The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence

In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s Vandal ancestors, it would encompass much of present-day West Virginia, Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania. King George III approved the plan, and apart from some tedious paperwork, the proprietors of Vandalia were optimistic that soon they would have their colony. They assured the Crown they would govern it as an orderly, lucrative addition to his North American continental empire. 

But in late 1773 the tea crisis changed everything. It distracted British authorities and ultimately provoked a civil war. Vandalia fell by the wayside, a largely forgotten footnote in the history of the American Revolution.

Imagine if the gears of British bureaucracy had moved faster. Imagine if in 1773 the colony of Vandalia had received its charter before the tea lay steeping in Boston Harbor. Would it have averted the war for independence? Almost certainly not. But it might have changed a great deal about the new nation that resulted.

At the time shots rang out on the Lexington Green the problems of how politically to organize and economically profit from the West were among the most pressing issues for North American empire—whether controlled from London or some new North American capital city. Indeed, some historians have suggested that frustration at British western policy contributed to the decision to rebel. The Proclamation of 1763, which constrained legal British settlement west of a line drawn down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, had checked many colonists’ ambitions. The nearly created Vandalia signaled a legal path to British property ownership on Indigenous homelands in the West. Without it, and as the eastern third of the continent descended into war, the region had no clear legal authority or political allegiance, at least from the perspective of most Anglo-Americans.

Two groups disagreed. First, of course, Indigenous nations had their own longstanding political, legal, and economic institutions governing the trans-Appalachian West. Nations including the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Lenapes (Delawares), Miamis, and Senecas, among others, did not recognize any European empire’s sovereignty over their homelands and had no intention of ceding their land. Organized around prosperous agricultural towns and villages, Indigenous nations were deeply enmeshed in extensive trade networks. Their economic and military dominance in this region ensured that it remained “Indian Country,” well outside the control of any European power. The best European empires or the new United States could hope for were voluntary diplomatic accords, maybe even alliance. However, Indigenous diplomats sought to navigate a path that minimized their nations’ military involvement while protecting their own territorial and political independence.

Meanwhile, second, and in direct threat to western Indigenous nations, a flood of illegal White settlers had traversed the Appalachian Mountain barrier and begun setting up their own farms and communities well beyond the reach of eastern colonies’ ability to reach or control them. Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, worried about these unruly folks. In 1774 he warned his superiors about one group in the Tennessee Valley who had formed “an inconsiderable, yet a separate State.” He fretted that its very existence set a “dangerous example to the people of America, of forming governments distinct from and independent of his majesty’s authority.”[1] Unlike the Vandalia project, these western communities were self-created and without a clear link in the chain of command.

To whom would the White migrants seeking to resettle Indigenous land give their allegiance? To Britain? The new state governments forming on the bones of the old colonies? Or this new confederation, the United States?

Many of the White western migrants were just as—if not more—frustrated with east coast political elites as with Britain. They felt disenfranchised by unequal political power, burdened by unjust taxation, and left defenseless against Indigenous attacks. They even charged eastern elites with seeking to seize land the settlers believed should be theirs. Settlers and their families took the risk and the effort to dispossess Indigenous people and clear the land for European-style agriculture, but it was well-heeled speculators back east who claimed legal title and all the profit. Populist violence in Maine, Vermont, and the western reaches of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina in the decades before and after the American Revolution testified to an enduring disaffection between such settlers and governing elites. To petitioners from Kentucky, “it is allmost impossible for the Leigislature of Virginia at such a distance to frame salutary w[hole]some Laws that might in all cases answer the weal and intrest of this Country.”[2]

Meanwhile, the states bickered among themselves over who would control the West—all the states collectively or only those with old charter claims to western land? These disputes delayed ratification of the interstate treaty of alliance for five years, an international embarrassment. Not until 1781, when states with western claims began to cede them to the national government, agreeing that the states would collectively control and profit from the land, did the last state sign the Articles of Confederation. The first national constitution depended on agreement over how to organize the West.

Of course, that agreement remained between easterners; it had no input from Indigenous nations or from White westerners, who both asserted their own claims to the West, albeit with radically different historical justification. Control of the trans-Appalachian West had not sparked the American Revolution, but once the war started that objective became second only to expelling the British armed forces. The war for the West saw some of the most brutal fighting with little distinction between combatants and non-combatants. In 1776 US partisans destroyed thirty-six Cherokee towns and systematically burned tens of thousands of bushels of corn, a practice that would be repeated in 1779 (11 towns), 1780 (1,000 houses), and 1781 (15 towns). In 1779 George Washington ordered US troops not only to invade Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) towns and destroy their food supplies but to “prevent them planting more.”[3] He earned the name “Town Destroyer,” by which name he is still known in Haudenosaunee communities to this day. Shawnee towns suffered similar attacks in the Ohio Valley. With systematic destruction US partisans struck at the economic and military capacity of prosperous Indigenous townspeople in their homelands.

The Treaty of Paris in 1783 did little to abate this violence or to settle the question of the allegiance of Indigenous people or White migrants. The trans-Appalachian West remained an internationally contested space well into the nineteenth century. The British maintained their forts in the Great Lakes region and the Spanish in Louisiana thought they had a better claim to much of the West than did the US. Both supplied and encouraged military resistance by Indigenous nations and separatism among White migrants. Coalitions of Indigenous nations routed US forces on multiple occasions, most devastatingly in 1791, throwing into serious doubt US capacity ever to take the West by force. Meanwhile, locals from Vermont to Tennessee flirted with allying Britain or Spain. One indicator of the degree of the problem was that Andrew Jackson, future US president, swore allegiance to the king of Spain in 1789. The power or future of the US in the West was uncertain indeed. The Revolution might have brought the US independence east of the mountains, but to the west the process of nation-building was far from finished. The Revolution would unfold for years—even decades—longer.

In this process, no single political decision was of greater importance than the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787 in New York while the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. The Ordinance, created for the Northwest Territory but extended as well (without the provision prohibiting slavery) to Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, did work that the Constitution left undone, outlining the process by which new states would be admitted. Its two most important and indeed radical contributions were, first, to insist on the extension of republican government in the West, and, second, to promise as a compact with White westerners that their (future) states would be admitted as equal partners into the American Union.

A great deal had changed between the near creation of the proprietary colony of British Vandalia in 1772 and the US promise of republican government just fifteen years later. The war of conquest for the West was by no means over in 1787, nor were the ongoing struggles between Anglo-Americans over who would exercise political and economic control, but revolutionary change was underway.

Jessica Choppin Roney is an associate professor of history and director of Undergraduate Studies at Temple University. She is the author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Johns Hopkins Press, 2014) and Revolutionary Settlement: The Colonies of the American Revolution (in progress).