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

Washington’s experience notwithstanding, you may still object on the grounds that he, after all, was not a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, nor a man with great knowledge or understanding of the Indians, at least not at the time just related, and so his understanding of the Indians may have been entirely different from the experiences of the actual signers. Then, let’s go to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. He, after all, was not only a signatory but was an author of the Declaration, including “the merciless Indian Savages” passage. Jefferson wrote in 1785, “I beleive [ sic ] the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman.”28 On another occasion, Jefferson, writing about the settler practice of retaliatory, disproportionate slaughter of Indians, noted that their “known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions, . . .” Here is his description, in his own words, from page 37 of his handwritten Notes on the State of Virginia :

In the spring of the year 1774, a robbery and murder were committed on an inhabitant of the frontiers of Virginia, by two Indians of the Shawanee tribe. The neighbouring whites, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way. Col. Cresap, a man infamous for the many murders he had committed on those much-injured people, collected a party, and proceeded down the Kanhaway in quest of vengeance. Unfortunately a canoe of women and children, with one man only, was seen coming from the opposite shore, unarmed, and unsuspecting an hostile attack from the whites. Cresap and his party concealed themselves on the bank of the river, and the moment the canoe reached the shore, singled out their objects, and, at one fire, killed every person in it.29

Unlike the Declaration’s description of Indians as being “merciless savages,” here Jefferson, describing an event that occurred but a scant two years before the Declaration, reports that they were “much-injured people.” And in his Notes , he further described Colonel Cresap in terms reminiscent of his condemnation of Indians in the Declaration: as a man “whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

We have articulated the verbatim description of Indians, their expectations, and the ways they were maligned, as offered by two of the most important of America’s founding fathers. We could offer many more such accounts but we believe the point is made. The Declaration offered an exceedingly ugly view of the Indian tribes and linked their maliciousness to the Crown’s decision to protect their access to land coveted by the colonists, or at least some of them. Now we wish to pull the argument together. The king’s actions from 1763 to 1769 put the wealth and future ambitions of the founding fathers at risk. They needed to be rid of British rule and its threat to their welfare. The king furthermore, for his own short-term political interest, was aligning with the Indians at the expense of the colonists. The Indians were the fundamental on-site, ongoing threat to the interests of the land-speculator founders, and in the view of our great leaders, they needed to be tamed to do as the land speculators wanted, or they needed to be removed from the scene. As George Washington emphasized in all-capital letters, in relating Half-King’s message: “TO COME, FATHERS, AND BUILD HOUSES UPON OUR LAND AND TO TAKE IT BY FORCE IS WHAT WE CANNOT SUBMIT TO.” That, at least as much as the fear of taxation without representation, seems to have been the motivation for revolution and the ouster of the English and oppression of the Indians.

What If?

WE HAVE SEEN THAT GEORGE WASHINGTON AND MANY OF THE other leaders of the American Revolution were men of extraordinary wealth who had good reason to fear the loss of that wealth under the prevailing policies of the British government. We have also seen that many of the founding fathers were at each other’s throats, sometimes due to personal strains, more often due to policy differences. Washington and Jefferson had strained relations, as did Hamilton and Jefferson, Adams and Jefferson, Adams and Washington, Madison and Hamilton, Madison and Washington, and so forth. These strains provided an opportunity that was poorly exploited by the king and his prime ministers, especially between 1763 and 1776 (that is, by George Grenville, 1763–1765, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 1765–1766, William Pitt, 1766–1768, Fitzroy, 1768–1770, and Lord North, 1770–1782). To borrow a later description of British colonial policy, George III had an opportunity to divide and conquer or, either failing that or in conjunction with it, to mollify. The opportunity to do either was squandered. With hindsight that seems eminently to the good of the United States, but back in 1776 when there was no United States, everyone might well have judged a different approach by the king as being a wiser, more beneficial policy.

The Seven Years’ War, and its subsidiary, the French and Indian War in North America, greatly increased Britain’s indebtedness, prompting the government, which was near bankruptcy, to seek new ways to raise revenue. When Grenville’s government introduced the Stamp Act, the British, as we have noted, imposed a great cost on the wealthiest colonial leaders, especially those either with large landholdings (such as George Washington) or those with lucrative law practices (such as Mercer and Adams). The outcry against the Stamp Act led to its repeal under Watson-Wentworth, clearly signaling the colonists that they could exert enough pressure on the British government to convince it to change course, a dangerous precedent for any sitting government. No sooner was Watson-Wentworth out than Pitt came in and imposed new taxes under the Townsend Acts. And so it went, with the pressure for revolution mounting in the colonies as its leaders saw their wealth and station put at risk by a British government that, from the colonial leaders’ perspective, sought to exploit them.

What might the king and his first minister have done differently to secure revenue from the colonies and diminish the threat of rebellion? Recall that the colonial Stamp Act Congress famously declared that no Englishman could be taxed without representation in Parliament. This was a well-established legal precedent since Edward I signed Confirmatio Cartarum in 1297. True, as in the case of George III, the legal precedent was often violated in practice but still, there it sat as a tool used against the Crown by the colonists. The Crown, instead, could have turned it into an advantage.

It was important to many of the colonial leaders to be seen to be and treated as Englishmen. One of George Washington’s great sources of resentment, for example, was that in the 1750s and 1760s he was not given the same respect—or the same salary—as a regular British officer of his rank. Recall also that he and many of the other leading revolutionaries were reluctant to choose rebellion over an accommodation with the British government. The more radical Madison, as we have noted, accused the Tidewater gentry—Washington, the Lee family, George Mason, and many other leading lights of Virginia—as being too soft toward the king because they looked for compromise, while such men as Patrick Henry and James Madison promoted revolution.

Imagine that the king, rather than going back and forth on taxing the colonists, had instead decided to pay down the national debt with a general tax on all Englishmen. Imagine further that he treated the colonists as if they were Englishmen every bit as much as anyone living in England. He could easily have done so by granting representation in Parliament to the colonists in a manner proportionate to their population relative to the population in Britain. Indeed, in the Wealth of Nations published in 1776, Adam Smith recommends just that, stating that “there is not the least probability that the British constitution would be hurt by the union of Great Britain with her colonies.”30 That would have translated into 25 percent of parliamentary seats filled by representatives chosen by the colonists who, in turn, might have apportioned those seats according to the population of each colony or by whatever other means they might have agreed to.