4
“The English Make Them More Presents”

On his first assignment in the West in 1816, Brevet Major Stephen H. Long was eager to test his abilities as a surveyor, to show what the Topographical Engineers could do for westward expansion, and perhaps even position himself to inherit the mantle of Lewis and Clark. Before leaving New York for St. Louis, he wrote to Secretary of War William Crawford proposing that he take a small party of cadets from the West Point Military Academy under his command to assist with the topographical survey. Crawford denied the request; however, he gave Long permission to take some survey instruments from the academy, and he embellished Long’s orders to the extent of saying, “Much useful information is expected from observations you will be able to make on the general face of the country, the navigable streams, and fertility of the soil.” He expected “diligence but not haste.”¹ That was all the encouragement Long needed to conceive of his task as a bit of exploration.

It was a modest beginning to his seven years of western exploration for the US government. The region of his first topographical survey contained no shining mountains. Spanning the northern half of the Illinois Territory, it was nothing but flat prairie. As an old man, he would recall that the country was “wild, solitary and dreary”—so different from the way it appeared some forty years later “occupied by a numerous and widespread population, and checkered with counties, towns, and villages.”² Moreover, the topographical survey was not the main purpose of his first assignment in the West, but rather an add-on to a summer taken up with examining and reporting on forts. Still, this was his opportunity.

Bright and ambitious, Long aimed to make connections not only inside the officer corps but also in high places outside the military. He wanted to become known to the president and his cabinet as well as newspaper editors, publishers, scientists, and scholars.

He had been angling for social and political connections for half a de­cade already. Before joining the army, while living in Germantown, he made frequent trips to nearby Philadelphia to make friends among the elites in what was then the undisputed cultural capital of the nation. In a city where patronage controlled access to power, he had become a smooth operator, hobnobbing with members of the august American Philosophical Society, canvassing the booksellers and publishing houses to find the most up-to-date books and periodicals, and reading the most talked-about works of fiction and nonfiction, such as Mary Brunton’s novel Self-Control and Edward Clarke’s Travels in Russia, Tartary and Turkey.³ Even after joining the army officer corps, he continued to use the patronage system to personal advantage. “I think patronage is a good word to be used by inferiors in relation to any countenance or support they may have received of their superiors,” he once confided to a friend.⁴ General Joseph Swift, the chief of engineers and Long’s first mentor, described him as “an amiable & discreet gentleman.”⁵ Others spoke of him as intelligent, enterprising, energetic, and suave.⁶

Early in October, Long started up the Illinois River with two privates and a mixed-blood guide, François Leclair, who spoke French and Potawatomi. Leclair shared his knowledge of the river system as Long explored the low marshy divide between the headwaters of the Illinois and the Chicago, the latter stream meandering through wetlands for a few short miles before emptying into Lake Michigan. Leclair showed Long a three-mile portage where the French and Indians had made “a kind of canal” for getting their canoes across the height of land. If a ship canal were built there, Long observed, it would complete a waterway from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. Where the city of Chicago stands today, the party encountered only a tiny, polyglot community of Potawatomi, British, and French traders, and two companies of American soldiers who had arrived on July 4 to rebuild Fort Dearborn. The old fort had been attacked and destroyed by Potawatomi allies of the British in 1812. Inspecting the natural harbor at the mouth of the river, Long became the first American to envision a great city rising there. From Fort Dearborn the party proceeded overland to Fort Wayne. There, Long sent his soldier escort and guide back to St. Louis while he proceeded onward through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to the nation’s capital, where he made his topographical report to the War Department.⁷

On his journey through northern Illinois and Indiana, Long had his first encounter with western Indians and the fur trade. In his topographical report he listed the principal tribes in the region as the Sacs, Foxes, Potawatomis, Kickapoos, Miamis, Delawares, Ojibwas, Shawnees, and Kaskaskias. Most of those nations, he wrote, had fought with the British against the United States in the recent war “and probably would do the same again upon a renewal of hostilities with Great Britain.” Allied with the British ever since the Revolutionary War, they still had a stronger affinity for the English than for the Americans. As some Indians had directly informed him, “The English make them more presents than the Americans. They furnish them with better articles, and at a cheaper rate. They are more punctual in fulfilling their engagements to the Indians. Those appointed to transact business with the Indians are not in the habit, like the Americans, of taking every advantage in their dealings with them.”⁸

Though Long titled this section of his report “Indians,” he was really talking about fur traders. Here in a nutshell was the army’s interest in the fur trade. To secure the northern frontier against the British, the army needed to pacify the Indian tribes; to pacify the Indian tribes, it wanted to reorganize the fur trade so that the Indians would no longer depend on British traders. In short, the United States had to take control of the fur trade within its borders so that the tribes would finally abandon the British-Indian alliance of the Revolutionary War era.⁹

American military strategists had been driving at this problem for many years. President Washington sought to put American trade with Indians on a stronger footing by means of the Trade and Intercourse Acts. Under those laws, the federal government took responsibility for licensing traders and regulating intercourse between whites and Indians. The army was called upon to track the traders, removing violators while protecting legitimate traders against Indian attack. But enforcement of the Trade and Intercourse laws was weak. In fact, during the first three decades of American independence, licensed American traders played a relatively insignificant role in the fur trade. British traders vastly outnumbered them and operated within US territory with impunity. In Jay’s Treaty of 1794, British traders were specifically guaranteed the right to maintain their trading posts on American soil. Americans’ strong resentment of those terms formed one of the causes of the War of 1812. Following the war, American interest in the fur trade burgeoned. The army built forts along the Indian frontier and took other steps to control the Indians. Long was destined to play a significant role in those efforts, first as a surveyor of new forts and then as a western explorer. He would become a keen observer of the fur trade and advise the government on how it might better regulate it.¹⁰

The first major statement of US aims in the fur trade after the Treaty of Ghent came in a report to the Senate by Secretary of War Crawford in March 1816. Long’s ideas paralleled Crawford’s, and it is likely he familiarized himself with Crawford’s report before preparing his own. The secretary’s report was a major statement on federal Indian policy—according to Crawford’s biographer, it was one of the signal accomplishments of his short stint at the War Department. Befitting the mood of national expansion, Crawford’s main concern was to consider ways to Americanize the fur trade within the territorial limits of the United States.¹¹

Crawford began with the widely held assumption that all Indian peoples were more or less dependent on the fur trade for some of their necessities—the more so wherever their hunting grounds were depleted of game. He stressed that the United States had to support the trade in one form or another or it would “alienate the affections” of the tribes. The British traders could not be evicted from US territory precipitously, because in many areas it would create a hardship for the Indians. Crawford pointed to such remote areas as the upper Mississippi and the upper Missouri, where the Americans had little knowledge about the tribes and could not simply move in as the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company vacated their trading posts. In such areas the British fur companies must be permitted to continue operations under US licenses for an interim period. As soon as the United States acquired more information on the Indians, then the British traders would be made to surrender their licenses so that American traders could take their place.¹²

Crawford wanted the government to increase its support of government-run trading houses, or “factories,” but only as a stopgap until private enterprise was able to meet the demand. The unpopular factory system dated back to the 1790s. When the federal government began to regulate the fur trade, it did so through two parallel measures: licensing of independent traders and establishment of factories. The government-run factories were intended to have a beneficial effect on Indian-white relations by supplying the Indians with manufactured goods at fair price, placing honest men in charge of the government stores, and keeping the more rapacious indepen­dent traders in check. President Jefferson expanded the factory system, giving it the mantle of “civilizing” the Indians. It was his belief that more trade would eventually lead the Indians to adopt a more settled way of life. (He also argued that it would promote Indian indebtedness, giving the United States an upper hand in extracting land cessions.) Congress was wary of establishing a government monopoly in the fur trade, however, and provided only half-hearted support for the factory system. Chronically underfunded, the factory system never became the dominant force on the frontier that its champions wanted. The licensed traders hated the government trading houses, since the purpose of the government traders was to keep a watchful eye on them and undersell them when necessary. By the second decade of the nineteenth century most westerners shared the private traders’ scorn for the government-subsidized trading houses, thinking that they discouraged capital investment on the frontier. Congress was increasingly inclined to heed western opinion and reduce funding for the factory system.¹³

If the factory system was a disappointment, the licensing system was even more fraught with problems. The law provided for the governors of the territories to issue licenses to anyone who could post bond. Ostensibly the bond was a guarantee that the licensed trader would abide by the government’s regulations. But with practically no enforcement the regulations were largely ignored. There were many disreputable traders who cheated the Indians out of their furs by whatever means they could. Often they plied the Indians with liquor and then stole from them. Competition between traders only made the situation worse by contributing to the use of illegal liquor in manipulating the Indians. Viewing the independent traders with much skepticism, Crawford urged Congress to amend the Trade and Intercourse Acts so that governors would have authority to select traders on the basis of moral character. Traders bore a responsibility as the torchbearers of “civilization,” and it was only reasonable to expect that they present a good face to the Indians.¹⁴

Crawford’s main idea for Americanizing the fur trade was for a large, well-capitalized company to enter the field and establish a private monopoly. Such a company would be easier for the government to regulate, and by ending competition between traders it would eliminate some of the worst abuses of the fur trade. The problem was how to attract sufficient capital, which could only be found in the commercial cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Unfortunately, venture capitalists tended to view the fur trade as a bad risk. Crawford’s solution was to establish a government factory at St. Louis that would serve as a forward supply base, furnishing goods, capital, and skilled persons to the trading houses located on the frontier. At first this factory would supply government trading houses. In time, when the desired company had arisen to take the place of the government, the whole operation could be sold to private enterprise.¹⁵

Crawford based his ideas on the conviction that the policy of an “enlightened nation” must be “to draw its savage neighbors within the pale of civilization.” For if the federal government were simply to withdraw from regulation of the Indian trade, allowing land-hungry whites to strike their own deals with Indian peoples, the outcome would be “continual warfare, attended by the extermination or expulsion of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to more distant and less hospitable regions.” A civilized people must abhor such an outcome, Crawford declared. So, the Indian must be assimilated.

Crawford echoed the Jeffersonian idea that the fur trade was an incubator for raising the Indian from a “savage state.” A growing dependency on trade goods would instill in the Indians the value of personal property, he believed. From a keener desire for personal property would come a desire for separate property in the form of land, and from this would come an inclination to farm. Once the Indian became a landowner and a tiller of the soil, he would acquire a respect for laws and be on the path to full American citizenship. It was a hopeful vision of universal human progress. But there remained the question of whether the Indian had sufficient time, given the pressure of white land hunger, to proceed unmolested along this path from savagery to civilization. Given that pressure, Crawford added his own recommendation to the Jeffersonian idea of civilizing the Indian, which many of his contemporaries found shocking. “When every effort to introduce among them the ideas of separate property . . . should fail,” Crawford urged, “let intermarriages between them and the whites be encouraged by the government.”¹⁶

Crawford was a southerner and a slaveholder, the owner of a small plantation in Georgia, and a co-founder and vice president of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to ending slavery in the United States by colonizing freed slaves in Africa. Evidently he had higher hopes for assimilating Indians into white society than he had for blacks. His idea was not a new one; missionaries had been advocating intermarriage between whites and Cherokees for a number of years. But Crawford’s proposal for the government to encourage interracial marriage caused dismay among some members of Congress. Three days after he submitted his report, the Republican Party caucus met to nominate a presidential candidate. With Crawford’s name in contention alongside James Monroe’s, several members who opposed him pilloried his report with its odious suggestion that the Indian and white races amalgamate. The caucus chose Monroe over Crawford by a vote of 65 to 54. Crawford never retracted his words about interracial marriage, but privately he allowed that the statement had been politically damaging.¹⁷

Long could not have known anything about what went on in the Republican Party caucus, but there is a good chance he was following Crawford’s political star that spring and summer of 1816. While Long was en route from St. Louis back to Washington in the fall, Crawford left the War Department to become secretary of the treasury. Three weeks later, James Monroe was elected fifth president of the United States, the last of the Virginia Dynasty. That winter, as the president-elect assembled his cabinet, Long wrote his topographical report and prepared a large map of the Illinois country. He addressed his report to Acting Secretary of War George Graham, who headed the War Department in the last few months of the Madison administration. Graham apparently approved of Long’s ardent recommendations for internal improvements and his nationalist tone. He gave the report to his friend, Joel Mead, editor of The National Register, with the suggestion that he publish an abstract of it in his weekly paper. Mead chose to print the entire report, presenting Major Long of the US Topographical Engineers to the American public for the first time.¹⁸