George Washington and the Indians

There are new revelations on every page in Ned Blackhawk’s ambitious The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In putting Indians back into the history of the country, rather than treating the trials and tribulations of Indian peoples as a separate discipline, he changes the way we understand the past. Indians, he says, had “agency,” were party to the actions and decisions that shaped the country. His is a different understanding of early founders Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and especially George Washington.

“Washington knew this world. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, had never fought interior [lands not in states, still held by tribes] battles, and they spent much of the post-1783 period in Europe. Thousands of Washington’s men had died in conflicts with Native peoples and their allies, and he commanded the earliest battles in two global wars. He had given commands that Indian villages be burned, their lands occupied, and their women and children imprisoned… Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—let alone Paine—had not experienced this interior world.”

Years ago, I read David McCullough’s prize-winning biography of John Adams, and wondered how the second president of the United States entire public and private life could be told without some mention of Indians. And in McCullough’s last book, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, Native Americans again get little notice. His story is about colonizers in what he calls “unsettled” lands, which of course were settled by several indigenous tribes. It is about the Northwest Ordinance and stipulations against slavery and for education and religious freedom. Confrontations with Indigenous peoples, and Tecumseh’s merging of many tribes and alliance with the British in the War of 1812—and the reasons for their failures—get little sympathy, or even mention.

Blackhawk’s book reminds us that Indians were in the thick of it at the nation’s beginning, and that Washington, no Indian lover or apologist, understood Indians and their role in the nation’s development. Washington feared a state-by-state scramble for Native lands, which would create a climate of uncertainty and instability. He believed that the value of land and orderly development could only happen with Federal authority over expansion and dealings with tribes. Blackhawk says:

“…tribal sovereignty helped the Republic’s economy. By establishing boundaries between Native nations and white settlements, diplomacy helped to bring, as Washington wrote ‘consequently a higher price’ for existing property… Squatting and speculation would only bring additional ‘confusion and bloodshed,’ both of which diminished the value of existing property. Making peace with Indians brought order. Treaties established borders and were essential to peace and prosperity.”

Washington himself had been a speculator in Indian lands across the 1763 Proclamation Line, established after the Seven Years War. This line divided lands controlled by the British and those comprising an “Indian reserve” and marginally controlled by the French. Thus, Washington participated in and foresaw the country’s Westward expansion. But in his mind a controlled expansion with the Federal government conducting diplomacy and managing that expansion was critical to the nation’s development. Left to individual states and settler greed, it was chaos.

That’s a different story than the one told by McCullough, or, for that matter, by Jill Lepore in her lauded retelling of American history, These Truths. They, and other historians of our textbooks and conventional accounts, see the growth of the nation as an unfolding of ideas proclaimed in sacred documents. “All men are created equal,” says Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson, his political heirs and their chroniclers set about explaining the gradual expansion of that term, with the franchise extended to: 1. White men who did not own property; 2. Black men; 3. Women; and, finally, in 1924, Native Americans. Led, in Jefferson’s mind, by yeoman farmers taking idealistic values and “unsettled land” as the country expanded.

There is something dreamlike and utopian in this idea. On the one hand, the egalitarianism is a noble goal, and having lived long enough to experience the Civil Rights movement and watched successes of Black, Brown, and Asian entertainers, athletes, academics and politicians, I applaud the goal of the founders and its gradual and often painful expansion.

On the other hand, the noble goal reminds me of another national goal explained and sometimes ridiculed in the textbooks and standard histories: “Manifest Destiny.” Jefferson had an eye West, and the Monroe Doctrine exerted American influence in the hemisphere. The first five presidents expanded this vision as the nation moved West. This goal was not so noble, as it meant the displacement of thousands of indigenous people.

But it became a compass point for Westward expansion. Historian Sarah Koenig makes a more subtle examination of the Westward Movement in Providence and the Invention of American History. She sees an Anglo-Protestant vision of divine direction as the nation crept and leaped across the continent—the not so noble goal. She also sees an alternative “objective history,” often stated by Catholics excluded in the Anglo-Protestant version that was ascendent. Koenig convincingly uses the “objective” story of the Walla Walla killings in 1847, which had been refashioned into an argument for the martyrdom of the Protestant missionaries, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and blamed on Catholic instigators, as a fulcrum in historical understanding.

Are Manifest Destiney and the Anglo-Protestant Providentialism of early America corollaries of “All [White] men are created equal,” which of course depended on “unsettled” land there for the taking? Native peoples could be largely ignored, bypassed, beat back, overcome in the march through the Louisiana Territory and on to the Pacific.

The more pragmatic and less idealistic Washington acknowledged that Indians were part of the picture, that they had some rights and purposes in the development of the country. That they were actors in the historical drama. They had agency.

Jeffersonian history has long carried the day, but Ned Blackhawk and others are now telling a fuller history, one which helps explain Native American endurance—and revival today.

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