Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America

Chapter 9 The Plan of 1764: Native Americans and a British Empire That Never Was

Chapter 9 The Plan of 1764: Native Americans and a British Empire That Never Was For a brief moment after the Seven Years War, a handful of British officials on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to imagine an empire where Native Americans and Europeans might coexist. Their ideas spawned an ill‑​­ starred document known as the “Plan for the future Management of Indian Affairs,” which the British ministry circulated for transatlantic comment in 1764. To set this “Plan of 1764” in context, and to explain both the logic of its vision and the reasons for its failure, requires an eighteenth‑​­ century back story reminis‑ cent of the period’s popular novel Tristram Shandy, for the perceived prob‑ lems that the Plan tried to address are as significant as the flawed prescription it offered. As both perception and prescription, the Plan reveals tensions at the heart of the British Empire as it was, even as it struggled to envision an empire that never was to be. Paradoxically, the Plan’s utter rejection—​­ the ap‑ parent irrelevance of its scheme for British‑​­ Indian coexistence—​­ may be its greatest historical relevance, and a further key to the racial violence of the intertwined U.S. and Native American wars for independence.1 * * * The secrets to a successful imperial relationship with Native Americans, as Superintendent for Indian Affairs William Johnson once complained, lay in “a Terra Incognita, inaccessible to the Generality of even enquirers.”2 Yet, as the Seven Years War drew to a close, Britons who approached that mysterious landscapeagreedonfourbasicprinciples.Firstwastheneedforanenforceable 178 European Power and Native Land boundary to defend Native lands from unregulated Euro‑​­ American expan‑ sion. “The Indians ought to be redressed or satisfied, in all their reasonable and well founded complaints of enormous and unrighteously obtained Pat‑ ents for their Lands and Treaties of Limitations with the respective Provinces agreed upon and religiously observed,” Johnson breathlessly concluded as early as 1759.3 The second principle was particularly vital for an empire whose national identity was deeply rooted in commerce: the need to find some workable sys‑ tem to regulate trade. Among what South Carolina’s agent to the Creeks called the “several irregular Practices and Abuses” that had “crept into the Indian Trade” were shoddy goods, rigged scales, usurious debts, and outright theft. Alcohol, as the key weapon in crooked traders’ arsenals, the most lucrative of commodities, and the lubricant of murderous violence when things went wrong, compounded Native grievances. The persistence of non‑​­ capitalist ideas about reciprocity and redistribution and the Indian expectation that much of what Europeans considered commerce should take the form of gift‑​­ giving only deepened Native perceptions that the entire system was corrupt. The real or imagined presence in Indian country of competing French and Spanish traders who were presumably eager to capitalize on British lapses to divert merchandise to New Orleans multiplied the potential for trouble.4 And trouble, in all its varied forms, undergirded the third great issue in British‑​­ Indian relations: boundary lines and trade regulations would remain meaningless unless some mutually acceptable system of resolving disputes between Native people and Europeans—​­ some workable mechanism of cross‑​­ cultural justice—​­ could be found. Finally, none of the other issues could be addressed effectively without centralized administration in the hands of agents who could speak reliably on behalf of the empire as a whole. It was vital, said Johnson, for “the Superintendency and Direction of Indian Affairs and Trade, to be under an Authority from the Crown” rather than the frac‑ tious individual provinces.5 Most Native Americans of the continental interior probably would have agreed with this four‑​­ part analysis. Paradoxically, the utter breakdown of Indian‑​­ British relations in “the War called ‘Pontiac’s’” demonstrates the im‑ portance Native people attached to boundaries, trade regulation, dispute resolution, and centralized imperial authority.6 The religious teachings of the Delaware prophet Neolin—​­ the ideological glue binding the varied In‑ dian attacks on British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio countries in 1763—​­ centered on what a more secular vocabulary would call the need for a clear :10 GMT) Sir William Johnson (1715–1774). Portrait by John Wollaston, Jr. Collections of the Albany Institute of History & Art. As British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, Johnson—​­ along with his counterpart for the Southern Department, John Stuart (1718–1779, of whom no portrait is known to exist)—​­ long struggled with the problems the Plan of 1764 attempted to address. 180 European Power and Native Land...