Background
Confronted by French-sponsored attacks by Indigenous nations on frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia during the misnamed Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), British colonial authorities from Pennsylvania and New Jersey made an innovative offer to representatives of the Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware), and Haudenosaunee (a coalition comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) nations: the establishment of a settlement boundary line at the Allegheny Mountains. The offer resulted in the October 26, 1758, Treaty of Easton, under which British provincial authorities secured the withdrawal of the Ohio Indigenous nations’ active support of the French in return for recognition of these nations’ right to their claimed settlements and hunting territories in the Ohio Valley. British officials also agreed to prohibit settlers from crossing the Allegheny Mountains after the war. This treaty proved crucial to the eventual British military victory. A negotiated boundary between recognized Indigenous lands and those open to settlement by colonists would become a focal point of diplomacy between Indigenous nations and representatives of Great Britain, and eventually the United States, for most of the next four decades.
On October 7, 1763, King George III and his Privy Council issued the Proclamation of 1763 to define and regulate the territories acquired by Great Britain in the Seven Years’ War. The proclamation extended the Allegheny Mountain settlement line established at Easton in 1758 to run from northwestern Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to the boundary between Georgia and Florida. British authorities intended this line to serve as a temporary boundary until a series of formal treaties with Indigenous nations that established a consensual line could be concluded.
The involvement of the Ohio Valley Lenape (or Delaware) and Shawnee as hostile combatants in Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763–1764) and their subsequent submission to preliminary peace terms with Colonel Henry Bouquet of the British army on October 13, 1764, provided Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern district, with an opportunity to restore his close Haudenosaunee allies as diplomatic supervisors of the Ohio Valley nations. This role had been curtailed by the Easton treaty, in which colonial authorities committed to direct diplomacy with the Ohio nations free of Haudenosaunee mediation or oversight. From April 29 to May 22, 1765, the Haudenosaunee negotiated a comprehensive preliminary peace treaty on behalf of their Lenape “Brethren.” Johnson extracted two key concessions from the Lenape: they would allow the Haudenosaunee to negotiate an Ohio Valley boundary on their behalf, and they would provide a compensatory land cession to defray the approximately £85,000 (about $10 million today) that a consortium of “suffering traders” claimed to have lost when their merchandise was damaged or plundered by hostile Indigenous nations during Pontiac’s Rebellion.
The Haudenosaunee outlined a preliminary boundary line that began at Owego, New York, and proceeded through northern and western Pennsylvania to the Ohio River and from there to the headwaters of the Tennessee River—a vast cession of Trans-Appalachian land that included nearly all of the present-day states of West Virginia and Kentucky along with southwestern Virginia and western Pennsylvania. The cession came almost entirely at the expense of the Ohio Valley Lenape, who hunted deer and bison on those lands. The Shawnee ratified peace on the same terms as the Lenape at a July 4–14, 1765, conference.
Negotiation of the Treaty
The British Board of Trade did not consent to fund the formal settlement of the boundary line proposed in the 1765 treaties until December 22, 1767, in part owing to domestic political turmoil stemming from colonial resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765. Pressure from Benjamin Franklin and other interested parties seeking to benefit from the promised compensatory grant to the “suffering traders” and from British Indian Department personnel such as Johnson and his deputy George Croghan, who warned of a repeat of Pontiac’s Rebellion, forced the imperial ministry’s hand. Secretary of State William Petty-Fitzmaurice, earl of Shelburne, issued instructions to Johnson for the northern boundary treaty on January 5, 1768.
At the time, British officials sought to coordinate Johnson’s negotiation of the northern boundary with the Haudenosaunee with negotiations between John Stuart, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern district, and the Cherokee Nation. The northern and southern settlement boundaries were to meet at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers near present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia, more than 500 miles northeast of Paducah, Kentucky, where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio River.
Treaties of the magnitude prescribed by the British monarchy in January 1768 required months of preparation. During the interim, the Board of Trade recommended two provisions geared toward reducing the costs of running the British empire in North America that complicated the negotiations: the withdrawal of British soldiers from as many Trans-Appalachian forts as practicable and the return of regulation of the Native trade to the thirteen British North American colonies. Despite Johnson’s strenuous protest, he was left to negotiate the Fort Stanwix treaty in a context of reduced imperial oversight of whatever resulted.
Fort Stanwix
In correspondence with Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Hillsborough during the summer of 1768, Johnson advised that the boundary would need to be extended north of Owego to persuade the Haudenosaunee to consent to the boundary south of their homelands in present-day upstate New York. Fully aware that his official instructions limited the extent of the cession he could accept from the Haudenosaunee, Johnson wrote an August 1768 letter to Hillsborough that created some flexibility to accept the more extensive cession to the Tennessee River proposed by the Haudenosaunee by pledging to settle a boundary “as Correspondent as possible” with his instructions. Johnson also used the time prior to the arrival of the Indigenous delegates at Fort Stanwix in September 1768 to conduct advance discussions with various speculative interest groups, including the “suffering traders,” concerning the preferred location and extent of their compensatory grant. In addition, Virginia speculators received assurances that Johnson would secure a larger cession from the Haudenosaunee than his royal instructions authorized, while Johnson and Pennsylvania governor Thomas Penn discussed a supplementary Haudenosaunee cession in northern Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley that would eliminate the claim to that region asserted by Connecticut-based settlers operating as the Susquehannah Company.
Treaty of Fort Stanwix
Negotiations at Fort Stanwix commenced on October 24, 1768. Most of the 3,102 Indigenous people present were Haudenosaunee, with some Ohio Valley Lenape and Shawnee attending as what Johnson described as “dependant Tribes” and “not as Owners of the Land but as Nigh Neighbours to the Settlements, to whom they might easily be troublesome.” Serious boundary discussions between Johnson and the Haudenosaunee began four days later but proved inconclusive, leading the superintendent to remind the Haudenosaunee of the proportional rewards to be realized from a generous cession. In a letter to Lord Hillsborough sent with a summary of the proceedings, Johnson acknowledged that “the greatest part of the business” was “transacted at private Meetings” with the chiefs of the Haudenosaunee nations” and “could not be committed to writing.”
On October 31, according to Johnson, the Haudenosaunee insisted on a boundary that extended from West Canada Creek (west of the Oneida Nation’s portage connecting the Hudson and Mohawk rivers to the Great Lakes) to the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. The next day, Johnson and Haudenosaunee sachems worked out the final terms of the treaty, which included the boundary line specified by the Haudenosaunee; an associated cession of land to Pennsylvania; Haudenosaunee-sanctioned grants of land to the “suffering traders” of approximately 2.5 million acres northeast of the authorized boundary of the Kanawha River; a grant of 200,000 acres in an undetermined location to Croghan; and a pledge of British protection of the territorial integrity of the Mohawk settlements east of the settlement boundary.
The principals signed the treaty or added their marks on November 5, 1768. The Haudenosaunee received cash and goods valued at £10,460 (approximately $2.15 million today) from Great Britain along with 10,000 “Spanish Dollars” (approximately $472,000) from Pennsylvania for the cession within that colony.
Aftermath and Legacy
Johnson achieved a boundary at Fort Stanwix that satisfied the Haudenosaunee, the “suffering traders,” and prominent colonial land speculators interested in access to trans-Appalachian territory south of the Ohio River that they incorrectly assumed would be open to settlement. The treaty failed to satisfy the Ohio Valley Lenape and Shawnee, who watched the Haudenosaunee carry off twenty boatloads of merchandise and cash from the treaty grounds while they received a mere $5,500 or so worth of goods. The treaty also antagonized Johnson’s superiors in Great Britain, who took issue with his unauthorized extension of the boundary to the Tennessee River, which did not align with the southern boundary negotiated in the October 14, 1768, Treaty of Hard Labor.
On April 25, 1769, the Board of Trade blasted Johnson for incorporating the grants to Croghan and the traders in the treaty “not as propositions submitted to your Majesty’s determination but as rights derived from the Indians, your Majesty’s acquiescence in which is demanded as a condition of the Treaty.” British authorities ultimately conceded the boundary line dictated by the Haudenosaunee but did not fully revoke the 1763 proclamation line, which frustrated speculators like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, who had hoped to gain clear title to lands they claimed in the Trans-Appalachian West. Royal officials banned settlement of the disputed area between the Kanawha and Tennessee rivers and declined to approve the treaty’s land grants to private parties.
Historians have long debated the reasons why Johnson deviated from his official instructions. Johnson personally benefited from the modification of the 1763 Proclamation Line, since the revised boundary opened for settlement substantial amounts of New York land in which he had an interest. Johnson also received Penn’s crucial support for the Crown’s approval of a grant of some 80,000 acres in the Mohawk River Valley that the Mohawk Nation had conveyed to him in December 1760. That grant was approved on May 22, 1769. Johnson’s actions at Fort Stanwix were in keeping with his long-standing reliance on the Haudenosaunee reputation as a powerful British ally and his determination to satisfy colonial speculators’ and settlers’ demands for additional land. Johnson also knew in 1768 that the Crown lacked the means to enforce a settlement boundary line. The small garrisons sprinkled throughout the Trans-Appalachian West were being moved east to address increasingly volatile protests in seaboard cities of the thirteen colonies. The terms of the Fort Stanwix Treaty indicate that Johnson based his diplomacy on the principle of trading land for time. Assuming that settlement would continue to advance west of the Allegheny Mountains, Johnson collaborated with the Haudenosaunee to push the line as far west as possible in hopes that settlers’ and speculators’ land hunger might temporarily be satisfied.
The Ohio Valley Lenape and Shawnee, who stood to lose the most from the Fort Stanwix Treaty, took exception to the revised boundary line and conducted periodic attacks on the “long hunters” who began intruding on the Natives’ Kentucky hunting grounds in 1769. These incidents elicited settler retaliation, inaugurating a pattern of violence that initially peaked in 1774, when Virginia governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, leveraged widespread settler concern over frontier instability to justify an organized campaign that succeeded for a time in expelling the Shawnee from their hunting grounds south of the Ohio River. The subsequent outbreak of the American Revolution cast that situation into doubt, and the Ohio Valley Indigenous nations continued to contest settler expansion. Informed by representatives of the new United States that Great Britain had ceded all land between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River south of the present U.S. border with Canada, the Ohio Valley nations continued their military resistance to the United States, seeking a restoration of the Fort Stanwix boundary line (which American treaty commissioners had in October 1776 promised to honor). That resistance did not end until 1794, when the Shawnee and Lenape suffered military defeat by the United States; the August 3, 1795, Treaty of Greenville resulted in a renegotiated boundary northwest of the Ohio River.
But the story of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix does not end in 1795. Led by Philadelphia merchant Samuel Wharton, the “suffering traders” who had been denied their grant from the Haudenosaunee in 1768 continued to lobby the Crown for a compensatory land grant. After 1771, those efforts evolved into a proposal for a fourteenth colony, Vandalia, that would have encompassed much of present-day West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky. The proposal was not approved prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the traders shifted their lobbying efforts to the U.S. Congress after 1775. Wharton’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts led to the recognition of seven British treaties with Indigenous nations (all but one concluded with the Haudenosaunee and dating from 1722 to 1768) on the official U.S. State Department list of ratified treaties. Future land-claims litigation may determine whether the federal government bears any responsibility for the terms of these treaties, but until that question is resolved, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix stands as testimony to a historical moment when Indigenous Americans and settler populations endeavored to build mutually beneficial relationships, often with unpredictable yet highly significant consequences for all involved.
