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The Shifting Nature of Empire: Vandalia and Other Plans for New Colonies West of the Allegheny Mountains Before the American Revolution
Michael Davis
University Of Alabama At Birmingham
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THE SHIFTING NATURE OF EMPIRE: VANDALIA AND OTHER PLANS
FOR NEW COLONIES WEST OF THE ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS BEFORE THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
by
MICHAEL DAVIS
BRIAN STEELE, COMMITTEE CHAIR
STEPHEN MILLER
AMY WATSON
A THESIS
Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University of Alabama at Birmingham, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in History
Copyright by Michael Davis 2022
THE SHIFTING NATURE OF EMPIRE: VANDALIA AND OTHER PLANS FOR NEW COLONIES WEST OF THE ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS BEFORE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
MICHAEL DAVIS
M.A. HISTORY
ABSTRACT
North American westward expansion following the end of the Seven Years’ War is a subject that has been dealt with by many historians from both sides of the Atlantic. The American push west of the Allegheny Mountains facilitated political divisions and divergent visions that would advance the push for independence from the British Empire and contribute to the creation of a new authority and a new kind of empire. This paper focuses on one aspect of this significant area of late-colonial and early republican American history. New western colonial schemes emerged from the ashes of the global war with France and immediately became a focal point for developing debates over the nature of the Empire and the relationship between Great Britain and her North American colonies. Land speculation companies chartered by prominent colonial leaders like Benjamin and William Franklin, Thomas Pownall, and George Mercer, as well as important imperial officials like Sir William Johnson, George Croghan, and Thomas Walpole, set out to secure land grants and settlement rights for the impending wave of Americans eager to exploit the newly acquired imperial territory.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………..iii
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………..1
LINES ARE DRAWN ……………………………….…………………………………...4
FRANKLIN’S GAMBIT ………………………………………………………………..11
LONDON CALLING ……………………………...………………………………….…16
A FEDERATION, IF WE CAN KEEP IT ……………………..………………………..24
CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………….32
iv
INTRODUCTION
The prospect of North American westward expansion following the end of the Seven Years’ War is a subject that has been explained by many historians from both sides of the Atlantic. The American push west of the Allegheny Mountains facilitated political divisions and divergent visions that would advance the push for independence from the British Empire and contribute to the creation of a new authority and a new kind of empire. This paper focuses on one aspect of this significant area of late-colonial and early republican American history. New western colonial schemes emerged from the ashes of the global war with France and immediately became a focal point for developing debates over the nature of the Empire and the relationship between Great Britain and her North American colonies. Land speculation companies chartered by prominent colonial leaders like Benjamin and William Franklin, Thomas Pownall, and George Mercer, as well as important imperial officials like Sir William Johnson, George Croghan, and Thomas Walpole, set out to secure land grants and settlement rights for the impending wave of Americans eager to exploit the newly acquired imperial territory. The most important of these land companies would be known as the Grand Ohio Company and its new colonial scheme was christened Vandalia. The debate over new colonial governments and western settlement in British North America marked a fundamental disconnect between an
1
emerging pragmatic republican vision of empire in the colonies and an idealistic authoritarian vision of empire in London.
The Seven Years' War is never ignored by historians as a factor in the 1760s crisis or indeed as a catalyst for the revolutionary 1770s. However, the focus is almost always on the offensive imperial taxes on stamps, sugar, and tea or the geopolitical consequences of eliminating a French threat to colonial security that freed colonists to express their resistance to imperial coercion. As the Continental Congress put it in their pronouncement of association in 1774; the present crisis is "occasioned by a ruinous system of colony administration adopted by the British Ministry about the year 1763, evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies, and, with them the British Empire."1 The new confederation rallied against the continuing abuses and infringements on their English rights which had most recently culminated in the Coercive Acts passed by Parliament in March of 1774. We are very familiar with the grievances of revenue-raising taxes, constitutional rights to a trial by jury in America, and the lately escalated Parliamentary attacks on Boston and the Bay Colony, but the final grievance outlined in the congressional decree is often overlooked. The reorganization following the Seven Years' War of the province of Quebec extended their territory to the edge of the western frontiers of the existing colonies. It challenged those colony's claims on westward expansion explicitly laid out in the original charters by ordering them to "discontinue settlement." This created an untenable situation where "thus by the influence of Evil Principles and ancient prejudices to dispose the inhabitants [of
1 Melvin Yazawa and James A. Henretta, Documents to Accompany America's History, Fifth Edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004), 116.
2
Quebec] to act with hostility against the free protestant colonies, whenever a wicked ministry shall chuse so to direct them."2
I want to suggest that the Treaty of Paris, the Proclamation Line, and the dynamics of western expansion tell us just as much about the doubt colonists developed in their status as freeborn Englishmen, despair in losing their unique opportunity for bettering their situation, and many to question that English liberties were worthy of their love. Two years before the Stamp Act, the spirit of liberty was stirred by the transformation of the British Empire in the west. The peace of Paris and the Proclamation Line of 1763 set the stage for colonial/imperial conflict and recast the actors in controversial and, ultimately, competing roles. The Proclamation Line and the restructuring of imperial policy regarding Indian affairs and western settlement set the tone for the coming conflict between provincial and imperial visions for the future of America.
2 Yazawa and Henretta, Documents, 116.
3
LINES ARE DRAWN
Colonial American historian Patrick Griffin says, "The beginning of the end for British Empire in America occurred not in Boston or Philadelphia but on the Pennsylvania frontier near the Proclamation Line."3 Griffin explores the ideological grounds on which the post-Seven Years' War British Empire was imagined. The Proclamation Line divided the American continent into East and West and demanded from imperial officials and administrators a new policy to incorporate newly acquired lands and newly subjectified people into the existing imperial structure. As for the people, Griffin argues that the imperial ideology placed these new subjects, now under the protection of the British Crown, in a state of nature– their civilization process still stuck in an earlier stage of development and therefore outside of the considerations of the social contract.4 Frontier American colonial disputes had sparked the war, and the "settlers and Native Americans from the Ohio Country transformed the frontiers of the colonies into killing fields.”5 The end of the war created an even more expansive frontier and metropolitan officials were understandably concerned that the ever-present tensions between white settlements and
3 Patrick Griffin. American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 72.
4 Griffin, Leviathan, 22.
5 Griffin, Leviathan, 23.
4
Native resistance created a permanent state of volatility up and down the new western border of the Empire.
The British military Commanders in Chief of North America experienced myriad problems with colonial cooperation and were almost daily troubled by unruly western settlers and land speculators stirring conflict on the frontier. Their experience spurred postwar policy into a more energetic and micro managerial posture. The Proclamation Line was the first in a more infamous series of Parliamentary attempts to reduce the anarchy of the western frontier to a more manageable state of imperial normalcy. The Stamp Act and Sugar Act were natural and justified solutions to the new imperial problems to pay for the new imperial structure. For Griffin, the limitations on imperial administration on such a large border, so far from the center of the Empire, dictated ideology on the frontier. Order could not be maintained by force alone but would require "deference from subjects (EuroAmericans) and encouragement for subjects in the making (Native Americans)." For Griffin, the ideology of the new British imperial policy "reflected the constraints of the possible."6 Throughout the 1760s, Anglo settlers consistently violated the no-man's land established in the Proclamation. The imperial American brain trust mainly agreed on why western settlers acted with such impunity towards the Royal decree. As the frontier moved further and further west, the distance from government became more of a problem.
Civilization's hold on these western settlers began to loosen the further they moved from the center of British American culture in the east. Sir William Johnson and Thomas
6 Griffin, Leviathan, 45.
5
Gage observe that the British colonists on the frontier were becoming more like the "savages" than cultured British subjects.7 In London, as well, the new President of the Board of Trade, Lord Hillsborough, "argued that 'the lawless Disposition… too generally prevails in Settlements so far removed from the Check and Control of Government.'"8 Colonists could not be trusted to respect the line, and imperial financial realities made enforcing the Proclamation difficult at best, at worst, impossible. Griffin describes the popular opinion on the frontier through the words of would-be settlers and the observations of colonial and imperial officials. From the perspective of those on the line, the gift-giving and capitulation to the Indians and the apparent privilege enjoyed by land speculators over individual settlers soured most against British authority before the news of Parliament's new taxes reached American shores.9 Why didn't the British just deal with Native Americans in the same way they did Irish and Scotch resistance in the past? It was too costly in terms of men and resources. The only solution was to make subjects to be of these Indigenous peoples– a long-term process that tried the patience of Anglo settlers in the west.
In Before the Revolution, Daniel Richter illustrates the uniquely American relationships that developed in the early decades of the 18th century between western-minded settlers and the Native inhabitants of the long-contested Ohio Country. For British and French imperial officials and warriors, the clashes in the backcountry at the edges of
7 Griffin, Leviathan, 52.
8 Griffin, Leviathan, 52-3.
9 Griffin, Leviathan, 77.
6
their empire were mere extensions of European antagonisms. The fighting was personal for the Anglo and French Americans and the Indigenous peoples. Richter points out that settlers and Indigenous belligerents were fighting a separate war that transcended European alliances in the Ohio backcountry. Both sides knew each other very well as they had been in a constant state of uneasy cohabitation in an area of land that had been ostensibly ceded to Anglo-American governments by the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737 and subsequent "treaties" at Lancaster in 1744, Albany in 1754, and Fort Stanwix in 1768.10 Richter's project intends to "develop eastward facing stories"11 to shift the point of view of American history from the European to the Native perspective. Although my paper does not enter into this increasingly vibrant area of scholarship, I think any Euro-centric treatment of this period must acknowledge the agency of Indigenous populations whose point of view is often obscured and whose history is often marginalized as objects of European activity.
The land of the Ohio Valley was a land of legendary beauty and utility both for the Indigenous peoples who were desperate to hold onto their eastern frontier as well as for the Anglo-settlers and land speculators whose zest for western movement overcame their fear of the well-known "savages" and the unknown wilderness. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson declared, "The Ohio… the most beautiful river on Earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance
10 Daniel K. Richter. Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 393-4.
11 Daniel K. Richter. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Harvard University Press, 2003. 2.
7
only excepted."12 Jefferson recognized the vast interior that might be opened through the navigation of this seemingly perfect river. The land in question was claimed by Virginia gentlemen starting with the early 18th-century adventurer Alexander Spotswood to the mid-century surveyors and speculators like George Mercer and George Washington of the Ohio Company. It was claimed by Pennsylvania speculators and proprietary government officials who claimed the land within their latitudinal borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific like their antagonists in Virginia. It was also claimed by ordinary white settlers who braved the wilderness and the constant threat of Indigenous reprisals for the incursion. British imperial officials indeed claimed the land as the vast realm ceded at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and asserted the authority to dictate settlement, treat with the Indigenous inhabitants, and organize any new western projects for the benefit of the Empire. And, of course, the land was cherished by an Indigenous population whose contrasting concept of ownership and conflicting interests with their European neighbors sealed their fate to be bullied and bled in the imperial American march West over the next hundred or so years.
Historian Colin Calloway focuses on the entire year of 1763 in his book, The Scratch of the Pen. He borrowed his title from a quote by a once-famous American historian from the 19th century, Francis Parkman. Parkman said that the Treaty of Paris in 1763 marked a moment when more land was transferred between nations than any agreement before or since, "half a continent… changed hands at the scratch of a pen."13
12 Thomas Jefferson, and Merrill D. Peterson. Writings. Library of America, 2011. 133-4.
13 Francis Parkman, quoted in Colin G. Calloway The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. Oxford University Press, 2007. 15.
8
The significant territorial gains resulting from Britain's victory over France at the Treaty of Paris may have stoked the flames of British nationalism at home, but, in North America, the resulting imperial reorganization would be the spark to the light of the flames of revolution.14 The Seven Years' War in North America was orchestrated by the great commoner William Pitt. Pitt's overarching vision was a North America and Atlantic region free of French interference and devoid of a French threat. The aggressive North American strategy proved fruitful for ending the war, but the powers in the British ministry feared Pitt’s monolithic focus on France.15 They were convinced that his insistence on concessions beyond France's ability to capitulate with honor would surely lead to another war. Pitt was forced out in favor of the King's favorite, Lord Butte. Butte organized the peace that would be signed in Paris in 1763 and the controversial concessions of sugar islands in the Caribbean in exchange for a frozen expanse in the extreme north of America. Pitt and his leftover supporters cringed at the failure to put the French American Empire to the sword, especially in the West Indies. Consequently, the vast new territory and the interior of the entire continent instantly became part of the Empire and a new headache for a new government. Greenville enters the stage with the reorganization and reformation of the colonial administration that would start with the Proclamation of 1763 and proceed too quickly to the Stamp Act etc., leading to the imperial crisis of the 1760s.
The consequences of the Seven-Years War were varied, but essentially battle lines that would become the central issues in the 1760s crisis and the revolutionary 1770s were
14 Calloway, Scratch, 10.
15 Calloway, Scratch, 11.
9
drawn. From Whitehall's point of view, the colonies were dependents whose commitment to the Empire seemed to subordinate their provincial interests, a drain on the imperial purse, and an increasingly inconvenient responsibility for an obstinate population whose longing westward gaze continually plagued ministerial ambitions. Colonists, on the other hand, believed they had helped to defeat the hated French and Indians and paid more than their fair share in provisions and in blood; they felt entitled to continue to expand the Empire for glory, god, and profit. The two main wave points were free Atlantic trade for merchants of the coastal colonial administrations and the migration of British, European, and African people pressurizing the expanding territorial frontier, creating a volatile fault line underneath an increasingly fragile empire. These factors cannot be separated as the increased Atlantic trade brought goods, people, and ideas to the interior and coastal centers. Population pressure, demographic realities, subconscious spatial relationship separation, organic cultural waves beating the borders of the empire, eroding imperial authority, and shaping the new Republic.
10
FRANKLIN’S GAMBIT
The European political situation still shaped Atlantic connections. Before the Treaty of Paris, the backcountry was a proxy for Atlantic contests between European imperial powers. Following France's capitulation and Spain's continuing abdication of imperial influence over their North American provinces, a retreating France and a weakening Spain shifted the dynamics at the edges of the European imperial domains. Anglo settlers who were previously seen as the vanguard against French and Spanish incursions became threats to metropolitan interests. Provincial motivations and interests began to diverge from metropolitan concerns at many of the same flashpoints where French, Indian, and British forces had clashed over the future of their empires in North America.
The first official plan for forming new governments across the Alleghenies came from a likely source. Benjamin Franklin was a rising star in the British Empire when he traveled to Albany to represent Pennsylvania at the Congress of 1754. Franklin had a vision for the future of Western movement; he saw the power and population and the necessity of colonization; he recognized the need for local Colonial sovereignty with a negative only from the crown or crown officials, not Parliament; and he saw the absurdity of coastal colonies administering Western movement from their Eastern perches. "A particular
Colony has scarce strength enough to extend itself by new settlements at so great a distance
11
from the old... the power of settling new colonies is, therefore, thought a valuable part of the plan."16 Franklin's plan was debated and sent back to the various colonies and to London where it died a quick death. Before the outbreak of the war between France and Britain, it seems that Union was far from the minds of most colonial leaders whose individual claims in the contested Ohio country and the still defended "sea to sea" claims outlined in many of the original Colonial Charters were elements of division not motivations for Union. When Franklin returned from Albany, he continued to work on the plan. He proposed two new colonies to be formed between the Ohio River at Lake Erie and two new colonies across the Alleghenies and west of the old colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Franklin's excitement is palpable in his letter to George Whitefield in 1756. "I sometimes wish that you and I were jointly employed by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio. I imagine that we could do it effectually, and without putting the nation to much expense ; but I fear we shall never be called upon for such a service. What a glorious thing it would be to settle in that fine country a large, strong body of religious and industrious people! What a security to the other colonies and advantage to Britain, by increasing her people, territory, strength, and commerce. Might it not greatly facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen, if we could, by such a colony, show them a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian traders? — the most vicious and abandoned wretches of our nation!"17
16 Benjamin Franklin. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. III Letters and Misc. Writings 1753-1763. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904.
17 “From Benjamin Franklin to George Whitefield, 2 July 1756,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0210. [Original source: The Papers of
12
Another attendee of the Albany Congress, Thomas Pownall, was also interested in western colonial expansion. Pownall was then the Lt. Governor of the province of New Jersey, but he would go on to serve as Royal Governor of Massachusetts from 1757 to 1760 during the height of the imperial war on the continent. Writing in 1765, Pownall observes that the colonies at present are in no condition for union or independence. "No one colony can by itself become [independent]-- and no two, under the present state of their constitutions, have any possible communion of power or interest, that can unite them in such a measure: they have not the means of forming such: they have neither legislative nor executive powers, that are extended to more than one: the laws of one, extend not to the other… In short, no one principle of association amongst them. On the contrary, the different manner in which they are settled; the different modes under which they live; the different forms of charters, grants, and frame of government which they possess… the different interests which they actuate; the religious interests by which they are actuated; the rivalship and jealousies which arise from hence, and the impracticability, if not impossibility, of reconciling and accommodating these incompatible ideas and claims; will keep the several provinces and colonies, perpetually independent of, and unconnected with each other; and dependent on the Mother Country."18 Pownall's analysis continues with a
Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, April 1, 1755, through September 30, 1756, ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 468–469.]
18 Thomas Pownall. The administration of the British colonies. The fifth edition. Wherein their rights and constitution are discussed and stated. By Thomas Pownall, Late Governor, Captain General, Commander in Chief, and Vice Admiral of his majesty's provinces, Massachusetts-Bay and South-Carolina; and Lieutenant-Governor of New-Jersey. In two volumes. Vol. 1. London: printed for J. Walter, at Homer's Head, Charing-Cross, M.DCC.LXXIV. [1774]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed March 5, 2022). 97-98. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CW0100558012/ECCO?u=birm97026&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=dc3516e6&pg=1
13
warning to the current ministry; the current military strategy of a commander in chief in America and the Quartering of troops might just give the colonies the common issue around which to unify.19 Pownall was particularly perceptive, recognizing right away that the new British world created by the Treaty of Paris required a modernizing policy of administrative reforms and constitutional reorganization in order to preserve the empire in America.
Part of Pownall's vision focused on the prospects for American westward expansion following France's exit from the continent and cessions made by Indigenous groups like the Six Nations. "As long as we keep up this useless, faithless, claim of dominion over [the Indians]; so long shall we be embroiled in war with them. The European power may finally extirpate them; but can never conquer them. The perpetually increasing Generations of Europeans in America, may supply numbers that must, in the end, wear out these poor Indian inhabitants from their own country; but we shall pay dear, both in blood and treasure, in the meanwhile, for our horrid injustice."20 "While therefore we do remain a great and just nation, as we pride ourselves Great Britain is: we should abhor the black base
19 Pownall, The Administration vol. 1, 98.
20 Thomas Pownall. The administration of the British colonies. The sixth edition. Wherein their constitutional rights and establishments as also those disputed points in the constitutions and administration of the government of the colonies, from whence the present American war sprung, and on which the final settlement of a peace must turn are discussed and stated. By Thomas Pownall, Member of Parliament, late Governor, Captain General, Commander in Chief, and Vice Admiral of His Majesty's Provinces, Massachusetts-Bay and South-Carolina; and Lieutenant-Governor of New-Jersey. In two volumes. Vol. 2. London: printed for J. Walter, at Homer's Head, Charing-Cross, M.DCC.LXXVII. [1777]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed March 5, 2022). 230-1.
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CB0128187439/ECCO?u=birm97026&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=3f83dc58&pg=281.
14
thought of using the power which providence hath given us, to the ruin and destruction of these brave and free people…"21
Men like Franklin and Pownall recognized the reality of Britain's American settler colonies. Their distance from the center and their unquestioned title to English liberties created a fundamental conflict that could only be rectified by reform and reorganization. Franklin saw a chance for the American Colonies to extend the empire of British liberty and British culture across the whole of the continent. He realized that the colonies were in an inherently superior demographic situation to the home island. British Americans were soon to be more numerous, more prosperous, and more independent as a result of the uniquely democratic and open society coinciding with a seemingly infinite amount of room for expansion. Pownall sought a modern solution to the American colonial problem. His fellow metropolitan influencers failed to acknowledge the necessity of modernization and reform of colonial administrations. The western expansion plans from Franklin and Pownall were opportunities to resolve the crisis in the 1760s before it gained its unstoppable momentum in the 1770s. It could have restructured the empire in a more favorable context for colonial leaders who would be prominent patriots like Washington, Mason, Franklin and implicitly cooperative projects between colonial elites and metropolitan moderates like Hallifax, Pownall, and Thomas Walpole.
21 Pownall, The Administration vol. 2, 245.
15
LONDON CALLING
Like all of the western land projects, The Ohio Company of Virginia was knocked off balance by the onset of war between England and France, a war that was sparked by the activity surrounding their own claims at the forks of the Ohio River. The appendix to the case for the Ohio company presented to the Privy Council in 1744 outlines the proposed land to be acquired and the purpose of the project. The Proposal sought to capitalize on the recent land allocations at the Treaty of Lancaster, where Six Nations leaders ceded land swathes of territory in the Ohio country. The Grand Ohio Company was able to use its metropolitan connections and Walpole's significant financial backing to offer to purchase their Ohio Land from the Crown for the entire sum Sir William Johnson offered the Six Nations for their cession at Fort Stanwix. A memorial was brought before Secretary of State Lord Hillsborough in December 1769. After receiving some politically motivated advice from the Secretary, Wharton and Walpole were convinced to propose a large enough grant to establish a new government in a new colony– a proposition not stated in the original Indiana-Ohio Company proposals. Hillsborough was opposed to the scheme and to any western colonization.22 His friends in Virginia and Pennsylvania were committed to
22 “From Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, 14 July 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0165. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 20, January 1 through December 31, 1773, ed. William B. Willcox. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, pp. 300–314.]
16
the peripheral expansion of existing colonial governments following the original charters that claimed the rights to western lands from sea to sea.
In hindsight, it is easy to imagine this continuing press across Western lands by Anglo settlers backed by imperial power establishing British law and spreading English cultural and governmental institutions throughout the continent. The empire would have continued to benefit from its possessions, and Anglo-Americans could have continued to benefit from the Crown's protection. However, as Anderson points out, the metropolitan officials had both a philosophical and material problem regarding Anglo-American westward expansion. The Proclamation of 1763 brought both Natives and Franco-Americans under British imperial protection. The former enemies were now new subjects whose obligation of allegiance to their new sovereign depended on the reciprocal obligation of protection from the British Empire. For metropolitan officials, the constant pressure on Native lands by colonial settlers promised an inevitable clash between mutually exclusive interests of the Anglo-American westward movement and Franco/Native inhabitants of the interior of the newly expanded empire. The philosophical dilemma of competing interests between equal subjects was manifested in the material problems of maintaining peace, stability, and prosperity for all the new imperial British-American subjects. Skirmishes between settlers from different colonies, Anglo and Native clashes over incursions on contested land, and Anglo-American resentment of the new equal status of Canadian and Native subjects, only recently the hated enemies and constant bane of colonial existence, demonstrated to metropolitan officials that immediate action was
17
necessary to rebuild financially and to tighten imperial control over the increasingly unruly
edges of the Empire.23
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland claimed the same sea to sea domain– claims that would collide in the same area of the Ohio Valley that would be the center of future colonial projects launched by the Grand Ohio Company. This new company was constituted from the original Ohio Company of Virginia and the Indiana Company. The latter enterprise was organized to secure land rights for a group of Pennsylvania Indian traders who had endured heavy losses in the Indigenous uprisings in 1754 and 1763, for which they acquired the moniker "Suffering Traders." The Sufferers petitioned the Crown for monetary compensation for their losses but received no satisfaction. They then shifted their strategy to recover their losses to seeking a land grant in the Ohio Country. One of the traders, William Trent, was tasked with securing the land in the form of the Indiana Company. Like many of the speculation companies and colonial schemes, this new venture had overlapping membership with the Illinois Company and the Ohio Company of Virginia. Those various projects would come together and pool their resources to form the Grand Ohio Company.
Anderson gets to the essence of British imperial officials' problem following the end of the Seven Years' War. Both imperial belligerents had experienced decades of relative peace and prosperity in their North American colonies by remaining essentially hands-off. Power and authority were, of course, assumed and sometimes projected from
23 Fred Anderson. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. Vintage, 2001. 475.
18
the centers of the empires. However, the French traders and British-American merchants and planters had organized their own local governments, treated with Indians, and generally operated with little more than intermittent intervention in colonial affairs and very little micromanagement. In the face of mounting war debts and bubbling conflicts along the border between Anglo settlers and indigenous groups, both of whom expected the protection and backing of the imperial authority, Crown officials and parliamentary administrations embarked on the restructuring of imperial policy that would doom their empire in America. For Anderson, the British government could have avoided the crises of the 60s and 70s by continuing the pre-war laissez-faire policy. The removal of Franco-Indigenous resistance to westward movement would have meant expanding settlements and competing claims between speculators and colonial governments that would have required solutions from the center of the empire, strengthening the imperial structure and reinforcing the faith in the Crown through the realization of hope for advancement and a better life on the frontiers of the empire.24
The obstinacy of western settlers and the late experience with colonial governments during the Seven Years' War convinced most imperial officials that Western lands could not be left to provincial control. The wartime experience of imperial administrators dealing with colonial assemblies and colonial militias had convinced most that the local governments of British America were inefficient, ineffective, and had been curiously rebellious in response to imperial authority.
24 Anderson, Crucible, 743.
19
Following a brief period of anxiety over the apparent restrictions on westward expansion, land speculators and speculation companies, eager settlers, and colonial visionaries recovered their pre-war momentum and reanimated projects for extending the British imperial domain. Secretary of State and the First Lord of Trade for the colonies, The Earl of Hillsborough, was in charge of receiving petitions for land grants and proposals for new settlements. He initially appears to support the petition of the Walpole/Grand Ohio Company, even suggesting that they ask for a grant large enough to establish a new Government. The suggestion included an amendment to the price of the land. Hillsborough suggested that the company offer to pay the entire amount offered by the Crown to the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix. The large amount, Hillsborough thought, would be prohibitive and sure to kill the proposal before it began; instead, the company agreed to the price, and the Privy Council approved the grant.25
A pragmatism permeated American thought in the 1760s and 1770s that clashed with the idealism that seems to have blinded most British imperial officials to the reality of the colonial system. An interaction between Franklin and Lord Hillsborough is illustrative. Franklin insisted that the Massachusetts Assembly had the right to appoint agents to London without the approval of the Royal Governor. Franklin appeared before his Lordship as an agent of Massachusetts charged with resolving the present crisis. Franklin was told by Hillsborough that he is not an agent because Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to assent to his appointment. Franklin was confused because he had
25 Benjamin Franklin. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. V Letters and Misc. Writings 1768-1772. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904.
20
the papers in his hand, and he had never understood that the acts of the Assembly in appointing agents must be approved by the Royal Governor. As Franklin described it, the interaction was full of tension– his Lordship's exasperation and Franklin's polite obstinacy jump off the pages of Franklin's recollection. Hillsborough told Franklin that he came to be in charge of the Administration when America was "in great disorder." It was through "firmness that they are now something mended… my duty to the master I serve, and to the Government of this Nation, required it of me… [and] while I continue in it I shall resolutely persevere in the same firmness."26 In this brief exchange, Hillsborough crystallized the conservatism that hindered metropolitan policy and prevented British administrators from adapting to the colonial circumstances of the new empire. Franklin was dumbfounded by such blind idealism and left with an exasperation for Hillsborough's lack of vision that equaled the Secretary of State's annoyance at colonial obstinacy.
The call and response between Hillsborough's Board of Trade Report against the Ohio scheme and Franklin's defensive response are clues to understanding the divergence of imperial and colonial world views on American expansion. Hillsborough objected to a colonial grant that appeared to him “to contain part of the dominion of Virginia… and to extend several degrees of longitude westward from the western ridge of the Allegheny Mountains." Franklin contended that the land prayed for was entirely west of the Alleghenies "and that those mountains must be considered the true Western boundary of Virginia." Franklin had long argued that the "sea to sea" claims by Virginia, Maryland, and
26 Benjamin Franklin. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. V Letters and Misc. Writings 1768-1772. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904. Minutes 16 Jan 1771.
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his own Pennsylvania were impractical and should be dismissed in favor of new colonies that could more efficiently administer government on the western frontier. The Secretary argued that the grant would extend beyond the land rights which had been purchased and negotiated through "treaties with the Indians." Franklin assumed his Lordship referred to Fort Stanwix in 1768 and Lochaber in 1770 and proceeded to refute with specific evidence that there existed any barrier to their colonial operation from the perspective of Six Nations or Cherokee leaders. The third objection in the Board of Trade Report is that the King's Proclamation of 1763 declared lands west of the Alleghenies off-limits to grants or settlements.
Hillsborough's argument is both commercial– the Secretary was concerned with the distance between trading ports and the proposed western colony– as well as constitutional– his Lordship was singularly focused on making sure the British American Colonies remain "in due subordination to, and dependence upon, the Mother Country." In his uniquely clever way, Franklin responds, "the settlement of the country over the Allegheny Mountains and on the Ohio was not understood, either before the Treaty of Paris, nor intended to be so considered by his Majesty's Proclamation of October, 1763, 'as without the reach of the trade and commerce of this Kingdom." He continues by demonstrating that the imperial benefits from the American Colonies could only be increased by a government in the Ohio Country. The land in question is "excellent, the climate temperate; the native grapes, silk worms, and mulberry trees are everywhere; hemp grows spontaneously in the valleys and on lands; iron ore is plenty in the hills, and no soil is better adapted for the
culture of tobacco, flax and cotton than that of Ohio." Franklin then points out the
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demographic reality that there are some "thirty thousand" of the King's subjects already settled on the lands in question. The governments of the Eastern Colonies were so removed from the new settlements that to deny the petition for the new colony would "leave such a body of people lawless and ungoverned." Franklin's polemic was delivered to the Privy Council with in-person arguments in favor of the colony from Thomas Walpole and Samuel Wharton. The Council was convinced because they issued a report to grant the lands to the Grand Ohio/Vandalia Company. They added that "the said settlement and district should be erected into a separate Government." The King's order ostensibly establishing the new government of Vandalia for the Walpole/Grand Ohio Company was issued in October of 1773. The timing was, of course, inauspicious. Two months later, Massachusetts radicals heaved boxes of East India tea into the Boston Harbor; within a year, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia; and six months later, bullets were flying at Lexington and Concord. Imperial and Colonial focus turned to the war and necessarily suspended any plans for the western expansion of new governments.27
27 Franklin, Works, Vol. V.
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A FEDERATION, IF WE CAN KEEP IT
The establishment of western policy by the Continental Congress indicates a developing American identity. However, it was not the fully formed racial hierarchies of the 19th century; it was not yet the exceptional savior of liberalism; it was still not the fully realized Empire of Liberty. It was, however, an identity rooted in faith in constitutional institutions. Sovereignty and jurisdiction were hotbed issues for the revolutionary generation. Their challenge to British Parliamentary sovereignty lay at the center of the call for revolution and independence. But the revolutionaries were at the same time state makers who depended on legitimizing the sovereignty and jurisdiction of a new kind of power– a power rooted in popular sovereignty. This new government of the people ironically required a central authority with legitimate autonomy and defined jurisdiction. The western settlers pined for the central government to represent their interests in an eastern-dominated confederacy. The landed elites in the seaboard colonies also recognized the need for central authority and, eventually, all of the so-called landed states ceded their land claims west of the old Proclamation Line to the Congress of the United States for the good of the commonwealth. This reciprocal recognition and tacit legitimization follow a long line back to the Committees of Correspondence and the local assemblies that legitimized Congressional authority in the infancy of the Revolution. This constitutional
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faith would face the ultimate test four score and a few years or so later when another war was waged for freedom and liberty and union.
There was no guarantee Congress would maintain legitimacy; there was no guarantee that this new experiment in America would even survive. Indeed, when you look at all of the infighting over land claims, border disputes on the frontier, and competing ideas of western state-making, not to mention their precarious military position, the survival of the new nation seemed unlikely. A unified colonial confederation was all in on the break with Great Britain, but they were far from all-in on the structure and nature of the proposed new government. The foundation that assured a Constitution was possible following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was the well-established authority Congress secured during the revolutionary years. Central to that process was securing jurisdiction over the western territory and the establishment of new states in the interior of their new nation.
The Revolution was truly underway and Washington’s army hopped around the countryside desperately trying to remain in the field against the greatest military force in the world. The land companies which had been focused on receiving their royal grants and charters for their new territory and the new government shifted their strategy to secure the grants through the newly formed American bureaucracy. The ministers in London were not deaf to the competing claims of the various companies nor to the objection by colonies like Virginia and Pennsylvania who held long-standing claims on the western lands through their original colonial charters. The breakdown in the royal process for the Vandalia project was largely a result of Hillsborough’s connections with Virginia who strenuously objected
to their lands being ceded to this new government in a new western colony. But the infant
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American Republic stimulated more competing interests over western lands. Moreover, the companies entered a volatile political environment where issues of national and local authority threatened to derail the union before it even got started. The colonies were united in their support of Washington’s army and they were of one mind on the necessity of independence from Britain, but they were far from consensus on the form and function of their new form of governing and a national government would require the newly independent states to recognize the sovereignty of Congress (and eventually the Federal Government) and to cede authority to a union that many felt was only held together by the common cause of the war and of independence. After a year or so of hemming and hawing and olive branching, the Continental Congress acted on Richard Henry Lee’s petition to declare independence and formed a new confederation.
By 1777, the new Virginia Governor, Thomas Jefferson, was leading the charge to democratize land acquisition in the trans-Allegheny west. The Vandalia and Indiana companies were still pressing their claims even though the Grand Ohio Company had been effectively dissolved following the Declaration of Independence. The House of Burgesses passed legislation in 1777 that invalidated all purchases of land made by individuals or speculation companies and sent a message to Congress stating that the Vandalia and Indiana companies possess no rights to land within the sovereign bonds of the Commonwealth of Virginia. (House of Delegates 1st session 1777 39.)
By November of 1777, Congress approved the final text of the Articles of Confederation and sent it to the states for approval. Ratification required unanimous
consent and the three and a half years it took for Maryland to finally assent tells us a lot
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about the precarious state of the union as well as the uncertainty over Congressional authority. In June of 1780, Congress convened a committee to report on the central issue holding up the ratification of the Articles: western territory claims. The committee report was written by John Duane of New York and it called for Virginia to relinquish its claims on the western lands in its territory for the benefit of the union that will secure “our very existence as a free, sovereign and independent nation.” 28 It was on the founding generation of statesmen to imagine a new form of government and a new basis for authority based on popular consent. The cession of western lands by the states and the shift in style from proprietary colonial governments to new territorial governments established for the common good are seminal events in the course of the making of the new Republic.
Chad Wozniak argues that the western colonial schemes of the 1760s and 1770s, along with Benjamin Franklin's earlier proposals for colonial expansion in the 1750s, were the models upon which the early United States' western territorial proposals were based; and, I agree. Much of the familiar process of state admission that is found in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 can be found in Jefferson's report. Wozniak points to several commonalities between the earlier colonial proposals and the eventual process of western expansion laid out in the Ordinance and, eventually, in Article IV of the Constitution. Although the Admission Clause in Article IV empowers Congress to admit new states, the
28 United States. Continental Congress., Sitgreaves, S., Hughes, H., Smith, P. (17771789). Journals of Congress: containing the proceedings from Sept. 5, 1774 to [November 3, 1788]. Philadelphia: Printed and sold by R. Aitken [etc.]. vol xvii. 559, 802.
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text fails to outline the specific process. The history of state admission is interesting and not for this paper, but it is essential to point out that the process itself became normalized through precedent primarily established in the Ordinance of 1787, but also owes much of its philosophy and methodology to the tradition of western imperial thinking started by Franklin at Albany in 1754 and carried through the colonial projects of the late colonial period. Each of these proposed that the new colonies would enter the union on equal footing and equal standing in the Constitutional organization.29 Each proposal rejects the sea-to-sea claims of the original charters that would have seen western expansion governed by provincial metropoles like Philadelphia and Williamsburg.30 And each proposal promised the inhabitants of the new colonies they would have the same privileges and rights they enjoyed as residents of any of the original colonies. Most of the plans explicitly or implicitly presaged the "apprentice government" structure outlined in Jefferson's plan and the Ordinance of 1787. Pownall's proposals and Franklin's Albany Plan laid it out in detail, while the others assured a temporary government structure upon which settlement and organization proceeded.31
For historians, the Articles are generally considered a speed bump on the way to federalism and the Constitution of 1787. For contemporary Americans, the new confederation was cumbersome and unwieldy; but it was the government, and they made it work. The weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation are well documented by
29 Chad J. Wozniak. “The New Western Colony Schemes: A Preview of the United States Territorial System.” Indiana Magazine of History 68, no. 4 (1972): 305.
30 Wozniak, “The New…”, 304.
31 Wozniak, “The New…”, 304.
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historians and by those in the 1780s who had to deal with the petty jealousies and conflicting interests of the various states. However, the powers that the Confederation did wield with some success are important in understanding the evolution of Congressional or Executive authority. Congressional authority did not come from force nor was it based on some divine system to which its citizens owed their unquestioned loyalty. This was a new kind of institution that would have to establish its authority through an organically developed relationship with the people and with local institutions like state legislatures and town assemblies.
Recognition of Congressional authority from these existing institutions was vital to the legitimacy of that authority. In the early days of the First Continental Congress, local committees and assemblies confirmed the authority of the Congress by enforcing confederated activities like the association for non-importation, carrying out orders to suppress dissent through Committees of Safety and Inspection, and fundamentally continuing to elect and send members to Philadelphia to take up the cause of unity in the face of continued British oppression. Jefferson's Congressional Committee in 1783 was "appointed to prepare a plan for the temporary Government of the Western territory."32 His report, issued in March of the following year, outlines the mode and means for incorporating new territory into the existing union. Patterned on Franklin's plan, Jefferson's report presages the commitment to expanding through establishing independent provinces that would be admitted to the union when they met certain minimums of the voting
32 Jefferson, Writings, 376.
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population ("20,000 free inhabitants" to form the temporary government), the establishment of a "permanent Constitution and Government for themselves," that they would be republican in form, free from residents with hereditary title, and, interestingly, that they would outlaw slavery after 1800.33 This was the foundation for a government of, by, and for the people. These local institutions were the lifeblood of Congressional authority but the system was not yet self-sustaining. The years following the Declaration and the start of open hostilities were a time when the union of American colonies and the legitimacy of their Congress were put to test after test in its early development– its survival was in no way assured.
The 18th-century constitutional debates were animated by paranoia. American patriots imagined popish plots and evil ministers whispering Jacobite fantasies of enslaving the colonists. British ministers believed an anarchic mob threatened to destabilize imperial sovereignty led by radical revolutionaries intent from the beginning to agitate for independence. These paranoid imaginings, like most delusions, have a basis in reality; and, subsequent events, when seen in hindsight, tend to confirm both sides' inherent bias. But it was the paranoia itself that largely animated the actions on both sides– a classic selffulfilling prophecy. Considering this environment, the legitimacy of Congressional authority under the Articles of Confederation and the eventual Federal Government under the Constitution was a real and present concern. Congressional and Federal sovereignty under these new United States was yet to be established and the required recognition from
33 Jefferson, Writings, 376-7.
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the relatively stable state governments was still decidedly up in the air. The land cession issue was as important to the establishment of Federal authority as was the debt or currency issues. The western land issue was addressed before the Constitutional Convention took place. The Ordinances and the cessions from the landed states displayed a tacit recognition of the authority of a new national government and deference to Federal sovereignty in matters that impact the entire union.
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CONCLUSION
If British officials believed that the connection to trade and the larger empire fostered patriotism, the American crisis and revolution might be a confirmation of that theory. The wild west of outlaws, wagon trains, and Indian wars was decades away, but the western territory over the Allegheny Mountains in the Ohio Country was every bit, if not more, wild than the dust swept lawless frontier of the 19th century West. The new Empire of Liberty was, of course, never entirely that. Settlers south of a new line, the Mason-Dixon Line, carried their new ideology of freedom and independence westward along with the old contradictory institution of slavery. Settlers north and south of the line deprived countless nations of Indigenous people the liberty of existence on lands that had been repeatedly promised would be left to the Indians but that would every time be stolen or “purchased” on the unstoppable Anglo western march. Like the Proclamation Line, the Mason-Dixon Line was a chimera promising the survival of a way of life that would be violently destroyed in the name of liberty. It took eight decades for the United States to begin to consider Black Americans subjects of the Empire of Liberty. The American Republic has never come to grips with the history of Indigenous dispossession and genocide. A vibrant, diverse, unique civilization was destroyed in the name of liberty– a sacrifice that still haunts American idealism.
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The ideological motivations for the American Revolution were expressed on the western frontier. However, the precepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were reserved for those in the new imperial sphere– a sphere no longer composed of the relatively diverse peoples of the late British American Empire. The new "Empire of Liberty" seamlessly transitioned from an imperial scheme centered in London to one centered on the new central government of the United States. The founders were acutely aware of the importance of settling the border disputes and speculation conflicts that, if left unsolved, could damage the spirit of unity within the inchoate confederation as well as fuel class conflict between wealthy land speculators and frontier settlers.
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