and the ghastly name of "Pittsylvania" almost adopted. The Queen looked more valuable and "Charlotta" was considered. Just then a popular book appeared, tracing the Queen's lineage clear back to the Vandals, and "Vandalia" seemed an inspiration.5 The Vandalia grant was hotly opposed by the Earl of Hillsborough, who succeeded Lord Shelburne as President of the Board of Trade in 1763, and as colonial Secretary of State in 1768. Hillsborough was the enemy of western expansion, and feared that it would result in the depopulation of Ireland, where he had large estates, and even of Great Britain. This is in itself a comment on the fable of Washington's being the father of the West, for a British minister was already dreading the depopulation of the empire by the movement of his people into the West, at a time when Washington had not even established his claim to the soldiers' lands. Hillsborough fought the Vandalia scheme with violence, but Franklin and his colleagues worsted him, the King was brought over and Hillsborough resigned. Still the grant was delayed. Year followed year and the "government of Vandalia" was not authorized. The Virginia Grants The colony of Virginia, which claimed nearly all the land in America not already settled, also made separate grants that conflicted with her own Ohio Company's claims. She deeded away about two million acres thus, including one parcel of a hundred thousand acres to John Robinson, Washington's partner in the Dismal Swamp business. The French and Indian War had postponed the Ohio Company's plans naturally, since the only tenants of the land were the enemy. When peace came, the Ohio Company had a petition before the King and the Board of Trade by March 2, 1763, and sped a representative across to London. This was Washington's close friend, Lieutenant Colonel George Mercer, who sailed July 8, 1763. But all the other corporations had agents there, too, using their influence with warm friends, or warming up cold ones. The Ohio Company had been a harsh disappointment to Washington, and he was sick with the deferment of possessing his share of those 200,000 acres promised him and his men so long ago for their military toil. He knew that most of his soldiers and brother officers were in no position to make use of their acres when (and if) they got them, and he planned to buy up all the claims he could. But first the British must renew their assent to the claims. In the meanwhile, he was eager to gather in other square miles of that mysterious land inhabited only by Indians who had neither rights nor title deeds. The Mississippi river had an attractive sound. He never learned to spell it, but he loved it. The Mississippi Company A "Mississippi Company" would have an even braver sound than the "Ohio Company," so nineteen Virginia gentlemen hastened to form one. Wash ington's name was the last on the list simply because his name began with a "W." In spirit he was an Abou ben Adhem. Among other charter members were his half-brother, John Augustine Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Ludwell Lee, William Lee, Henry and William Fitzhugh. These distinguished gentlemen planned to enlarge their group to fifty, and ask the King for no less than two and a half million acres along the river. Each of the associates was to receive fifty thousand acres as soon as the crown granted the petition. While they were at it they begged the King to forego quitrents, fees and taxes for twelve years as a compensation for their "great expense, dangers, hardships and risques," in return for which they would try to plant two hundred families of the King's subjects on the land. Dr. Arthur Lee was selected as their agent. 6 Kentucky was the land this company wanted to exploit, and Kentucky was the land that General Lyman's Military Adventurers wanted to exploit. Thirty-one-year-young Washington glowed with the thought of adding these 50,000 acres to the 5,000 he would garner from the Ohio Company, and at least 45,000 more that he could doubtless buy up cheap from old soldiers in needy circumstances. These 100,000 acres added to what he had inherited, gained by surveying, purchase, trade, and marriage, would make him a landlord indeed. With loving interest he copied out the rules and regulations of the Mississippi Company, and his manuscript is in the Library of Congress still. Washington paid in his initiation fee of £25. 13.9., and an assessment in 1768 of £16. 18. 9. But postponement sickened the company and it gradually died out as sick corporations do. The shareholders received not a square inch of land, and on January 1, 1772, Washington finally wrote it off his books as a loss of £27.13.5. It was not much to spend for a chance at fifty thousand acres of what is now Illinois and Kentucky. Other Schemes In the meanwhile New Yorkers were conspiring in the same direction, flattering the Prince of Wales by promising to call their new empire New Wales. An English soldier of fortune, Charles Lee, who would clash with Washington later, had another magnificent scheme. British officers, among them Colonel Bouquet, had another plan. A writer in Edinburgh proposed to form a province taking in everything from the Ohio to the Mississippi. He thought he could win the King by naming it after his wife and calling it hideously "Charlotina”! ▾ To sum up the claims and clarify a little the chaos, which is no more confusing to the reader than it must have been to the distracted British 6 Alvord, op. cit., II, p. 93. 7 F. L. Paxson, History of the American Frontier, p. 22, and G. E. Howard in Preliminaries of the Revolution, p. 229, spell it "Charlotiana." ministry and the hopeful pioneers, the following principal schemes may be listed: 8 The Ohio Company; petitions of 1748 and 1752. Franklin's Plan, 1754-56. Pownall's Proposition, 1754-1756. Mississippi Co., petitions of 1763 and 1768. New Wales Colony, 1763. Phinehas Lyman's Plan, 1766. Illinois Scheme, 1766. Amherst's Detroit Plan, 1767. Indiana Company, 1768. Lyman's Mississippi Colony. The Grand Ohio Company. In view of this catalogue it is manifest that Washington was only one of a multitude. This is said in no derogation of his honorable ambitions, but to disprove the fantastic tendency to rob everybody else of honors and lay them all at his feet. Nobody would be more surprised than Washington to learn what posterity has done with him, for his own impression of himself must have been that he was so far from being a gigantic power that he could hardly attract any attention at all to his modest and ancient petitions. Everybody in America was clutching at the new West, and the English little knew what magnificent longings they would turn into magnificent rebellion when they decided to grant none of the petitions, but make a ridiculous pretence of respecting the rights of the Indians, and an insane promise to keep the whites out. Of all the competing companies, Washington and the other Virginians feared most the Walpole Vandalia Company, which Franklin wrought for. Its encroachments on their claims and grants were alarming. In 1770 Washington, who saw his own soldiers' lands smothered under the Vandalian claims, wrote a protest to Governor Botetourt, the new royal representative, who had arrived in Virginia the year before. He reviewed the history of the Ohio Company's grant to his soldiers as an "absolute compact," no less good for having lain "in a dormant state for some time." He asked for one change in the tract allotted, and ended: “This favor, my Lord, would be conferring a singular obligation on men, most of whom, either in their persons or fortunes, have suffered in the cause of their country; few of them benefited by the service; and it cannot fail to receive the thanks of a grateful body of men, but of none more warmly than of your Lordship's most obedient and humble servant." 9 The Grand Ohio Company In a futile effort to satisfy the Virginians and everybody else, the Vandalia or Walpole Company was finally reorganized as the Grand Ohio Company. This huge corporation simply absorbed the Virginia Ohio Company, though 8 The list is taken from Alvord's maps based on John Mitchell's map. 9 Ford, Writings, II, p. 272. it made provision for the 200,000 acres of land bounties promised by Dinwiddie to Washington and his men. For securing this guarantee, Col. George Mercer claimed the credit. He wrote Washington that he had "agreed with, or I may rather say prevailed with, the great Land Company." >> 10 Croghan wrote of the Grand Ohio Company that its grant would contain over thirty million acres—as he put it “thirty od millians of acts and the offise will open att £10 Sterling per hundred and a half penny for a quit-rent which will make a handsome division to the 72." The seventy-two shareholders were mostly Englishmen except Croghan, Benjamin and William Franklin, the four Whartons and William Trent. Croghan and Trent were accused by Baynton and Morgan, two of the former partners in the Indiana Company, of ditching their interests, and Morgan wrote Croghan that Trent was "not worth giving a Kick in the Breech to, or a Pull by the Nose." He challenged Trent to a duel.11 This was the same Trent whom Washington had accused of a cowardice in 1754; but he had been acquitted by a court. Croghan's personal claim of 200,000 acres was gathered in by the Grand Ohio octopus, but Washington's personal claim, though protected in the grant, was still to be fought for. 10 Ford, Writings, II, p. 340 n. 11 Volwiler, George Croghan and the Westward Movement, p. 271. APPENDIX IV THE ORIGINS OF THE REVOLUTION Just when and how and why the Revolution started are subjects upon which no two historians agree. The old school emphasized, as the revolutionists did, the nobler phases of the love of liberty and the hatred of oppression. The new school emphasizes the economic and social conditions that drove the Americans into a revolt, and the political developments in the whole empire that impelled the British to turn their kingdom into a vast commercial corporation while Parliament carried on a life and death struggle with a King and a Junta 1 determined to restore the long-lost absolutism of earlier monarchs. The revolutionists themselves called the breach a "civil war" until the idea of independence was gradually and reluctantly accepted. Even Parson Weems called it a civil war more than once.2 But some of the later historians, and many of the professional patriots of today, have found in the mere suggestion of a civil war something belittling to the glory of a war for independence. Yet Washington himself called it "civil discord." 3 Washington and his fellows at first absolved George III of all blame, and said that they fought only his corrupt and misleading ministers. Gradually they came to abhor the monarch and to believe that he was really a despot, though they did not therefore absolve his subjects at home, who were fighting the same King with such vigor as to make them allies of the Americans, and to cripple the attack on the colonies. Such tolerance was hardly to be expected of them since Parliament upheld the war, and, as Lecky says, "All the measures of American coercion that preceded the Declaration of Independence were carried by enormous majorities in Parliament." To the middle age of historians, as to the demagogues, George III was an archfiend of iniquity and George Washington an archangel of purity. Neither was either. The Beards say that the concept of the American Revolution as a quarrel caused by a stubborn King and obsequious ministers shrinks into "a trifling joke," a "myth that must be dismissed as puerile." The English Whig historians (who have the same desire to celebrate the Whigs of 1770 as the Americans to glorify their heroes), after having "raked over every word of the King's correspondence have found no passage showing that George II[ 1 The people of that time usually called a junta a Junto. 2 M. L. Weems, Life, p. 65. 3 Ford, Writings, II, p. 444. * Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, I, pp. 201, 210. |