Beginnings of the American PeopleBecker, Carl L. (Carl Lotus)
History
Beginnings of the American People
Becker, Carl L. (Carl Lotus)
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783
Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy
originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious
enough that if titles to land were granted, not only by the English
Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over
the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure
result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior
was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the
allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly
every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not
resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well
aware that the pretended friendship of the English was but a thin mask
to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to rob him of
his land. During the latter years of the war, after the conquest of
Canada placed the allies of France under the heavy hand of Amherst and
opened the way to actual settlement, it became clear that an ominous
spirit of unrest was spreading throughout all the Northwest. It was
precisely to guard against the danger of an Indian uprising, which in
fact came to pass in the formidable conspiracy of Pontiac, that the
Board of Trade formulated as early as 1761 the policy which found
expression in the famous Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The
Proclamation announced the intention of the English Government to take
exclusive control of Indian relations and Western settlement. "For the
present," all territory west of the Alleghanies, from the new provinces
of Florida on the south to Canada on the north, was to be "reserved to
the Indians." Governors were forbidden to grant land there. Those who
had already settled within reserved territory were required to remove
forthwith; and every Indian trader was bound to give security for
observing such rules as the Imperial Government might establish. It was
the intention of the ministers, although unfortunately not so expressed
in the Proclamation, to open the reserved lands to settlement as soon as
Indian titles could be justly extinguished. In accordance with this
intention, the Government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768,
by which the Six Nations ceded to the Crown their rights to lands south
of the Ohio; and both before and after that event it was seriously
concerned with projects for new colonies in the interior. The most
famous of these projects was that of the Vandalia Colony, for which a
royal grant was about to be executed in 1775 when the promoters were
requested to "wait ... until hostilities ... between Great Britain and
the United Colonies should cease."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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