The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 44

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 44


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51


ou Elizabeth Town


-


Theeling Cr.


Monongahela R.


Brownsville


Union


PITTSBURG AND WHEELING.


[From a "General Map of the Course of the Ohio from its Source to its Junction with the Mis- sissippi," in Collot's Atlas. ]


portages to the branches of the Monongahela. Rochefoucault- Liancourt says : " Being situated nearer the rivers Youghio- geny and Mocongahel [Monongahela], Baltimore possesses a part of the trade of the back country, if Pennsylvania supplies most of the stores."


The other routes from Virginia were to the head of Green-


512 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST.


brier River and so down the Kanawha to the Ohio ; and through Cumberland Gap, by the Wilderness Road, as Boone tracked it in 1775, using so much skill in avoiding the water- courses that the modern engineers have put the railroad over much the same course. In 1795, the Virginia Assembly passed " an act opening a wagon road to Cumberland Gap," appropri- ating £2,000 to construct a way suitable for wagons carrying loads of one ton ; and in the summer of 1795, large trains of emigrants were passing this way.


The Virginia road to Knoxville passed the same way, without turning to the right at the Holston settlements as the Kentucky way did, and so went on to Nashville. This road was joined by another from North Carolina ; and at the French Broad River, it was united with still another road from South Caro- lina. The Georgia road left Augusta and fell into this route from South Carolina.


The application of artificial power to the propulsion of boats was still a constant dream. Morse, in his Gazetteer, thought it probable that " steamboats would be found of infinite service in all our extensive river navigation." In 1792, Earl Stanhope, in England, had contrived a duck's foot paddle, shutting with the forward motion and opening with the return, and he had driven it by steam. In the autumn of the same year, Ormsbee at Providence, in Rhode Island, moved a boat three or four miles an hour on the same principle, calling the motors goose feet. Robert Fulton sought to substitute the simpler dipping paddle. Two years later (1794), Samuel Morey, a New Hamp- shire man, who had been experimenting since 1790, moved a boat with a stern wheel five miles an hour, from Hartford to New York, and in June, 1797, he propelled a side-wheel boat on the Delaware. Fitch, the earlier mover in this problem, who had gone, as we have seen, to England, had now returned to America, a believer in the serew propeller. Its principle had first been proposed by the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli in 1752, and it is described by David Bushnell in a letter to Jeffer- son in 1787, showing how a submarine boat worked by a screw had been earlier used by him in an attempt to blow up a Brit-


NOTE. - The opposite map from Morse's Universal Geography, Boston, 1793, shows the concep- tion then prevailing of the interlocking waters of the Chesapeake, Lake Ontario, and the Ohio.


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514 WAYNE'S TREATY AND THE NEW NORTHWEST.


ish fifty-gun ship in New York harbor. This side of the steam navigation problem had already engaged the attention of Watt, Franklin, Paneton, and others. In 1796, Fitch tried a serew propeller in a yawl, on a fresh-water pond in New York city, near where Canal Street now is. Moving to Kentucky, we find him still experimenting with a model boat, three feet long, on a creek near Bardstown. Here he died in 1799, and he is buried by the scene of his last efforts, near the banks of the Ohio. In 1798, Stevens was engaged, with the sympathy of Chancellor Livingston, Nicholas T. Roosevelt, and Isambard Brunel (the last an exiled French royalist and later famous in engineering work), in experimenting on steam propulsion on the Passaie River. He used a boat of thirty tons, and drew water from the bottom of the boat and expelled it astern. In . this, and in the use of elliptical paddles, his efforts failed of success. So the century went out, with the dream of Cutler and Morse still unfulfilled.


CHAPTER XXIII.


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


1791-1794.


THE year 1791 was one of hesitancy in the southwest. Con- gress, in February, had admitted Kentucky to the Union, but her actual entrance was set for June of the next year. Ver- mont was almost immediately received, to adjust the balance of North and South.


Zachary Cox had, in 1785, begun a settlement at the Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River (in northern Alabama), and early in 1791, Sevier and others of the ejected Franklinites, under the authority of the Tennessee Company, made ready to occupy the country just south of the shoals, where Georgia, December 21, 1789, had made that body a grant of 3,500,000 acres. Ru- mors of their purpose stirred the Cherokees, and there was danger of a general Indian outbreak. Knox early protested against the daring independence of the Tennesseeans, and the President warned them of the risks they ran. He told them that the federal government could not and would not protect them against the angry Indians. Nevertheless, the company advertised for settlers. The President now appealed to the Attorney-General to devise some remedy against such flagrant acts, for every new irritation of the southwestern tribes was sure to extend to their Spanish neighbors, with whom the gov- ernment was still trying to settle the momentous question of the Mississippi.


The convention of Nootka had relieved Spain of immediate apprehension of a war with England, and Miro was getting tired of the unproductive Kentucky intrigue. The federal gov- ernment was loath to stir the slumbering embers. While it had no purpose to press the vexed question to a rupture, it was but too conscious how any moment might awake the Spanish passions. In March, 1791, Jefferson wrote to Carmichael at


·


516


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


Madrid that at any time such an " accident," as the seizure of American boats on the Mississippi, might " put further parley beyond our power." He at the same time thought to calm the Kentucky discontent by writing to Innes that the government only awaited an opportunity to bring the Spanish negotiations to a point. "I can assure you of the most determined zeal of our chief magistrate," he said. "The nail will be driven as far as it will go peaceably, and further, the moment that circum- stances become favorable." On May 30, 1791, Innes wrote back to Jefferson that such assurances " have in a great meas- ure silenced our complaints."


It was at the same time a question how far France could be depended upon to exert her influence on the Spanish ministers. Lafayette had assured Washington (June 6) that "France will do everything in her power to bring Spain to reason, but will have a difficult and probably unsueeessful task." Events in Franee, however, were moving too rapidly.


On July 2, 1791, Governor Blount, who had already been authorized (August 11, 1790) to aet, met the Cherokee chiefs on the Holston at White's Fort. Over five hundred families had of late years settled on lands guaranteed to the Cherokees by the treaty of Hopewell, and the purpose of the new treaty, which Blount hoped to make, was to bring these families within the jurisdiction of the whites. There was the usual dilatory diplomacy before the Indians finally consented to place them- selves under the protection of the United States. They agreed to allow the whites free use of the road across their territory to the more distant settlements, and promised that travelers upon it should not be molested, and that no harm should come to any one navigating the Tennessee. By the bounds that were determined along a winding and disjointed line, which was the source of later trouble, and which Ellicott was ordered to trace, the Cherokees abandoned much of the land which the whites had usurped. The treaty, in fact, confirmed the whites in the possession of all the Tennessee country, except a traet lying between the Holston and the Cumberland, and other regions lying either in the southeast or towards the Mississippi. In


NOTE. - The opposite " Map of the Tennassee government by Genl. D. Smith and others," is in Carey's .American Atlas, Philadelphia, 1795. It shows the road connecting Knoxville going west with Nashville and going east with the Holston settlements. The Kentucky road is the dotted line which crosses the Clinch River going north.


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518


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


the autumn Congress ratified the treaty. Spanish intrigues, aimed to unite the southwestern tribes as a barrier against the Americans, prevented a like acceptance on the part of all the sections of the Cherokee tribes, and the more western settle- ments soon, as we shall see, suffered from savage marauders.


On the spot where Blount had made the treaty he very soon laid ont a town for his capital, and bearing in remembrance the secretary of war, it was named Knoxville. It was surveyed in sixty-four lots, priced at $800 each. In the autumn, the Knoxville Gazette was started (November 5), which did good service, at a little later day, in cherishing loyalty and keeping the Tennessee settlers proof against the Jacobin fever.


Of the conditions at this time along the Mississippi and in Florida, we fortunately have the impressions of an intelligent traveler, John Pope, who, in 1791, recorded his observations, as he descended the river in a boat whose crew -to show the diversity of life on the river - was made up of " one Irishman, one Anspacher, one Kentuekian, one person born at sea, one Virginian, and one Welehman."


At New Madrid the Spanish commander complained that the governor at New Orleans did not sufficiently support him ; and to Pope his "excellent train of artillery " appeared to be the chief defense which he had. It was doubtful if, at this time, the entire Spanish foree between the Gulf and St. Louis, and at a post on the Missouri, numbered more than two or three thon- sand men. As he drew near Natchez, Pope found the country " pretty thickly inhabited by Virginians, Carolinians, Geor- gians, and some few stragglers from the Eastern States." On the Bayou Pierre, an inlet from the river, thirty miles in length and twenty wide, he found a population " composed generally · of people who have moved and still continue to move in elevated stations." He describes Natchez as having about a hundred houses. The fort commands the river a mile up and two miles down, but on its " back part it is pregnable to a dozen men." Going on board the barge of Gayoso, the governor of the town, he was regaled " with delicious wines." He speaks of Gayoso's " majestic deportment, softened by manners the most engaging and polite." Below Natchez he saw the "seat " of Mr. Ellis, a Virginian, near which lay three large tobacco-boats unlaunched. After this, " slight, airy, whitewashed buildings become more


519


MCGILLIVRAY.


common on the eastern side, and are in general occupied by people from the United States." Then came " country seats," " beauteous farms, and elegant buildings."


At New Orleans, now a town of less than six thousand in- habitants, Pope found that private adventurers from New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were carrying on a tolerable trade, and could undersell the natives, while making a hundred per cent. profit. Passing on to Pensacola, he says: "The upper and lower Creek nation trade at this place, where they are uni- formly imposed upon by a Mr. Panton, who has monopolized their trade. The poor Indians barter their deer skins at four- teen penee sterling per pound for salt at nine shillings sterling per bushel. Panton is part owner of the salt works on the island of Providence, and has brought the salt to Pensaeola in his own bottoms at the average expense of about three pence per bushel. I think his goods at Mobile, Pensacola, and St. Marks are usually vended at about five hundred per cent. on their prime cost."


From Pensacola, Pope, in the early summer of 1791, went inland to visit McGillivray, at his house on the Consee River, five miles above its junction with the Tallapoosa, where together they form the Alabama. This half-breed chieftain had an upper plantation, six miles higher up the stream. Here the traveler found him superintending the erection of a log house with dor- mer windows, on the spot where MeGillivray's father, a Scotch trader, had lived amid his apple-trees, which were still stand- ing. Pope describes this tall, spare, ereet man, with his large dark eyes, sunk beneath overhanging brows, as showing signs of " a dissipation which marked his juvenile days and sapped a constitution originally delicate and feeble. He possesses an atticism of dietion, aided by a liberal education, a great fund of wit and humor, meliorated by a perfect good nature and polite- ness." Pope describes his host's table as affording a generous diet, with wines and other ardent spirits. He possessed, as other visitors showed, some fifty or sixty negro slaves, three hundred cattle, and a large stock of horses and lesser animals.


McGillivray always protested that he did all he could to make his tribesmen carry out the treaty which he had made in New York, but that he failed by the intrigues of the Spaniards among his countrymen. " This perpetual dictator," as Pope


520


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


calls him, " who in time of war sub-delegates a number of chief- tains for the direction of all military operations," soon passes out of our story, for, to anticipate a little, he contracted a fever at Mobile, where he was consulting with these same intriguing Spanish, and died at Pensacola, on February 17, 1793, and was buried in the garden of that William Panton who, with McGillivray's own connivance, had unmercifully bled his fel- low-tribesmen.


The year (1791) closed with a change in the control at New Orleans. Miró had left, and on December 30 he was succeeded by Carondelet, who had been transferred from the governorship of San Salvador, in Guatemala. It was not long before the inev- itable and irrepressible intrigue of the Spanish nature began to show itself in the influence which Carondelet exerted on those of the Cherokees who were discontented with the recent treaty. Reports were coming to Blount of intended inroads upon the Cumberland settlements, and he cautioned Robertson to be on his guard, and to prevent any provocations on the part of the whites. The federal government, meanwhile, tried, by increas- ing their subsidy from $1,000 to $1,500, to appease the reeal- citrant Cherokees by a supplementary treaty at Philadelphia in February, whither an Indian delegation had gone. The sav- ages were well received by Knox, and the President wrote to the governor of South Carolina, where there had been some dis- content manifested at the enforced moderation of the federal government, that he looked for good results among the other southern Indians from this conciliatory reception of the Chero- kees. It was deemed in Philadelphia a fortunate occurrence that these southern tribesmen were so acceptably engaged in that city when news of St. Clair's defeat was received there, for otherwise the ill tidings might have aroused the Indians along the sonthern border. Although the Cherokees had returned in a friendly mood, and Blount had been led to hope for peace, there was still small confidence in the Cumberland region that the amicable humor of the Indians would last long, after the discouraging tidings from the Ohio country were given time to produce an effect. Accordingly, Robertson was urged by the settlers to prepare for the worst. In May, 1792, though Blount had confidence " in the black paint sprinkled with flour " which the Cherokees wore in token of good intention, the governor


521


BOWLES AND MCGILLIVRAY.


yielded to Robertson's apprehensions, and ordered out two companies of militia to protect the frontiers, but with injunctions not to cross the Indian frontiers. In the same month, Robert- son himself was wounded by prowling savages while at work on his farm, and the danger seemed serious. Some of these maranders were Delawares from beyond the Mississippi, and when Robertson complained of them to the commander at New Madrid, he was told that the Spanish authorities could not be responsible for vagrant savages of the Spanish jurisdiction, if they went beyond their reach.


Matters, to those who were in the secret, were, at the same time, far from satisfactory for the Spanish governor. The influ- ence of Bowles, as a rival among the tribes of McGillivray, was, to the mind of Carondelet, dangerous enough for him to arrest his sway by treachery. That renegade was accordingly invited to New Orleans, only to be apprehended and sent a prisoner to Spain. If MeGillivray, in whose loyalty Carondelet had confidenee, had thus got rid of an enemy, he was too conscious of his own waning ascendeney among his people not to seize eagerly an opportunity, which the Spanish governor offered him, of leadership in a new confederation of the Indians. With characteristic duplicity, he was, at the same moment, flattering Blount with a promise of leading two thousand Creeks to a conference with American agents.


As the summer went on, James Seagrove, the Indian agent of the government, made clear to the authorities at Philadel- phia what he called the " simplicity and treachery " of McGilli- vray, and was in turn instructed to countermine that chieftain's influence with the Creeks. The complicity of the Spanish in all this was everywhere believed among the whites, and it was a question if the Spanish governor should not be told that this intriguing with the Creek leader could not be longer borne.


At Mobile, whose defense Carondelet thought of more impor- tance than that of Pensacola, the Spaniards held Fort Charlotte, and there was another armed station at Pensacola. Their mili- tary occupation extended up the Tombigbee, and near their Fort Stephen, on that river, a body of English-speaking settlers were engaged in raising indigo. These constituted the outpost of Spanish influence, and not a white man was permanently settled between them and the Cumberland region. Here roamed


522


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


the Creeks, and in the early summer of 1792, it was known that Spanish emissaries were passing among these Indians and inviting them against the Americans, rendering it difficult for Ellicott to make any progress in running the treaty line of the previous year. There were also reports of Spanish traders


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THE CHICKASAW COUNTRY.


[From a Chart of the Sources of the Mobile and the River Yazoo. The Boar River is a branch of the Tennessee. The letter D stands for " carrying-place three miles only in length to join the Tennessee and Mobile Rivers."]


trafficking on American soil. These stories reaching Philadel- phia, Jefferson, in September, 1792, urged Washington to authorize counter movements on Spanish soil.


The Spanish posts at Natchez and at Chickasaw Bluff had no such protection from barrier tribes, for the Chickasaws were more or less friendly with the Cumberland people, who were likely, as the Spaniards felt, to attack those posts. Feuds were arising between the Chickasaws and the Creeks, and, in case of a Spanish war, it seemed likely those tribes would be on different sides. With this in view, the Spanish governor had, on May, 14, 1792, brought together representatives of the


523


THE KENTUCKY CONVENTION.


southern Indians, to bring about, if possible, an alliance with them, so as to make them breast the American advances. When these inimical steps were brought to the attention of the Span- ish agent in Philadelphia, he told Jefferson that the conditions naturally arose from the disputes of jurisdiction, and from the umbrage which the Indians generally felt because some had put themselves under American protection.


Almost simultaneous with this Spanish treaty, Blount had once more met the Cherokees. Little Turtle, their spokesman, expressed dissatisfaction because the line which Ellicott was running was going to cut off their hunting-grounds. In the conference, no farther immunity was made certain than that Blount and Pickens and their party, descending the river to Nashville to hold a conference with the Chickasaws and Choc- taws, would not be molested. By September, 1792, it was feared that war had not been prevented, and Blount was ready to let Robertson forestall an attack from the Cherokee towns by marching against them, when it was learned the hostile pur- pose was dropped. This professed forbearance was apparently a ruse to disarm the settlers, for, on September 30, six hundred Chickamaugas and Creeks dashed upon Buchanan's Station, and brought war to the settlers' doors. For all this, Blount required Robertson to maintain the defensive, and to wait for Congress to declare a war. The brigadier-general of the east- ern posts, Sevier, had little faith in defensive war, and when Blount ordered out the Watauga militia to protect Ellicott, - who was so far favoring the Indians as to leave some of their villages on the Indian side which the treaty line placed with the whites, - there was likelihood of a general war, if Sevier's dash prevailed.


While the Tennessee region was suffering this uncertainty, the movement in Kentucky for Statehood had resulted, in April, 1792, in a convention at Danville, to frame a constitution. This was the tenth coming together of the people in their long striving after autonomy, in which they had shown a marked steadiness in the face of excitement. Though so near the end, the soberer members found still some ground for alarm, and Innes expressed their doubts when he declared some uneasi- ness at the disposition shown to put the work of constructing


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526


THE UNREST OF THE SOUTHWEST.


their fundamental law too exclusively into the hands of " plain, honest farmers." The draft presented to the convention was the work of George Nicholas, the representative of the newer comers, rather than of the older leaders of the territory. The instrument followed on broad lines the Federal Constitution, but made the principle of government a little more democratic. It gave manhood suffrage, but gave no recognition of public education. Though allowing the possibility of emancipation, it saved slavery by declaring " all men, when they form a social compact. equal." This constitution was ratified in May, and Isaac Shelby was made the first governor.




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