Equal Footing

In 1796, the Southwest Territory became the first U.S. territory to become a state, joining the union as Tennessee. This new state promptly used its newfound status as a sovereign on “equal footing” with existing states to challenge the persistence of federal authority, especially over land and Indian affairs. A series of collisions followed: over ownership of the public domain; over William Blount’s odd scheme to use his supposed influence in Indian country to challenge federal power; and, above all, over the federal government’s attempt to survey the boundary of the Cherokee Nation, which threatened to dispossess white land claimants. Ultimately, the federal government preserved its formal authority even as it gave Tennessee what it wanted—a seemingly Pyrrhic victory that had important precedential consequences. In particular, when part of the Northwest Territory sought to become the new state of Ohio in 1802, the federal government sought to protect its authority. Most importantly, it decided for the first time to attach conditions to the new state’s admission that guaranteed federal land ownership, a practice that quickly became a constitutional norm; the new state also tacitly accepted continued federal authority over the state’s Native peoples. The result was that the federal government’s power to adjudicate property and jurisdictional conflicts survived despite state challenge; in the process, the federal government ironically became the most visible defender of the earlier, multipolar order against these states’ assaults.

The Land Company Experiment

The first major federal effort to remake territorial property came through large sales to land companies. This chapter recounts this history through the stories of three land companies: the Tennessee Company, the Ohio Company, and the Miami Company. The Tennessee Company represented what the federal government hoped to avoid. Created by speculator Zachariah Cox, the Company purchased millions of acres of land in Georgia’s Yazoo sale. Cox then spent the next decade challenging federal authority, threatening Native nations, bamboozling investors with dubious title, and asserting his own sovereignty in the southern borderlands. When it created the Ohio and Miami Companies in the Northwest Territory, the federal government sought to avoid such outcomes. The two companies, headed by Rufus Putnam and John Cleves Symmes, promised to distribute title systemically while also preserving peace with Native peoples. Yet this supposedly mutually beneficial relationship did not work out. Both companies felt abandoned and betrayed by the federal government when war with the Northwest Indian Confederacy ensued. Yet, like the Tennessee Company, the Ohio and Miami Companies also both succumbed to the lure of profit on bare promises of future title, creating still more property confusion and uncertainty that fell to the federal government to resolve. The experiment’s failure led Congress to reject large-scale land sales as a viable solution to the territories’ property uncertainty.

Laws of War and Peace

Alongside individual murders and crimes, the federal government also confronted in the territories a long-standing borderlands law governing organized violence. Both Natives and whites there conducted larger-scale, often brutal expeditions against each other, often with little or no formal authorization from their ostensible governments. The federal government sought to replace this seemingly pathological culture of violence by imposing a definition of war drawn from the newly adopted U.S. Constitution that made the federal government, and particularly Congress, the sole arbiter and source of legitimate violence against Native nations. The effects of this federal assertion of supremacy differed in the two territories. In the Northwest Territory, the conflict known as the Northwest Indian War expanded earlier practices of borderlands violence under federal auspices. Citizens of the Southwest Territory demanded the same, and nearly got it, in what this chapter terms the war-that-nearly-was. What actually followed in the Southwest Territory instead was an intense, polyvocal legal contest between territorial citizens and officials, Congress, the Washington administration, and the Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw Nations over the meaning of the categories of war and peace. Yet again, federal officials failed to establish federal supremacy, but they did succeed in insinuating federal law into territorial life and Indian country, including disputes between Native nations.

The Rise of Federal Title

The failure of federal efforts to reform title meant that federal officials in the territories found themselves, unwillingly, adjudicating conflicting claims to ownership, often in ad hoc, unplanned fashion outside of courts. This chapter describes three sets of adjudications of territorial land rights. The first involved conflicting assertions of different Native nations to ownership, as federal officials, as part of their effort to “extinguish” Native title, had to decide which nation owned which land. The effort led them to try to understand Native land laws in an effort to parse these claims. The second required wading into the land rights of the French habitants of the Illinois Country, where territorial officials similarly attempted to understand past French land law to confirm preexisting claims to title. The third concerned veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were promised land in the U.S. Military District in the Northwest Territory. Frequently defrauded out of their rights, these holders of the so-called bounty lands appealed to the U.S. Secretary of War to protect their title. In all three cases, the result was that federal officials distilled the territories’ plural sources of ownership into a single federal title issued under federal authority. This decades’ worth of difficult and unheralded legal and administrative work became the foundation for the federal land system, especially when the Harrison Land Act of 1800 codified the resolution to long-standing heated debates about the public lands.

1777–1840: The Big Knives Will Be in Control

This chapter recounts that while the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe were migrating into Illinois, the American colonists in the eastern reaches of North America were fighting for their national independence from the British. The war ended in 1783 with the victorious Americans founding a new nation. Four years later, the US government organized a swath of land that included parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan into what is known as the Northwest Territory. Located within the boundary of this new jurisdiction was Starved Rock, which officially became part of the Northwest Territory in 1787. In 1823, the first Americans settled in the Starved Rock area. The chapter then looks at the Black Hawk War in 1832. The conflict began as a Sauk Indian response to American settlers moving onto lands ceded in 1804. Ultimately, treaties and land cession agreements written by representatives of the US government were intended to swindle the tribes; they denied basic due process rights to the Indians.

The Illinois

Patrick Henry ordered Col. George Rogers Clark to take the Illinois country for Virginia in January 1778. Using Fort Pitt information and Spanish support secured by Henry, his Illinois Regiment surprised the largely French population at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes in July. After British governor, Henry Hamilton, brought a Detroit force to recapture Vincennes, Clark led his 170-man army through “a drowned country” in February 1779 to retake Vincennes and capture its commander. The British surrender of Vincennes survives among the most important events of the American Revolution, as it nullified the Crown’s plan to capture the American West before trapping Washington on the east coast. The new country’s ability to hold the territory through the Treaty of Paris negotiations also secured the Old Northwest territory for the United States.

George Rogers Clark and William Croghan

This is a story of greed, adventure and settlement; of causes won and lost. The book’s theme is eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflict and settlement in the Ohio River valley, told within the context of the national and international events that led to the American Revolution and guided Kentucky’s postwar future.“Colonel” George Croghan serves as the exemplar of Britain’s trans-Appalachian experience. The Revolution was fought in three theaters; the northern belonged to George Washington, and among his officers was Croghan’s nephew, Major William Croghan. The major joined the southern theater at the moment the Continental Army surrendered to Britain in Charleston. The third theater was the Revolution in the West, and its leader was Virginia colonel, later general, George Rogers Clark, whose vision secured the old Northwest Territory for the new nation. Taken together, the war adventures of Clark and Croghan epitomize the American course of the Revolution. Croghan and Clark arrived at the Falls of the Ohio River after the Revolutionto survey the land that served as payment for Virginia’s soldiers. Clark, however, regularly was called by Virginia and the federal government to secure peace in the Ohio River valley, leading to his financial ruin and emotional decline. Croghan, his partner and brother-in-law, remained at Clark’s side throughout it all, even as he prospered in the new world they had fought to create, while Clark languished.