THERE WERE MANY STRANDS leading to the moment when the colonists felt driven to weave their anger together into a single declaration of opposition to rule from London. The decision of the British Parliament to close the port of Boston in 1774 as punishment for the destruction of a valuable cargo of tea brought to the surface the resentment of northern merchants already burdened by duties on their goods, a general fury at the earlier killing of civilian rioters by British troops, and a pervasive fear that colonial assemblies were powerless against the King’s ministers. But that autumn, when delegates of the discontented colonists convened in Philadelphia as members of the First Continental Congress in order to articulate their grievances, it was not by chance that the first resolution they agreed was ‘That they are entitled to life, liberty, & property …’.
Here property meant more than land alone, but for Virginians especially it was land as property that they had in mind, and in particular land beyond the Appalachians. Hence the declaration of the first paragraph of the Virginia constitution, drawn up in June 1776 by George Mason, ‘That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.’ Entitlement to this sort of property was a subject on which the humblest Conestoga mule-driver was at one with the grandest planter.
Barely ten years earlier, the reaction of Colonel George Washington to the royal veto on the acquisition of land beyond the mountains could have served as a warning of what was to come. There had been no more loyal and energetic commander in the French and Indian War, but the Colonel was also a Virginian planter and land speculator, and his views were widely shared.
‘I can never look upon the Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,’ Washington wrote in 1767 to his colleague and fellow-surveyor Colonel William Crawford. ‘It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying those lands. Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.’
George Washington was not a man to be deflected even by his sovereign’s express command, although as a serving officer he deemed it best to be discreet. ‘If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands,’ he continued to Crawford, ‘I will take upon me the part of securing them, as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will, moreover, be at all the cost and charges of surveying and patenting the same … By this time it will be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land. You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity.’
Alas, poor Crawford never did. The King’s veto was still nominally in force when he was taken prisoner by a Cherokee band while leading a column of troops in territory beyond the Appalachians. On 3 August 1782 the Virginia Gazette carried a report of his ordeal by a Dr Knight, who had been captured along with Washington’s colleague: ‘… the unfortunate Colonel was led by a long rope to a stake, to which he was tied, and a quantity of red-hot coals laid around, on which he was obliged to walk bare-footed, the Indians at the same time torturing him with squibs of powder and burning sticks for two hours, when he begged of Simon Gurry (a white renegade who was present) to shoot him. [Gurry’s] reply was, “Don’t you see I have no gun.” [Crawford] was soon after scalped and struck several times on the bare skull with sticks, till being exhausted, he laid down on the burning embers, when the squaws put shovel-fuls of coals on his body, which made him move and creep till he expired. The Doctor was obliged to stand by and see this cruelty performed; they struck him in the face with the Colonel’s scalp, saying “This is your great Captain’s scalp, tomorrow we will serve you so.” ’
Gruesome stories such as these were used to justify acts of equal cruelty on the other side. John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary living with the Tuscarawas Indians, told in 1773 of the Indian-hunters ‘who maintained that to kill an Indian was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way – nay more, would decoy such as lived across the river to come over for the purpose of joining them in hilarity; and when these complied they fell on them and murdered them’.
These atrocities were evidence of the mounting conflict between land-hungry colonists and native inhabitants. Consequently when George III banned land purchases beyond the mountains, it was, as the proclamation worded it, so that ‘the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed’. But even Americans who might have sympathised with this strategy could not accept the King’s feudal right to impose the ban.
The power that the land beyond the mountains exerted on people’s minds can be deduced from the attempts to circumvent the veto. Two land companies had been created to speculate in the west before the ban was in place – the Ohio Company, which proposed to purchase 500,000 acres beyond the Ohio river, and the Loyal Land Company, organised by Peter Jefferson with investment coming mostly from his neighbours in Goochland County, Virginia, which aimed publicly at buying 800,000 acres of Kentucky, but privately had ambitions of exploring and acquiring millions more as far west as the Pacific Ocean. In the fifteen years after George III’s proclamation, a whole succession of similar speculative ventures came into being.
The Mississippi Company was created in 1768 to settle land along the river with George Washington as one of its founders, followed by the Illinois and Wabash in which Patrick Henry had an interest, and the Watauga Association which settled eastern Tennessee and later tried to establish the independent state of Franklin. In 1775 Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina sent Daniel Boone, a brave scout but an incompetent surveyor, to find territory in southern Kentucky, where he signed a treaty with the Cherokee Indians giving Henderson’s Transylvania Company several million acres – Boone’s surveying lapses made it unclear exactly how much land was involved. The most ambitious of them all, the Vandalia Company, which aimed to acquire sixty-three million acres in what is now Illinois and Indiana, employed Benjamin Franklin as its London agent and even counted among its members such influential figures in the British government as the future Prime Minister, Lord North, and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden. ‘One half of England is now land mad,’ remarked one of its promoters, ‘and everybody there has their eyes fixed on this country.’
These powerful interests created some loopholes in the prohibition, but it was still in place in 1773 when a young surveyor named Rufus Putnam sailed up the Mississippi to Natchez. There he began surveying over a million acres on the banks of the river so that it could be sold to New England veterans of the French and Indian War. He was a rarity among the mostly southern land speculators, because he came from Massachusetts. His career is instructive because it illustrates how widely the effects of the ban were felt. In character he more or less resembled the coat of arms he later adopted which showed three bristly wild boars below a roaring lion surrounded by thistles and the motto in spiky Gothic lettering, ‘By the name of Putnam’, and almost everything he achieved he owed to his ferocious determination.
In 1745, when Rufus was barely seven years old, his father died, leaving the family destitute. His mother’s second marriage was to an illiterate drunkard named Sadler. ‘During the six years I lived with Capt Sadler,’ Rufus wrote bitterly, ‘I never Saw the inside of a School house except about three weeks.’ At the age of fifteen he apprenticed himself to a man who built watermills, and sucked up knowledge where he could; but as he confessed in his autobiography, ‘having no guid I knew not where to begin nor what corse to pursue – hence neglected Spelling and gramer when young [and] have Suffered much through life on that account’.
Rufus’s prospects were transformed by the French and Indian War. In 1757 he joined the Royal American Regiment, where he became an engineer, a trade that taught him how to carry out every kind of measurement. When peace came in 1763 the orphan used his new skill first to build mills, and later to survey land. The demand for surveyors in British America was such that a good practitioner could command an income that matched a lawyer’s. Even at the age of seventeen, George Washington was able to boast of his earnings to a friend. ‘A doubloon is my constant gain every day that will permit my