Blood and Boundaries: Virginia Backcountry Violence and the Origins of the Quebec Act, 1758-1775

Since Parliament debated and approved the Quebec Act simultaneously with the Coercive Acts, scholars often regard the bill with the same opprobrium reserved for the legislation approved to punish refractory Sons of Liberty for the Boston "Tea Party." Undeniably, by the summer of 1774, Americans regarded with deep suspicion anything that appeared either to erode extant rights or establish potentially dangerous precedents. Parliament, for instance, denied French Canadians the right to a legislative assembly, but did so only because the habitants' religion precluded them from government service in an empire in which Roman Catholicism remained technically illegal. Paranoid American radicals seized on Parliament's failure to grant an assembly as the harbinger of a sinister plot to deprive them of their right to self-government. Parliament's readiness to tolerate French Canadian Roman Catholicism also raised the dander of bigoted Anglo-American Protestants and sparked rumors of popish plots to destroy religious liberty. Finally, the provision that allowed King George III to establish ecclesiastical courts in Quebec convinced non-Anglicans throughout America of the imminent desire of Parliament to establish an Anglican bishop in America. While the act was not a conspiracy against American liberties in the thirteen restive colonies, the fears and suspicions of the putative revolutionaries were not entirely mistaken.¹

The intent of the Quebec Act was, first and foremost, to provide a permanent civil government for the French Canadian residents of Quebec. Secondarily, however, Frederick, Lord North, the king's prime minister and the secretary of state for the colonies, George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, wanted to resolve an issue that had vexed imperial authorities ever since the end of the Seven Years' War: the enforcement of an Anglo-Indian backcountry boundary. The solution proposed in the Quebec Act was to exclude Americans, particularly Virginia frontiersmen, from the Indian territory north and west of the Ohio River. Since none of the king's or Parliament's regulations had the slightest effect on the bloody Virginia backcountry, North's parliamentary managers tried to make the prospect of settlement in the territory west of the river so unpalatable to liberty-loving, Protestant Virginians that they would remain east of the new boundary and leave the Ohio Indians in peace. The Quebec Act not only extended the borders of that province southward to the Ohio, but also provided a judicial system that British post commanders and future civil authorities could use to punish trespassers onto the king's, and the Indians' land. In that sense, Parliament indeed intended to punish Americans with the Quebec Act, but the purpose was to create an Indian territory in which the most refractory of all the Americans, the Virginians, could finally be brought to justice for their frequently homicidal deeds.

Military necessity dictated the first British attempt to establish a permanent Indian territory. In 1758, as the British and provincial soldiers of Brigadier General John Forbes marched steadily westward through Pennsylvania toward the Forks of the Ohio and Fort Duquesne, the area's Delaware, Shawnee, and Allegheny Seneca inhabitants were firm French allies. Forbes, however, was determined to avoid the mistakes of the last British general who sought the Forks, Edward Braddock, whose pronouncement that "no savage shall inherit the land" alienated the Ohio Indians and doomed his expedition. Thus, Forbes demanded that Pennsylvania governor William Denny and northern Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson secure at least the Ohio Indians' neutrality, if not their outright friendship, for the impending campaign. Denny and Johnson came through for Forbes in the October 1758 Treaty of Easton, but Delaware chief Pisquetomen drove a hard bargain: the British had to guarantee the sanctity of the Ohio Indians' hunting grounds as the price for their neutrality. With potential enemies thus placated, Forbes's march resulted in the eventual French evacuation of Fort Duquesne and the British occupation of the Forks. Among the occupiers were hundreds of Virginia provincial troops, commanded by Colonel George Washington, who scanned the ground around them with discerning eyes and hoped that they glimpsed the Old Dominion's western future.²

Washington had...