Books: The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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Frederic Austin Ogg >> The Old Northwest, A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond
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The ink with which the Treaty of Paris was signed was hardly dry
before the King and his ministers were confronted with the task
of providing government for the new possessions and of solving
problems of land tenure and trade. Still more imperative were
measures to conciliate the Indians; for already Pontiac's
rebellion had been in progress four months, and the entire back
country was aflame. It must be confessed that a continental
wilderness swarming with murderous savages was an inheritance
whose aspect was by no means altogether pleasing to the English
mind.
The easiest solution of the difficulty was to let things take
their course. Let seaboard populations spread at will over the
new lands; let them carry on trade in their own way, and make
whatever arrangements with the native tribes they desire.
Colonies such as Virginia and New York, which had extensive
western claims, would have been glad to see this plan adopted.
Strong objections, however, were raised. Colonies which had no
western claims feared the effects of the advantages which their
more fortunate neighbors would enjoy. Men who had invested
heavily in lands lying west of the mountains felt that their
returns would be diminished and delayed if the back country were
thrown open to settlers. Some people thought that the Indians had
a moral right to protection against wholesale white invasion of
their hunting-grounds, and many considered it expedient, at all
events, to offer such protection.
After all, however, it was the King and his ministers who had it
in their power to settle the question; and from their point of
view it was desirable to keep the western territories as much as
possible apart from the older colonies, and to regulate, with
farsighted policy, their settlement and trade. Eventually, it was
believed, the territories would be cut into new colonies; and
experience with the seaboard dependencies was already such as to
suggest the desirability of having the future settlements more
completely under government control from the beginning.
After due consideration, King George and his ministers made known
their policy on October 7, 1763, in a comprehensive proclamation.
The first subject dealt with was government. Four new provinces--
"Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada"*--were set up
in the ceded territories, and their populations were guaranteed
all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants of the
older colonies. The Mississippi Valley, however, was included in
no one of these provinces; and, curiously, there was no provision
whatever for the government of the French settlements lying
within it. The number and size of these settlements were
underestimated, and apparently it was supposed that all the
habitants and soldiers would avail themselves of their privilege
of withdrawing from the ceded territories.
* The Proclamation of 1763 drew the boundaries of "four distinct
and separate governments." Grenada was to include the island of
that name, together with the Grenadines. Dominico, St. Vincent,
and Tobago. The Floridas lay south of the bounds of Georgia and
east of the Mississippi River. The Apalachicola River was to be
the dividing line between East and West Florida. Quebec included
the modern province of that name and that part of Ontario lying
north of a line drawn from Lake Nipissing to the point where the
forty-fifth parallel intersects the St. Lawrence River.
The disposition made of the great rectangular area bounded by the
Alleghanies, the Mississippi, the Lakes, and the Gulf, was fairly
startling. With fine disregard of the chartered claims of the
seaboard colonies and of the rights of pioneers already settled
on frontier farms, the whole was erected into an Indian reserve.
No "loving subject" might purchase land or settle in the
territory without special license; present residents should
"forthwith remove themselves"; trade should be carried on only by
permit and under close surveillance; officers were to be
stationed among the tribes to preserve friendly relations and to
apprehend fugitives from colonial justice.
The objects of this drastic scheme were never clearly stated.
Franklin believed that the main purpose was to conciliate the
Indians. Washington agreed with him. Later historians have
generally thought that what the English Government had chiefly in
mind was to limit the bounds of the seaboard colonies, with a
view to preserving imperial control over colonial affairs. Very
likely both of these motives weighed heavily in the decision. At
all events, Lord Hillsborough, who presided over the meetings of
the Lords of Trade when the proclamation was discussed,
subsequently wrote that the "capital object" of the Government's
policy was to confine the colonies so that they should be kept in
easy reach of British trade and of the authority necessary to
keep them in due subordination to the mother country, and he
added that the extension of the fur trade depended "entirely upon
the Indians being undisturbed in the possession of their
hunting-grounds."*
* But as Lord Hillsborough had just taken office and adopted
bodily a policy formulated by his predecessor, he is none too
good an authority. See Alvord's "Mississippi Valley in British
Politics," vol. I, pp. 203-4.
It does not follow that the King and his advisers intended that
the territory should be kept forever intact as a forest preserve.
They seem to have contemplated that, from time to time, cessions
would be secured from the Indians and tracts would be opened for
settlement. But every move was to be made in accordance with
plans formulated or authorized in England. The restrictive policy
won by no means universal assent in the mother country. The Whigs
generally opposed it, and Burke thundered against it as "an
attempt to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by
an express charter, has given to the children of men."
In America there was a disposition to take the proclamation
lightly as being a mere sop to the Indians. But wherever it was
regarded seriously, it was hotly resented. After passing through
an arduous war, the colonists were ready to enter upon a new
expansive era. The western territories were theirs by charter, by
settlement, and by conquest. The Indian population, they
believed, belonged to the unprogressive and unproductive peoples
of the earth. Every acre of fertile soil in America called to the
thrifty agriculturist; every westward flowing river invited to
trade and settlement as well, therefore, seek to keep back the
ocean with a broom as to stop by mere decree the tide of
homeseekers. Some of the colonies made honest attempts to compel
the removal of settlers from the reserved lands beyond their
borders, and Pennsylvania went so far as to decree the death
penalty for all who should refuse to remove. But the law was
never enforced.
The news of the cession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi to
the English brought consternation to the two or three thousand
French people living in the settlements of the Kaskaskia,
Illinois, and Wabash regions. The transfer of the western bank to
Spain did not become known promptly, and for months the habitants
supposed that by taking up their abode on the opposite side of
the stream they would continue under their own flag. Many of them
crossed the Mississippi to find new abodes even after it was
announced that the land had passed to Spain.
>From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the
Wabash, and the Illinois had remained, in French hands, mere
sprawling villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have
contained in its most flourishing days two thousand people, many
of them voyageurs, coureurs-de-bois, converted Indians, and
transients of one sort or another. In 1765 there were not above
seventy permanent families. Few of the towns, indeed, attained a
population of more than two or three hundred. All French colonial
enterprise had been based on the assumption that settlers would
be few. The trader preferred it so, because settlements meant
restrictions upon his traffic. The Jesuit was of the same mind,
because such settlements broke up his mission field. The
Government at Paris forbade the emigration of the one class of
people that cared to emigrate, the Huguenots.
Though some of the settlements had picturesque sites and others
drew distinction from their fortifications, in general they
presented a drab appearance. There were usually two or three
long, narrow streets, with no paving, and often knee-deep with
mud. The houses were built on either side, at intervals
sufficient to give space for yards and garden plots, each
homestead being enclosed with a crude picket fence. Wood and
thatch were the commonest building materials, although stone was
sometimes used; and the houses were regularly one story high,
with large vine-covered verandas. Land was abundant and cheap.
Every enterprising settler had a plot for himself, and as a rule
one large field, or more, was held for use in common. In these,
the operations of ploughing, sowing, and reaping were carefully
regulated by public ordinance. Occasionally a village drew some
distinction from the proximity of a large, well-managed estate,
such as that of the opulent M. Beauvais of Kaskaskia, in whose
mill and brewery more than eighty slaves were employed.
Agriculture was carried on somewhat extensively, and it is
recorded that, in the year 1746 alone, when there was a shortage
of foodstuffs at New Orleans, the Illinois settlers were able to
send thither "upward of eight hundred thousand weight of flour."
Hunting and trading, however, continued to be the principal
occupations; and the sugar, indigo, cotton, and other luxuries
which the people were able to import directly from Europe were
paid for mainly with consignments of furs, hides, tallow, and
beeswax. Money was practically unknown in the settlements, so
that domestic trade likewise took the form of simple barter.
Periods of industry and prosperity alternated with periods of
depression, and the easy-going habitants--"farmers, hunters,
traders by turn, with a strong admixture of unprogressive Indian
blood"--tended always to relapse into utter indolence.
Some of these French towns, however, were seats of culture; and
none was wholly barren of diversions. Kaskaskia had a Jesuit
college and likewise a monastery. Cahokia had a school for Indian
youth. Fort Chartres, we are gravely told, was "the center of
life and fashion in the West." If everyday existence was humdrum,
the villagers had always the opportunity for voluble conversation
"each from his own balcony"; and there were scores of Church
festivals, not to mention birthdays, visits of travelers or
neighbors, and homecomings of hunters and traders, which invited
to festivity. Balls and dances and other merrymakings at which
the whole village assembled supplied the wants of a people
proverbially fond of amusement. Indeed, French civilization in
the Mississippi and Illinois country was by no means without
charm.
Kaskaskia, in the wonderfully fertile "American Bottom,"
maintained its existence, in spite of the cession to the English,
as did also Vincennes farther east on the Wabash. Fort Chartres,
a stout fortification whose walls were more than two feet thick,
remained the seat of the principal garrison, and some traces of
French occupancy survived on the Illinois. Cahokia was deserted,
save for the splendid mission-farm of St. Sulpice, with its
thirty slaves, its herd of cattle, and its mill, which the
fathers before returning to France sold to a thrifty Frenchman
not averse to becoming an English subject. A few posts were
abandoned altogether. Some of the departing inhabitants went back
to France; some followed the French commandant, Neyon de
Villiers, down the river to New Orleans; many gathered up their
possessions, even to the frames and clapboards of their houses,
and took refuge in the new towns which sprang up on the western
bank. One of these new settlements was Ste. Genevieve,
strategically located near the lead mines from which the entire
region had long drawn its supplies of shot. Another, which was
destined to greater importance, was St. Louis, established as a
trading post on the richly wooded bluffs opposite Cahokia by
Pierre Laclede in 1764.
Associated with Laclede in his fur-trading operations at the new
post was a lithe young man named Pierre Chouteau. In 1846--
eighty-two years afterwards--Francis Parkman sat on the spacious
veranda of Pierre Chouteau's country house near the city of St.
Louis and heard from the lips of the venerable merchant stories
of Pontiac, Saint-Ange, Croghan, and all the western worthies,
red and white, of two full generations. "Not all the magic of a
dream," the historian remarks, "nor the enchantments of an
Arabian tale, could outmatch the waking realities which were to
rise upon the vision of Pierre Chouteau. Where, in his youth, he
had climbed the woody bluff, and looked abroad on prairies dotted
with bison, he saw, with the dim eye of his old age, the land
darkened for many a furlong with the clustered roofs of the
western metropolis. For the silence of the wilderness, he heard
the clang and turmoil of human labor, the din of congregated
thousands; and where the great river rolls down through the
forest, in lonely grandeur, he saw the waters lashed into foam
beneath the prows of panting steamboats, flocking to the broad
levee."
Pontiac's war long kept the English from taking actual possession
of the western country. Meanwhile Saint-Ange, commanding the
remnant of the French garrison at Fort Chartres, resisted as best
he could the demands of the redskins for assistance against their
common enemy and hoped daily for the appearance of an English
force to relieve him his difficult position. In the spring of
1764 an English officer, Major Loftus, with a body of troops
lately employed in planting English authority in "East Florida"
and "West Florida," set out from New Orleans to take possession
of the up-river settlements. A few miles above the mouth of the
Red, however, the boats were fired on, without warning, from both
banks of the stream, and many of the men were killed or wounded.
The expedition retreated down the river with all possible speed.
This display of faintheartedness won the keen ridicule of the
French, and the Governor, D'Abadie, with mock magnanimity,
offered an escort of French soldiery to protect the party on its
way back to Pensacola! Within a few months a second attempt was
projected, but news of the bad temper of the Indians caused the
leader, Captain Pittman, to turn back after reaching New Orleans.
Baffled in this direction, the new commander-in-chief, General
Gage, resolved to accomplish the desired end by an expedition
from Fort Pitt. Pontiac, however, was known to be still plotting
vengeance at that time, and it seemed advisable to break the way
for the proposed expedition by a special mission to placate the
Indians. For this delicate task Sir William Johnson selected a
trader of long experience and of good standing among the western
tribes, George Croghan. Notwithstanding many mishaps, the plan
was carried out. With two boats and a considerable party of
soldiers and friendly Delawares, Croghan left Fort Pitt in May,
1765. As he descended the Ohio he carefully plotted the river's
windings and wrote out an interesting description of the fauna
and flora observed. All went well until he reached the mouth of
the Wabash. There the party was set upon by a band of Kickapoos,
who killed half a dozen of his men. Fluent apologies were at once
offered. They had made the attack, they explained, only because
the French had reported that the Indians with Croghan's band
were Cherokees, the Kickapoos' most deadly enemies. Now that
their mistake was apparent, the artful emissaries declared, their
regret was indeed deep.
All of this was sheer pretense, and Croghan and his surviving
followers were kept under close guard and were carried along with
the Kickapoo band up the Wabash to Vincennes, where the trader
encountered old Indian friends who soundly rebuked the captors
for their inhospitality. Croghan knew the Indian nature too well
to attempt to thwart the plans of his "hosts." Accordingly he
went out with the band to the upper Wabash post Ouiatanon, where
he received deputation after deputation from the neighboring
tribes, smoked pipes of peace, made speeches, and shook hands
with greasy warriors by the score. Here came a messenger from
Saint-Ange asking him to proceed to Fort Chartres. Here, also,
Pontiac met him, and, after being assured that the English had no
intention of enslaving the natives, declared that he would no
longer stand in the conquerors' path. Though in unexpected
manner, Croghan's mission was accomplished, and, with many
evidences of favor from the natives, he went on to Detroit and
thence to Niagara, where he reported to Johnson that the
situation in the West was ripe for the establishment of English
sovereignty.
There was no reason for further delay, and Captain Thomas
Sterling was dispatched with a hundred Highland veterans to take
ever the settlements. Descending the Ohio from Fort Pitt, the
expedition reached Fort Chartres just as the frosty air began to
presage the coming of winter. On October 10, 1765,--more than two
and a half years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris,--
Saint-Ange made the long-desired transfer of authority. General
Gage's high-sounding proclamation was read, the British flag was
run up, and Sterling's red-coated soldiery established itself in
the citadel. In due time small detachments were sent to Vincennes
and other posts; and the triumph of the British power over
Frenchman and Indian was complete. Saint-Ange retired with his
little garrison to St. Louis, where, until the arrival of a
Spanish lieutenant-governor in 1770, he acted by common consent
as chief magistrate.
The creoles who passed under the English flag suffered little
from the change. Their property and trading interests were not
molested, and the English commandants made no effort to displace
the old laws and usages. Documents were written and records were
kept in French as well as English. The village priest and the
notary retained their accustomed places of paternal authority.
The old idyllic life went on. Population increased but little;
barter, hunting, and trapping still furnished the means of a
simple subsistence; and with music, dancing, and holiday
festivities the light-hearted populace managed to crowd more
pleasure into a year than the average English frontiersman got in
a lifetime.
For a year or two after the European pacification of 1763 Indian
disturbances held back the flood of settlers preparing to enter,
through the Alleghany passes, the upper valleys of the westward
flowing rivers. Neither Indian depredations nor proclamations of
kings, however, could long interpose an effectual restraint. The
supreme object of the settlers was to obtain land. Formerly there
was land enough for all along the coasts or in the nearer
uplands. But population, as Franklin computed, was doubling in
twenty-five years; vacant areas had already been occupied; and
desirable lands had been gathered into great speculative
holdings. Newcomers were consequently forced to cross the
mountains--and not only newcomers, but all residents who were
still land-hungry and ambitious to better their condition.
To such the appeal of the great West was irresistible. The
English Government might indeed regard the region as a "barren
waste" or a "profitless wilderness," but not so the Scotch-Irish,
Huguenot, and Palatine homeseekers who poured by the thousands
through the Chesapeake and Delaware ports. Pushing past the
settled seaboard country, these rugged men of adventure plunged
joyously into the forest depths and became no less the founders
of the coming nation than were the Pilgrims and the Cavaliers.
Ahead of the home-builder, however, went the speculator. It has
been remarked that "from the time when Joliet and La Salle first
found their way into the heart of the great West up to the
present day when far-off Alaska is in the throes of development,
'big business' has been engaged in western speculation."* In
pre-revolutionary days this speculation took the form of
procuring, by grant or purchase, large tracts of western land
which were to be sold and colonized at a profit. Franklin was
interested in a number of such projects. Washington, the Lees,
and a number of other prominent Virginians were connected with an
enterprise which absorbed the old Ohio Company; and in 1770
Washington, piloted by Croghan, visited the Ohio country with a
view to the discovery of desirable areas. Eventually he acquired
western holdings amounting to thirty-three thousand acres, with a
water-front of sixteen miles on the Ohio and of forty miles on
the Great Kanawha.
* Alvord, Mississippi Valley in "British Politics," vol. I, p.86.
In 1773 a company promoted by Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin,
William Johnson, and a London banker, Thomas Walpole, secured the
grant of two and a half million acres between the Alleghanies and
the Ohio, which was to be the seat of a colony called Vandalia.
This departure from the policy laid down in the Proclamation of
1763 was made reluctantly, but with a view to giving a definite
western limit to the seaboard provinces. The Government's purpose
was fully understood in America, and the project was warmly
opposed, especially by Virginia, the chartered claimant of the
territory. The early outbreak of the Revolutionary War wrecked
the project, and nothing ever came of it--or indeed of any
colonization proposal contemporary with it. By and large, the
building of the West was to be the work, not of colonizing
companies or other corporate interests, but of individual
homeseekers, moving into the new country on their own
responsibility and settling where and when their own interests
and inclinations led.
Chapter III. The Revolution Begins
One of the grievances given prominence in the Declaration of
Independence was that the English Crown had "abolished the free
system of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing
therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so
as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for
introducing the same arbitrary rule into these colonies." The
measure which was in the minds of the signers was the Quebec Act
of 1774; and the feature to which they especially objected was
the extension of this peculiarly governed Canadian province to
include the whole of the territory north of the Ohio and east of
the Mississippi.
The Quebec Act was passed primarily to remedy a curious mistake
made by King George's ministers eleven years earlier. The
Proclamation of 1763 had been intended to apply to the new French
speaking possessions in only a general way, leaving matters of
government and law to be regulated at a later date. But through
oversight it ordained the establishment of English law, and even
of a representative assembly, precisely as in the other new
provinces. The English governors were thus put in an awkward
position. They were required to introduce English political forms
and legal practices. Yet the inexperience and suspicion of the
people made it unwise, if not impossible, to do so. When, for
example, jury trial was broached, the peasants professed to be
quite unable to understand why the English should prefer to have
matters of law decided by tailors and shoemakers rather than by a
judge; and as for a legislature, they frankly confessed that
assemblies "had drawn upon other colonies so much distress, and
had occasioned so much riot and bloodshed, that they had hoped
never to have one."
The Act of 1774 relieved the situation by restoring French law in
civil affairs, abolishing jury trial except in criminal cases,
rescinding the grant of representative government, and confirming
the Catholic clergy in the rights and privileges which they hard
enjoyed under the old regime. This would have aroused no great
amount of feeling among New Englanders and Virginians if the new
arrangements had been confined to the bounds of the original
province. But they were not so restricted. On the contrary, the
new province was made to include the great region between the
Alleghanies and the Mississippi, southward to the Ohio; and it
was freely charged that a principal object of the English
Government was to sever the West from the shore colonies and
permanently link it with the St. Lawrence Valley rather than with
the Atlantic slope.
At all events, the Quebec Act marked the beginning of civil
government in the great Northwest. On November 9, 1775, Henry
Hamilton appeared as Lieutenant-Governor at the new capital,
Detroit. Already the "shot heard round the world" had been fired
by the farmers at Lexington; and Hamilton had been obliged to
thread his way through General Montgomery's lines about Montreal
in the guise of a Canadian. Arrived at his new seat of authority,
he found a pleasant, freshly fortified town whose white
population had grown to fifteen hundred, including a considerable
number of English-speaking settlers. The country round was
overrun with traders, who cheated and cajoled the Indians without
conscience; the natives, in turn, were a nondescript lot, showing
in pitiful manner the bad effects of their contact with the
whites.
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