Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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       FOUR Life, Liberty and What?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ