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

(8ayeriSChe :'1 \ StaatsbibliottJek !

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

2

'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

1ntroduction

3

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

1ntroduction

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.

1ntroduction

7

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