The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 27

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
Number of Pages: 622


USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 27


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Soon after Brant had presented his memorial to Congress, insisting upon the Ohio as the Indian boundary, the govern- ment of the confederation had addressed itself to accomplish by treaty what it hardly dared attempt by war, while the north- ern posts were in the hands of the British. The chief impedi- ments in this action had been found in the rampant propensi- ties of the Kentuckians. "It is a mortifying circumstance,"


307


CAMPUS MARTIUS.


From the American Pioneer, March, 1842. CAMPUS MARTIUS AT MARIETTA.


wrote Harmar on December 9, 1787, to the secretary of war, "that while under the sanction of the federal authority negotia- tions for treaties are holding with the Indians, there should be such presumption in the people of Kentucky as to be forming expeditions against them." The natural result of such irregu- lar warfare was the forming among the tribes of " confedera- tions and combinations," whose mischief-making it was expected that St. Clair would thwart.


It was a question then, and has been since, in all surveys of this period, how far the British government, or its individual


308


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


agents, were responsible for the Indian hostilities. St. Clair, in January, 1788, wrote to the secretary of war: "Notwith- standing the advice the Indians received from Lord Dorches- ter to remain at peace with the United States, there can be but little doubt that the jealousies they entertain are fomented by the agents of the British crown." Hamilton wrote in The Federalist : " The savage tribes on our western frontiers ought to be regarded as our natural enemies and their [Great Brit- ain ] natural allies, because they have most to fear from us and most to hope from them," and for this reason he was urging a standing national army instead of local protection of the fron- tiers. A lack of unity of purpose in the States, and a setting of local interests before those of the confederation, was a con- stant source of perplexity in many ways. In dealing with the Indians, this laek of a common policy was most harassing. In July, 1788, St. Clair complains of the government of New York distracting the Six Nations by calling them to council at Fort Stanwix and making a treaty, at the same time that the federal authorities were inviting them to a conference at Fort Harmar.


Since 1786, when the tribes had been summoned to a council by George Rogers Clark, the Indians as a body, on one pre- tense or another, had avoided making a treaty with the whites. In the summer of 1788, St. Clair had urged such a meeting upon them, not, however, without a suspicion that they would decide upon war as an alternative. In this belief he was de- termined to be forearmed, and by the first of September, 1788, he had called upon the governments of Virginia and Pennsyl- vania to hold in readiness some three or four thousand militia, while he equipped his regulars for forest service, and hoped to add to them some three or four hundred recruits from the French on the Wabash.


It was with some apprehension lest they were more deter- mined on war than on peace that St. Clair saw the warrior chief- tains begin to assemble at Fort Harmar on the 9th of Sep- tember, 1788. Representatives of the various tribes came in slowly. Meanwhile, a dubious character, one John Connolly, known to be a British emissary, was disquieting the governor, lest to the Indian difficulty another was to be added. The gov- ernor heard in November that Connolly had gone to Kentucky


309


ST. CLAIR'S TREATIES.


in behalf of Lord Dorchester, and it was not quite clear whether Connolly's purpose was to detach the Kentuckians from the American cause by offering them better security under British protection, or his mission had some connection with the Span- iards and the Mississippi. We now know that Dorchester had a month before (October, 1788) informed his home government that the people of Kentucky were both planning to force the Mississippi and to bargain with the English for an outlet through the St. Lawrence, and this throws some light on the way in which Parsons had been approached at Pittsburg. Before this, in August, 1788, Madison had written to Jeffer- son : " Spain is taking advantage of disgust in Kentucky, and is actually endeavoring to seduce them from the Union, - a fact as certain as it is important."


While St. Clair was in the uncertain frame of mind that suspicions of this kind engendered, by December 12, those of the Six Nations and other tribes who had been proof against the persuasions of Brant and McKee had assembled at Fort Harmar in such numbers that the governor was ready to open the conference. There was by this time, because of St. Clair's constant professions, no hope on the Indians' part that Brant's contention for the Ohio as a boundary would be recognized. Brant and his Mohawks had withdrawn to Detroit. This development distressed St. Clair, as it well might, and it gave him further anxiety to learn that Dorchester was strengthening the fortifications of Detroit. He also received further proofs that the Spaniards were seeking to undermine the loyalty of the settlers on the Cumberland and Tennessee, and that Colonel George Morgan, who had received a grant from the Spanish for a settlement on the west bank of the Mississippi, was hold- ing out inducements for settlers disposed to expatriate them- selves. This settlement of New Madrid, which Brissot called "a pitiful project of granting to those who shall establish them- selves there the exclusive right of trading to New Orleans," proved a movement which Brissot thought in reality " the first foundation of the conquest of Louisiana."


Amid such anxieties as these, St. Clair went on with his nego- tiation till in the course of January, 1789, he concluded two treaties. The first was with the Six Nations, except the Mo- hawks, whom Brant had withdrawn. It confirmed the provi-


310


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


sions made at Fort Stanwix in 1784. The other was with the Wyandots and other western tribes, and confirmed the grants towards Lake Erie made at Forts McIntosh and Finney in 1785. In some respects the new agreements were more advantageous to the whites than the earlier ones. At all events, they con- firmed all the grants made by the Indians north of the Ohio which Brant had labored to prevent.


St. Clair made proclamation of the result on January 24, 1789, and, as Parsons said, the treaty ended " to the satisfac- tion of all concerned." St. Clair himself was confident that the Indian confederations had been broken and " Brant had lost his influence," though, as the governor wrote to Knox, it was not possible for him to extend the bounds beyond the lines earlier agreed upon. St. Clair soon discovered that the tribes who were not " concerned " in it were far from being satisfied, and this meant the distrust of a large part of the twenty to forty thousand Indians - for the estimates are not very pre- cise - scattered over the northwest. The Shawnees particu- larly were insolent and began their restless maraudings, which had a tendency for a while to check western immigration, - a condition not unacceptable to the British fur traders at Detroit.


Knox wrote to Washington a few months after the treaty was signed that the Indians possessed a right to the soil in these western lands, and it was only to be taken from them by their consent or a just war, - a principle easy enough to compre- hend, and ever since maintained by the American courts ; but the fact that there are always likely to be tribes or bands not uniting in agreements opened then, and has raised since, a question of title which has usually to be settled by force.


Meanwhile the fair fame of the Ohio Company was suffering · from the remote results of the conduct of its chief promoters. When it was known what was meant by the sudden increase of the purchase which Cutler made, by which he obtained more than three times as much land as the company itself had in- tended to acquire, there was by no means among his associates a general approval of his purposes.


Cutler's furtive manœuvre in the purchase, in order to screen so many " principal characters of the country," gave place to questionable devices in subsequent efforts to make the most of


311


JOEL BARLOW.


what had been acquired as the reward of collusion. It is not clear just how far Cutler was responsible for the extravagant representations which were used in Paris to promote a bewilder- ing speculation and to dupe innocent enthusiasts. Brissot, in defending the promoters, claimed that these seductive descrip- tions were original, not with Cutler and his allied contrivers, but with Hutchins ; still it is certain the company adopted them. The compact of the two companies, as represented by Duer and Cutler, professed that they were " jointly and equally concerned in Europe and America in the disposal of their lands," which connects Cutler on its face with any nefarious practices of Duer and his agents. Putnam, at least, as one of the trustees of the company, could hardly have been ignorant of much that was done, and was indeed actively engaged in some part of it. The object which these scheming confederates had in view was to draw into the Scioto speculation for their own gain, the public securities of the United States which were held in Europe, and to entice to the Ohio country those who were dismayed at the sudden murkiness which portended and accompanied the French Revolution. There was, moreover, a purpose to whet the eagerness to engage in such American ventures, now that Jefferson's consular convention with France was calculated to keep the United States subservient to that country, and that such participation was likely to prove advantageous to French commerce. The agent who was employed to accomplish this, after other agencies had failed, was Joel Barlow, a man now four-and-thirty years old, of Connecticut stock, who had just become known as one of the " Hartford wits," and the author of The Vision of Columbus. Sailing from New York, he reached Havre on June 24, 1788, and was soon at his task in Paris. In what this agent did, he may have exceeded the authority committed to him, and in such acts his principals are relieved from complete responsibility for what followed. The next year, 1789, Barlow formed a company in Paris, and sold to it three million acres on the Ohio, west of the seven- teenth range. The payments for it were to run in part till


NOTE. - The map on the following pages is from a map, Plan des Achats des Compagnies de l'Ohio et du Scioto, graré par P. F. Tardieu, and used by Barlow in Paris to advance his decep- tive measures. It represents the " Seven Ranges " and the lands of the Ohio Company as " cleared and inhabited," and places the "Première Ville " as without the bounds of the Ohio Company, when it was within them. Marietta is called " Mariana."


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314


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


1794. To advance the speculation, Barlow caused to be turned into French an overdrawn description of the country, which Cutler had printed at Salem in 1787, couched in language showing the inevitable vices and devices of land speculators. This translation was published at Paris in 1789, and it was accompanied by a map, prepared by the associates in America, as Todd, Barlow's biographer admits, though he acknowledges that he keeps the worst side of the transaction out of sight. This map aimed to further the deceit, begun in Cutler's adver- tising description, and if that was drawn from Hutchins, the false statements of the map, representing both in the Seven Ranges and in the Ohio and Scioto Company's land a settled country, were certainly the associates' and Barlow's fabrications. Barlow, it may be allowed, was not alone in hopeful cheer for the future, if he was deceptive in the present, when he claimed that there would be in twenty years a larger population beyond the mountains than was then on the Atlantic slope, and that, " sooner or later," the capital of the whole country must be in the centre of it, for Hamilton not long before, in the federal convention, had prophesied a doubling of the representation in Congress in five-and-twenty years.


If the business of the Scioto associates was a nefarious one, not a little of the mischance must be ascribed to the feverish condition of France. The infatuated Parisians were easily led to their ruin, and there is little evidence that they put Barlow's persuasions to any test, though existing caricatures, issued at the time, show that something like correct knowledge of the Ohio country existed, for one of them indicates a belief that the company were selling imaginary acres, and offering maps - as was the case - on which rocky deserts were represented as fertile plains and the territory was supplied with all the appurtenances of civilized life, while in but one corner of it a few pioneers were completely isolated in their incipient struggles with the wilderness.


If this Scioto venture, as we shall later see, proved a grievous misery, an experiment more creditable to those concerned had taken place in the Miami country. In August, 1787, John Cleve Symmes, who was one of the three judges associated with St. Clair in the government of the northwest, applied to the


315


SYMMES'S COLONY.


land office for a million acres lying between the Great and Little Miami, offering terms the same as the Ohio Company had paid. The increasing demand for land had carried up the value of the military scrip, so that the completion of the trans- fer was not reached till May 15, 1788. Thomas Ludlow, a New Jersey man, who had made the survey, found that the million acres supposed to lie between the two Miamis were diminished to something over a quarter of that extent. In the following July, Symmes started to reach his grant. He had fourteen four-horse wagons and about sixty persons in his train. With this equipment he landed from his barges at the Little Miami on September 22, 1788, accompanied by Ludlow, Den- man, and Filson, names associated with the beginnings of this venture. Here, on a site opposite to the spot where, coming from the Kentucky mountains, the Licking poured into the Ohio, they planned for a town, but before much could be done, the Indians prowled about in a hostile manner, and it was thought prudent to return to Limestone (Maysville), sixty miles up the river, on the Kentucky shore, where a settlement had been begun four years before. In November (1788), a party returned to the same spot and built a blockhouse. About Christmas, Denman, Ludlow, and another party left Limestone, and push- ing their boats through the floating ice-cakes, they landed on December 28, on the same ground. Some eight hundred acres of the immediate region had been bought by Mathias Denman and two others, whom he admitted to the enterprise, for some- thing less than two hundred and fifty dollars. In the party was John Filson, who was to employ his skill for surveying in laying out the streets of a town. It fell to Ludlow to take measurements, so as to find out where the purchased area began, at a spot twenty miles from the mouth of the Great Miami. Denman and Ludlow began to consider what name to give the projected settlement, and thought of Cincinnati, in commemoration of the society of which Washington was then the head ; but Filson, who had been a schoolmaster, exercised his unpolished wits in fashioning a strange name. He was not quite sure which of the two endings to his conglomerated desig- nation he preferred, burg or ville ; but he had no doubt about the rest of the composition, and his pedantry prevailed. So Losantiville was adopted, signifying the town (ville) opposite


316


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


(anti) the mouth (os) of the Licking (L). When St. Clair later came upon the spot, he preferred Cincinnati, and the future city was saved a ridiculous designation. Filson, being soon killed by the Indians while venturing inland, was not destined to make a similarly bizarre combination of the city lines, and its streets were really laid out by Ludlow.


This and other settlements in the neighborhood assured, Gen- eral Harmar sent a detachment to protect the colony, and on September 26, 1789, the troops began to erect a stockade on a reservation of fifteen acres. The post was named Fort Wash- ington, and in December Harmar, accompanied by about three hundred men out of the six hundred in his department, arrived and established there his headquarters. Cineinnati, under such military protection, outstripped the other neighboring settle- ments on the Great and Little Miami, and soon became the county seat.


The use that was to be made of the Mississippi and its eastern affluents had now become a burning political problem. The stren- uous contention which Franklin had made in 1783 to secure the main current of that river as a boundary of the young Repub- lic had brought its sequel. The Ohio, which had already be- come the main avenue to the Kentucky and Cumberland regions, was now the principal approach to the new settlements on the northern banks. So long as the British retained the lake posts, the Ohio was to have no rival as a western route. Washington, soon after he became President, had addressed himself to this perplexing question. In October, 1789, he had asked St. Clair to investigate the portages between the Ohio basin and Lakes Erie and Michigan, as forming a connection with the posts, which he hoped now to demand with the weight of a better organized government behind him. So he instructed Gouver- neur Morris to sound the British authorities about entering upon a commercial treaty. He also directed him to reopen the ques- tion of the posts, while Hamilton intimated to the British agent in New York that his government need no longer fear that the United States did not offer a stable administration to deal with.


While this matter was pending, the use of the Mississippi was


.


317


THE MISSISSIPPI VOYAGE.


a more vital consideration for the west. The Ohio, from Pitts- burg to the rapids at Louisville, had a course of ten hundred and seventy-four miles, as it was then reckoned. Hutchins had described it as carrying "a great uniformity of breadth, from four hundred to six hundred yards, except at its confluence with the Mississippi and for a hundred miles above it, where it is a thousand yards wide. For the greater part of the way it has many meanders amid rising ground upon both sides. . . . The height of the banks admit everywhere of being settled, as they are not liable to crumble away. ... There is searce a place between Fort Pitt and the rapids where a good road may not be made and horses employed in drawing up large barges against a stream remarkably gentle, except in high freshes."


A down voyage on the Ohio was easy and pleasant, barring the risk of the savage bullets, and the barges of the emigrants went on at three or four miles an hour in ordinary stages of the water; but their progress was accelerated to double that speed in the spring freshets. The return voyage was altogether trying. Any plan of an ocean commerce for the West by an outlet in the Gulf of Mexico presented so serious an obstacle in the stemming of this current that the canal companies of Virginia derived their chief impulse from this obstruction in a rival route.


From New Orleans to Louisville, now a town of some sixty dwellings, boats of forty tons, manned by eighteen and twenty hands, could hardly accomplish the trip in less than eight or ten weeks, - a voyage which the first steamboat which accomplished it made, in 1815, in five-and-twenty days. It was a serious question if any method could be devised to overcome this obsti- nate current so as to reduce this time. There were those who contended that some scheme of artificial propulsion, such as Rumsey and Fitch were now experimenting with, would yet reduce the cost of transportation on this up-voyage to a tenth of the expense of carriage by land and water from Philadelphia to the same point. When Cutler had tried to impress the sus- ceptible public by that vein of prophecy which blinded the poor settlers of Gallipolis, he added : "The current down the Ohio and Mississippi for heavy articles that suit the Florida and West India markets . .. will be more loaded than any stream on earth. . . . It is found by late experiments that sails


318


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


are used to great advantage against the current of the Ohio, and it is worthy of observation that, in all probability, steam- boats will be found to be of infinite service in all our river navi- gation." Cutler himself had had hopes of substituting the screw for oars in the ordinary manual labor of the boats. In August, 1788, he had tried an experiment on the Ohio, with the help of Tupper, in which he claimed to have " succeeded to admira- tion " in propelling a boat by a screw worked by hand.


If this question of artificial propulsion was one factor in the Mississippi question, there was another in the opposition of Spain to the claim of the West to seek the ocean by the Gulf of Mexico, and Jay was soon aware that Spain " did not mean to be restricted to the limits established between Britain and the United States." In May, 1785, Gardoqui had come to negotiate a treaty of commerce in behalf of Spain. In confer- ences which he later had with Jay, it was proposed that the United States should abandon for twenty-five years all elaims to descend the Mississippi to the Gulf in recompense for the com- mercial privileges which Spain, on those terms, was disposed to grant. Rufus King recounted the arguments of those ready to accede to this demand. He believed that if the free navigation of the Mississippi was seeured, the east and west must sepa- rate, for the commerce of the west would inevitably follow the Mississippi. To populate the west would indeed make a mar- ket for the western lands, but the disposing of them at this risk would pay too dearly for replenishing the treasury of the country. He acknowledged that the cry for the Mississippi was a popular one, but to insist on the point was a sure way to a war with Spain, and such a conflict, with a probable loss of territory and the fisheries, was too great a risk. Edward Rut- ledge of South Carolina told Jay that "the majority of those with whom I have conversed believed that we should be bene- fited by a cession of it [the Mississippi] to Spain for a limited time."


Jay himself was ready to accede to the demand of Spain, but on bringing it to the attention of Congress, in August, 1786, it was apparent that the country had become clearly divided on the issue, and there was great heat in the controversy. The members from the South and West, with few such exceptions as Rutledge, insisted on opening that river in opposition to the


319


SPAIN AND THE MISSISSIPPI.


commercial classes of the North, which valued the professed opportunities of trade even at the cost which Spain demanded. Otto wrote to Vergennes in September, 1786, that he feared the heated opposition of the two sections would lead to open advo- cacy of disunion. Jay's purposes had aroused Virginia. On March 1, 1787, Randolph wrote to Madison : "The occlusion of the Mississippi will throw the western settlers into an imme- diate state of hostility with Spain. If the subject be canvassed, it will not be sufficient to negative it merely, but a negative with some emphasis can alone secure Mr. Henry to the objects of the convention at Philadelphia." Mason said in the federal convention in July : "Spain might for a time deprive the west of their natural outlet for their productions, yet she will, be- cause she must, finally yield to their demands." Henry Lee, in August, when it seemed that Jay might carry his point, wrote to Washington : "The moment our western country becomes populous and capable, they will seize by force what may have been yielded by treaty." In October, Lafayette said to Jay : " In a little time we must have the navigation, one way or the other, which I hope Spain may at last understand." In De- cember, Madison, observing as Randolph had done, represented to Washington that Patrick Henry, heretofore a warm advocate of the federal cause, was now become cold because of Jay's project, and was likely, if Congress acceded, to go over to the other side. Monroe and Grayson, to avoid a rupture, were inclined to compromise, so as to agree with Gardoqui that exports from the west should have free passage by the Missis- sippi, while imports should enter the Atlantic ports.




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