The Treaty of Paris
Great Britain’s victory over France and Spain at the close of the Seven Years’ War secured large territorial cessions in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. France surrendered its claims to the interior of eastern North America, relinquishing Canada and withdrawing from the vast Louisiana territory that spanned the Mississippi River watershed. The British returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other conquered Caribbean islands to France. In exchange, Britain gained the “Ceded Islands”—Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago. Spain ceded Florida to Britain and abandoned claims to territory in the Southeast.
As a result, from 1763 until the United States declared its independence in 1776, British North America stretched from the Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys and from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. Critics charged that the costs of settling and defending this vast territory would be greater than would ever be produced in revenue, but royal officials calculated the value in terms of the region’s long-term contributions to national wealth. In addition to protecting a growing consumer market that already absorbed about a quarter of all British exports, the creation of a vast mainland empire anticipated other benefits. It promised to open commerce with Native nations, to give Britain unchallenged command over northern forests to supply its navy, and to better support its Caribbean sugar colonies, which depended on the mainland for shipping, provisions, and lumber. Benjamin Franklin anticipated that in a century, eastern North America would “be fill’d with British People” and that the Atlantic Ocean would “be covered with … Trading Ships.” Franklin and other American colonists, however, presumed that the new interior territory would be open to colonization.
The Royal Proclamation
Once treaty terms had been set, the king ordered his Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations—commonly known as the Board of Trade—to propose a plan for governing and settling Britain’s new American empire. The board submitted its “Report on Acquisitions in America” to the king on June 8, 1763. It laid out a plan for the “settling of the whole Coast of North America … from the Mouth of the Mississippi to the Boundaries of the Hudson’s Bay Settlements.” This plan anticipated that this environmentally diverse space would produce a broad range of profitable commodities. The report encouraged the rapid development of the Ceded Islands as new sugar-producing colonies to be populated with enslaved Africans procured through Britain’s transatlantic slave trade. The report also called for the creation of plantation colonies in East and West Florida and farming and fishing colonies in and around the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the Northeast. The report divided British North America into a coastal and piedmont zone, earmarked for “planting, perpetual Settlement & Cultivation,” and an interior that would be left as “hunting Grounds; where no settlement by planting is intended.” These lands “should be considered as Belonging to the Indians,” who now fell under the king’s “dominion and protection.”
To illustrate this idea of a divided British North America, the board purchased a copy of Emmanuel Bowen’s An Accurate Map of North America (1763) and annotated it to reflect the report’s vision for an American empire. It drew boundaries around the new colonies of Quebec, East Florida, and West Florida and a red line along the Appalachian Mountains to show where colonial governors would no longer be permitted to grant new tracts of land to colonists. This was the first representation of what later became known as the Proclamation Line.
When King George III and his Privy Council issued the Royal Proclamation on October 7, 1763, they incorporated these recommendations into a command that gave them the force of law. To impose jurisdictional order on the new lands, the proclamation named four new colonies (Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada) and described their boundaries in terms of geographic landmarks. French Canada and Spanish Florida had encompassed vast reaches of the continent, but the new colonies of Quebec and East and West Florida were compressed into discrete, governable provinces. The Ceded Islands were to be governed from Grenada, which already had an established population of French sugar and coffee planters and enslaved Africans.
The king granted those who had fought to create this empire during the Seven Years’ War the right to acquire tracts of land in these new colonies at no charge. Common soldiers and sailors would receive 50 acres, while senior officers would receive 5,000 acres. Those lands not included within the boundaries of the new North American colonies would be reserved for the “use of the … Indians.”
Negotiating the Boundary Line
Some senior British officials believed that the proclamation would create a permanent boundary between colonial and Indigenous territories. The “Country on the Westward of Our Frontier quite to the Mississippi,” according to Viscount William Barrington, Britain’s secretary at war, was “intended to be a Desert for the Indians to hunt in & inhabit.” Others, however, noting the inclusion of the words “for the present,” believed that the proclamation’s prohibition on western settlement eventually would be rescinded. In 1767, George Washington wrote that he never “look[ed] upon that Proclamation in any other light … than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.”
As European powers negotiated the Treaty of Paris, they failed to consult Native leaders or take their interests into account. Indigenous people who occupied the Anishinaabe homeland around the Great Lakes, including the Odawa (or Ottawa), Ojibwe, Algonquin, and Potawatomi, offered their verdict on the Peace of Paris starting in May 1763, when they began to use coordinated violence to resist Britain’s assumption of control over the former French forts around the Great Lakes. Odawa leader Pontiac led a confederation of these disgruntled French allies in a series of attacks that killed hundreds of colonists and undermined British command of the North American interior. By the time news of Pontiac’s attacks reached London in the fall of 1763, the proclamation already had been drafted. Its provisions relating to Indigenous peoples anticipated their hostility to British rule and attempted to allay suspicions that Britain intended to open Native lands to settler occupation.
Between 1763 and 1775, the British conducted more than a dozen formal diplomatic meetings with Native leaders. These “Indian congresses” were convened to turn the proclamation’s vision for British America into a reality on the American frontier. Thousands of Native participants walked hundreds of miles to attend these events, the first of which was held at Georgia’s Fort Augusta in the fall of 1763. Native crowds gathered to hear Britain’s Indian superintendents read and explain the terms of the proclamation. Indigenous leaders met with British officials to work out rules for travel, trade, and justice. And at every meeting, they discussed the specific location of a boundary line between British colonies and newly acknowledged Native nations.
Once the two sides agreed on a course for a segment of the line, British surveyors measured it with compass and chain, marking out its course on the landscape by noting landmarks along its path. The boundary maps generated by these surveys made it clear where colonial governors were authorized to grant new tracts of land to settlers and what land was to remain open to Indigenous peoples.
As this negotiated line took form, British surveyors and Native representatives walked the land together, clearing away brush and using hatchets to notch trees to mark the boundary. By doing so, Indigenous observers could see for themselves that the location of the line as specified in the treaties matched the markers on the visible landscape. When they surveyed the line through North Carolina, for example, they used the peak of Mount Tryon as a landmark. British surveyors carved the royal cypher GR (Georgius Rex, or King George) on the colonial-facing side of the mountain’s highest tree, while Indigenous representatives carved their personal marks on the Cherokee-facing side. Anyone who saw this marked tree understood exactly where the boundary line was.
By 1768, a truly continental line had begun to emerge. In that year, the Board of Trade submitted a new map to the king that showed the progress made in turning the proclamation line from an idea into reality. Across the Southern Indian District, much of the boundary was marked by actual surveys. In the North, negotiations with the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations of the Iroquois) had worked out the basic terms of a “line of separation.” All that remained to complete the line was to set the boundary between the Cherokee Nation and Virginia and convene a new round of congresses to ratify the agreement.
Virginia and the Erosion of the Indian Boundary
Virginia’s existing land claims complicated the idea of drawing a straight line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains to divide Native from colonial territory. The proclamation forbade colonial governors from granting lands “beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantick Ocean from the West.” A dozen years before the proclamation, however, Virginia’s settlers and speculators had moved beyond this geographic threshold to settle along the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio River whose waters flow into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico rather than into the Atlantic. Virginia officials collaborated with the Cherokee to affirm the colony’s long-standing claims to interior lands, arrangements that pushed the negotiated boundary into the Trans-Appalachian West.
The Cherokee met with John Stuart, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern district, at Hard Labor Creek in South Carolina in 1768. There, Cherokee leaders proposed that the Kanawha River serve as the boundary between Virginia and the Cherokee Nation. Virginia’s new governor, Norborne Berkeley, the fourth baron Botetourt, rejected this proposed boundary as too restrictive. Such a line would betray promises to the colonists already settled on the western banks of the river by throwing their lands into Indian Country. In response, the Cherokee agreed that both sides of the Kanawha River would fall on the Virginia side of the boundary. The line negotiated in the Treaty of Hard Labor was to begin near the North Carolina–Virginia border at John Chiswell’s lead mine and run in a straight line north to the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers near present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Even after this agreement was completed and the line surveyed, Botetourt argued for additional cessions of land to give Virginia more western territory, thereby setting the stage for another round of negotiations with the Cherokee two years later. At the Lochaber Congress in South Carolina in 1770, Virginia again asked for more land, and the Cherokee again complied. The revised line veered sharply to the west for 100 miles when it reached the North Carolina–Virginia border before terminating at the same location as the Hard Labor line—the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers. The giant triangle thus formed by this revision of this part of the boundary took hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Native peoples and added it to Virginia’s territory.
The British appointed Colonel John Donelson to survey the new line. Donelson was joined by Indigenous representatives, including Cherokee leader Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter). The boundary they surveyed diverged wildly from the geography agreed to at the Lochaber Congress. Instead of terminating at the juncture of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, the boundary was located hundreds of miles downriver, where the Louisa River joins the Ohio, adding approximately 10 million acres of land to Virginia. Cherokee collusion with British surveyors appears to have been a strategic attempt to maintain a buffer around Cherokee towns to the south, putting the Native inhabitants of the Ohio River Valley in the direct path of new settlement from Virginia.
The negotiation of the southern boundary of the Proclamation Line coincided with the settlement of the northern boundary. The original intent was for the northern and southern boundaries to meet at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. But during the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which set the northern boundary, Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern district, convinced the Haudenosaunee to cede a huge tract west of the Proclamation Line to Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The proclamation had stalled the ambitions of western land speculators, but Virginia’s enlargement of its territory through negotiation and survey in the early 1770s revived their fortunes. Virginia’s new royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, began issuing grants to Seven Years’ War veterans under the terms of the proclamation. Some of the officers sold their land rights to Virginia speculators. As Mingo and Shawnee fighters resisted the arrival of settlers in the area around Fort Pitt, Dunmore and leading speculators seized on this frontier violence as a pretext to invade the region. Dunmore mustered more than 2,000 militiamen and marched them to the Ohio River to attack Native towns. At the Battle of Point Pleasant, the Virginians defeated a confederation of Ohio River Indigenous forces in the final battle of Dunmore’s War.
Virginians were the last to come to terms with Indigenous nations over the location of the boundary and the most determined to undermine it. More than any other colony, Virginia challenged the geographic idea behind the proclamation because of the existing settlements west of the mountains and the aggressive land claims of settlers and speculators.
In 1783, two decades after the conclusion of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain signed another Treaty of Paris that acknowledged the independence of the United States of America. Thereafter, the Proclamation of 1763 ceased to have legal power in the new nation. The protections it had promised Native Americans against settler expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains no longer applied. But in Canada, which remained part of the king’s dominions, the proclamation was never overruled. Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982 acknowledged and affirmed preexisting Aboriginal rights, including those first described in the Proclamation of 1763.
