Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Certainly we would understand our colonial forefathers’ being exercised in the extreme if the king willy-nilly began to confiscate their homes, their farms, or their factories—but that was not the complaint. He was doing no such thing. The grievance was that George III was imposing limits or conditions on new acquisitions; that is, he was restricting the incentives for land speculation! Why did this prominent, specific issue constitute so dire a deviation from painful but tolerable practices that it warranted rebellion? Because it was the dividing line between great wealth and power for the revolution’s leaders and their diminishment at the hands of the Crown!

The complete list of grievances is, as one would expect, extensive. It culminates with this complaint:

He [the King] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This final grievance is, as well, worthy of our reflection for it speaks to the earlier one that the king was “raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” This connection is apparent in two seemingly unimportant words: “our frontiers.”

How remarkable a choice of language! How audaciously the signatories chose to view the vast frontier beyond their borders as their frontier, as opposed to Britain’s frontiers in North America as King George III had declared it. Moreover, by the use of such language, they completely overlooked the further claims of the French, the Spaniards, and, most notably, the territories controlled by the “Indian Savages” who were, after all, the original and rightful settlers on these lands (and recognized as such in later years by the Supreme Court). It seems implicit in their declaration about “our frontier”—despite there being almost no English settlers yet present in that frontier—that the revolutionaries already had some nascent notion of manifest destiny, a concept we normally associate with the attitudes of US citizens in the time of President James Polk more than a half century later. Indeed, so eager were the founders to seize the frontier for themselves that they reprised the claim to “our” frontier verbatim as a justification for the War of 1812.

Perhaps, in defense of the founding fathers, we might argue that the idea that the “Indian Savages” had a rightful claim to these lands is an anachronistic application of modern-day standards. But were their own claims rightful? Many wealthy individuals besides Washington and the Ohio Company—for there were many other land speculation companies up and down the frontier—were actively and aggressively engaged in land acquisition at the expense of the Indians living in territories beyond the control of the signers and their supporters. Indeed, although Washington’s interest in the Ohio Company had been familial, and not as an investor, he was an investor in the Dismal Swamp Company, the Walpole Grant, the Mississippi Company, and other land speculation companies. He was an avid and well-diversified land holder. As Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have reported, Washington “was obsessed with the idea of amassing land in the West, tremendous amounts of it, putting it all under cultivation and bringing commerce and people there. This cycle of acquisition and development began very much as the expression of a ‘private’ self, of private ambition and private interest. He was fully determined that it should bring him wealth, possessions, and status. He would in fact expend much time and effort on this, revealing considerable executive capacities in the course of it, while some of his dealings—especially with men who seemed to get in the way of his projects and ambitions—were exceedingly sharp and even ruthless.”25 The British and the Indians were among the “men who seemed to get in the way of his projects and ambitions.”

What might the founding fathers have known about the legitimacy of the “Indian Savages” and their claims from reading history or from their own experiences? The history of Western thought at the time certainly includes ideas that run contrary to those expressed in the Declaration, and which might have been known to its authors, including especially Thomas Jefferson, a widely read and well-educated man.

They might have known the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, who, in 1532, had argued against the Spanish Crown’s usurpation of the rights of the Indians (“barbarians,” as he refers to them) to their land and their lives. And perhaps the Declaration’s signatories were familiar with the writings, or at least the ideas, of Adriaen van der Donck (ca. 1620–ca.1655). A prominent leader of New Amsterdam, as the head of the city’s governing body, the Board of Nine, under Governor General Peter Stuyvesant, Van der Donck was the author of what remains in large measure the fundamentals of the Charter of the City of New York, as well as the first to argue for many of the distinct freedoms that characterize the American melting pot and that were captured in so many of the Declaration’s grievances and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he was the author of a highly successful “best seller” that described the quality of life in New Netherlands. In this amazing work he made very clear that the Indians, including Indian women, are as smart and civilized as Europeans, they learn quickly when they are schooled, and they had much to offer in terms of superior knowledge of agriculture in the soil and weather conditions of New Netherlands.

How about George Washington’s personal, firsthand knowledge of Indian concerns and practices? Remember when young George Washington, at Robert Dinwiddie’s behest, went into the Ohio Country to confront the French? In the course of carrying out his orders, he had occasion to align with the local Algonquin Indians. An agreement had been reached between the Ohio Company and the Logstown Algonquins, led by a man known to Washington as Half-King. Half-King, who you may recall was the person who killed the French commander in the Jumonville Affair, was a key local chief and the designated representative of the Onandaga Council, the legislative body of the Iroquois nation.26 As such he represented an important and sizable body of Indian interests. From Washington’s perspective, the agreement between the Logstown Algonquins and the Ohio Company meant that Half-King, and the tribes for which he was essentially proconsul, were allied with the English.

With that understanding and with his orders to remove the French in mind, Major Washington called upon Half-King to relate his recent interactions with the local representatives of France. The response, written in George Washington’s own hand, with his original emphases noted here, is most instructive. Half-King related how he had told the French to leave, and went on to tell the French, as Washington reported,

If you had come in a peaceable manner, like our brothers, the English , we should not have been against your trading with us, as they do; BUT TO COME, FATHERS, AND BUILD HOUSES UPON OUR LAND AND TO TAKE IT BY FORCE IS WHAT WE CANNOT SUBMIT TO. . . . the Great Being above allowed it to be a place of residence to us, so, Fathers, I desire you to withdraw as I have done [desired of] our brothers the English . . . I lay it down as a trial for both, to see which will have the greatest regard for it, and that side we will stand by.27

It is evident that the young George Washington understood that Half-King’s allegiance depended on who respected his people’s claim to the land. It is also evident that he viewed Half-King as a legitimate interlocutor and not as some monstrous Indian Savage. If nothing else, we know he recognized that he needed to cooperate with Half-King and he clearly anticipated a quid pro quo—Half-King would honor his commitments as long as Washington and the British did the same. However, Washington’s overall mission was not to respect that land claim but rather to expel the French and to open the way to the English without regard to Indian rights.