The Fabric of America (13 page)

Almost a century later when his boundary markers had to be restored, the new boundary commissioners paid tribute to his methods. Comparing Ellicott's feat using a handmade zenith sector, clocks, and compasses with their own findings based on late-nineteenth-century instruments machined and ground to an accuracy of one ten-thousandth of an inch, they concluded, “The operations of the early Commissioners do their memory great credit. The variation from the true geographic parallel is small [considering] the difference in precision between the instrument of that day and this.” The science, however, produced consequences unimaginable to the scientists. The most destructive fell on the Six Nations, but to the United States the most significant was the defeat it suffered at the hands of New York.

. . .

For more than a century, the Six Nations had played a strategic role balancing the competing pressures imposed by British and French colonial powers. Writing of their values, the French Jesuit missionary Father Charlevoix described “these Americans” in terms that the new Americans would have used of themselves. They were, he said, “perfectly convinced that man was born free, that no power on earth has a right to infringe his liberty, and that nothing can repay him for the loss of it.”

To accommodate that conviction with the need to live together, the federation of six nations, around fifteen thousand strong, organized their government through a constitution that reconciled differing ambitions by a sophisticated set of checks and balances that some modern apologists argue must have served as a model for the United States. Each individual nation had responsibility for a different administrative role, consultation was required on all decisions and unanimity on major choices, and decision-making alternated between men and women. Although the federation was formed through war, with ultimate authority being wielded through elected male chiefs, women selected the leaders, and as the constitution declared, “Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother.”

The Revolution destroyed this cohesive arrangement. The Mohawks under their leader Joseph Brant chose to fight with the British and drew in three other nations, the Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga, with them, while the Oneida and the Tuscarora, influenced by the missionary Samuel Kirkland, supported the Americans. In 1779, General John Sullivan attacked the Six Nations homeland below Lakes Erie and Ontario in retaliation for a raid on the Wyoming Valley. His troops not only destroyed crops, but brought back with them news of the richness of Six Nations land, making it a prime target for settlers and speculators alike.

When peace came, New York's claim to almost twelve million fertile acres of Six Nations land was challenged by Massachusetts, under the terms of its royal charter granting it possession of “the Maine lands from sea to sea.” This border dispute only ended in December 1786 when the two states reached the compromise agreement known as the Hartford Treaty, leaving jurisdiction with New York, but giving Massachusetts the right to buy two
thirds of the land, approximately eight million acres, from the Six Nations. Almost at once Massachusetts sold its right to two New York speculators, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham, for $1 million, a sum that exactly equaled the state's entire annual budget. The down payment of one third of the price immediately allowed Governor John Hancock to remove the crushing burden of taxation from western farmers. Had the border been established earlier, Shays's Rebellion might never have taken place, and the history of the Constitution would have followed a different course.

The treaty also left the Six Nations to the tender mercies of Governor Clinton once Ellicott had completed demarcating the border with Pennsylvania. To keep the transaction cheap, Clinton negotiated for leaseholds rather than outright purchase and, following a policy suggested by General Philip Schuyler, restricted the state to acquiring farmland only. This left the much larger hunting grounds untouched, but as Schuyler had correctly predicted, the settlers quickly began to clear off the game anyway, eventually allowing the state to acquire all the Indian land cheaply.

Leasing the land was attractive to the Six Nations, not simply because it left ultimate ownership with them, but because their sachems, or leaders, were by then convinced that they had to learn the ways of the Americans, and that it was useful to have their teachers living in their midst. But the difference between leasing and selling was buried in the horse-trading of the Hartford Treaty, and the speculators sold the land as though it were owned outright. “[Governor Clinton] did not say, ‘I buy your Country,'” the Oneida sachem Good Peter protested in 1788. “Nor did we say, ‘We sell it.'” But Clinton paid no heed, insisting that the three nations with whom he had signed agreements should move into smaller reservations close to the Canadian frontier.

The state might be ruthless, but the arrival of a new player in the form of the U.S. government offered the Six Nations sachems a slim hope of holding on to their land and legal rights. As immediately became clear, the new president took a very different view of Indian rights.

The election in 1789 of General George Washington as president provided the clearest possible symbol of the overriding authority of the United States. Not only was his election unanimous, he was the incarnation of the Union.
No one else could have welded the disparate forces of the states into a national army so that, as he said when he bade them farewell, “Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other… instantly became but one patriotic band of Brothers.” The broad chest, the towering height, the wide-socketed blue eyes, the boldly jutting chin made more formidable by the need to clamp shut his jaws against his spring-loaded false teeth, all gave him the appearance of a leader, but he was more than a symbol.

Washington came to the presidency with an agenda, and that was unity. The full force of his prestige, personality, and shrewdness was concentrated upon the belief that “
it is in our United capacity we are known
, and have a place among the Nations of the Earth. Depart from this, and the States separately would be as unknown in the World and as contemptable (comparatively speaking) as an individual County in any one State.” To the last day of his presidency, he did not deviate from the belief that the states should accept a subordinate role within the Union because “
all the parts combined
cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger.”

So formidable has the stature of “the Father of the Nation” grown in history, together with that of the two great figures Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who served him as secretaries of state and the treasury, it is difficult to grasp how gossamer thin the federal power really was, whatever the Constitution said, and how easily it could be defied by powerful state governors. Its weakness was cruelly exposed in the battle over the disposal of the Six Nations land north of Ellicott's border.

The new federal Constitution gave the United States the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” One of the federal government's earliest pieces of legislation was the 1790 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, which made clear that Indian land was only to be acquired by treaty with the United States. The act was passed specifically to give the president power to deal with William MacGillivray, the leader of the Creeks in Georgia and Florida, but within weeks of its passage, Washington dispatched Timothy Pickering, as someone who was familiar with the area, to inform a Seneca delegation preparing to meet the Pennsylvania negotiators “
that all business between them and any part of the United States is hereafter to be transacted by the general Government
.”

Encouraged by the entry of the United States into the negotiations, the Seneca sachem Cornplanter immediately set about enlisting the new president's assistance, using political skills honed by long sessions in his own confederation. In November 1790, Washington agreed to meet Corn-planter in person and gave his word that Seneca ownership of their lands would be guaranteed by the federal government, which alone had the right to negotiate for their sale. “Here then is the security for the remainder of your lands,” Washington promised Cornplanter. “No State nor person can purchase your lands, unless at some public treaty held under the authority of the United States. The general Government will … protect you in all your just rights.”

By allying himself to Washington, Cornplanter showed himself to be the most pragmatic of the Six Nations' sachems. His rivals for paramount influence among the Six Nations, the warlike Brant and the eloquent Red Jacket, counseled complete opposition to the inexorable hunger of American settlers for land, but Cornplanter recognized that this was a force that could not be opposed, only diverted. Washington himself took an equally realistic view of the Six Nations.

Cornplanter

His Indian policy was intended to persuade potential enemies to live peaceably within the United States. As a major land speculator himself, he had no qualms about acquiring their land. In 1795 he would buy three thousand acres in New York's Mohawk Valley, using money borrowed from Governor George Clinton, and resell quickly for a profit of $6,000 on the deal. But self-interest demanded that all dealings be done equably without stirring up hostility. “
It will be fortunate for the American public,”
he declared in early 1791, “if private Speculations in the lands, still claimed by the Aborigines, do not aggravate those differences, which policy, humanity, and justice concur to deprecate.” Whatever the difficulties, unity always remained the ultimate prize.

From a federal perspective the need to avoid unnecessary hostility was obvious. In the northwest, Brant and the British were encouraging a western alliance among tribes such as the Delaware, Wyandot, and Miami against further white settlement in the Ohio Valley. In the southwest, Cherokee anger at incursion by settlers from North Carolina and Georgia had already turned to sporadic violence, and it could easily spread by way of the Chickasaw to the Creek in the far south.

Yet for all that the Constitution, the Congress, and the Father of the Nation might say, within his own frontier Governor Clinton continued to pursue his own program of forcing the Six Nations to exchange lease rights in their former lands for outright ownership of smaller reservations close to the Canadian border. The eight million acres of the Phelps and Gorham purchase were freed up through these arrangements, as were four million acres bought later by Alexander Macomb. The evidence that New York was acting on behalf of speculators regardless of the greater good of the United States drove Washington to a furious outburst to Alexander Hamilton.

“
The States individually
are omitting no occasion to interfere in matters which belong to the general Government,” he wrote in April 1791. “It is not more than four or five months since the Six Nations or part of them were assured (through the medium of Colonel Pickering) that thence forward they would be spoken to by the Government of the United States
only
and the same thing was repeated in strong terms to the Cornplanter at Philadelphia afterwards… To sum the whole up in a few words: the interference of
States, and the speculations of Individuals will be the bane of all our public measures.”

Whatever New York could do for its speculators, Pennsylvania was about to do better. What made this second defiance more humiliating for Washington was that it concerned a tract of land in the extreme west of Six Nations territory, known as the Triangle, that clearly belonged to the United States.

The Triangle got its name from a curious gap left by Ellicott's line. Under the terms of New York's 1780 cession to the United States of its claims to western lands, the state's western border was deemed to be the meridian running north-south through “the western extremity of Lake Ontario.” Ellicott's parallel clearly extended westward of this line. Thus the triangular area between New York's western limits, Pennsylvania's northern boundary, and the shores of Lake Erie could only belong to the United States. Within this area Seneca land was unequivocally guaranteed to them by the president.

The most important feature on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie was a spit of rock and sand called Presqu'isle that thrust out like a fishhook into the lake creating a safe and well-protected harbor. That harbor was vital to speculators hoping to interest customers in the potential of the Six Nations land because it would allow farmers to ship their produce to markets in the east. The two principal speculators were Nathaniel Gorham, who owned eight million acres of New York, and to the south, John Nicholson, who laid claim to nearly four million acres of Pennsylvania.