USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 7
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The country north of the Ohio, where Dunmore expected to operate, was designated in the Parliamentary bill, now near its passage, as "heretofore a part of the territory of Canada."
69
THE FRENCH ON THE WABASH.
This phrase struck sharply at the pride of Dunning and others, jealous of English honor, and Lord North at one time proposed to leave the words out. It was urged by the opposition that under such an acknowledgment, if the time should ever come for France to regain Canada in a diplomatie balance, she could fairly contend for this conceded limit. While this apprehen- sion strengthened the opponents of the bill in England, the news of its progress through Parliament brought other fears to land speculators in Virginia. Some travelers and adventurers in the summer of 1773 had, under the lead of one William Murray, formed a company at Kaskaskia which became known as the Illinois Land Company, and with these the governor and various gentlemen of tide-water Virginia were associated. They had bargained with the Indians for large tracts of land, bounded by the Wabash, the Mississippi, and the Illinois, and the deed had been passed. Was their purchase now imperiled by this bill ? What was to be the effect of the measure upon the French traders and denizens of that country, and upon their relations to the Indians ?
The French on the Wabash and beyond, occupying lands which the royal proclamation of 1763 had pledged to the Indians, had been for ten years a source of perplexity to the commanding general in New York. In September, 1771, Gage had reported that the tribes thereabouts were constantly im- periling the English traders, and "it is natural to suspeet," he says, " that the French instigate the Indians against us to keep the trade to themselves." He then intimates that it may be- come necessary to dislodge the French at Vincennes. Early in March, Gage received royal orders to warn the French at that place to remove immediately, and it is for us, he adds, "to let the neighboring Indians know that we shall have traders among them to take the place of the French." In April, 1772, Gage issned a proclamation of his intent to remove all settlers from that country, English as well as French. They were given time to withdraw voluntarily. The warning was a cruel one to the French, who had enjoyed unquestioned homestead titles for seventy years. When their protests were sent to New York, Gage dallied in his decision. This gave time for the resignation of Hillsborough, forced by Franklin, to throw the control of the question into the tenderer hands of Lord Dart-
70
THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR.
mouth, and the poor French were respited. They went on, pursuing their avocations, hunting and trading, and Patrick Kennedy, who was at this time exploring the Illinois, reports meeting them on its banks. It seems clear that the routes from Detroit, the home of the congeners of these Illinois French, were constantly traversed by these people, either by the Mau- mee or the Illinois River, -a journey in either case of near nine hundred miles to the Mississippi, often the depot for their furs. Haldimand, in succeeding Gage, opened communica- tion with their western aliens. He had advised Gage that it would be difficult to controvert their land titles. Now under Dartmouth's orders he had cautioned the English commander at Fort Gage to be conciliatory towards them. A little later, Haldimand was endeavoring to get more direct information of their condition. He was instructing Lieutenant Hutchins to leave Pensacola and take the route north by the Mississippi, so as to bring him reports. Later still, he sent Lieutenant Hall to placate the Indians and prepare the French settlers for the stabler rule of the new bill. Gage, in London, was not less anxiously consulting with North and Dartmouth, and conferring with Carleton about its provisions. Haldimand was meanwhile constantly reporting new disorders on the Ohio, with a suspicion of French intrigue behind the savage irrup- tions, and there was need of haste in applying the assuaging effects of the bill. But its opponents were questioning the scheme because they thought it hopeless and unpatriotic to check an inevitable westward progress. Haldimand under- stood the real purpose of its promoters, when he said that the bill was aimed at preventing the Americans getting possession of the continent. Lord Lyttelton recognized the fact that to confine the Americans by such a barrier was to thwart their contest for empire. Wedderburn said distinctly that it was one object of the bill to prevent the English settling in that country, and that the new barrier would allow " little tempta- tion " to send settlers north from the Vandalia grant.
It was not only this territorial expansion of Quebec, but the concessions which the bill made to French Catholics, greater than any English Romanist could dare expect, and the grant of French law in British territory, which increased the steady aversion to it of English merchants, and which aroused the lord
71
THE BILL PASSED.
mayor and magistrates of London, because they supposed it imperiled British honor. For the seaboard colonists to enter that territory and find French law instead of English law, and to encounter an established Catholic religion, was not likely to strengthen the loyalty whose decadence the ministry was de- ploring in the older colonies. "Does not your blood run cold," said Hamilton, " to think that an English Parliament could pass an act for the establishment of arbitrary power and popery in such an extensive country ? " However politic the modern historian may think this rehabilitating of French customs to have been for the vastly preponderating French element north of the St. Lawrence, to include the Ohio country in such provi- sions is not approved even by such defenders of the ministerial policy as Kingsford, the latest historian of Canada. There is indeed little to support the charges that the bill was but the first step in reducing " the ancient, free, Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery," by setting up " an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies." These were phrases used by Congress in an address to the people of Great Britain a few months later (October 21, 1774), and still more solemnly in the Declaration of Independ- ence. They were simply loose sentences used for political ends. The Parliamentary opposition, which was dignified by the sup- port of Chatham and Burke, never ventured to think of any such effect on the Atlantic side of the Alleghanies from these untoward provisions, whatever the bravado utterances of Thur- low may have indicated. "I do not choose," said Burke at one . time, " to break the American spirit, because it is the spirit that has made the country."
The bill was introduced on May 2, 1774, into the House of Lords, weary with the long sessions which the discussion of the Massachusetts coercive acts had caused. It went to the Com- mons, and passed that body on June 13, while Logan was ren- dering an Indian war in the designated region inevitable, and was sent back with amendments to the Lords. In this body, by a vote of fifty to twenty in a house that seated five hundred and fifty-eight members, and after the season was so far advanced that many peers had gone to their estates, it was passed on June 18, and four days later was approved by the king. In this way the government stultified itself.
72
THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR.
Before the news could reach Virginia, but while the prospect seemed certain that such a bill would become law, Dunmore, on July 12, instructed Andrew Lewis to descend the Kanawha with a force and cross the Ohio into the Shawnee country. Meanwhile, Major Angus McDonald passed the mountains with a body of militia, and, moving down the Ohio to the modern Wheeling, he found himself in command of about seven hun- dred sturdy fighters. Here, with the aid of the Zanes and following plans suggested by George Rogers Clark, he built Fort Fincastle, later known as Fort Henry. Towards the end of July, he dropped down the river to Fish Creek, whence he made a dash upon the Shawnee villages on the Muskingum, - creating the first success of the war.
Dunmore himself had left Williamsburg on July 10, and by the last of September he was at the head of about thirteen hun- dred men at Fort Fincastle. He kept out some experienced scouts, Clark, Cresap, Simon Kenton, and Simon Girty among the number. He sent Crawford forward to build Fort Gower at the mouth of the Hockhocking.
The Indian agents, Johnson and his deputy, Croghan, - who was now living on the Alleghany just above the forks, - watched this war of Virginia and the Shawnees with solicitude. Sir William got his tidings of it through the Iroquois, and they associated all the barbarity of the whites with the name of ,Cresap. Logan certainly agreed, as his famous speech shows. Rev. William Gordon had some time before transmitted to Dartmouth what purported to be a letter addressed by the French king to the Six Nations. In this they were told to keep up their courage, and they would, as they found oppor- tunity, enter Canada with eighty ships, while " an equal number entered the Mississippi to the aid of his southern children." The English were well aware of the uncertainties of a general savage uprising, with France on the watch. "There is too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians," said Croghan, " and if the assembly gives in to that spirit, instead of securing the friendship of the Six Nations and the Dela- wares by negotiation, no doubt they will soon have a general rupture." He adds that the Six Nations have tried to prevent the war with the Shawnees. With such an Iroquois as Logan aroused, there was little chance of peace.
73
FIGHT AT POINT PLEASANT.
The real stroke of the war came on the very site of the con- templated capital of Vandalia, in the angle formed by the june- tion of the Kanawha with the Ohio, - Point Pleasant, as it was called. The confliet here was the most hotly contested fight which the Indians ever made against the English, and it is all the more remarkable as it was the first considerable battle which they had fought without the aid of the French. Lewis, on arriving at the spot, learned from Dunmore's messages, which the governor's scouts had hidden near by, that the gov- ernor with his forces would be on the Ohio at a point higher up, where Lewis was instructed to join him. The next day new orders came, by which it appeared that Dunmore intended to turn up the Hockhoeking River, and that Lewis was expected to eross the Ohio and join him in the Indian country. When Lewis was thus advised, his rear column had not come up, and his trains and cattle were still struggling in the wilderness. The force which he had with him at Point Pleasant was a motley one, but for forest service a notable body, and not a frontier settlement but had contributed to it. There were in it Shelby, Christian, Robertson, and Morgan, - heroie names in these western wilds.
While Lewis was making ready to obey orders, a squad of men, out hunting, discovered that a horde of Indians was upon them. Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief, had divined Dunmore's plan, and, with a strategic skill unusual with Indians, had crossed the Ohio for the purpose of beating his adversary in detail. The opposing armies were much alike in numbers, say eleven hundred each, - perhaps more, - and in forest wiles the difference was hardly greater. Cornstalk soon developed his plan of crowding the whites toward the point of the peninsula. Lewis pushed forward enough men to retard this onset, while he threw up a line of defense, behind which he eould retire if necessary. He sent, by a concealed movement. another force along the banks of the Ohio, which gained the Indians' flank, and by an enfilading fire forced the savage line back. In the night, Cornstalk, thus worsted, recrossed the Ohio.
Meanwhile, Dunmore, ascending the Hockhocking, marched towards the Seioto, making some ravages as he went. Corn- stalk, after his defeat, had hurriedly joined the tribes opposing Dunmore, but he found them so disheartened by his own dis-
74
THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR.
comfiture that he soon led a deputation to Dunmore's camp and proposed a peace. The governor, hearing of Lewis's ap- proach, and not feeling the need of his aid in the negotiations, and fearing that the elation of the victorious borderers might disquiet the now complacent tribes, sent messages to Lewis that he should withdraw, which Lewis reluctantly did. A treaty followed. All prisoners were to be given up ; all stolen horses returned. No white man was to be molested on the Ohio, and no Indians were to pass to its southern bank. It was also agreed - in mockery, as the tribes must have felt - that no white man should cross to the north. Four chieftains were given to the whites as hostages.
Logan kept aloof, and was sullen. He was a fighter and not a councilor, he said ; but he sent in the speech to which refer- ence has been made, an eloquent burst of proud disdain, if we can trust the report of it. His string of scalps had satisfied his revenge.
There were acts on Dunmore's part, such as his failure to succor Lewis, and his refusal to let him share in the treaty, which, when his conduct and that of his minion, Connolly, were later known in his eagerness to quell the patriotic uprising in tide-water Virginia, led many to suspect him of treachery in the negotiation with the Indians, and of a purpose to secure them to the royal side in the impending revolutionary struggle. There is no evidence that, at the time, this distrust prevailed. As late as March, 1775, the Virginia Assembly thanked him for his success. Yet it is true that he had, before he entered upon his campaign, dissolved the Virginia Assembly in May, 1774, in disapproval of their votes of sympathy for oppressed Boston.
Dunmore had, indeed, obtained all he hoped for by bring- ing peace, in reestablishing a new hold for Virginia upon the territory, which, as he later learned, was on the first of the following May to pass, by action of Parliament, under a new jurisdiction. The grasp which Virginia had now taken had cost her £150,000, but it was to be of great importance in the coming struggle with the king, for she had administered a de- feat to the Indians, which was for some time to paralyze their power in that region. It was a grasp that Virginia was not to relax till she ceded her rights in this territory to the nascent union when the revolt of the colonies was ended, - a hold that
75
THE COMMISSION TO CANADA.
before long she was to strengthen through the wisdom and hardihood shown in her capture of Vincennes.
Before the battle of Point Pleasant had decided the fate of the Indians, the passage of the bill, which in early summer had created so little attention in Parliament, was met in London by " a prodigious cry " in September, -a clamor that William Lee, then in England, did his best to increase by " keeping a continual fire in the papers." The bill was not to go into effect till the spring of 1775, and Carleton having returned to Canada, Dartmouth, in January, sent him instructions about putting it in force. The minister's letters must have crossed others from the governor, informing him of the opposition to the bill even among the French people of the province, and of the measures which the revolting colonies were taking to gain the Canadians to their cause. In Montreal the bust of the king had been defaced.
Already in the previous September, Congress had reechoed the " prodigious cry " of London, and had declared the re- establishment of the Catholic religion in Quebec to be " danger- ous in an extreme degree ; " but this mistake in language was discovered, and John Dickinson drafted for that body a concil- iatory address to the Canadians, which, in March, 1775, Carle- ton informed Dartmouth the disaffected on the St. Lawrence were printing and distributing in a translation. Within a year the lesson of prudence had been forgotten, and singularly enough while Congress (February, 1776) was appointing a commission, with one Catholic member (Charles Carroll) and a Catholic attendant, to proceed to Montreal, the ardent Hugue- not blood of John Jay had colored an address of Congress to English sympathizers by characterizing the Catholic faith " as a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets." It was only necessary for the loyal Canadians to translate and cir- -culate Jay's imprudent rhetoric to make the efforts of the com- missioners futile. Congress again grew wiser when it framed the Declaration of Independence, and Dr. Shea has pointed out that the allusion to the Quebec Bill in that document is " so obscure that few now understand it, and on the point of religion it is silent."
Congress thus failed to undo the Quebec Act by gaining the
76
THE QUEBEC BILL AND THE DUNMORE WAR.
people it was intended to shield; and it was left for Virginia, under a pressure instigated by Maryland, to do what she could to make the territory, of which Parliament would have deprived her, the nucleus of a new empire beyond the mountains.
England stubbornly adhered to her efforts to maintain the act north of the Ohio, as long as the war lasted. Before the actual outbreak, Franklin, in his informal negotiations in Lon- don, had told the ministry that there could be no relief from the dangers of " an arbitrary government on the back of the settlements " but in a repeal of the Quebec Act. He claimed it to be the right of the Americans to hold the lands which the colonists had acquired from the French, while at the same time it was their duty to defend them and set up new settlements upon them. Dunmore was naturally of another mind, and we know that after his treaty was made he schemed with the Dela- wares and the ministry to get a royal confirmation to that tribe of the country north of the Ohio and east of the Hoekhocking, as a ready means to bar out the Virginians.
CHAPTER VI.
SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
1769-1776.
NUMEROUS rivulets, springing along the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, and broadening as they leap down the slopes, ulti- mately gather and flow towards the sea in two principal streams, - the Yadkin and the Catawba. There was a Scotch-Irish stock in this mountainous region, which was proving difficult for Governor Tryon, the royalist executive of that province, to manage. This recalcitrant spirit of independence found an attractive seclusion in the free wilderness life which returned hunter and adventurer pictured beyond the mountains. One of these restless spirits dwelling on the Yadkin has already been presented to us in Daniel Boone.
In the valley interposing between the Blue Ridge and Iron Mountain, - the present western boundary of North Caro- lina, - a network of small streams unite and flow north to the Kanawha and Ohio. Other spraying threads of glistening life, drawing into a single channel, break through the Iron Mountain, when, increased by various tributaries, it becomes known as the Watanga, an affluent of the Holston, one of the chief branches of the Tennessec. To the valley of this stream, lying in what is now the northeast corner of the State of Ten- nessee, Daniel Boone had come, as we have seen, in 1769. There was soon after planted across the Indian war-path which this valley afforded - up and down which the northern and southern Indians had for years followed one another - the first permanent settlement beyond the mountains south of the Virginia grants. William Bean had built himself a cabin here, and his son was the first white child born in Tennessee. The communications of the region were easiest from Virginia and down the tributaries of the Kanawha.
On October 18, 1770, a treaty of Virginia with the Chero-
78
SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
kees, made at Lochaber, in South Carolina, had extended the bounds of the Old Dominion so far westerly as to correspond in the main with the present eastern line of Kentucky. Virginia thus secured from the Cherokees, in the very year in which their famous Sequoyah, the subsequent inventor of their alpha- bet, was born, their rights to much the same territory which had been ceded by the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix in 1768. If the southern bounds of Virginia (36° 31' north latitude) were where these Watauga people supposed, this Cherokee cession covered their valley, and they were under the protection of Virginia laws, so far as those ordinances could prevail in so distant a region. The new Lochaber line began at a point on the Holston - into which the Watauga flowed - and extended northward, and there was little knowledge of what it encoun- tered, till it struck the mouth of the Kanawha, whose springs were adjacent to those of the Watauga. The line really threw the upper parts of the valley of the Big Sandy River and the southwest angle of West Virginia - excepting the extreme point of that angle - into the conceded territory. The main object of the treaty was to placate the Indians for the eneroach- ments along the alluvial bottoms of the Kanawha, which the surveyors had been making in that region under the Fort Stanwix grant. That concession of the Iroquois had proved extremely irritating to the Cherokees, because it assumed to , deal with their territory.
Before the truth about the latitude of the Watauga settle- ment was known, there was a significant immigration thither, bringing upon the stage of western settlement some notable personages. In 1770, a supple and robust young man, whose blue eye had the alert habit of a hunter, and whose native air of command attracted notice wherever he went, and perhaps the weightiest man of all these trans-Alleghany pioneers, passed that way, bound on further explorations. In him, James Rob- ertson was first introduced to the little stockaded hamlet, where a few hardy adventurers were breasting the wilderness. The next year (1771) he came among them again, this time resolved to stay, for he had brought with him a train making sixteen families, whom he had induced to enter upon this new world. It was after the battle of the Alamance (May 16, 1771), where Tryon's force had dispersed the Regulators, - a body of asso-
79
WATAUGA ASSOCIATION.
ciates against horse thieves and tax-gatherers, - and some of that disaffected body, eager to find other control than a royal governor, were in this emigration: Robertson built himself a cabin on an island in the river, and events soon placed him in the forefront of a little colony, organized on manhood suffrage and religious liberty. In it he acquired leadership, though he was more deficient in education than was usual with pioneers, for he was only beginning to acquire the penman's art.
In the same year (1771), Jacob Brown had formed a settle- ment on the Nollichucky, a branch of the Holston next south of the Watauga, and it was he who, on the discovery being made, by the surveyors extending the southern line of Virginia, that both of these settlements were without the government of Virginia, entered into an agreement with the Cherokees, by which the joint communities, now numbering eighty souls, secured a lease of these valleys, in consideration of six thousand dollars' worth of goods, for a term of eight years. By this they avoided such an infringement as a purchase would be of the proclamation of 1763.
These little communities, thus thrown out of the control of Virginia, and having no connection with North Carolina, though within her charter limits, were placed in much the same condi- tion in these western wilds that the Mayflower pilgrims were in a hundred and fifty years before, when, stranded beyond the patent of Virginia, they were forced into forming a compact of government.
It was thus, in the spring of 1772, that Robertson undertook a leading part in making what was called the Watauga Associa- tion. This was a combination of the people of the Watauga, Carter's, and the Nollichucky valleys, under written articles. for civil government and the protection of law. It was also a union, based on necessity and the Indian consent. With these environments they were ready to face the demand for their removal made by Cameron, the British Indian agent, on the ground of their defying the royal proclamation. The govern- ment, which the articles instituted, proved rugged enough to survive all strains that were put upon it for six years. In August, 1776, the association petitioned the North Carolina Assembly to be allowed to come under its protection. This paper is still existing in Sevier's handwriting. They professed
80
SOUTH OF THE OHIO.
a desire "to share in the glorious cause of liberty" with their brothers on the seaboard. In 1778, the region was organized as Washington County in North Carolina. This change brought but slight disturbance to the existing forms of government.
That this little republic of the wilderness lasted so success- fully was indeed owing to the character of the men who formed it. While in the throes of birth, the little community wel- comed to its shelter two other remarkable persons. Captain Evan Shelby was a frontier cattleman of no uncertain charac- ter, whose Welsh blood had been invigorated by his mountain career. John Sevier brought to the wilderness a handsome mien, which befitted his gentle Huguenot blood. His life as an Indian trader had given him an eager air, but a certain self- conscious dignity beamed from his blue eyes, and waves of brown hair haloed a well-poised head, carried erect, and show- ing a countenance lightened at times with gleams of merriment. He was now not more than six and twenty years old, with a life of striking incident and humane interests still before him. He was, says Phelan, the " most brilliant military and civil figure " in the history of Tennessee. In these three men, Robertson, Shelby, and Sevier, the Watauga settlement was fortunate in these formative days, for being without the pale of established civil control, the colony became easily the asylum of vagabonds and culprits escaping justice by flying over the mountains. With such intestine disturbances, and with the savages about them, the character of its chief rulers could be the only security which such an isolated community could possess. No copy of their self-imposed constitution of restraint has been preserved ; but we know enough of the workings of their simple govern- ment to see how the laws of Virginia, so far as applicable, with an executive committee to enforce them, and a sufficient method of record for lands, sufficed to answer all requirements. It was the earliest instance of a government of the people by the peo- ple, and under a written compact, beyond the mountains, and was established by men of American birth.
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