Indian Wars: Eastern Wars

Once the United States won its independence from Great Britain, the infant nation faced many pressing problems—forming a stable government, establishing trade, dealing with foreign powers, and paying off war debts among them. The sale of unsettled land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in the eastern United States was critical to paying off those debts. The presence of Native Americans on this land served as the only real obstacle to white settlement. Native Americans constituted independent nations that claimed much of the same territory as the United States. Conflict between Native Americans and the new United States was inevitable and would lead to a series of wars between Native American tribes and U.S. forces in the eastern United States.

In 1787, while the United States was still operating under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. One component of this law provided the framework for the distribution and use of the lands that would eventually make up the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. It also codified the principle that the lands west of the Appalachians legally belonged to Native Americans.

For the most part, white Americans were willing to admit that the land the Native Americans resided upon was the usufructuary property of those tribes, though subject to the laws of the United States. The problem then centered on the means by which white settlers could secure proper title to those lands. Legally, only three methods were available: military conquest, purchase, or transfer of Native American titles for the relief of debt. Outright wars of aggression were not acceptable to much of the American public nor was waiting for Native Americans to sell their lands or relinquish them for debts.

Although the United States had little stomach for outright military aggression, Americans were quick to respond to real or imagined threats from Native Americans. If provoked in any manner, the government felt justified in carrying out punitive wars against Native Americans, then demanding cessions of large amounts of land from the defeated tribes. A disgraceful aspect of this process was that white settlers would often provoke Native Americans to violence and then clamor for government protection.

Peaceful negotiation would prove to be no more honorable. Most indigenous peoples’ customs held that all land belonged to the tribe in common, and federal law stipulated that only the federal government was entitled to purchase land from Native American tribes. Settler purchases from individual Native Americans were thus violating the legal norms of both cultures. Compounding the problem was that indigenous peoples generally believed in a decentralized form of government. No one chief had the right to sell his tribe's land. Such an act was normally the province of the tribal council. As a result, treaties with the Indians were often obtained through questionable methods. Fraud and deception were common, as was the practice of dealing not with the tribal council, but with a chief or group of chiefs who could be manipulated by the government negotiators. Native Americans might and did protest the legality of such treaties, generally without success.

...