Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with the habits of their life; would hence soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars, and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must be, the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime, and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence, Increase and multiply.' Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God by an express charter has given to the children of men."

Signally as England failed in the attempt to exclude civilization from the Great West, she did not abandon the attempt to apply the principles of the Royal Proclamation to the American wilderness. In discussing the Oregon Question with the United States in 1818-1846, she stubbornly strove to prevent settlements on the waters of the Columbia, and to devote the shores of the distant Pacific to the purposes of the Hudson Bay Company. Fortunately she was again foiled by the power that had foiled her before-the enterprise and hardihood of the American pioneer.1

1 New light has recently been thrown upon the subject of this chapter and related topics. See the following publications: F. J. Turner: Western State Making in the Revolutionary Era, The American Historical Review, Vol. I., pp. 70-257; G. H. Alden: New Governments west of the Alleghanies before 1780, Madison, Wis., 1897; Victor Coffin : The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution, Madison, Wis., 1896; also Winsor: The Western Movement; and Roosevelt: The Winning of the West. Mr. Coffin controverts the view advanced above, that the year 1763 marks a turning point in British Western Policy. It seems plain, at least, that from this time on British policy was fluctuating and inconsistent.

IX.

THE NORTHWEST IN THE REVOLUTION.

MR. BANCROFT says the French and Indian war was be gun by England "for the acquisition of the Ohio Valley. She achieved this conquest, but not for herself.

England became not so much the possessor of the valley of the West as the trustee, commissioned to transfer it from the France of the Middle Ages to the free people who were making for humanity a new life in America." How unfit England was, in the days of George III., to be the possessor of the valley, is shown by the policy that she pursued from the close of the French war to the beginning of the Revolution. She was first anxious to secure possession of the Ohio, and then reluctant to see it put to any civilized use. Her restrictive Western policy, as we have seen, was one of the causes leading to the War of Independence, and so leading to the loss of the whole West.

Although a solitude, and because a solitude, the overmountain country had more at stake in the Revolution than the Atlantic slope. On the slope, whatever the issue of the war, an Anglo-Saxon civilization, although it might be greatly stunted and impoverished, was assured; but in the Western valleys such few seeds of civilization as had been planted were Gallican and not Saxon. Moreover, there were uncertainties and perils growing out of the relation of that country to the Franco-Spanish civilization of Louisiana. Between 1748 and 1783 the Western question presented three

1 History, II., 565.

distinct phases. In 1748-1763 it was the supremacy of England or France in the West; in 1763-1775 it was whether the country should belong to the red man or the white man; and in 1775-1783 it was whether it should form a part of the United States or of some foreign power. In general, this last question was settled by the "skirmishes of sentinels and outposts" east of the mountains, as Lafayette called the Revolution. Still the Northwest appears in the Revolution in two or three aspects that must be presented.

For a few years before the beginning of the French war the Western Indians had been disposed to listen to the English envoys who visited them rather than to the French; but the defeat of Braddock brought upon the English frontiersettlements all the scalping knives of the Western hordes. The Indians were really a part of the soil, like the trees and the buffalo, but France could not transfer them in 1763 with the same facility to their new masters. The savages understood perfectly that the English were far more dangerous to them than the French had been. The posting of garrisons in the Western forts would be likely to bring to their best hunting grounds swarms of colonists greedy for lands. The officers of the garrisons sent to the West reported the Indians sullen and angry. Pontiac was at that very time organizing his formidable conspiracy, the aim of which was to roll back the tide of English invasion. In the summer of 1763 the storm of war burst upon the wilderness-garrisons: Mackinaw, St. Joseph, Sandusky, Ouiatenon, Fort Miami, Presque Isle, Le Bœuf, and Venango fell into the hands of the savages; and Fort Pitt and Detroit were beleaguered. But Boquet's brave march to the heart of Ohio and Gladwin's heroic defence of Detroit broke the power of the Ottawa chieftain, and the Indians were compelled to come to terms. And now began a process of mutual reconciliation. The royal proclamation of 1763, the subsequent restriction of the Western population, the measurable adoption of French methods by the British officers, the growing conviction of the savage that

the British Government and the colonies were not the same, and that his danger came from the latter-these causes, with the widening breach between the Mother Country and the colonies, gradually won the Indians over to the British side, and made them ready to accept the war-belt whenever the British commandant at Detroit should send it to them. It is a fact, and perhaps a curious one, that whenever the St. Lawrence Valley and the Atlantic Slope have been arrayed against each other in deadly strife, the Western Indians have sided with the former-in 1755, in 1775, and in 1812.

In 1763 Sir William Johnson estimated the Western Indians, exclusive of the Illinois, at 9,000 warriors,' and we may accept that as the number at the beginning of the Revolution. Of these the large majority were already enemies of the Americans, fully prepared to do their part to wrap the long frontier from the Susquehanna to the Tennessee in flames and blood. Left to themselves, these savages would have been a formidable foe; but with a base of supplies on the Detroit, with rallying points in the wilderness-forts, and with the constant stimulation and frequent leadership of British officers, they were simply portentous. The American Revolution in its Northwestern aspect was a continuation of the French and Indian war, the old conflict renewed with some change of parties. The States find the savage power of the Northwest arrayed against them as before. France has dropped out and England has taken her place, succeeding to all her ideas-even that of employing the savage's tomahawk against her revolted colonies-and to all the advantages of e old French position.

The proposition to employ the scalping knife called out m Lord Chatham one of his immortal bursts of eloquence. It was repugnant to the feelings of General Howe and Sir Guy Carleton; but it was heartily approved by Governor Hamilton, at Detroit, who at once made ready to use all the re

I Walker: Michigan Pioneer Collections, III., 16.

sources that his position gave him, to bring upon the rear and flank of the States the only form of warfare known in those regions. He employed Elliot, McGee, and the Girty brothers. He subsidized the Indians. Time and again he sent to the tribes the war-belt, summoning them to bloody forays that he himself had planned. His acts will not be here recounted, nor will the history of this phase of the Revolution be written; but it is due to Hamilton to say that his policy was seen at Wheeling, at Harrodsburg, at Boonesborough, at the Blue Licks, where the flower of Kentucky fell, as well as in a hundred attacks upon outlying stations and defenceless farms.

The only other force that the British commander at Detroit could wield was that of the habitants. Before we can describe the part that they played in the struggle, we must sketch their history from the close of the previous war.

The moment the French settlements in the West passed into English hands, they began to decline in both the number and the quality of their population. The causes of this decline are easily found.

The sources of such strength as they had had were now sapped. The proclamation of 1763 left them outside the pale of any civil jurisdiction, subject only to military authority. Nor did the Quebec Act work any real change. All through the Revolution, the commander of the Detroit garrison was the civil as well as the military head of the whole Northwest, and most of his subordinates were military officers. There were magistrates, but their commissions came from the commandant, and they dealt out a very arbitrary and capricious justice. For example, Governor Hamilton adjudged a defendant, who pleaded that he could not pay a debt, to give the plaintiff an old negro wench; and Dejean, a magistrate who cuts a great figure in Detroit in those days, condemned men to the gallows whom a jury had found guilty of theft. The orderly was a more conspicuous officer of the law than the constable. Military officers sometimes solemnized