded their claims to the Shenandoah Valley and the claims of other tribes for whom they claimed to speak. Or so they believed. The Virginians at the treaty had neglected to mention that the original royal charter granted the colony land “from sea to sea” and that the northern limits of the colony extended northwest from the Potomac River as far as Canada. As the Treaty of Lancaster was worded, the Iroquois actually handed over the entire Ohio country and much more. The treaty unleashed a flurry of land speculation in the Shenandoah Valley and beyond.53 George Washington was only twelve years old, but the Iroquois cession of other peoples’ lands at the Treaty of Lancaster pointed Virginia west, turned the Ohio country into a bitterly contested borderland, and set a stage that would shape his formative years and his thinking about the West for the rest of his life (see figure 1).
Figure 1 This map was published to accompany Washington’s Ohio journal, showing the extent of Virginia’s western claims.
virginians always looked west.54 Four large rivers running from the west and their fertile lands beckoned colonial settlers and gave them access to more lands in the interior of the continent. More than 380 miles in length, the Potomac River linked up with other river systems and connected the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys.55 Washington was born and lived most of his life in the region between the Potomac and Rappahannock known as the Northern Neck. Even among land-hungry Virginians, Northern Neck planters were notorious land speculators and developers. Great families like the Carters, Lees, and Fitzhughs, who held leadership positions in the House of Burgesses and dominated the social and political life in the older, settled areas of the region, took the lead in acquiring new lands for settlement. Robert “King” Carter built a fortune and a family dynasty on the ruthless acquisition of land and slaves: when he died he passed on to his descendants 333,000 acres of land and 829 slaves. For Northern Neck planters, and for Washington in particular, the West was not just an arena for speculation; it was key to the agricultural and commercial development of the Potomac River, which connected Virginia to the Ohio country.56 Virginian land dealers and settlers pushed west beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, spreading along the Shenandoah Valley and then across the Allegheny Mountains. In the span of a generation, between 1720 and 1754, most of the Piedmont and part of the valley was surveyed and twenty-five new counties formed. In an age of rampant territorial expansion, Virginia’s surveyors held the keys—or rather the chains and compasses—to convert public land to private property.57
Surveying and speculating went hand in hand. In Europe, surveyors mainly measured and mapped existing properties and verified earlier records; in America, they carved up Indian country and remade indigenous space to create extensive new properties. Surveyors used Gunter’s chain, designed in 1620 by an English clergyman and mathematician named Edmund Gunter, as the standard instrument for measuring distance. The 66-foot chain had 100 links. Ten chains measured 1 furlong; 80 chains equaled 1 mile. Ten square chains equaled 1 acre. Once planters and settlers had chosen their claims, surveyors roughly measured lengths of chains and links to gauge acreages of 50 acres or multiples thereof. A measurement of 6 chains and 25 links on a property running for 1 mile from a riverbank gave a total of 242,000 square yards, or 50 acres. “This was frontier math,” wrote the late Andro Linklater, author of Measuring America, “and it became second nature to anyone who wanted to own land.”58
Surveyors located good lands and helped establish clear title. They measured and staked out parcels of land with chains and pins and then produced a written report and a plat (a map of the property), which, duly recorded, gave their clients’ claims legal backing against squatters and rival claimants. All grants and purchases of land had to be platted by a licensed surveyor before the claims could be entered on the land registry and patented, so there was plenty of work for surveyors. County surveyors were responsible for carrying out work within their county borders, and each surveyor owed his appointment to the surveyor general of the colony, whose office in turn was a privilege of the College of William and Mary. The college did little or nothing to train, certify, and select surveyors; it simply received a portion of their fees. Because land ownership conveyed civil power in Virginia, surveyors and the property lines they ran could shape the contours of colonial politics, and surveyors often represented large landowners and large land companies. And because the surveyors were the first to venture out onto the new territo
ry, they had the opportunity to identify and acquire the best lands for themselves. In colonial Virginia, surveying was a lucrative and respectable occupation. In the Shenandoah Valley, Indians called a surveyor’s compass the “land stealer.”59
Simple descriptions of American territorial expansion depict families of settlers moving west to build new homes and new lives. However, in the early eighteenth century, wealthy speculators and surveyors often operated in advance of settlers and sometimes worked against them as planters. Large planters, or at least the agents and surveyors they deployed, often established their legal right to frontier property with a paper trail of surveys, plats, grants, deeds, and warrants before small farmers arrived on the scene. Settlers sought land for residence and subsistence; speculators and surveyors sought land for profits. They would realize those profits by selling or renting to settlers at some future date when the value of the lands had increased. Until then, their goal was often to exclude settlers. Close-knit networks of speculators and surveyors did much of the work of transforming Indian lands into real estate.60
From a young age and for the rest of his life, George Washington immersed himself in the land business. As a teenager he cut his teeth as a surveyor and caught the fever for speculating in western land. Applying Anglo-Virginian ideas of land ownership, he would worry little about Indian rights of occupancy and much about establishing his paper rights as he scrambled to amass a personal fortune.
Washington’s father had been a surveyor, and Washington received some rudimentary education in surveying as a youth. His first practical experience in backcountry surveying came in the spring of 1748.61 The sixteen-year-old was invited to tag along with a surveying party as a traveling companion for his friend and neighbor George William Fairfax, the twenty-four-year-old nephew of Lord Thomas Fairfax. Some ten thousand settlers, including Germans from Pennsylvania, were living in the Shenandoah Valley by this time, and the surveying party headed west to pin down boundaries where they were beginning to settle on his lordship’s lands. Washington’s journal of his trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond to the Shenandoah records his first experience roughing it on the frontier—he complained about the dirt and discomfort he had to endure—and marks the beginning of a lifelong obsession with western land.62
He also met his first “wild” Indians. At the mouth of the south branch of the Potomac in Maryland, the surveying party stopped at the trading post of one Thomas Cresap. Born in Skipton in Yorkshire in 1702, Cresap had migrated to America when he was fifteen and established himself as a frontier trader and land speculator. When “thirty odd Indians coming from war” arrived at the post, Washington penned a description of them in his diary. The surveyors gave the Indians liquor to encourage them to perform a “war dance,” and Washington described that as well. But he was not interested in them: “Nothing remarkable on Thursday but only being with the Indians all day so shall slip [sic] it.” He was not impressed by the Indians or by the German settlers he met, calling the latter “as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians.”63 The young Virginian seemed to hold in equal disdain the people whose lands he would take and the people he would recruit to rent those lands. It was an attitude he would find difficult to shake; as president, in addition to regarding frontier settlers as no better than Indians, he would frequently blame them for his real estate troubles and the nation’s Indian wars.64
After his first trip into the Virginia backcountry, Washington returned as a surveyor four times in the next five years.65 In the spring of 1749 (by which time he had evidently fallen in love with Sally Fairfax, who had married his friend George William in December), Washington helped survey the new port town of Alexandria on the Potomac. In July he was appointed surveyor of the newly formed Culpeper County. The appointment of a seventeen-year-old owed more to his connection to Lord Fairfax than to his experience in the field. Washington spent less than a year as county surveyor and carried out only one survey. Then he turned his attention west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where Lord Fairfax gave him steady work and more profitable opportunities surveying parcels of land for sale and settlement.66
In the spring of 1750, he was surveying in the Shenandoah Valley again. By October he had made enough money to buy 1,459 acres in the valley, most of it along Bullskin Creek in Frederick County. He was eighteen. It was the beginning of a career in land dealing and the first in a lifetime of land investments.67 In all, Washington conducted forty-five surveys west of the Blue Ridge.68 In three years he earned about £400 from surveying fees and took advantage of his position to acquire 2,315 acres of prime land in the
Shenandoah Valley.69 He did not survey professionally again, but he used his surveying skills for the rest of his life, even as president, acquiring new lands for himself by purchase or grant, defining and defending the boundaries of his holdings, and dividing them into profitable lots. Between 1747 and 1799 Washington surveyed or had surveyed more than two hundred tracts of land, and he acquired title to more than 65,000 acres in thirty-seven different locations. By the time he died, he owned more than 52,000 acres spread across Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, New York, and the Ohio Valley, in addition to lots in Virginian towns and Washington City.70
Taking a break from accumulating money and land, Washington accompanied his half brother Lawrence to Barbados in 1751 on what was supposed to be a recuperative trip for Lawrence’s tuberculosis. While there, George succumbed to smallpox, a disease since eradicated but still a dread killer in the eighteenth century. Fortunately, it was a mild case; he survived, pockmarked but immune for the rest of his life, and was back home in Virginia before Christmas. Lawrence was not so lucky; his health continued to deteriorate, and he returned home to die the next year.
When his father died in 1743, eleven-year-old George Washington inherited Ferry Farm on the Rappahannock River, where he lived with his mother and siblings.71 Lawrence, the eldest son, inherited the much larger farm on the Potomac, which he renamed Mount Vernon after the British admiral under whom he had served. When Lawrence died in 1752, Mount Vernon passed to his daughter, Sarah. When she died young two years later, George began to rent the estate from his brother’s widow, Ann, who had remarried and moved away. When Ann died in 1761, he inherited Mount Vernon outright.
Lawrence’s death also left vacant his position of adjutant general, which carried the rank of major and responsibility for raising, organizing, and training the local militia when called up by the colonial government. Washington took the moment to step into a military career. When the governor and council divided the adjutancy into four districts, Washington applied for the Northern Neck, where he lived. That post went to William Fitzhugh, and Washington was awarded the Southern District instead. In February 1753, just before his twenty-first birthday, he took the oath of office and the military title that went with it. When Fitzhugh resigned after just a few months, Washington successfully lobbied Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie and the Virginia Council to secure the vacant Northern Neck adjutancy.72 With no military experience whatsoever, he was now a soldier as well as a land speculator.
both career paths led to the Ohio country. Virginians like Washington who ventured there were like blind men feeling an elephant: they touched the edges of an Indian world they could barely imagine, a continent inhabited by countless Indian nations, confederacies, villages, bands, and clans that built and sustained relations with one other; that faced west, north, and south as much as they faced east to confront a growing English presence; and that conducted their own foreign policies in a kaleidoscope of shifting positions. Political power was diffused; communities were generally autonomous, and they reached decisions by consensus. Individuals were expected to subordinate their own interests and ambitions to the good of the community. Unlike elite Virginians, Indian leaders reckoned wealth in relatives rather than in land, slaves, and money, but like Virginians, they measured their influence in the extent, and status, of personal connections—in their relatives and the followers who
gave them their allegiance. Communities maintained order by custom, clan obligations, and the force of public opinion. Throughout the eastern woodlands, in villages nestled in fertile river bottoms, people sustained balanced economies based on extensive cornfields, hunting, and trade. A communal ethic of sharing and a moral economy of reciprocity provided practical ways of dealing with periods of plenty and scarcity. Clan law prohibited incest—marrying a member of the same clan—and regulated homicide: a killing, whether by a member of the community or an outsider, demanded a killing to balance the death and restore order. People kept the world in balance by prayer, ritual, and ceremony, and kinship with the spirit world. Spiritual forces permeated everyday lives and possessed and exerted power. Access to spiritual power required observing proper rituals, conducting appropriate ceremonies, and behaving in respectful ways—with other people, with animals, with the natural environment. In the absence of centralized government, written laws, courts, police or penal systems, or churches, Virginians regarded Indian societies and ways of life as wild and disorderly; they did not and could not see that Indian beliefs, ethics, and obligations gave their lives and their world meaning, order, and cohesion.73 Yet Washington and his fellow Virginians also saw things and ways of ordering the world that Indians did not see: invisible lines on the landscape drawn on surveyors’ plats and in deed books, and a future of fields, pastures, and meadows.74
In part, Virginians failed to see order in Indian country because their very presence made things increasingly disorderly. What the Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear said about the trans-Mississippi West in the nineteenth century was equally true of the trans-Appalachian West in the eighteenth: it only became wild when white men arrived. Escalating conflict, epidemic diseases, and entanglement in Atlantic trade networks brought change, chaos, and catastrophe to societies that strove for continuity and harmony. Widening imperial and tribal contests made war a way of life for many communities, demanding and diverting more of their energies and resources, and upsetting balances between generations, between genders, and between civil chiefs and war chiefs that had helped curtail violence in the past. The Cherokees in the southern Appalachians may have numbered about twenty thousand people when Washington was born; six years later smallpox struck. The trader James Adair said it cut their population in half. He probably exaggerated, but the epidemic was devastating enough.75 Meanwhile, Cherokee and other southeastern hunters armed with guns killed more and more deer and exchanged thousands of deerskins to English traders. By the late 1750s Savannah, Georgia, was annually exporting more than 200,000 pounds of deerskins to England; Charleston, South Carolina, more than 355,000 pounds. The English tanning and leather-dressing industry converted them into fine-quality gloves, shoes, hats, and buckskins. English traders brought pack trains carrying cloth, guns, powder and shot, metal pots, iron axe heads, steel knives, traps, tools, and rum to Cherokee towns and furnished goods on credit charged against a hunter’s anticipated take of deerskins. Like Virginia planters, Cherokee hunters became dependent on manufactured goods acquired via the Atlantic trade. Cherokees could not “live independent of the English,” said one chief in 1750. “The Cloathes we wear, we cannot make ourselves, they are made for us. We use their Ammunition with which we kill Deer. We cannot make our Guns, they are made to us. Every necessary Thing in Life we must have from the white People.”76