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Treaty Making, American-Style

The outbreak of the Revolution and the uncertainties it created generated feverish diplomatic activity as Indian nations explored their options and reshuffled alliances and relationships. Indian messengers carrying wampum belts ran forest trails from Indian village to Indian village as well as to Albany, Detroit, and Fort Pitt. Employing the rhetoric, metaphors, and rituals of wampum diplomacy, the Americans competed with the British to secure the support, or at least the neutrality, of Indian tribes, and they negotiated treaties that emphasized alliance and friendship. Major General Philip Schuyler, together with other commissioners appointed by the Continental Congress and commissioners appointed by the government of New York, held a series of treaties with the Iroquois.¹ Operating out of Fort Pitt, George Morgan, who as a trader and junior partner in Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan had built connections in the Ohio Indian country, held councils with the Six Nations, Shawnees, Delawares, and Wyandots.²

Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the United States endeavored to stake its place as a new nation by establishing relations with the nations of Europe and entering the system of treaties and diplomatic customs by which supposedly civilized nations dealt with each other. At the same time, the United States established relations with the Native nations of the American continent, which required conforming to the system of treaties and diplomatic customs that Indians had developed with colonial powers, although its participation in these treaties involved performance of protocol more often than commitment to substance.³ The United States’ first formal recorded treaty with an Indian nation was held at Fort Pitt in 1778. US commissioners and Delaware delegates led by White Eyes exchanged pledges of perpetual peace and friendship on a wampum belt depicting the thirteen states and the Delaware nation holding the chain of friendship. The United States guaranteed the Delawares’ territorial rights as defined in previous treaties and even laid out the possibility that other tribes that were friendly to the United States might join the alliance and “form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have representation in Congress.” But the final version of the treaty committed the Delawares to an offensive and defensive alliance, allowed American troops free passage through Delaware country, and permitted US soldiers to build forts there. The Delawares complained that the American commissioners “put a War Belt & Tomahawk in the hands of said Delaware Nation & induced some of their Chiefs to sign certain Writings” that contained “declarations & engagements they never intended to make.” They returned the war belt and tomahawk. The speaker for the Delaware Council said he had “looked over the Articles of the treaty again & find that they are wrote down false, & as I did not understand the Interpreter what he spoke I could not contradict his Interpretation, but now I will speak the truth plain & tell you what I spoke.” George Morgan, who was not present at the treaty, said the Delawares had “a very wicked false Interpreter,” and he denounced the treaty as “villainously conducted.” He subsequently submitted his resignation to Congress “as Policy may require a certain conduct toward the Indians which Col. Morgan is not capable of.”4 The peace and friendship pledged at Fort Pitt did not last long. White Eyes died in November, murdered by American militia. William Crawford, a friend and business associate (read: fellow land speculator) of George Washington and who had attended the treaty, died four years later, ritually tortured to death by Delaware warriors exacting vengeance for the slaughter of their relatives. Needless to say, nothing came of Delaware representation in Congress. Between the treaty with the Delawares in 1778, and 1871, when Congress terminated treaty making, the United States ratified and passed into law about 370 treaties. The conduct and consequences of the first US treaty did not bode well for those that followed.

In 1783 Indians were massively affected by a treaty in which they took no part: the lands Britain ceded to the United States at the Peace of Paris were Indian lands. For the Americans those lands were both a natural resource and the economic engine of the new nation. Acquiring and selling the lands would provide homes for citizens, fill the empty treasury, and ensure the growth and survival of the young republic. Western lands, said Richard Henry Lee, abounded with “all those primary and essential materials for human industry to work upon, in order to produce the comfort and happiness of mankind.”⁵ In other words, the new nation would build on Indian homelands and also transform them into productive commodities. That meant uprooting Native people, severing their ties to places where generations of ancestors had lived and died, and restricting and then eradicating mobile patterns of subsistence that had sustained Indian societies from time immemorial. “Our lands are our life and our breath,” a Creek chief named Hallowing King explained. “If we part with them, we part with our life.”⁶ In the terms Richard Henry Lee and Hallowing King understood the contest for land, the future of the American nation and the survival of Indians as Indians were incompatible. Treaties had developed as an American blend of Indian and European diplomacies in which the participants met to establish or renew peace, alliance, and trade; settle disputes; and exchange land for gifts; now treaties were instruments for transferring Indian land to American ownership and treaty negotiations became life-and-death struggles.

Following British precedent, the Confederation Congress planned initially to establish a boundary line that could be renegotiated and moved westward as Indians retreated before the advancing tide of American settlement. But the US government was no better able than the imperial government to maintain such a boundary and was not the only player in the game. Individual states also made their own treaties with Indians, often in defiance of federal wishes, and sometimes they challenged the authority of the federal government to conduct Indian affairs. Between 1783 and 1786 twenty-one major treaties were held but the Confederation Congress negotiated only six of them. Spain made four; Britain, one; individual states, seven; and private interest groups made three. “Nowhere along the seaboard or in the backcountry on either side of the Ohio River was there a clear-cut center of authority, white or red,” writes the historian Dorothy Jones.7 The northern states and Virginia ceded their claims to land north of the Ohio to the federal government, but south of the Ohio Virginia retained its claims to Kentucky, North Carolina did not cede Tennessee until 1789, and Georgia claimed Alabama and Mississippi until 1802. In the North and South, private companies and land speculators also tried to get in on the act; in fact, Congress worked with private land companies to try and settle the territory northwest of the Ohio in a systematic and orderly way. Like the Indian confederations that formed to resist the insatiable American assault on tribal lands, the American confederation was subject to internal divisions and tensions. Meanwhile, the British in Canada and Spaniards in Florida watched from the wings and maintained their own alliances among the tribes as a potential buffer against an aggressive new republic.

US negotiators continued to adhere to forms of intercultural diplomacy as they had been developed and fine-tuned in countless councils in colonial America and as practiced in the treaty system that Britain had operated. The first secretary of war, Henry Knox, saw no point in “waging war for an object which may be obtained by a treaty” and argued that “the independent nations and tribes of Indians ought to be considered as foreign nations, not as the subjects of any particular state.”⁸ American treaty commissioners smoked peace pipes, spoke on wampum, and gave gifts. The federal government also built on European precedents in bringing Indian delegations to the nation’s capital, where they toured the sights, sat for portraits, and sometimes met the president.9 American commissioners had no qualms about employing “fathers and children” terminology in their dealings with Indians; however, rather than a kinship metaphor indicating reciprocal relations it increasingly served as a way to infantilize Indians and emphasize their dependence on the Great Father for protection, guidance, and subsistence. The United States continued colonial practice and issued medals to Indians. These medals bore a likeness of the president on the obverse (with the exception of John Adams, every president from Washington to Benjamin Harrison issued one) and were known as peace medals because of the clasped hands of friendship embossed on the reverse. Without medals, Thomas McKenney, the head of the Indian Office, explained in 1829, “any plan of operations among the Indians, be it what it may, is essentially enfeebled.” The Indians esteemed them as “tokens of Friendship,” “badges of power,” and “trophies of renown” and regarded the receipt of medals as an “ancient right.” But as the balance of power shifted dramatically to the United States, peace medals increasingly became tokens of “good behavior” rather than symbols of allegiance.¹⁰ Indian oratory continued to find a receptive audience in the early years of the Republic and examples of Indian eloquence appeared in print, but increasingly they were sentimentalized as befit a tragic people who were assumed to be dying out.¹¹

The power dynamics that had produced the intercultural diplomacy of the colonial era were changing. Americans were eager to expand and impatient with long-winded protocols that allowed all parties ample time for reflection and discussion. As American power increased, respect for Indian customs and concerns diminished and long-standing practices and rituals of reciprocity eroded. More and more often, treaties were conducted on American terms and by American schedules. Treaties established boundaries but the boundaries became ever more permeable and impermanent. Henry Knox admitted that breaches of treaties were the main cause of Indian wars. Unless the federal government restrained its citizens, the Indians could “have no faith in such imbecile promises, and the lawless whites will ridicule a government which shall, on paper only, make Indian treaties, and regulate Indian boundaries.”¹²

Few Americans shared Knox’s concerns that the United States deal honorably with the Indian nations and maintain the traditions of wampum diplomacy. James Duane, a congressional delegate from New York and chairman of the committee on Indian affairs, urged his state to dispense with wampum and abandon “the disgraceful system of pensioning, courting and flattering them as great and mighty nations.” “The Stile by which the Indians are to be addressed is of Moment also,” he wrote. “They are used to be[ing] called Brethren, Sachems and Warriors of the Six Nations. I hope it will never be repeated. It is sufficient to make them sensible that they are spoken to[,] without complementing 20 or 30 Mohawks as a nation and a few more Tusceroes and Onondagoes as distinct nations.” They were defeated dependants and should be treated as such.13

The United States approached its first post-Revolution treaties with the assumption that they had already acquired the Indians’ lands by right of conquest. General Philip Schulyer told the Six Nations they were deceived if they thought that Britain had made provision for them in the Peace of Paris: “the treaty does not contain a single stipulation for the Indians,” he said. “They are not so much as mentioned.” The Indians had chosen the wrong side and had lost. “We are now Masters of this Island, and can dispose of the Lands as we think proper or most convenient to ourselves,” Schulyer declared. The government would make peace with the Indians but in doing so would establish “lines of property” that would be “convenient to the respective tribes, and commensurate to the public wants.” Because the United States had pledged grants of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War but “the public finances do not admit of any considerable expenditure to extinguish the Indian claims,” the Indians would be required to give up land as atonement for their participation and barbarities in the war.¹⁴ American commissioners replaced elaborate speeches and wampum rituals with blunt talk and forceful demands. Treaties, they said, consisted of the United States granting peace to Indians and giving back to the tribes those lands it did not immediately require. Asserting its rights of conquest, the United States assumed it could abolish the boundary line of 1768, and it demanded hefty cessions of territory from the Indians as the penalty for fighting on the wrong side in the Revolutionary War.¹⁵

US commissioners Richard Butler, Arthur Lee, and Oliver Wolcott held a second treaty at Fort Stanwix with the Six Nations in October 1784. In fact, they hurried to Fort Stanwix to participate in a treaty that New York had already initiated and the conference involved multiple negotiations between representatives from Congress, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Six Nations. The Seneca chief Cornplanter and the other Iroquois delegates argued for the Ohio River boundary but the American commissioners would not hear of it: most of the lands had been ceded in the treaty at the same place eighteen years before. Divided and bitter, intimidated by the presence of American troops, and cowed by the American demand for hostages, the Iroquois ceded all land west of the western boundary of Pennsylvania. The tone of negotiations at the treaties in 1768 and 1784 could not have been more different.¹⁶ The Iroquois delegates met with scorn when they returned home and Cornplanter feared for his life. Seven years later in Philadelphia, Cornplanter and his fellow Seneca chiefs Half Town and Big Tree met President Washington, “the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires” (whom they also knew as “the town destroyer” after his scorched-earth policies in Iroquois country during the Revolution), and delivered a lengthy complaint about injustices and deceptions in the Fort Stanwix treaty of 1784. “You have compelled us to do that which has made us ashamed,” they said. And they were not convinced by Washington’s assurances of future protection for their lands: “Father: Your speech, written on the great paper, is to us like the first light of the morning to a sick man, whose pulse beats too strongly in his temples, and prevents him from sleep. He sees it, and rejoices, but he is not cured.”17

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix promised to protect the lands of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras who had supported the Americans during the war. But New York was anxious to extinguish Indian title to western lands before other states advanced rival claims. At the Treaty of Fort Herkimer in 1785, Governor Clinton of New York bought a large tract of land along the New York–Pennsylvania border from the Oneidas, pushing the 1768 Fort Stanwix treaty line west to the Chenango River. Good Peter, the Oneida chief, at first refused to part with so much territory but the commissioners kept up the pressure, lobbying and dividing the Oneidas in private evening meetings until eventually they caved. “We have several times spoke, and sometimes near each other,” said Good Peter. “It often happens that in the Course of a Night People’s Minds get altered.”¹⁸ In a series of shady deals, New York State representatives and rapacious land company agents proceeded to gobble up Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca lands, sometimes over protests by the Iroquois that they believed they were leasing the lands, not selling them. Iroquois diplomatic rituals traditionally served to bring people together with good minds, and their council protocols usually allowed time for consideration and consensus building. “Possess your Minds in Peace, that we decline making an Answer at present,” an Oneida sachem named Oneyanha (or Beech Tree) told the New York commissioners. “A good Mind is necessary in deliberating on Things of Importance.” But New Yorkers in a hurry to get their hands on Oneida lands did not possess peaceful minds, and they pressured and divided the Oneidas. “Our minds,” said Good Peter, “were much agitated, and drawn various ways.”¹⁹

The Indians having their women along may have limited such agitation and distraction. At a treaty council held at Denniston’s Tavern in Albany in February 1789, “female Governesses [clan mothers] and other Women” accompanied the Iroquois chiefs and warriors. The Indians told the New York commissioners why they were there: “Our Ancestors considered it a great Transgression to reject the Council of their Women, particularly the female Governesses. Our Ancestors considered them Mistresses of the Soil. Our Ancestors said who bring us forth, who cultivate our Lands, who kindle our Fires and boil our Pots, but the Women. Our Women say, they think their Uncles had of late lost the Power of Thinking, and were about sinking their Territory.” In other words, the women were not happy with the land cessions made by the men. On this occasion, the men had “much Conversation with our Sisters” before any agreement was made. “It is an acknowledged Truth that our Sisters are the principal Inhabitants of the Earth,” Good Peter explained to the governor. “The Earth from whence spring the Articles necessary to sustain Life is theirs, and it is thereupon necessary we should hearken to their Advise.”20 But women were not immune to the pressures and tactics applied to acquire Oneida lands and they were unable to stem the tide of dispossession. As New Yorkers secured the land by treaty and chicanery, Samuel Kirkland, who had a hand in many of the deals, reported that it became commonplace for Indians to say “cheat like a white man.”²¹

The United States dictated treaties by right of conquest to most of the Ohio tribes. At Fort McIntosh, at the confluence of the Ohio and Beaver rivers (present-day Beaver, Pennsylvania), the treaty commissioners Butler, Lee, and George Rogers Clark addressed the Indians “in a high tone” and told them they were a conquered people. Because the English king had made no provision for the tribes, they were “therefore left to obtain peace from the U. States, & to be received under their government and protection, upon such conditions as seem proper to Congress, the Great Council of the U. States.” The commissioners brushed aside the Indians’ objections that these lands had been handed down to them by their ancestors and that they still regarded them as their own: “The detail of these claims and title may appear to be of consequence among yourselves. But to us & to the business of the Council Fire to which we have called you, they have no relation; because we claim the country by conquest; and are to give not to receive.”²² The commissioners demanded southern and eastern Ohio as the price of peace.

A year later, 150 Shawnee men and 80 women of the Mekoche or Maquachake division—traditionally responsible for matters of mediation and peacemaking—arrived at Fort Finney at the mouth of the Great Miami River. “Painted and dressed in the most elegant manner,” they entered the grounds of the fort “in very regular order; the chiefs in front, beating a drum, with young warriors dancing a peculiar dance for such occasions.” The two head dancers each carried the stem of a pipe painted and decorated with wampum and bald eagle feathers as symbols of peace. Behind the warriors came the women and children. The Indians sang, the Indians and Americans each fired a salute, and the American commissioners entered the council house and took their seats. Then the Indians filed in; the men “entered at the west door, the chiefs on our left, the warriors on our right and round on the east end until they joined the chiefs; the old chief beating the drum, and the young men dancing and waving the feathers over us, whilst the others were seated; this done, the women entered at the east door, and took their seats on the east end, with great form.” The Shawnee speaker rose to address the commissioners and urged them to be of good mind; then, holding a string of wampum, he ritually cleared their ears, wiped their eyes, and “removed all sorrow from [their] hearts.”²³

But the American commissioners had little patience with such protocols and were in no mood for conciliation. Richard Butler had been a trader among the Shawnees, spoke their language, and had two children by a Shawnee woman, but he had fought against the Shawnees in 1764. This was also his third treaty council in three years and it was time to wrap things up. Clark had made a name for himself as an Indian fighter during the Revolution; he had led assaults on Shawnee villages in 1780 and 1782 and operated on the assumption that the only thing Indians understood or respected was force. His idea of Indian diplomacy was to hold out a red or black wampum belt in his right hand and a white one in his left and say, “Hear is a Blody [sic] Belt and a white one take which one you please.”24 Samuel Parsons, a Harvard graduate, Connecticut lawyer, and former officer in the Continental Army, was intent on opening Indian country to veterans—or to men like himself who bought up the veterans’ land bounties at a fraction of their value. The Americans demanded that the Shawnees cede all land east of the Great Miami and give hostages as a guarantee of compliance. The Shawnees protested: “God gave us this country, we do not understand measuring out the lands, it is all ours.” They insisted on the Ohio River as the boundary and refused to give hostages. When the Shawnee speaker offered the wampum belt on which he spoke, the American commissioners refused to accept it. Butler picked up the belt “and dashed it on the table.” Clark pushed it off the table with his cane and ground it into the dirt with his boot. The Americans then withdrew “and threw down a black and white string” of wampum, symbolizing the choice between war and peace, promising destruction for the Shawnees’ women and children if they failed to comply. The Mekoche chief Moluntha urged his people to reconsider. When the council reconvened the Shawnees gave the commissioners a white belt and begged them to have pity on the women and children. They then grudgingly accepted the American terms and ceded their tribal lands east of the Great Miami, which meant they gave up most of southern and eastern Ohio.²⁵ But the Mekoches did not necessarily speak for the rest of the Shawnees and the treaty did little to restrain Kentucky militia who had become accustomed to crossing the Ohio and attacking Shawnee villages during the Revolution. Before the year was out, Moluntha’s village lay in ruins and the old chief lay dead, a Kentuckian’s axe in his skull and his fingers still clutching a copy of the treaty he had persuaded his people to sign.

The national assault on Indian homelands got under way more slowly in the South. The southern states posed a more immediate threat than Congress. The United States signed its first treaties with the major southeastern tribes at Hopewell in northwestern South Carolina. US commissioners Benjamin Hawkins, Andrew Pickens, Joseph Martin, and Lachlan McIntosh met with nine hundred Cherokees in November 1785 and then gathered with Choctaw and Chickasaw delegates in January 1786. The Indians produced their British medals and commissions and asked for American ones in exchange. Corn Tassel, the chief of Chota, reminded the Americans that the Indians were the first inhabitants of the land and the white people were now living on it as their friends. “From the beginning of the first friendship between the white and red people, beads were given as an emblem thereof: and these are the beads I give to the commissioners of the United States, as a confirmation of our friendship.” The Americans wanted to reaffirm tribal boundaries, but even so Tassel seemed to lose land. He drew a map detailing Cherokee territorial claims, reviewed the treaties they had made, and dismissed the Henderson treaty of 1775 as fraudulent. “I know that Richard Henderson says he purchased the lands at Kentucky and as far south as Cumberland, but he is a rogue and a liar, and if he was here I would tell him so.” Henderson had asked only for some grazing land on the Kentucky River; he must have concocted the deed and added the chiefs’ names himself. But the commissioners would not budge:

You know Colonel Henderson, Attacullacula, Oconostoto, are all dead; what you say may be true; but here is one of Henderson’s deeds, which points out the line, as you have done, nearly til it strikes Cumberland, thence it runs down the waters of the same to the Ohio, thence up the said river as it meanders to the beginning. Your memory may fail you; this is on record, and will remain forever. The parties being dead, and so much time elapsed since the date of the deed, and the country being settled on the faith of the deed, puts it out of our power to do anything respecting it; you must therefore be content with it, as if you had actually sold it, and proceed to point out your claim exclusive of this land.

Reluctantly, Tassel agreed to “say nothing more about Kentucky, although it is justly ours.” The US commissioners read the treaty out loud and the Cherokees then signed it. Georgia and North Carolina had not ceded their western lands to the federal government, and their commissioners and agents who were present immediately lodged a written protest against the treaty as “a manifest and direct attempt to violate the retained sovereignty and legislative right” of their states. The agent for North Carolina was William Blount, whose reputation for land grabbing earned him the name the “dirt king” among the Indians.26 In the face of state opposition, the federal government lacked the power to honor the boundaries it had reaffirmed. “We have held several treaties with the Americans, when Bounds was always fixt and fair promises always made that the white people Should not come over,” Tassel complained three years later, “but we always find that after a treaty they Settle much faster than before.”²⁷

Choctaw delegates arrived at Hopewell the day after Christmas in 1785 after a seventy-seven-day journey from their Mississippi homeland. In addition to the physical difficulties and dangers they encountered, the delegates also likely traveled at a deliberate and ritualistic peace, as befitted a mission that was both diplomatic and spiritual. They did not go there to give up their land or their sovereignty; they went to talk about trade, establish peaceful relations, and instruct the American commissioners about Choctaw ways of conducting diplomacy.28 The Americans were not particularly interested in learning Indian protocol. They were interested in Indian land, although they did not yet have the power to coerce compliance with their demands.

As the tribes recovered from the shock of the Peace of Paris, resistance stiffened. Indians who were not present at the treaties dictated by the United States denounced those who were and refused to accept the terms. As 1786 drew to a close, delegates from the Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, Hurons, Ojibwes, Potawatomis, Ottawas, Piankeshaws, Weas, Miamis, and Cherokees gathered in council near Detroit and adopted a united stance. In a forceful message to Congress they declared that the previous treaties were invalid and that they would only recognize land cessions “made in the most public manner” and approved by the united tribes.²⁹

Faced with the prospect of an all-out war with still-formidable Indian nations, Congress had little choice but to retreat from its high-handed policy of dictating treaties by right of conquest. Knox recommended returning to the British practice of purchasing Indian lands in open council, and the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, proclaimed that the United States would observe “the utmost good faith” in its dealings with Indian people and that their lands would not be taken from them without their consent or would be invaded except in “just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” But Congress did not retreat very far. The ordinance also laid out a blueprint for national expansion: the Northwest Territory was to be divided into districts that, after passing through territorial status, would become states. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin eventually entered the Union as states carved from the Northwest Territory. The same year, prepared to purchase Indian claims to lands that had been ceded in the treaties at Forts Stanwix, McIntosh, and Finney, Congress authorized and financed Arthur St. Clair, the newly appointed governor of the Northwest Territory, to convene the tribes in a general council and get them to confirm the land cessions. He was to establish peace with the tribes but not depart from the earlier treaties “unless a change of boundary beneficial to the United States” could be obtained. And while purchasing Indian land was not the primary goal of the treaty, he was not to “neglect any opportunity that may offer of extinguishing the Indian rights to the westward, as far as the river Mississippi.” About two hundred Indians met St. Clair at Fort Harmar near present-day Marietta, Ohio, in December 1788. But they demanded the Ohio River be restored as the boundary, making the negotiations “both tedious and troublesome” for St. Clair. He resorted to the haughty language employed by American commissioners in earlier treaties, telling the Indians that Britain had ceded their lands and that the United States was generous in its restraint. He eventually browbeat the delegates into signing. The two treaties signed on January 1789 were, yet again, essentially dictated treaties.30

Most of the Indians stayed away from Fort Harmar. They had already had their fill of American treaty making. An Ottawa war chief named Gushgushagwa, Augooshaway, or Egushawa reviewed and denounced the Americans’ diplomatic tactics to his Indian listeners a couple of years later. The United States had invaded their country, built forts, assembled the rum-loving Indians, told them a long story about how having conquered the English they had conquered the lands of all the Indians, and then presented them with papers to sign. The Americans had said that their papers, writings, belts, and messages were proof of their desire for peace, but “they were not presented with the dignity which the importance of the subject required, or comformably to the wise customs of our ancestors, but flung at you with threats.” Egushawa reminded his audience how the Virginian commissioner at Fort Finney had picked up the Shawnee wampum belt and “threw it off, contemptuously, with his cane!” A few Indians from various tribes attended the Fort Harmar treaty, “although their chiefs forbad them; knowing well that our elder brethren would require more of that pen and ink witch-craft, which they can make speak things we never intended, or had any idea of, even an hundred years hence; just as they please.” The Americans professed to want peace but they were the aggressors, said Egushawa: “notwithstanding their pen and ink work,” they attempted “to make dogs of all the nations who have listened to them.”³¹ Indian resistance, in large measure, was a protest against the treaty-making tactics of the Americans.

As the young nation consolidated its government it established the machinery and basic policies by which it conducted relations and negotiated treaties with the Indian tribes. The US Constitution, adopted in 1789, affirmed federal control over Indian affairs. Article 1 gave Congress the power to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes, and Article 2 authorized the president to make treaties, subject to ratification by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The secretary of war was responsible for supervising the negotiation of Indian treaties. The president appointed commissioners to carry out negotiations on his behalf, and the commissioners and the Indian leaders signed the treaty. Not all treaties were ratified and Congress modified others—cutting the amount of annuity payments to the Indians, for instance. The revised version of a treaty then had to be taken back to the tribes for acceptance. By the time that happened, things could be very different in Indian country, leaders could have changed, and the original signers would have acquired a rather jaundiced view of American pledges and promises. Once a treaty was ratified, the president signed it. From the initial negotiation to proclamation could take several years.32

In 1790 Congress passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. Traders required licenses to operate in Indian country, and transfers of Indian land required congressional approval. The Trade and Intercourse Act was renewed periodically until 1834. In words that must have sounded reminiscent of British assurances after the Proclamation of 1763, George Washington told the Iroquois “the General Government only has the Power to treat with the Indian Nations, and any Treaty formed and held without its Authority will not be binding. Here, then, is the Security for the Remainder of your Lands. No State, nor Person, can purchase your Lands, unless at a general treaty, held under the Authority of the United States.”³³

But frontier settlers, squatters, and speculators seldom shared their government’s concern for orderly expansion and individual states, that were often resentful of attempts by the federal government to restrict their rights, sometimes made treaties that never received congressional approval. Like the British imperial administration in 1763, the US government found that proclaiming order on a distant frontier was a far cry from being able to enforce it and restrain its citizens as they flooded Indian lands. Many Federalist leaders were concerned with restoring social order on the frontier in the wake of the bloody Revolutionary War and they wanted to exert the government’s authority to ensure a well-ordered national expansion. In that, they shared some common goals with Indian civil or village chiefs; both groups of leaders sought to establish trade and boundaries and to avoid war. But Indian and Federalist leaders also shared similar challenges. Civil chiefs influenced, persuaded, and acted as a check on warriors, but they did not control them. As battle lines hardened, Indian warriors and Indian-hating frontiersmen turned away from the moderate policies of their “civil” leaders. Warriors denounced tactics of accommodation and forged new multitribal resistance movements; frontiersmen denounced leaders who seemed to pander to Indians while American settlers’ cabins burned. American citizens embraced the vision of a rapidly expanding agrarian republic and American policies justified taking Indian land by eradicating Indian cultures and hunting economies.³⁴

Not everything that went into an Indian treaty appeared in the Constitution. Sometimes the United States resorted to bribes to get the results they wanted. In 1790, Alexander McGillivray led a delegation of Creek chiefs to New York where they signed a treaty in which they ceded most of their lands in Georgia to the United States and the United States guaranteed Creek territorial boundaries. Secret articles in the treaty gave the head chief an annual salary of $1,200 and salaries of $100 each to lesser chiefs.³⁵ Creek complaints about inadequate representation in the treaties they made with the United States increased, and secret articles became more common.36 After the Treaty of Holston in July 1791, negotiated with William Blount, governor of the Territory south of the Ohio River and ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs, Cherokees complained that Blount pressured them into selling land and that the federal negotiators inserted clauses without their knowledge and bribed the interpreter to tell them that the land being ceded was smaller than it actually was and that the payment would be double the amount that was written in the treaty.³⁷ After their experience with Blount, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow asked the secretary of war to “Tell General Washington that the Carolina people ought not to be appointed to hold talks with the Indians, as they always ask for our lands.”³⁸ As Georgia continued to encroach on Creek and Cherokee lands, Creek chiefs in the 1790s worried that if they parted with any more land “at last the white people will not suffer us to keep as much as will be sufficient to bury our dead” and that before long the whites would take “every fork of a creek where there is a little good land … and every stream of water, where there is a fish to be found.”³⁹

Despite the bombast of its treaty commissioners, the United States still lacked the military power to crush Indian resistance. The Indian confederacy that formed north of the Ohio repulsed General Josiah Harmar’s expedition in 1790 and then, in November 1791, the confederacy shattered an army led by St. Clair, inflicting some nine hundred casualties and effectively destroying the only army the infant republic possessed. It was the biggest single defeat ever inflicted by Indians on the United States and it took the new nation three years to reverse the outcome. With its army reduced to a shambles, the government opted to negotiate, or at least to stall and break down the tribes’ united stance while it rebuilt its army. In the summer of 1792, it sent peace feelers via an Iroquois delegation headed by the noted Seneca orator Red Jacket. Almost one thousand Indians from the confederated nations assembled in council on the Auglaize River to hear the Americans’ offer. Although Joseph Brant, the Iroquois, and some other groups favored compromise, the western tribes stood firm on maintaining the Ohio River boundary that had been established in 1768. A Shawnee chief named Painted Pole demanded that Red Jacket “speak from your heart and not from your mouth,” and, picking up the strings of wampum on which Red Jacket had spoken, he threw them at the feet of the Seneca delegation. The Shawnees had been fighting for the Ohio River boundary for more than twenty years and they would accept no other boundary. The fighting had taken its toll on the authority of their civil chiefs: war leaders sat in front of civil chiefs during the councils and the Mahican emissary Hendrick Aupaumut reported that it was now the Shawnee “custom that the Chief Warriors should be foremost in doing business.”⁴⁰

The following year in an abortive peace council at Sandusky in northwestern Ohio matters were not helped by the fact that Simon Girty was interpreting. Girty, who had been captured by Indians at fourteen and then liberated at the end of the French and Indian War, had built a career in a conflicted ethnic and national borderland on his dual identity, his multilingual skills, and his knowledge of Indian and white cultures. During the Revolution he went over to the British and worked in the Crown’s Indian Department, incurring the wrath of Americans who hated him as a renegade who had betrayed both his country and his race. Girty continued to side with the Indians and the British after the Revolution. At one Indian council, according to Secretary of War Henry Knox, “no other white person was admitted but Simon Girty, whom they considered as one of themselves.” The Sandusky peace talks had barely gotten under way when a Wyandot chief, with Girty interpreting, told the American commissioners that the Indian delegates would convey their words to their warriors but that the commissioners might as well go home. As the council was breaking up, someone pointed out that the speech had been misinterpreted. Girty modified his translation to say instead that the commissioners should wait for the Indians to consult and give their answer. Girty had earlier vowed “that he would raise hell to prevent peace.”41

The Indians at Sandusky suggested to the commissioners, rather tongue-in-cheek, that the United States take all the money it was offering the Indians for their lands and all the money expended in raising and paying armies, and divide it among the poor settlers who had been “in continual trouble ever since they cross the Ohio,” so they would happily go back to where they came from. The commissioners were not amused. The Indians also rejected the premises on which the United States claimed their land:

We never made any agreement with the King, nor with any other nation, that we would give to either the exclusive right of purchasing our lands; and we declare to you, that we consider ourselves free to make any bargain or cession of lands, whenever and to whomever we please. If the white people, as you say, made a treaty that none of them but the King should purchase of us, and that he has given that right to the United States, it is an affair which concerns you and him, and not us: we have never parted with such a power.

The federal government rejected (and the Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh later explicitly denied) the Indians’ assertion that they could sell their lands to whomever they pleased, and the commissioners at Sandusky were adamant: “it is impossible to make the river Ohio the boundary, between your people and the people of the United States.” The Indians were equally adamant: “Look back, and review the lands from whence we have been driven to this spot,” they said; “We can retreat no further.” With negotiations at an impasse, the commissioners departed. The Indians had only themselves to blame for the continuing war, they reported. As the commissioners withdrew, General Anthony Wayne advanced with his rebuilt American army.42 In August 1794 Wayne defeated the confederated tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Word of the battle reached US treaty commissioner Colonel Timothy Pickering and the Iroquois at Canandaigua. Pickering, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had been assigned a double task: keep the Six Nations, especially the Senecas, from joining the western confederacy, and obtain unconditional surrender of any Iroquois claims to land in the Ohio Valley. He had been educated at Harvard, but he learned about doing business in Indian country from Red Jacket, who had matched him in two previous meetings and lectured him on proper council protocol.⁴³ More than 1,500 Iroquois, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Handsome Lake, and other prominent leaders, gathered at Canandaigua in the fall of 1794. At the invitation of both President Washington and the Iroquois, four Quakers attended the treaty as observers, and three of them kept journals, in which they recorded both Iroquois and American perspectives on the proceedings. The treaty dragged on for almost two months with frequent delays and adjournments. Red Jacket conveyed the sentiments of the Iroquois women, who insisted that their voices be heard because “it was they who made the Men, [and] altho’ they did not sit in council, yet that they were acquainted from time to time with the transactions at the Treaties.” At one point, irritated that Pickering was busy writing down what he was saying, Red Jacket stopped and “would not proceed until he looked him in the face.” The Quakers William Savery and James Emlen both commented on the need for patience. “It is to no purpose to say you are tired of waiting,” explained Savery, “they will only tell you very calmly, Brother, you have your way of doing business, and we have ours; we desire you would sit easy on your seats. Patience then becomes our only remedy.” Emlen reflected: “Perhaps no people are greater masters of their time, hence in their public transactions we often complain of their being tedious, not considering that they & we estimate time with very diff[eren]t. judgm[en]ts—we are very apt to condemn any natural practices that differ from our own but it requires a greater conquest over prejudices & more penetration than I am Master of clearly to say that we are the happier people.”⁴⁴

Pickering was there to appease the Iroquois. He told them his principal purpose was “to heal the wounds which have been given by disposing of your lands, and to point out the way in which you can avoid future strife.” The Oneidas had seen their homeland shrink from five or six million acres to one-quarter of a million acres and the recurrent land losses divided their nation. “Brother,” one said, “you requested that we would lay before you the whole cause of our difference: I repeat, that is our land.”⁴⁵ An Oneida chief named Onondiyo (or Captain John) “had much to say about the many deceptions which had been practiced upon them by the white people; observing that however good and honest white men might be in other matters, they were all deceivers when they wanted to buy Indian lands; and that the advantages of learning which they possessed made them capable of doing much good and much evil.” The Iroquois were particularly incensed by the intimidation and deception at Fort Stanwix ten years earlier, although Pickering explained to the Quakers that the lands they ceded constituted just compensation for siding with Britain during the Revolutionary War. “He instanced the case of an individual who had committed a trespass on another; the law determines that the trespasser shall suffer either in person or in property, and this law is just. Such,” added Savery, “is the reasoning of conquerors.”46

Pickering acknowledged that some white people had imposed on the Indians, exploiting their ignorance in computing the value of their lands, plying them with alcohol, and getting them to sign papers that had not been properly interpreted. Sometimes the interpreters deliberately deceived; sometimes their interpretations were not exact because Indian languages lacked the words to express the terms used in treaties, which even few white people understood. “You ought never to set your hands to a paper unless the interpreters first say, in the presence of the Great Spirit, that they have faithfully interpreted every word,” Pickering advised. “If this were done, brothers, such papers would contain but a few words; and the fewer words the less danger of you being deceived. But I must not enlarge on these matters.” For Pickering, the best way for the Iroquois “to avoid future strife” was to adopt white ways so they could match whitemen and to become literate so they could avoid being cheated.⁴⁷

But the short-term goal was to keep the Iroquois out of the war that was winding down in the West. When the Treaty of Canandaigua was finally signed, the United States confirmed Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga lands in New York; restored lands to the Senecas; and promised never to disturb them “in the free use and enjoyment thereof.” Fifty sachems signed the treaty.⁴⁸ Three weeks later, Pickering signed a second treaty with the Oneidas, awarding them, and their Stockbridge and Tuscarora allies, compensation for their services to the United States during the Revolution. Washington recognized Pickering’s peace-keeping diplomacy by promoting him to replace Henry Knox as secretary of war, but Philip Schulyer and other powerful New Yorkers continued to erode the Iroquois homeland in defiance of federal law and federal treaties.⁴⁹

In August 1795, the western Indians assembled at Greenville to make peace with Wayne (see figure 3.1). Wayne opened the councils in customary fashion—“I have cleared the ground of all brush and rubbish, and opened roads to the east, to the west, to the north, and to the south, that all nations may come in safety and ease to meet me,” he announced. He stated that he adhered to the protocol of the calumet and wampum belt “to evince that my mind and heart are always the same.”50 The American officers and commissioners maintained a façade of civility in dealing with the Indians and the Indians still attempted to establish social obligations with the Americans.⁵¹ New Corn, a Potawatomi chief, asked Wayne to replace the Indians’ old medals, which they had received from their former British allies, with General Washington’s medals. They had “thrown off the British” and henceforward would regard the Americans as their only true friends. “The Great Spirit has made me a great chief, and endowed me with great power,” said New Corn. “The heavens and earth are my heart, the rising sun my mouth.” He knew that other people had made and broken treaties but he was “too honorable and too brave a man to be guilty of such unworthy conduct.” The Great Spirit heard what he said and he dared not tell a lie. He asked Wayne, “the Great Wind,” not to deceive the Indians as the French, British, and Spaniards had done but to keep his promises. “My friend,” he concluded, “I am old, but I shall never die. I shall always live in my children, and children’s children.” And he handed Wayne a string of wampum.⁵²

FIGURE 3.1 “Indian Treaty of Greenville,” Ohio, 1795. Artist unknown; believed to be Officer of General Wayne’s staff. (Chicago History Museum [ICHi-64806])

But lofty rhetoric and respectful relationships could not mask the marked shift in power: Wayne effectively dictated the terms and presented the Indians with a prepared treaty for signing. Sixty-nine chiefs, including Little Turtle of the Miamis, and Black Hoof and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees who had fought to defend the Ohio boundary since before the Revolution, acknowledged that the fight was lost and ceded most of Ohio to the United States. Egushawa, who had denounced treaties as “pen and ink witchcraft,” signed this one.53 The war for the boundary established at Fort Stanwix in 1768 was finally over.

Even as Little Turtle and Wayne negotiated a new boundary between Indians and whites, the individual who stood beside them translating their words reflected the porous nature of such boundaries. William Wells had been captured by the Miamis as a boy, married Little Turtle’s daughter, and apparently “went Indian.” He participated in raids against frontier settlements, helped lure travelers on the Ohio River into ambushes, and had fought against both Harmar and St. Clair. Then he left the Miamis, enlisted as a scout in Wayne’s army in the Fallen Timbers campaign, and was at the treaty as one of the team of interpreters. Seventeen years later, Wells would escort the garrison and families as they evacuated Fort Dearborn (present-day Chicago) at the beginning of the War of 1812. Dressed as an Indian with his face painted black as was the Miami custom when confronting certain death, Wells was killed by attacking Potawatomi warriors, who cut off his head and tore out his heart.⁵⁴

The Greenville boundary was no more effective in checking American expansion than the Proclamation Line of 1763 or the Fort Stanwix boundary had been. “Scarcely anything short of a Chinese Wall, or a line of Troops will restrain Land Jobbers, and the Incroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian Territory,” said George Washington.⁵⁵ Treaties increased dramatically in number and frequency—more than two hundred between 1795 and 1840 and sometimes every couple of years with the same tribes. Just three years after the Treaty of Canaidaigua, Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and other Seneca chiefs agreed to the Treaty of Big Tree, which ceded millions of acres of land west of the Genesee River and effectively reduced the Seneca homeland to eleven parcels. Red Jacket received a cash payment for his compliance. Although he later took a strong stand against further reductions of Seneca land, many Senecas remember him for the land-sale treaties he signed and depict him as “as a man condemned by the Creator to push a dirt-filled wheelbarrow up a hill for eternity.”⁵⁶ Treaty making became land marketing, and some Indians were active participants; they sold off chunks of tribal land to finance consumption of new goods and pay off old debts, and some used treaties as a way to enter the land market and make money on the one valuable commodity they possessed.⁵⁷

Treaties were the key instruments in the recurrent dispossession of Indians as the United States pushed steadily westward. In the winter of 1802–3, President Thomas Jefferson told Delaware and Shawnee delegates in Washington that he would “pay the most sacred regard to existing treaties between your respective nations and ours, and protect your whole territories against all intrusions that may be attempted by white people.” At the same time, Jefferson was implementing plans to deprive the Indians of their lands. Jefferson and others easily solved the dilemma of how to deal honorably with Indians (as they said they would) while at the same time taking their lands (as they knew they must); they determined that having too much land was a disincentive for Indians to become “civilized.” Ignoring the role of agriculture in Eastern Woodland societies, Jefferson argued that Indians would continue to hunt rather than settle down as farmers unless their options were restricted. Taking their lands forced Indians into a settled, agricultural, and “civilized” way of life and was therefore, in the long run, good for them. As Indians took up farming, Jefferson wrote in 1803 to William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, “they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families.” To promote this process “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals run into debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” In this way, American settlements would gradually surround the Indians “and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.” The process of dispossession could be comfortably accomplished within Jefferson’s philosophy of minimal government. The government could do little to regulate the frontier and protect Indian lands, which meant that the Indians would fight for their land. The government would then have no choice but to invade Indian country, suppress the uprising, and dictate treaties in which defeated Indians signed away land. The stage was then set for the process to repeat itself. Jefferson’s strategy for acquiring Indian lands resulted in some thirty treaties with a dozen or so tribal groups and the cession of almost two hundred thousand square miles of Indian territory in nine states. Jefferson regretted that Indians seemed doomed to extinction, but he had little compunction about taking away their lands.58

Traders were willing participants in Jefferson’s strategy. The Scottish traders William Panton and John Forbes, who continued to dominate Indian trade in the Southeast after the Revolution, knew all about leveraging Indian debts to secure Indian lands—they’d been doing it for years—and readily collaborated with the United States. They bought at discount the debts individual hunters owed small traders and then aggregated them into one lump sum. By 1803, the southeastern tribes owed John Forbes and Company $192,526 (the Creeks alone owed $113,000). The United States compelled the Creeks to cede millions of acres, in exchange for which it paid off some of the traders’ debts. In 1805, the traders exerted their influence among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Upper Creeks to help secure the cession of almost eight million acres. The United States paid the tribes a total of $380,000 in money and goods, of which more than $77,000 went to Forbes and Company to settle the Indians’ debts. Eventually, the company recouped all but a little under $7,000 of the original debt. In this way, “thousands of small, face-to-face exchanges between traders and hunters were transmuted by a multinational company and an expanding nation-state into massive land cessions that affected an entire people.”59 At the Treaty of Mount Dexter in 1805, for instance, Choctaws ceded more than four million acres of land in southern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama to the United States for $50,500. Of that amount, $48,000 went to pay off their debts to traders. The remaining $2,500 went to the interpreter, John Pitchlynn, “to compensate him for certain losses sustained in the Chaktaw country, and as a grateful testimonial of the nation’s esteem.” (Pitchlynn, who had interpreted in the Choctaws’ first treaty with the United States twenty years earlier, was long recognized as a “friend to the United States” who could exert influence over the tribe.) The Choctaws were left with $3,000 a year in trade goods.⁶⁰ Such arrangements became common in US treaty making and trader-creditors became regular attendees at treaty councils.

United States commissioners in the first decade of the nineteenth century held treaties with individual tribes, or groups from several tribes, and pressured them into exchanging land for cash, annuities, or trade goods. These tactics yielded millions of acres of land in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. The Treaty of St. Louis in 1804 stood out as infamous even by the treaty-making standards of the time. Sauk and Fox (Mesquakie) delegates signed away a huge swath of tribal lands for $1,000. The Sauk war chief Black Hawk denounced the treaty and said the delegates were “drunk the greater part of the time they were in St. Louis.” A dozen years later he unwittingly confirmed the deal: “Here, for the first time, I touched the goose quill to the treaty,” he recalled in later life, “not knowing, however, that by that act, I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it, and never would have signed their treaty.” As far as Black Hawk was concerned, he could not have sold the land even if he had wanted to: “my reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil ….Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.”⁶¹

As governor of Indiana territory, William Henry Harrison built his career on advancing Jefferson’s policies of national expansion and Indian dispossession.⁶² He exploited divisions within and among the tribes, coercing one tribe into signing by threatening to cut a better deal with another; he bribed compliant chiefs, and he ignored or rode roughshod over the reciprocal obligations that treaty making entailed and the pledges that treaties established. At the Treaty of Fort Wayne with Delawares, Potawatomis, Miamis, and members of the Eel River tribes in September 1809, the Miamis resisted Harrison’s demands and a chief named Owl insisted that the United States pay the going rate for their land—about $2 per acre. Such a price was totally unacceptable to Harrison. He withheld annuities due under previous treaties until this one was signed, and he injected alcohol into the proceedings to move negotiations along. The Miami position became untenable and in the end the United States acquired almost three million acres for less than two cents an acre. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh called it a “whiskey treaty.” Harrison told the secretary of war that the treaty terms were “just to all” and he assured the Indians that the United States would always adhere to their agreements: “To do otherwise would be offensive to the great spirit and all the world would look upon them as a faithless people.”63 Harrison became president in 1840.

Indians understood how American treaty makers operated, even if they found it hard to do anything about it. Wyandots at Detroit in February 1812 sent a message to the president and Congress:

Fathers, Listen! We can assure you in sincerity and truth, how the thing is conducted at all treaties. When the United States want a particular piece of land, all our nations are assembled; a large sum of money is offered; the land is occupied probably by one nation only; nine-tenths have no actual interest in the land wanted; if the particular nation interested refuses to sell, they are generally threatened by others, who want the money or goods offered, to buy whiskey.⁶⁴

Such treaty-making tactics fueled the cause of the Tecumseh, who denounced the American practice of making treaties with individual tribes, and added urgency to the idea that Indian land belonged to all the tribes and could be ceded only with their unanimous consent. Tecumseh’s vision was to create a united and independent Indian state in what was to become the heartland of the United States. A boundary line between Indians and whites like that implemented in 1763 and reaffirmed in 1768 became a dream for Indian freedom fighters in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Tecumseh’s resistance movement attracted warriors from more than thirty tribes but his vision ended with his death in battle in 1813. The men who killed him, and according to some accounts stripped the skin from his body, were Kentuckians, who had grown up on the dark and bloody grounds opened up by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.

In the South, Upper Creek towns tended to favor adopting a militant stance in dealing with the United States; Lower Creek towns tended to advocate peace and accommodation. Conflicts within the Creek confederacy spilled over into attacks on American settlers, and the United States responded with swift military action against the militant Creeks or “Red Sticks.” In the Creek War of 1813–14 General Andrew Jackson led a series of devastating campaigns that culminated in the slaughter of some eight hundred Creek warriors at the Battle of Tohopeka, or Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama in March 1814. About five hundred Cherokees and one hundred Lower Creeks helped Jackson win his victory. But Jackson paid no attention to former allies as he drove to acquire Indian land. At the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, the future president met with thirty-five pro-American Creek chiefs and exacted retribution and “just indemnity” for the expenses of the war. As Jackson made clear to the secretary of war, this was not to be a negotiated peace: “The Commissioners appointed to make a treaty with the Creeks will have little to do but assign them their proper limits. Those of the friendly party, who have associated with me, will be easily satisfied; and the remainder of the hostile party, pleased that their lives were spared them, will thankfully accept, as a bounteous donation, any district which may be allowed them for their future settlement.” The first article of the treaty began with the words “The United States demand.” Jackson took twenty-three million acres in Georgia and Alabama, the biggest single land cession in southeastern Indian history, and most of it from “friendly” Creeks who had helped him win his victories.65 Meanwhile, the end of the War of 1812 effectively removed Great Britain as an ally of Indian nations in the Southeast. The way was open for the United States and the expanding cotton kingdom to advance across the Old Southwest. Nations like the Choctaws who in the past had successfully played off rival colonial powers now had to deal only with the United States; Indians who had formerly traded deerskins now found increasingly that Americans wanted only their lands. They took those lands in treaty after treaty, but increasingly the federal government, and Jackson in particular, resorted to force rather than “the old norms of negotiation.” As Leonard Sadosky notes, “The forms remained the same, but the realities of power behind them were very different.”⁶⁶

As the cotton kingdom and its slave labor force expanded across the South, treaties generated more and more cessions of Indian land. Southern cotton fed the mills of northern England and New England, and southeastern lands were too valuable to be left in Indian hands. Americans increasingly demanded the occupation of all Indian lands. In 1803 American emissaries in Paris had purchased the Louisiana Territory—some 827,000 square miles of territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains for a mere $15 million—and the United States doubled its size overnight. Many Americans saw the West as barren and virtually empty, useless for American farmers but good enough for Indian hunters. Removing Indians from the East was now a practical possibility. American treaty makers began pressuring Indian people to cede their lands in exchange for new lands west of the Mississippi. As American pressures and market forces undermined traditional social and economic structures, Indians seemed to face a choice between destitution and removal, and many Indians chose the latter. In 1817, Cherokees gave up two large tracts of land in Georgia and North Carolina in exchange for land in Arkansas. In 1820, Andrew Jackson bullied and threatened Choctaw chiefs into making a treaty at Doak’s Stand, ceding lands in Mississippi and accepting lands in the West in return. Ten years later, at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, US commissioners told the Choctaws that if they refused to move west, they would be made subject to Mississippi state law and lose their existence as a tribe. Some Choctaws remained in Mississippi but most headed west.

In 1825 the Creek chief William McIntosh and a handful of minor chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, giving up all remaining Creek lands in Georgia between the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers. In return the United States paid $400,000 to “the emigrating nation,” of which $200,000 went directly to McIntosh and the treaty signers. McIntosh had led the pro-American faction of the Lower Creeks in the Creek War, fought alongside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson that confiscated two-thirds of all Creek land. McIntosh grew wealthy through a series of shady land deals, and he engineered further cessions of Creek lands into American hands. In addition to the Treaty of Fort Jackson, he signed treaties with the Americans in 1805, in 1818, and twice in 1821. He overreached in the Treaty of Indian Springs, which blatantly flouted a recent tribal law that made selling tribal lands a capital offense. Despite protests from the Creeks against such “base treachery,” abundant evidence of fraud, and a warning from the Indian agent that ratification might “produce a horrid state of things among these unfortunate Indians,” the Senate ratified the treaty. Creek warriors acting on the orders of the Creek National Council assassinated McIntosh for treason.67

Removal treaties secured millions of acres in the North as well. Charles Latrobe, a traveling Englishman of Huguenot descent (and later the first lieutenant-governor of Victoria in Australia), stopped off at Chicago in the fall of 1833 while a treaty was being negotiated with the Potawatomis. Latrobe found the “little mushroom town” “crowded to excess.” Six thousand Indians camped on the prairie around the town. Gaudily dressed and painted warriors were accompanied by wives, children, ponies, and dogs; groups of older chiefs sat around smoking and talking; local merchants dispensed their wares; and whiskey flowed freely. In addition to “emigrants and land speculators as numerous as the sand,” there were

horse-dealers, and horse-stealers, rogues of every description, white, black, brown, and red—half-breeds, quarter breeds, and men of no breed at all;—dealers in pigs, poultry, and potatoes;—men pursuing Indian claims, … creditors of the tribes, or of particular Indians, who know that they have no chance of getting their money, if they do not get it from the Government agents;—sharpers of every degree; pedlars, grog-sellers; Indian agents and Indian traders of every description, and Contractors to supply the Pottawattomies with food. The little village was in uproar from morning to night, and from night to morning.

Latrobe saw casks of whiskey “for sale under the very nose of the Commissioners” and drunken Indians everywhere. “Who will believe that any act, however formally executed by the chiefs, is valid, as long as it is known that whiskey was one of the parties to the treaty”? Watching the proceedings, Latrobe concluded “that the business of arranging the terms of an Indian Treaty, whatever it might have been two hundred years ago, … now lies chiefly between the various traders, agents, creditors, and half-breeds of the tribes” on whom the chiefs had become dependent and the government agents. The Potawatomis signed the treaty and gave up the last of their lands on the Great Lakes, some five million acres in present-day northern Illinois and Wisconsin, in exchange for an equal quantity on the Missouri and $1 million in removal expenses and support, part of which, $175,000 to be precise, went to paying off debts to traders and other creditors.68

Amid such chaos and confusion, Indian homelands became American real estate. Pressured by American demands and divided by American tactics, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ottawa leaders signed away thousands of acres of land around the Great Lakes in the 1820s and 1830s. The Potawatomis held the unfortunate record: they signed a treaty each year from 1826 to 1829, two treaties in 1832, the Chicago treaty in 1833, four treaties in 1834, nine in 1836 (!), and another in 1837.⁶⁹ The pressure on the Iroquois also continued in the nineteenth century as politicians, transportation interests, and land speculators conspired to divest them of their lands, and canals, railroads, the massive influx of settlers, and the rapid growth of cities transformed Iroquoia. In 1826, under pressure from the Ogden Land Company, the federal government made a treaty with the Senecas, which the US Senate never ratified, taking thousands of acres. A dozen years later, sixteen Seneca chiefs signed another treaty at Buffalo Creek, “one of the major frauds in American Indian history,” but nonetheless ratified by the Senate. Coerced by threats, bribery, and alcohol, they agreed to sell their remaining lands in New York to the Ogden Land Company, to give up their four reservations, and to move to Kansas. Commissioner Ransom H. Gillet induced more chiefs to sign their agreement after the treaty council.⁷⁰

Despite the bribes, whiskey, intimidation, and divide-and-conquer tactics, Indians did not succumb easily or go quietly. Time and again in treaty negotiations they cited chapter and verse from earlier treaties and requested redress for agreements not met and payments not made.⁷¹ In 1820, a chief named Sassaba kicked away the gifts of tobacco that American officials placed on the ground before the Ojibwe delegation, by the same action rejecting the Americans’ request for a land cession.72 Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ottawa leaders learned that the United States could not be trusted to honor its treaty commitments; they became acquainted with American business and financial practices and in subsequent meetings often kept American treaty commissioners on the defensive with pointed questions about long-overdue payments. They spoke out against boundaries and land cessions; they resisted attempts to divide their nations, and at the same time frustrated efforts to consolidate or conflate different bands into a single polity capable of making comprehensive land cessions; they articulated their nationhood on their own terms, stressing kinship and alliances, and pointed to the autonomy of individual bands who had multiple and overlapping claims to the lands being negotiated.⁷³ At the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, seven Choctaw elder women sat in the center of a circle comprising some sixty Choctaw councilmen, the US commissioners, and other persons involved in the negotiations. The women freely expressed their opinions and one of them threatened to cut open with a butcher knife a Choctaw man who agreed to sell the Choctaws’ land and move west. The US commissioners chose to make no mention of the presence or participation of the Choctaw women in their formal record of the treaty.⁷⁴

And the Senecas fought a “heroic battle” against the fraudulent Treaty of Buffalo Creek of 1838. Even while he was still a student at Dartmouth College, Seneca Maris Bryant Pierce helped wage a campaign to have the treaty overturned. He gave speeches, wrote a letter to President Van Buren, organized petitions to the Senate, and traveled to Washington as part of a delegation to present their case to the secretary of war. Despite the protests, the Senate ratified and the president proclaimed the treaty, but the Senecas kept up their efforts to renegotiate it. An amended treaty, signed in 1842, fell far short of meeting their expectations, but it did preserve a foothold in their homeland. The Senecas regained the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations but not Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda (although the Tonawanda Senecas were “allowed” to buy back a small portion of their reservation in 1857).⁷⁵

And the Cherokees turned their fight against removal into a national debate in print, in Congress, and in the Supreme Court.