Conceived in Liberty (135 page)

While King George’s War was still under way, Pitt was vainly urging upon the cautious Newcastle an expansion of the war to conquer French Canada. In 1746, Pitt was agreeing with the leading New Hampshire fish merchant William Vaughan on the goal of conquest; in the same year he had his ally the Duke of Bedford submit a memorandum to Newcastle pressing for the seizure of Canada. Among the reasons mentioned was the smashing of French trade and sources of supply; but heading the list was the British seizure of the entire North American fur and fish trade—in which the French colonies were outcompeting the English.

The peace treaty ended these schemes temporarily, but the agitation of the war party continued unabated. The war party was able to strengthen
its command of the key cabinet posts: Bedford had moved up from the admiralty to the crucial post of secretary of state for the South; his protégé the Earl of Sandwich assumed his former post; while, as we have seen, his other protégé the Earl of Halifax came in as president of the Board of Trade. William Shirley was selected by Bedford to sabotage the boundary negotiations with France over Nova Scotia and other colonial areas, and thus to keep the war pot brewing. Pelham managed to oust Bedford and Sandwich from office in 1751, and to horrify the war party by slashing army and navy appropriations and pursuing a pacific policy. Halifax, however, at the Board of Trade not only aggrandized his power over colonial affairs, but also pressed his desire for aggression against New France. Finally, the death of the prime minister Henry Pelham in early 1754 eliminated the great leader of the peace forces. Although he succeeded his brother as prime minister, Newcastle, isolated and surrounded by the war party, was pushed into another and far more grandiose war against France.

Caught in a war drive that he opposed, Newcastle decided that the Cumberland-Fox clique, which wanted a limited war against France concentrated on the continent of Europe, was far less dangerous than the Pitt-Bedford warmongers for unlimited aggression against all the French colonies. Newcastle therefore threw in with the former group, and Henry Fox was brought into the cabinet as secretary of war and then as secretary of state.

All the previous intercolonial wars had begun in Europe and were then reflected in the colonies. But the French and Indian War between Britain and France began in the colonies, and only later was extended to Europe as the Seven Years’ War. While the war in Europe lasted from 1756 to 1763, the war in America broke out—albeit unofficially—in late 1753 and was virtually over by 1760.

The French had heroically explored the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and had settled them as efficient fur traders with the Indians. With a population throughout their extensive territory of no more than seventy-five thousand, the French faced an aggressive and powerful set of English colonies containing a million and a half persons—and despite this overwhelmingly superior population, ever subject to hysteria over the supposed “menace” of New France. Moreover, behind the colonies was a British government directing the royal colonial governors, and increasingly in the hands of an extremely aggressive war party frankly dedicated to the total conquest of New France and the reduction of France and French trading competition to second-class status.

The final conflict between British America and New France was precipitated not so much by these general forces as by an Anglo-Virginian attempt at a huge land-grab. English settlements had now reached the Appalachian Mountains. Beyond stretched New French territory, tempting opportunity not only for ousting French fur traders but also for land speculation. Virginia,
in particular, began to press its wild and grandiose land claims based on its original charter of 1609 and ignoring all the developments since. According to this questionable thesis, the Virginia government was the rightful sovereign of everything not only west, but northwest of the Appalachians to the Pacific—a claim which directly interfered, of course, with Pennsylvania’s own notion of its proper territorial area.

The first attempted Virginia grab of French land in the Ohio Valley came in 1743, when Colonel James Patton and his partners asked Virginia for a grant of two hundred thousand acres on the New River. At that time, before King George’s War had begun, the Virginia government refused the request on the wise ground that such an aggressive act might precipitate war with France. The advent of war ended Virginia’s scruples, however, helped by an Indian conference at Lancaster in mid-1744, at which the Iroquois signed away the right to the Ohio lands. The fact that the Iroquois’ only connection with this land was their highly dubious assertion of over-lordship, made no difference. A flimsy legitimacy, provided by pliant Iroquois over land they had nothing to do with, was now cast over the British claims.

In 1745, the Virginia government gave the first of its munificent grants of French territory. On the same day it gave away three huge land grants. One was of one hundred thousand acres on the Greenbrier River, across the Alleghenies, to the Greenbrier Company. The company was headed by the leading Virginia oligarch John Robinson, president of the Virginia Council, and included John Robinson, Jr., Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and William Beverly. A second gift granted one hundred thousand acres to the old Patton group, this time on the Ohio and New rivers. A third grant of fifty thousand acres on the Greenbrier River was made to Henry Downes and associates.

All this was ominous enough to the French, but at least these moves were made in the heat of conflict. The truly ominous and critical land-grab attempt was launched immediately after the war, with the grant of a vast amount of Ohio land to the newly formed Ohio Company.

The Ohio Company had its roots in the monstrous-sized land grant of over five million acres given to Lord Culpeper in the Northern Neck and later inherited by Lord Fairfax. An early manager of the Fairfax fief was Robert (“King”) Carter, who was able to use his position to amass a very large amount of land and to gain a dominant position in the Virginia planter oligarchy. Early in the eighteenth century, Fairfax replaced Carter by young Thomas Lee, who in turn used his position to amass a landed fortune. He was also aided in this task by marrying a Ludwell heiress and thus adding the prominent Ludwell estates. Losing his post in 1747, Lee, a member of the Virginia Council, decided to organize the Ohio Company as a speculative group for land settlement, and proceeded to
pressure the government for the subsidy of a huge land grant at the forks of the Ohio River. To form the Ohio Company, Lee gathered around him a significant group. Many of them were residents and neighbors of the Fairfax fief, including George Fairfax and the Washington family, especially Lawrence and Augustine Washington. Marylanders among the organizers included the frontier trader Thomas Cresap. Lee and eleven others formed the Ohio Company in 1747, and quickly petitioned the governor and Council for a grant of two hundred thousand acres of land near the forks of the Ohio River. But Governor Gooch was not enthusiastic about the aggressiveness of the land grants, and the powerful Speaker John Robinson, himself a rival land speculator and a determined opponent of the company, was able to secure rejection of the Ohio Company request.

Undaunted, Lee and the others went over the Virginia governor’s head to appeal the decision to the Crown. To petition and put pressure on London, Lee secured the services of a prominent Quaker merchant, John Hanbury. In the spring of 1749, not long after Lee had assumed the post of president of the Council, the Crown directed Virginia to grant the two hundred thousand acres. In the summer, the governor and Council made the grant, conditioned on a hundred families’ settling there within seven years and on the company’s building a fort near the forks. As soon as the conditions were met, the company would take up an adjoining three hundred thousand acres on the same terms. Quitrent payments to the Crown were waived for ten years, and after that would only have to be made for land actually under cultivation.

The conditions of the Ohio Company grant had two fateful consequences: one, the fact of official British sanction alerted the French to the likelihood of dangerous encroachment on their territory; and two, a direct aggressive challenge was thereby laid down to the French. It was, clearly, high time for the French to act.

By the time the grant to the Ohio Company was made, Lee had converted the company all the more into a personal fief. George Fairfax and others had dropped out, while friends and relatives such as Richard Lee, Philip Ludwell Lee, and George Mason were added, as was the powerful Duke of Bedford in reward for his services in securing the grant. The outgoing Governor Gooch, for his part, tried to offset the exclusive privilege of the grant by handing out huge chunks of Ohio territory on the same day to several other groups of land speculators. John Tayloe secured a renewal of the one-hundred-thousand-acre Patton grant; Bernard Moore and others received one hundred thousand acres on the New River; Peyton Randolph and others four hundred thousand acres on the New; William Winston, Jr., fifty thousand acres east of the Ohio River; and the Loyal Company received the staggering total of eight hundred thousand acres along the southern Virginia frontier.

All in all, nearly one million, five hundred thousand acres were blithely granted away by Virginia in one day in 1749. The Loyal Company and the other grantees were not required to colonize or to build forts. The Loyal Company was a coalition of speculators headed by John Lewis of the Shenandoah Valley clique, Edmund Pendleton, a protégé of the Robinsons, and an Albemarle group, including Peter Jefferson and Dr. Thomas Walker. The Loyal Company collaborated closely with the Greenbrier Company of John Robinson’s. In the meanwhile, Thomas Lee became acting governor of Virginia in 1749-50, succeeding Gooch. After Lee’s death in late 1750, the newly appointed governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, had become, not accidentally, a member of the Ohio Company. Dinwiddie, incidentally, had gotten his start in the British bureaucracy as a virulent hatchetman for Lord Carteret, engaged in prosecuting and ousting firm adherents of Walpole from the royal bureaucracy. Dinwiddie was now a protégé of the formidable Duke of Bedford. Soon the company was expanded to include the Mercers, Robert Carter, George Washington, and Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina.

From the time of the grants in 1749, much of Virginia politics may be explained by the emergence of two powerful factions of speculators in Ohio land: the Ohio Company clique of the Lees, Washingtons, Carters, Mercers, and Masons; and the Loyal-Greenbrier Company coalition of the Robinsons, Pendletons, Jeffersons, et al. As we have indicated, the Ohio Company, with its British success, its grip on the governorship, and its duty to build a fort on the forks of the Ohio, was the more alarming speculative group—to the fur traders and politicians of Pennsylvania, to the Indians of the Ohio Valley, and, not least of all, to the French.

The French, for their part, reacted to the threat of Anglo-Virginian aggression in the Ohio Valley with efficiency and dispatch. The French effectively warned the native Indians that the Ohio Company meant to clear and settle, and therefore to oust the Indians rather than to trade with them. The French launched a campaign to oust the English traders from the Ohio Valley, where they had been permitted to operate freely. A string of forts was built by the French throughout the region during 1753; Marquis Duquesne, governor general of New France, used over a thousand men to build a series of defensive forts in the Ohio Valley, including Forts Presque Isle on Lake Erie and Le Boeuf and Venango on French Creek.

Governor Dinwiddie, in his turn, reacted to French defensive measures by desperate appeals to fellow governors and especially to the Crown to take appropriate offensive action to outweigh the French moves. Finally, in August 1753, the Crown, under pressure also of the war party at home, took the fateful decision that was to lead to all-out conflict with France. The English government threw down the gauntlet of aggression. It instructed all the American governors to repel a French “invasion” of what was arrogantly
proclaimed the “King’s domain” in the Ohio Valley, specifically referring to any interference with the construction of forts. Governor Dinwiddie was flatly ordered to consider any French forts as
ipso facto
acts of aggression upon supposed Virginia territory, and the Ohio Company’s plan to build a fort on the Ohio was officially encouraged. Dinwiddie was authorized if necessary to drive French forces from “his” territory by force of arms.

The die was cast. Dinwiddie now had official sanction for the aims of his Ohio Company. Dinwiddie’s first step was to send young Major George Washington, a partner in the Ohio Company, to Fort Le Boeuf with an ultimatum to the French troops to quit the Ohio Valley. When Washington returned with what should have been the expected refusal, Dinwiddie prepared eagerly for war. William Trent, agent of the Ohio Company, was made a captain by Dinwiddie and sent with a troop of armed men to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio and to repel the French; Washington, promoted to lieutenant colonel, was ordered to raise a hundred men and to join him. The governor also sent messages to all the other colonies urging them to join the fight, and to the Indian tribes, inviting them to make war upon the French. Dinwiddie tried to call up the militia, but the sturdy citizens of Virginia proved highly resistant to the draft. They generally refused to leave their families and homes for remote imperial aims. The Council noted that the draft was to be used only for fighting
within
Virginia, and that the Ohio Valley was only dubiously within the Old Dominion. Calling a special session in February 1754, Dinwiddie managed to convince the House of Burgesses to appropriate ten thousand pounds for the invasion, but he was forced to accept a committee of burgesses to supervise the expenditure of the money. Dinwiddie, however, had to abandon calling up the drafted militia, and desperately tried to encourage enlistments by proclaiming the reservation of two hundred thousand acres of Ohio land for free gifts (free of quitrent) for fifteen years to volunteers for the war.