Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

Liberty and Power in the Old Northwest, 1763-1800

— 227 — LibertyandPowerintheOldNorthwest,1763–1800 E r i c H i n d e r a k e r The most familiar political legacies of the American Revolution relate to the intertwined concepts of power and liberty. In the British monarchy of the eighteenth century, power theoretically flowed from the top of society downward, from God’s chosen regent the king, through his appointed noble authorities, until it finally settled in a residual form among established landowners of the realm. The Revolution, as we all know, reversed this conception of power. Revolutionary leaders assumed that power originally resided in the people—specifically, in the hands of all independent adult males. The Revolution also made guarantees of liberty a cornerstone of national principles . In particular, liberty meant to an eighteenth-century audience the right to control one’s own property and to consent to its appropriation by the state. Because Parliament was not in any modern sense a representative body by the time of the Revolution, and because the colonies lacked both voice and vote in its deliberations, colonists argued that their liberties as Englishmen were infringed by Parliamentary taxes. The security of property and the importance of representative government constituted the essence of what eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans understood by the term “liberty,” and one of the Revolution’s primary goals was to secure those principles for posterity.1 E r i c H i n d e r a k e r — 228 — Yet there is more than one way to understand the means by which definitions of power and liberty were transformed during the Revolutionary era, and events in the Old Northwest allow us to gain a broader view of exactly what was gained and what was lost in this process of redefinition. The British empire acted on its own assumptions about the meanings of power and liberty in its efforts to control the trans-Appalachian west after the Seven Years’ War, as did the Ohio Indians as they labored to establish a workable equilibrium with Euro-American colonists and representatives of British government. This essay seeks to describe the process by which liberty and power were redefined in the Old Northwest between 1763 and 1800 and to consider the significance of that redefinition for white settlers and Native American residents of the region.2 I Following the Peace of Paris in 1763, in which France ceded all of its claims to North America east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, British prospects in the west were transformed. The challenge of administering the vast new territory inspired conflicting visions of postwar development. From the highest levels of imperial administration to the ordinary farmers and laborers in the colonies who pinned their hopes on colonial expansion, the trans-Appalachian west presented both opportunity and danger. At the top of British government, the challenge of administering this region led to sharp conflicts among the king’s ministers. Charles Wyndham, the Earl of Egremont, and Sir William Petty, the 2d Earl of Shelburne, favored a process of limited and orderly western development. To that end, they promulgated the widely misunderstood Proclamation of 1763, which traced a boundary along the entire length of Britain’s seaboard colonies to separate colonial settlements from Indian lands. Originally this line was intended as a prelude to further western development. But Shelburne and Egremont were soon eclipsed in the ministry by the Earl of Hillsborough, who was convinced that expansion could only damage the empire by creating enormous new administrative burdens and depopulating more useful parts of the realm. As a result, he chose to interpret the Proclamation Line as a permanent boundary. For more than a decade, the ministry vacillated on its western policy and sent conflicting signals to its agents in the colonies.3 Among those agents, none was more involved in the question of western administration than William Johnson. Like Egremont and Shelburne, Johnson argued for Libe rty a n d Powe r i n th e Ol d N orth west, 1763–1800 — 229 — limited, orderly expansion. He recommended that the empire settle the boundary disputes that had proliferated along the western edges of settlement, and then adopt a policy of slow, steady colonial growth regulated by publicly negotiated purchases of Indian lands. He was convinced that gradual expansion would be acceptable to the Indians, who were already accustomed to periodic sales of land, as long as reckless speculation and opportunism...