The Colonization Of North America Part 34

Plans to occupy the Illinois country.--By the end of 1761 British troops had taken possession of all the lake posts from Niagara to Green Bay, besides Venango, Miamis, and Ouiatanon further south. In July, 1763, orders were sent by the Governor of Louisiana for the evacuation of the Illinois posts, and boats were prepared at Fort Pitt for sending four hundred English troops to relieve the French garrisons. But the conspiracy of Pontiac delayed the complete transfer of this region for nearly three years.

The conspiracy of Pontiac.--Early in the war the tribes north of the Ohio had ravaged the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers, but after 1758 they had been quiet, although they did not like the English. They feared eviction from their lands, English traders had proved arrogant and dishonest, and General Amherst was attempting a policy of economy in presents, in spite of the criticism of the better informed Indian agents. Pontiac, head chief of the Ottawas, organized a general revolt, embracing the Algonquins, some of the tribes of the lower Mississippi, and some of the Iroquois. By a simultaneous a.s.sault in May, 1763, all but three northwestern posts--Detroit, Fort Pitt, and Niagara--fell almost without a blow. At Presq'Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango, Mackinac, Sandusky, St. Josephs, and Ouiatanon, there were ma.s.sacres, and the garrison fled from Green Bay.

Failure of the Loftus expedition.--It being impracticable now to send troops to the Illinois country by way of the Ohio, this was attempted by an expedition up the Mississippi Major Loftus was sent from Mobile with three hundred and fifty men to occupy Fort Ma.s.sac, Kaskaskia, and Fort Chartres. In February, 1764, he left New Orleans, but when two hundred and forty miles up the river, at Rocher a Davion, he was attacked by Tunica Indians, whereupon he abandoned the expedition and returned to Mobile.

Peace.--While Colonel Bradstreet reoccupied the Lakes, General Gage, Amherst's successor, resorted to conciliation, and a series of peace emba.s.sies were sent to the Illinois country from Mobile and from the northern garrisons. The submission of the Ohio tribes, failure of hopes for aid from New Orleans, and news of the transfer of western Louisiana to Spain, led Pontiac to negotiate at Ouiatanon in 1765 with George Croghan. At Detroit Croghan secured peace with all the western tribes.

Thomas Stirling then descended the Ohio with a detachment and in October occupied Fort Chartres. "Thus, after nearly three years of fighting and negotiating, British forces were in possession of the last of the French posts in the West."

Establishment of government.--In accordance with the Treaty of Paris a proclamation of General Gage guaranteed the inhabitants the free exercise of the Catholic religion. Settlers were allowed to sell their lands and emigrate, or to become British subjects on taking the oath of allegiance. The inhabitants of Kaskaskia and other places asked and received an extension of the time for decision to March, 1766. Many of them emigrated to St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve, or to New Orleans. The Proclamation of 1763 made no provision for civil government in the Indian reserve, and local administration was left to the military authorities and Indian agents. The French people were dissatisfied, and many misunderstandings arose between them and the English settlers and officers. By 1770 the complaint took the form of a demand for civil government, which was provided in 1774 by the Quebec Act.

LAND SPECULATION AND PLANS FOR WESTERN COLONIES

Western schemes.--Before the French and Indian War grants had been made by the British government of lands beyond the Alleghanies, and settlement on the back lands had been favored as a means of opposing, the French and of extending British trade. During the war the frontiers of settlement were contracted, but, in antic.i.p.ation of victory, new grants were sought and new schemes proposed. Not only were lands desired, but prominent men proposed new colonial governments west of the mountains. Nearly all of the proposals involved territory in the Ohio Valley. After the Albany Congress of 1754 Franklin urged the formation of two barrier colonies in the West. In 1756 Thomas Pownall, ex-governor of New Jersey, made a similar proposal. About the same time Samuel Hazard of Philadelphia promoted the formation of a Presbyterian colony to embrace most of the Ohio Valley and extending across the Mississippi.

In 1757 the Greenbrier Company secured 100,000 acres of land on the western waters.

The victory over the French stimulated new speculative and colonizing schemes for the West both in England and America. In June, 1763, the Mississippi Company was formed, composed of prominent Virginians, including Colonel George Washington and Richard Henry Lee. A memorial to the king was drawn asking for 2,500,000 acres on both sides of the lower Ohio, quit rent free for twelve years, and protection by royal forts, on condition of settling two hundred families. Late in 1763 a pamphlet published in Edinborough, Scotland, proposed a colony named Charlotiana, to include the country between the Wabash, Ohio, Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. About the same time Charles Lee proposed a colony on the Illinois and another on the Ohio.

Effect of the Proclamation.--The Proclamation of 1763 closing the Trans-Alleghany country to settlement seems to have checked for a time the schemes for speculation. The Proclamation contained an implied promise that the boundary would be revised, while it was well known that influential politicians in England favored the opening of the West. New schemes for western lands, therefore, were not long suppressed. In 1766 William Franklin, governor of New Jersey, launched a plan for two colonies, one at Detroit, the other on the lower Ohio. Through the aid of Benjamin Franklin, father of the governor, the Ohio country was favored by the Board of Trade, but in 1768 the plan dropped from sight.

Meanwhile many other land companies were formed.

A policy of expansion adopted.--The policy of the ministry regarding the West was vacillating, and more so, no doubt, because of the pressure of conflicting interests. But in 1768 the ministry decided on a definite plan for western settlement, the principle being that expansion should be gradual and under control of imperial agents, who should purchase land from the Indians as needed. Johnson and Stuart, Indian superintendents, had already made tentative arrangements for revising the proclamation line. In 1765 the Six Nations ceded their claims to lands between the Ohio and the Tennessee. Stuart, by a series of treaties, secured a line from the southern boundary of Virginia to the St. Mary's River. Florida, thence along the tidewater line to the Appalachicola River. West of that point the line was not completed, but important cessions were made along the Mobile coast. In 1768 the former lines were ratified, and Stuart, in two treaties with the Cherokees and Creeks (October, November, 1768), secured the extension of the line to the mouth of the Kanawha River on the north and to the Choctaw River on the south. At Fort Stanwix in 1768 the Iroquois ratified essentially their cession of 1765. The lines did not correspond, since the Iroquois cession included Western Tennessee and Kentucky, which were not within the other cessions. Meanwhile the southern line was modified by the treaty of Lochaber by running it west along the southern boundary of Virginia to the Holston River, thence direct to the mouth of the Kanawha. The purpose of the change was to take in the recently formed Watauga settlement.

Vandalia.--Having extinguished the Indian t.i.tles, it was now possible to found a new colony back of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and such a project was put on foot. Samuel Wharton of Philadelphia formed a company for the purpose of purchasing part of the lands. The company included some of the leading men in England and America, among them being Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Walpole. Official aid was enlisted by including two members of the ministry. In 1769 the purchase was made, and, in spite of Lord Hillsborough's opposition, by 1775 the project of a new and separate province named Vandalia had been approved by king and council.

The outbreak of the Revolution set the plan aside. Had it been carried out it would have cut Virginia off from her back lands. The Quebec Act of 1774 operated in the same direction, by attaching the Northwest to Quebec. Virginia therefore resisted. Governor Dunmore opposed the Vandalia colony, made grants of land both within and beyond it, and joined a company which purchased Indian lands north of the Ohio.

TRANS-ALLEGHANY SETTLEMENT

Western settlements before 1763.--But it was the backwoodsmen, and not the corporations, who opened the Trans-Alleghany country. Before the war a few settlements had been made on the western waters, In 1748 Draper's Meadows, on the Greenbrier, in West Virginia, were settled. Between 1750 and 1752 a settlement was made by the Ohio Company at Redstone on the Monongahela. By 1758 several small settlements had been made on the Holston, Watauga, and Cheat Rivers. But during the war these western settlements were abandoned, and the frontier pushed eastward a hundred miles or more.

The westward movement after the war.--The French and Indian War was scarcely over when the westward movement began again, regardless of proclamations or the deliberations of the Board of Trade. In 1760 Daniel Boone, from the Yadkin in North Carolina, "cilled a bar" on the Watauga River. Between 1761 and 1765 Wallen annually led hunters to the west. In 1765 Croghan surveyed the Ohio River, and the next year James Smith and others explored the Tennessee. In 1767 Finley was in Kentucky, and Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay were at French Lick (the site of Nashville).

In 1767 and 1770 Boone was "prospecting" for Judge Richard Henderson, a land speculator of North Carolina. At the same time Mansker led a party down the c.u.mberland and on to Natchez. By this time others had wandered far beyond the Mississippi and were causing the Spanish officials anxiety.

The hunters, traders, and prospectors were followed by surveyors and settlers. The chief partic.i.p.ants in the movement were from the middle region and the South: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Prominent among the pioneers on the western waters were the Scotch-Irish who had settled the back country of the older colonies and stood waiting at the western pa.s.ses.

The Appalachian barrier.--To reach the Mississippi Valley the frontiersman was forced to pa.s.s the Appalachian barrier, extending from Maine to Georgia. The easiest pa.s.s through it, by way of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, was impeded by the Six Nations who stood between the western frontier of settlement and the vacant lands beyond. Farther south the barrier was traversed by a series of interlocking rivers, flowing in opposite directions, whose valleys afforded trails. The Susquehannah led to the Alleghany, the Potomac to the Monongahela, the James and Roanoke to the Great Kanawha, the Great Pedee, the Yadkin, and Catawba to the head waters of the Tennessee. A series of longitudinal valleys on the eastern front of the southern Appalachians gave access from Virginia and North Carolina to the upper Tennessee, from whose valley an easy pa.s.s was found to Kentucky by way of c.u.mberland Gap.

The Indian barrier.--The Iroquois Confederacy, though friendly, was a r.e.t.a.r.ding force to the northern stream of emigration. The Algonquin tribes north of the Ohio had been friendly with the French, and after the French and Indian War they favored the French traders rather than those from the seaboard colonies. At the southern end of the Appalachians westward expansion was r.e.t.a.r.ded by the strong confederacies of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. The region between the Ohio and the Tennessee was the "dark and b.l.o.o.d.y ground" between the northern and southern tribes, but permanently inhabited by neither. It was this region which was opened to settlement by the Indian cessions between 1768 and 1770. The cessions were followed immediately by a movement of settlers into the area.

_THE SETTLEMENT OF EASTERN TENNESSEE_

The North Carolina Regulators.--The movement across the mountains was stimulated by a popular upheaval in the back country of North Carolina.

Shortly before 1740 the Scotch-Irish and German migration reached North Carolina and by 1765 the lands along the headwaters of the Yadkin, Haw, Neuse, Tar, Catawba, and Deep Rivers had been occupied. Many English and Welsh also had settled in the same region. Between the Piedmont and the coastal plain was a spa.r.s.ely settled country of pine forests. "Cut off ... from the men of the east, the men of the 'back country' felt no more sympathy for the former than they received from them." The coast country controlled the legislature and the courts. The men of the West complained that they were forced to pay excessive taxes, that the sheriffs were dishonest, and fees extortionate. An additional grievance was the scarcity of money. During 1765-1767 the frontiersmen began to organize and from 1767 to 1771 the back country was in a state of rebellion. Lawyers were seized and whipped, and the Hillsboro court was broken up. In 1771 the Regulators were defeated by Governor Tryon's troops in the battle of the Alamance and the rebellion soon subsided.

During those troubled years many had sought new homes in the western valleys.

The Watauga settlement.--Permanent settlement was made in eastern Tennessee in 1769. In that year a band of pioneers moved down the valley from Virginia and settled on the Watauga River, a branch of the Tennessee, thinking that they were still in Virginia. A short time afterward they were joined by settlers from North Carolina, within whose bounds the colony proved to be. Two able leaders soon emerged. James Robertson, a backwoodsman and a "mighty hunter," went to Watauga in 1770 and took thither a colony of sixteen North Carolina families in 1771. A year later arrived John Sevier, a Virginian of Huguenot extraction. Like Robertson, he was an able Indian fighter and a leader of men.

The Watauga a.s.sociation.--Finding themselves outside of Virginia and beyond the reach and protection of the North Carolina administration, the settlers, like the Pilgrim Fathers in a similar situation, reverted to the social compact--familiar to Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and to back-country North Carolinians who had "regulated" horse stealing--and formed a government for themselves. In 1772 a convention of the settlers created an independent government called the Watauga a.s.sociation. It had a written const.i.tution, vesting the administration in an executive committee of five, two of whom were Sevier and Robertson. This committee exercised most of the powers of sovereignty, making treaties, administering justice, granting lands, and making war on the Indians. In 1776 the Watauga a.s.sociation, realizing the need of help, pet.i.tioned the Council of North Carolina to extend its government over the new settlements, and in 1777 they were organized as Washington County.

_THE BEGINNINGS OF KENTUCKY_

The surveyors and first settlers.--Settlement had also begun in what is now Kentucky. Ahead of the settlers went the prospectors and surveyors, who descended the Ohio and the Kanawha to select and survey lands. In 1770 and 1772 George Washington explored lands in what is now northeastern Kentucky. In 1773 the McAfees led a party of surveyors down the Ohio, crossed Kentucky, and returned over the c.u.mberland Mountains.

In the following year several parties of surveyors and land hunters were sent by Virginia officials to lay out bounty lands for soldiers. Others went without official sanction. One party was led by John Floyd from Fincastle County, Virginia, who descended the Kanawha and Ohio to the Falls, crossed Kentucky, and returned by c.u.mberland Gap. During his expedition he surveyed lands for George Washington, Patrick Henry, and others. Attempts at settlement had already been made. In 1773 Daniel Boone led a colony from North Carolina toward Kentucky, but was driven back by Indians. The next year Harrod, of Virginia, founded a settlement in Kentucky called Harrodsburg, but it was broken up by Indians, whose hostilities drove out all settlers and land hunters.

Indian ravages.--The border war which now occurred was the culmination of a long series of troubles between the frontiersmen of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the Indians of the Ohio Valley. The Delawares had been pushed over the Pennsylvania Mountains to the Muskingum and Tuscarawas Rivers. Among them settled the Moravian missionaries, who formed them into Christian towns and kept them peaceful when others were hostile.

The Shawanee had been pushed north to the Scioto River, whence they marauded the Virginia border. Behind them were the hostile tribes who had taken part in Pontiacs War. Through 1773 an Indian uprising was threatening, and preparations were made in the westernmost settlements of Virginia. Early in 1774 many settlers fled from the Holston and Clinch Valleys. Minor outrages being committed along the Ohio, alarm, spread, and in April there was a retreat across the Monongahela, which was crossed by more than a thousand refugees in a single day.

Lord Dunmore's War.--Governor Dunmore now prepared for war, which, there is some ground for thinking, he helped to bring on as a means of strengthening Virginia's claims to the Northwest. To warn the surveyors and settlers Colonel Preston, lieutenant-sheriff and surveyor of Fincastle County, Virginia, sent Boone and Stoner through Kentucky. They went as far as the Falls of the Ohio, and saved most of the men on the frontier. The governor organized a campaign, himself leading the Virginia regulars down the Ohio, while the frontier levies were led by Colonel Andrew Lewis. They were to meet at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. When Lewis reached that point he was attacked before the arrival of Dunmore by the Indians under Chief Cornstalk, whom he defeated. Thereupon the Indians sued for peace with Dunmore, who had entered their country north of the Ohio. In the following October a treaty was made at Fort Pitt which kept the northern Indians quiet during the first two years of the Revolution and made it possible to settle Kentucky.

Henderson and Transylvania.--Harrodsburg was now refounded by Virginians (1775) who const.i.tuted the majority of the settlers. Henderson, the North Carolina land speculator, formed a land company, called the Transylvania Company. To improve his t.i.tle in 1775 he made a treaty with the Overhill Cherokees paying them 10,000 for their claims to lands along and between the c.u.mberland and the Kentucky. Boone, with a party of thirty men, was sent ahead to clear a road for Henderson's colony from the Holston River to the Kentucky (1775). It became the famous highway known as the Wilderness Road. Henderson followed with his colony, founded Boonesborough, built a fort, and opened a land office, naming his colony Transylvania. He attempted to set up in the wilderness a modified proprietary regime. Having established his colony, he called a convention; the delegates made laws which Henderson approved, and a compact was formed between the delegates and proprietors defining the irrespective rights. The proprietors retained control by reserving to themselves the veto power.

Transylvania absorbed by Virginia.--Henderson's procedure was regarded as illegal, and he was denounced by the governors of both Virginia and North Carolina. When the Revolution broke out the proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress and appealed to that body for protection, but, largely through Virginia's influence, the delegation was rejected. The Virginia settlers in Kentucky, led by Harrod, opposed Henderson's claim to lands, appealed to Virginia, and sent George Rogers Clark to the a.s.sembly. Virginia a.s.serted sovereignty over Kentucky, and stormy times continued till 1777, when Kentucky with her present boundaries was organized as Kentucky County, Virginia.

_THE UPPER OHIO AND MIDDLE TENNESSEE_

Westsylvania.--While Henderson was founding Transylvania another region west of the mountains was being settled and was struggling for independent statehood. Emigrants from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and other states had crossed the mountains and settled on the tributaries of the upper Ohio in what are now western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and eastern Ohio. By the middle of 1776 there were said to be 25,000 families on the tributaries of the Ohio above the Scioto River.

But the land which they occupied was in dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the Indiana and Vandalia Companies, and the settlers took up the struggle, quarreling over land t.i.tles and jurisdiction. The disorders prevented effective organization against the Indians. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence the settlers memorialized Congress, asking independent statehood as a "sister colony and fourteenth province of the American confederacy," under the name of Westsylvania, whose boundaries they described, but the request was not granted.

The c.u.mberland settlement.--Robertson was the type of frontiersmen desirous to be ever on the move. In 1779 he prospected at French Lick, returned to Watauga, raised a colony, and in the fall led it forth. The women and children were conducted by Donelson down the Tennessee and up the c.u.mberland, while Robertson, guided by Mansker, led the men overland. Nashborough, now Nashville, was founded at the c.u.mberland Bend, and other stations were occupied along the river. In 1780 a convention formed an "a.s.sociation" much like that of Watauga, but after three years of independence the district became Davidson County, North Carolina.

THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC

The French people.--At the time of the conquest the Canadian people numbered about 65,000 living in the St. Lawrence Valley, with several thousand scattered among the western posts. The settlers were in the main a frugal, industrious, unlettered, religious people. They were of two distinct cla.s.ses, the gentry and the peasant tenants. After the war there was a considerable emigration to France of the official, n.o.ble, and commercial cla.s.ses, leaving chiefly cultivators of the soil and fur traders. By 1775 the population had grown to perhaps 90,000, chiefly through natural increase of the French. By 1784 the population was 113,000.

The British settlers.--The conquest left in the province and attracted to it later a small body of British settlers but by 1775 they did not number more than five or six hundred. Most of them lived in the towns of Quebec and Montreal, and engaged in business, especially in the fur trade, many as agents for English houses, others being independent merchants. When Hillsborough restored seignorial tenure, many of them acquired seigniories, though they continued to live by trade.

Military rule.--British rule in Canada began with the capitulation of Montreal in September, 1760. General Amherst was made governor-general, with lieutenant-governors at Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers. From that time to the enforcement of the Proclamation of 1763 Canada was under military rule. But French law and customs were followed in the main, and there was little discontent.

Civil government established.--Civil government was established in August, 1764. The governor was a.s.sisted by an executive council composed of the lieutenant-governor, chief justice, and eight citizens. The government provided by the Proclamation of 1763 was unsuited to a population almost wholly French, professing the Catholic religion, and living under laws and customs of their own. The Proclamation provided for an a.s.sembly, but none was held in Quebec because the French people would not take the test oath, and the British settlers were too few in numbers to warrant an a.s.sembly representing them alone. Uncertainty existed regarding t.i.thes and the future status of the Catholic Church.

The Proclamation contemplated the establishment of British law, but practice was uncertain. The French inhabitants were not politically ambitious, but the British were aggressive in their demands for an a.s.sembly and the uniform establishment of English law.

The Quebec Act.--Under these circ.u.mstances a change of system was deemed necessary. It was provided by the Quebec Act of 1774, the first parliamentary legislation for Canada. The act maintained the privileges of the Catholic clergy, t.i.thes from Catholic subjects being continued.

French civil procedure was established, with some exceptions, but English criminal procedure was enforced. Provision was made for an appointive executive council with powers to make ordinances for the province, but no provision was made for a provincial a.s.sembly.

Boundaries extended.--The population of the Illinois country was similar to that of Quebec. The French _habitants_ there had been demanding civil government, and it had been complained by the Montreal traders that the prosperity of Canada had been impaired by cutting off the western posts.

Therefore the boundaries of Quebec were extended to include the region between the Ohio River and the Upper Mississippi. By the Proclamation of 1763 Labrador east of River St. John's, Anticosti, and the Magdalens, had been attached to Newfoundland. Labrador now began to develop commerce with the interior and the North and with Newfoundland.

Opposition to the fishing admirals of Newfoundland caused these three districts to be annexed to Quebec in 1774.

Not intended as a blow at liberty.--The Quebec Act was regarded in the other colonies as a blow at popular liberties and as an encroachment upon colonies whose chartered boundaries extended into the Northwest. It was in fact an administrative act intended primarily as a means of providing for the interests of the great body of the inhabitants, the French. The attachment of the Ohio country to Quebec, however, checked the natural spread of settlement from the seaboard colonies, and the act, on the other hand, prevented the a.s.similation of the French people by the English in Canada.

The Loyalists in Canada.--During the American Revolution a considerable number of Loyalists crossed into Canada and settled at the border posts.

Many others joined the British army against the Americans. At the close of the war some of the border counties of New York were almost depopulated. In 1783 there were in the Montreal district seventeen hundred Loyalists at seventeen posts, not counting enlisted men. Of those who migrated after the revolution the greater number at first settled in Nova Scotia. By the end of 1784 the number there exceeded 28,000 and caused the forming of the new province of New Brunswick. Over three thousand went to Cape Breton Island, and three times that number to the interior of Canada. Thirteen hundred settled at Kingston and formed the nucleus of Upper Canada, which was separated from Lower Canada in 1791. More important than this, the Revolution determined the course of Canadian history. In order not to be absorbed by the United States, Canada was forced into unswerving loyalty to the British Empire.

THE NORTHERN FUR TRADERS

Supervision of the fur trade.--The fur trade of Quebec under the new regime was supervised according to the principles of the Proclamation of 1763. The most fundamental fact was that the French monopolistic system was discontinued, except at certain "King's posts" in the lower St.