Conceived in Liberty (151 page)

As soon as the fighting ended in 1760, General Jeffery Amherst, the British commander, indulged his absolute contempt and hatred for the Indians. The substantial supply of presents that the British had been wont to grant the Indians was suddenly cut off now that France was beaten; moreover, Amherst arbitrarily decreed severe restrictions on the amount of ammunition that could be traded or given to the Indians. With the supply of ammunition, so necessary to their livelihood of hunting, suddenly cut off, the Indians were naturally embittered against the English. When the Indians protested, Amherst savagely told them through intermediaries that should they cause any trouble, “they must not only expect the severest retaliation but an entire destruction of all their nations, for I am firmly resolved whenever they give me an occasion to extirpate them root and branch.” As a typical hard-liner, Amherst scoffed at the suggestion that the Indians might be either capable of causing or courageous enough to create any real mischief. He was therefore heedless of repeated warnings of probable Indian uprisings upon the cutting off of their ammunition.

In addition to cutting off the Indians’ supply of ammunition, Amherst ruthlessly blocked their supply of rum. Not only did he prohibit any sale of rum to the natives, but he also ordered all trading to be confined to the British forts in order to enforce the ban. Also aggravating Indian resentment was the personal arrogance of the British toward them, a striking contrast to the previous friendliness and camaraderie of the French. The Indians were expected to conduct business at the forts and then leave; the English soldiers were forbidden to fraternize with them.

Another Indian grievance was Amherst’s arrogant disregard of English treaties with the western Indians and of the Crown’s own pronouncements, by permitting white settlement and by giving Seneca Indian lands at Niagara Falls to some of Amherst’s officers. The gifts were, of course, made without bothering to purchase the land from the tribes. Alarmed by the threat to their lands, the Indians were further disturbed by the rapid British construction of new forts, especially the one at Sandusky Bay on the southwest shore of Lake Erie. Amherst grew particularly cocky from the ruthless British suppression, during 1761, of a Cherokee uprising in South Carolina.

The western Indians were driven to a point of desperation by the news in early 1763 that their friends, the French, had ceded the whole of America east of the Mississippi to the hated British. Jeffery Amherst simply shrugged off the problem of disturbed Indians: “Whatever idle notions they may entertain in regard to the cessions can be of very little consequence....”

But General Amherst was soon to find out that the consequences were great indeed, for on May 7 the Indians launched a general uprising dedicated to driving the hated British out of all lands west of the Appalachians. Headed by the great Ottawa chief, Pontiac, the “Pontiac Rebellion” began with the massacre of a band of British soldiers near Detroit, followed by the rapid conquest
of all the forts in the northern Ohio Valley, including Fort Sandusky and Fort Miamis (now Fort Wayne, Indiana), with the exception of the great fort of Detroit. This conquest was completed by the beginning of June 1763 and included the destruction of a troop sent to relieve Detroit from Indian siege.

Hearing the great news of victory, the Indians further east joined the rebellion. In the Allegheny region, Forts Le Boeuf, Presque Isle, and Venango were quickly captured by Senecas and Hurons, and Delawares and Shawnees had even besieged Fort Pitt by the end of June.

General Amherst perfectly exemplified the classical hard-liner, the eternally “tough” enemy of “appeasement.” Like all hard-liners, he was ignorant of the fears, aims, or motivations of those he designated as the enemy. He knew only that they were evil and contemptible, men easily cowed by the equivalent of a “whiff of grape.” Convinced that they would not dare to resist stern and harsh measures, Amherst found, as hard-liners invariably do, that repression only provoked resistance, and suddenly the despised enemy was striking and winning on many fronts. One would think that the hard-liner, seeing the abject failure of his policy, seeing his “toughness” only provoke a conflict, would have the grace to admit his error and retire from the scene. But the hard-liner has never done so; instead he takes the outbreak as merely an indication that only extermination can be the deserts of such a diabolical enemy. To Amherst, negotiations for peace became more traitorous than ever.

General Amherst reacted to the Indian uprising as might be expected. At first, and for quite a while, he refused to believe that near savages could have the gall to attack, much less endanger posts where
British
soldiers were stationed. When he finally realized the scope of the war, he could only express amazement. He could not believe that
his own
actions might have provoked the war; the enemy must be irrational: “It is difficult, my Lord,” he wrote to the British secretary of state, “to account any causes that can have induced these barbarians to this perfidious attempt.” Driven into frenzy, Amherst vowed—as is typical of the hard-liner—ruthless extermination of the enemy. He set upon all-out punishment, and frantically ordered his commanders to take no prisoners. As he ordered one troop, the Indians were to be treated “not as a generous enemy, but as the vilest race of beings that ever infested the earth, and whose riddance from it must be esteemed a meritorious act, for the good of mankind. You will, therefore, take no prisoners, but put to death all that fall into your hands....”

If the Indians were truly subhuman, then
any
means for their extermination was proper. Accordingly, Amherst, in early July, directed his chief aide, Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary, to spread smallpox among the Indians. Colonel Bouquet, an apt pupil, answered that he would send blankets infected with smallpox as gifts to the Indians. Delighted, Amherst replied that “you will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of
blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” One other method was hunting the Indian “vermin” down with dogs, but this proved impracticable because of the scarcity of good English hunting dogs in the colonies.

Thus Pontiac’s rebellion gave rise to one of the great advances of the “art” of modern war: germ warfare. As in the case of other important inventions in history, other great minds were thinking along the same lines: even as General Amherst was adumbrating the concept of germ warfare, his commandant at Fort Pitt had been putting it into practice. Captain Simeon Ecuyer, another Swiss mercenary, generously gave two smallpox-infected blankets to the Delaware Indians. The new theory bore fruit, and soon smallpox raged among the Delawares and the Shawnees and seriously reduced the fighting spirit of the eastern Ohio tribes.

Germ warfare was not decisive, however. The summer of 1763 found all the Ohio country in the hands of the Indians, except for the besieged forts of Pitt and Detroit. The Indians proceeded to ravage the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia; by the end of the year, over a thousand whites had been killed or captured. Unfortunately for the Indians, neither the more northerly nor the southern Indians revolted. In New York, the Iroquois (except for the Senecas) remained pro-British; to the south, the Cherokees were still cowed by the suppression two years earlier, and by the lavish presents given them at a great conference in Augusta arranged by Lord Egremont.

The turning points of the war were Colonel Bouquet’s ability to relieve Fort Pitt, after his victory at Bushy Run in early August, and Fort Detroit’s ability to withstand Pontiac’s siege. Pontiac had always clung to the hope that the beloved French, still occupying Louisiana and the Illinois country, would come to his aid and drive out the English once again. But in October the French commander in Illinois wrote to Pontiac and told him the facts of life; the French had made peace and were indeed leaving, and the Indians had better make peace themselves. His heart no longer in the war, Pontiac offered peace, and the offer was accepted by the commandant of Detroit.

The Indians were ready to quit and make peace. The big question now was the attitude of the British army. Would it make peace calmly and bloodlessly? Or would it insist on bloody vengeance to be wreaked upon guilty and innocent Indians alike in the name of “punishment”? Amherst, no longer a hero, had been happy to hurry back to England in October, leaving General Thomas Gage with the task of “crushing the Indians’ insurrection, and punishing those tribes who have so ungratefully attacked their benefactors.”

Gage’s instincts were certainly hard-line, but he soon realized that a policy of suppressing the
western
Indians would at least drive them west of the Mississippi into Louisiana and thus end the lucrative British beaver trade with them. The Indians to the east, however, had no such escape route, so Gage
sent out two punitive expeditions in the summer and fall of 1764. But Colonel John Bradstreet, leaving Fort Niagara in the summer with a formidable force, had either the wisdom or the naiveté to circumvent Gage’s rather vague orders, and to conclude a just and easy peace with the Shawnees and the Delawares, insisting only on the Indians’ surrender of all their English prisoners. Gage and Bouquet were furious at this failure to wreak vengeance, “to punish these infamous murders” by the Indians. Gage refused to ratify the peace and ordered an attack on the Indians, who at the same time had failed to surrender the white prisoners.

Colonel Bouquet was now sent out, in the fall of 1764, from Fort Pitt, with orders to pillage and kill all the Shawnees and Delawares in Ohio that they could find and to burn all their villages. He was then to force the Indians not only to surrender prisoners but also to “deliver up the murderers” of white traders, to pay a high indemnity to the traders, and to renounce all land east of the Ohio River. Bouquet, however, found out that the Indians had been preparing to surrender their prisoners to Bradstreet, and, out in the field, even the tough Bouquet agreed to forgo punishment for the prompt surrender of captives. By mid-November, with Gage giving him
carte blanche,
Bouquet had concluded peace with the Delawares and Shawnees in return for the prompt return of white prisoners. Unfortunately, the British insisted on forced repatriation, including as “prisoners” all whites who had grown to prefer Indian life, and half-breed children born in the Indian camps. At any rate, rationality triumphed over repression, and a formal and harmonious peace was concluded with Delawares and Shawnees in the spring of 1765; the only imposed indemnity was to be land granted as compensation to the English traders.

With the French and Indian War completely over, and the northern American continent east of the Mississippi subdued by 1763, the English government faced more insistently the problem of what to do with the western lands. Until now—or at least until the temporary edict of 1761—virgin land had been open to settlement, on various terms and in various relationships to the Indian tribes. But now the British government began to prepare what would be a rude shock to the American colonists. On June 8, 1763, Lord Shelburne, powerful protégé of the Earl of Bute and the Duke of Bedford, and president of the Board of Trade, recommended that the newly conquered land be divided into three new colonies: East Florida, West Florida, and Canada; simultaneously, the vast remaining lands of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were to be reserved completely to the Indians and barred totally from white settlement. Rule over the west was to continue indefinitely in the hands of the British army.

It is incorrect to imply, as many historians have done, that this measure was designed merely to quiet the Indians temporarily in the face of Pontiac’s rebellion. The Board of Trade’s proposal was made months before the Indian rebellion had become known in England. To be sure, the rebellion hastened the English decision, and the board now urged an immediate proclamation reserving to the Indians all territory west of the Appalachians and ousting all white settlers from the western lands. The king issued a proclamation to this effect on October 7; it established East Florida westward to the Appalachicola River; West Florida in the southwest from the Appalachicola to the Mississippi; and Quebec in what was formerly French Canada. Cape Breton Island was added to Nova Scotia, and the region south of the Altamaha River to Georgia.
Most important, the proclamation barred any white settlement, present or future, in the lands west of the Appalachians, and placed its government under the military commander in chief. Even voluntary purchase of land from the Indians was outlawed! The proclamation also decreed that Indian lands within the bounds of the seaboard colonies must be voluntarily purchased from the Indians in public transactions.

What was the reason for this astounding British policy, which stunned and deeply angered the American colonists? We have seen one grave flaw in the theory that this was only a temporary way to appease the rebellious Indians; another flaw is that the Proclamation Line continued in force long after Pontiac’s rebellion had been quelled. The Board of Trade later proclaimed its aim to be the altruistic one of protecting and safeguarding the Indians, and many historians have naively fallen for this myth. But surely the contemptuous attitude of the British then and in the past toward the Indians is enough to discredit the idea of a sudden burst of enlightened altruism toward the Red Men. Far more convincing are two motives attributed to the Crown, both economic: (a) a general desire to keep the Americans confined to the seaboard, to continue to provide markets for English manufactures; and (b) a bowing to the pressure of the powerful English fur lobby, which was desirous of keeping the West free of settlers and therefore confined to the fur trade.

On the first point, the British were apprehensive that Americans in the interior would begin to make their own clothes and other goods in their households rather than buy English textiles, so that valuable English markets would be lost. This motive for outlawing further settlement was privately admitted by various key British officials, including John Pownall, secretary of the Board of Trade. For its part, the fur lobby had powerful connections in the English government. Particularly important for the American fur trade was David Franks of Philadelphia, who was connected with John Watts and James DeLancey in the Albany fur trade. The crucial London connection of Franks and Watts was David’s brother Moses Franks, a powerful recipient of government contracts and largesse. There was some evidence that Lord Egremont, who issued the original prohibition on settling the western lands in 1761, was heavily involved financially with Moses Franks.