Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (21 page)

Although the British had lost thirteen of their North American colonies in 1783, they had established a new colony, Canada, whose southern boundaries pointed like a dagger at the heartland of the United States. Moreover, the British refused to evacuate their forts in the Northwest Territory of the United States, even though they had promised to do so in the peace treaty in 1783. These forts—at Michilimackinac and Detroit in the west, at Niagara and Oswego on Lake Ontario, at Oswegatchie on the St. Lawrence, and at Dutchman’s Point and Point-au-Fer on Lake Champlain—controlled both the Indian country in the Northwest and the waterways along the American-Canadian border. Although the British had many reasons for continuing to hold these posts, they justified their action by claiming that the United States had prevented British subjects from recovering debts owed them by American citizens and thus had not fulfilled the terms of the peace treaty.

From their positions in Canada and the Northwest forts, the British encouraged the Indians to resist American demands for land, supported the formation of an Indian confederacy under the remarkable leadership of the Mohawk Joseph Brant, who had been educated at Eleazar Wheelock’s school in Lebanon, Connecticut, and intrigued with dissident elements in the territories of Kentucky and Vermont. Levi Allen, one of the Allen brothers who had helped establish Vermont, actually tried to negotiate a commercial treaty with the British and get Britain to recognize Vermont’s independence and possibly unite it with Canada. The Northwest borderlands of the United States were extremely vulnerable to British meddling.

The Southern boundary was even hazier and more open to exploitation by a European power. In the peace treaty the British had ceded to the United States the territory north of the 31st parallel, more or less the present boundary of Florida. But in a separate treaty in which the British returned Florida to Spain, the northern boundary of Florida was set much farther north. The Spanish claimed that the boundary ran at least as far north as the Yazoo River, which meant that much of present-day Alabama and Mississippi remained Spanish. The Spanish actually occupied Natchez, the most important settlement in the disputed region.

More important, Spain also held New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory. In 1762 France had given these possessions to Spain as payment for Spain’s allying itself with France in the Seven Years’ War against Great Britain. Spain welcomed this territory not because it had any ambitions to populate it or to make it profitable, but simply because it wanted to use it as a barrier to protect the silver mines of Mexico from the aggressive Anglo-American colonists to the north. Spanish officials saw only too clearly that every American who crossed the Appalachian Mountains and settled along the Ohio River and its tributaries weakened this territorial buffer. Yet if these Western settlers could not move their produce down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, they would have no reason to keep crossing the Appalachians into Kentucky and Tennessee.

Since the Spanish in the Southwest controlled the outlet to the sea for Western settlers seeking to market their produce, they, like the British in the Northwest, were in a position to intrigue with Indians and with dissident settlers who might be persuaded to separate from the United States. In fact, in 1784 in an effort to influence or to stop Americans moving into Kentucky and Tennessee, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American trade.

In response to this crisis, the American secretary of foreign affairs, John Jay, in 1785–1786 negotiated an agreement with the experienced Spanish minister to the United States, Don Diego de Gardoqui. Although the Confederation Congress had instructed Jay not to surrender America’s right to navigate the Mississippi in his negotiations with the Spanish minister, Jay thought that giving up that right for twenty-five or thirty years in return for having access to Spanish markets was very attractive; and he was willing to connive with some New Englanders (who were flirting with separation from the Union) to get that access to Spanish markets. But out of fear of the Western settlers being denied an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico, Southerners led by James Monroe and Charles Pinckney prevented the nine-state majority in the Confederation Congress needed for a treaty, and the scheme failed. But the willingness of a majority of seven states to sacrifice Western interests for the sake of Eastern merchants convinced some Western leaders that perhaps they ought to listen to what Spain had to offer the Americans in the West. Hence was born what came to be called the “Spanish Conspiracy.” It continued to plague the Southwest into the early years of the nineteenth century.

After the failure of the treaty, Gardoqui contacted some Western leaders, including John Brown, the representative of the Kentucky district of Virginia, James White, a congressman from North Carolina, and, most important, James Wilkinson, an ex–Revolutionary War officer, and tried to convince them that the future of Americans in the West belonged to
Spain. Spain offered trading licenses to Kentucky settlers, negotiated with leaders in Tennessee, and sought to attract Americans to settle in Spanish territory. Spain even enlisted Wilkinson as a paid agent of its government. Wilkinson secretly swore allegiance to the Spanish crown and for fifteen years received $2,000 a year as Agent 13 of the Spanish government, an arrangement not authenticated until the twentieth century. Wilkinson remained a central figure in the Spanish Conspiracy even after he became a lieutenant colonel and later general and commander of the U.S. Army. Even without knowing that he was a paid agent of Spain, John Randolph of Virginia said that Wilkinson was the only man he ever knew “who from the bark to the very core was a villain.”
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Fears of a Spanish conspiracy were very real. At the end of the eighteenth century many Western settlers appeared ready to deal with any government that could benefit them. In 1784 Washington warned that the Westerners were “on a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.” Even Jefferson in 1787 worried that because of the temptations of foreign powers and “the temper of the people” in the West, a “separation was possible at every moment.”
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F
ROM THE OUTSET
the Federalists knew that they faced difficulties in the newly acquired lands west of the Appalachians. The settlers were moving westward in massive numbers, and their relentless search for land was bound to be resisted by the Indians who possessed it. Like most other American leaders, the Federalists hoped not only that the West would be “a mine of vast wealth to the United States,” as Madison had predicted in
Federalist
No. 38, but that it would be settled in an orderly and progressive fashion. They also anticipated, as Hamilton put it, “that it should be in great measure settled from abroad rather than at the entire expence of the Atlantic population.”
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The government anticipated drawing boundaries between the settlers and the Indians, care being taken, said Washington, “neither to yield nor to grasp at too much.” But purchasing the Indians’ rights to the land and protecting or assimilating them in a civilized manner depended on an organized and steady pace of white settlement. As Washington foresaw the process, “the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire.”
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Nothing worked out as the Federalists and other leaders hoped. The Americans’ desire for land was too great and the authority of the central government too weak to control the westward scramble. The result was decades of continual bloody warfare over possession of the newly acquired Western territories.

Prior to the Revolution the British crown had tried to control the Americans’ movement into the West, especially with the Proclamation of 1763, and it had been no more successful than the Federalists were to be. Land companies sprang up and began staking claims to land in the Ohio Valley. By the time of the Revolution Kentucky had already become an incredible patchwork of conflicting land claims. The break from English authority worsened the disorder in the West. It threw people back upon themselves and their own individual interests. As one Western settler put it, “When without a king, [one] doeth according to the freedom of his own will.” Land claims multiplied and, said one observer, were “so laid one upon another that scarcely any body knows who is safe.”
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The Western settlers were as defiant of the new American authorities in the East as they had been of the British crown. Various separatist movements sought to take control of public lands and set up illegal governments within several of the states—notably in western Virginia, Vermont, the Wyoming valley, and western North Carolina. By the end of the War for Independence the earlier migrations had become a flood. One observer in 1785 thought the movement westward was so great that it seemed “as if the old states would depopulate, and the inhabitants be transported to the new.”
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By 1790 Tennessee had well over thirty-five thousand settlers, while Kentucky had more than double that number, stimulated in part by John Filson’s popular 1784 account of the “Present State of Kentucke.” Both territories were rapidly growing, and land-hungry squatters were already spilling north of the Ohio River in a scattered and unauthorized manner.

The Confederation Congress tried to bring some order out of this chaos. In the early 1780s the various states with claims to the West finally ceded to the Confederation their separate rights to the Western lands. In return, the United States pledged to use the revenues from sales of this national domain for the common benefit of the country and promised to see that the Western settlements would eventually be admitted to the Union as republican states equal in rights to the thirteen original states.
The original plan for the trans-Appalachian West was embodied in the Ordinance of 1784 that was drawn up by a committee headed by Jefferson. This plan divided the West into a grid of sixteen states with straight-line boundaries that took no account of the region’s complicated geographical contours.

Although Jefferson’s abstract Enlightenment plan did not survive, it nevertheless set the pattern for the future development of the West. Perhaps more than anything else, it expressed the American leaders’ desire that settlement of the West be neat and orderly. Certainly the Land Ordinance of 1785 by which the Confederation established a comprehensive system for the survey and sale of land in the West likewise revealed a preoccupation with regularity and order.
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The land north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians was to be surveyed and marked off in a rectangular pattern—with east-west baselines and north-south ranges—before any of it was sold. This territory was to be divided into townships six miles square, with each township in turn cut up into thirty-six numbered sections of 640 acres each. Land was to be sold at auction, but the minimum price was set at one dollar per acre, and no one could buy less than a section of 640 acres, which meant that a very substantial sum was needed for any purchase. In each township Congress retained four sections for future sale and set aside one other for the support of public education. Although only seven ranges were actually surveyed in southeastern Ohio, this policy of surveying in rectangular units became the basis of America’s land system.

Those who devised this system assumed that development of the West would be centrally controlled, that settlement would be tightly clustered, and that the relatively high price for land would keep out poor, lazy, Indian-hating squatters. Congress hoped that the Western purchasers would be industrious market-oriented farmers who would respect the gradually moving boundary between the white settlers and the Indians. By following these regular procedures of compact settlement, said Washington, wildcat land jobbers and hustlers would be restrained, peace would be maintained with the Indians, and more useful types of citizens would be encouraged to migrate.
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Not only would enterprising and commercially minded settlers be willing to buy the land that would produce the revenue the United States required, but such civilized settlers would also bring to the West much-needed order and enlightenment. Desiring that the Western settlers be properly educated, Congress mandated the setting aside land for public schools.

Many Eastern leaders were leery of encouraging Western settlement anyhow, which is why many Federalists like Hamilton hoped that the West would be settled mostly by immigrants from abroad. Many Easterners had an uneasy sense that the Western settlers were apt to drift away from civilization and union with the United States. As John Jay warned in 1787, “the Western Country will one Day give us trouble—to govern them will not be easy.”
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Even when the Confederation Congress realized in 1787 that sales to individuals by auction were not going well, they continued to cling to the hope that someone would pay money for the Western land. In desperation it turned to Eastern speculators who all through the 1780s had concocted schemes for making profits out of undeveloped tracts of land in the West. In 1787 Congress was convinced by the lobbying efforts of Manasseh Cutler, a New England minister, that the Ohio Company—a joint-stock company made up of former Continental Army officers—might be able to supply the kinds of enterprising settlers, presumably New Englanders, and the money the United States needed. Thus for a million dollars Congress transferred to the private hands of the Ohio Company a large chunk of its Western land—1,500,000 acres west of the previously drawn seven ranges that ran north of the Ohio River. As part of the deal, the Ohio Company was given an option to apply for an additional 4,500,000 acres in the Ohio territory for a newly formed Scioto Company, the brainchild of William Duer, the secretary of the Confederation’s Board of Treasury and later assistant secretary in Hamilton’s Treasury Department.