The principles of the Proclamation of 1763 were developed, through correspondence between the Lords of Trade and the Indian Superintendents, into a detailed plan for the complete control of Indian relations and white settlement, which was submitted to the Crown on 10 July 1764.1 This Plan of 1764 recommended a well-organized Indian service under the two Indian Superintendents, fixed tariffs for trade, licences and regulations for traders, and the repeal of all conflicting colonial laws. It suggested that only the Crown-not the colonial authorities-be permitted to acquire land from the Indians. As the enforcement of this plan was expected to cost £20,000 annually, it was not formally adopted.

The failure and repeal of the Stamp Act meant the adjournment of any real effort to solve the Western problem, which at this point diverges from those of colonial relations and taxation. The Rockingham ministry let it lie, and the Chatham-Grafton ministry adopted no definite Western policy until 1768.

In the meantime, the two able Indian Superintendents, Johnson and Stuart, were enforcing the Plan of 1764 so far as their limited funds permitted. They licensed traders, issued regulations, and began to build up an efficient Indian service. They mediated peace between warring tribes, and with Pontiac's followers. They established an almost continuous line of demarcation, considerably to the west of the line of 1763, between the Indians' hunting grounds and lands open to white settlement. This was done by a series of 'talks' or conferences between Indian chiefs, the Superintendents, and colonial governors. The minutes of an important 'talk' are here printed (p. 54) as a sample of Indian diplomacy. A later conference the same year resulted in the Treaty of Fort

1 Printed in Alvord and Carter, The Critical Period (Illinois Historical Collections, x), 273-81; Shortt and Doughty, 433; Documents on Colonial History of New York, vii. 637. See Comments on the Plan in pp. 62-8 below, and American Historical Review, xx. 815-31.

See map of this line in American Historical Review, x. 785.

Stanwix, 5 November 1768, which established that part of the line through central New York and Pennsylvania.

Most of this frontier line was actually surveyed and marked; it was confirmed by the Crown, and intended to endure. But the Superintendents had neither power nor authority to make it respected by the frontiersmen. No important treaty between North American Indians and colonial, imperial, or federal authorities has been much more than a truce, or a death warrant for the Indians. Their political organization was so loose that the young braves could not be restrained from occasional scalping expeditions; and no English or American Government has been strong enough to restrain its frontiersmen from bloody outrages and reprisals.

1

The backwoodsman's viewpoint is presented in the Remonstrance of 13 February 1764 here printed (p. 9), from the 'distressed and bleeding frontier inhabitants of Pennsylvania' to their own Governor and Assembly: a document which may serve as a link between (b) the problem of Indian and backwoodsman, and (e) that of political adjustment between seaboard and interior. Pennsylvania was then controlled by an oligarchy composed of Philadelphia Quakers, with some of the older German families.1 It was kept in power by manipulating the apportionment of assemblymen against the frontier counties. Although whiggish on the taxation question, this ruling class saw eye-to-eye with the imperial government on the Western problem, its Quaker pacifism being reinforced by an interest in the fur trade, in dear land, and in cheap labour.2 The backwoodsmen, mainly Irish protestants, could get no support or protection from the Assembly, even during Pontiac's rebellion. In December 1763 a gang known as the

1 C. H. Lincoln, Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania (New York: Appleton, 1901).

2 See significant extracts in the Farmer's Letters (pp. 48–50, below), and message from the Assembly to the Governor, 13 January 1768, alluding to the 'horrid acts of barbarity' and audacious encroachments of the backwoodsmen, and proposing a bill for their deportation. Minutes of Provincial Council of Penn., ix. 408.

'Paxton Boys' took a cowardly revenge by wiping out the peaceful survivors of the Conestogo Indians, whose ancestors had made the celebrated' treaty that was never broken' with William Penn.1 The Boys' then marched on Philadelphia, with the intention of putting more refugees to the hatchet, and were only dissuaded from their purpose by the Assembly adopting their demands as to scalp bounties (p. 13). The Pennsylvania frontiersmen joined the revolutionary movement in order to democratize Pennsylvania (in which they succeeded-see pp. 162-76), as well as to obtain freedom from transatlantic control.

2

Another document that illustrated the internal conflict in the Colonies, but without Indian complications, is the petition of North Carolina Regulators' in 1769 (pp. 83-7). In this province the physical, social, and religious differences between seaboard and frontier were even more pronounced than in Pennsylvania. The highlanders were mostly Germans and Ulstermen who had come in from the north, by following the folds of the Alleghanies. Their settlements were separated by a strip of pine barrens from the lowlands, where dwelt many slaveholding planters and merchants. The lowlanders, ardent champions of no taxation without representation', had held bonfires of stamped paper in 1765. At the same time they exploited the highlanders with unfair taxation and representation, and by centrally appointed judges and local officials, who grew rich through various methods of judicial robbery. When redress could not be had, the people of the frontier counties formed associations for regulating public grievances', which refused to pay taxes, and broke up court sessions. Their armed bands were defeated in the Battle of the Alamance' on 16 May 1771 by North Carolinians, who afterwards became patriot leaders in the War of Independence;

1 Franklin's' Narrative of the Massacres', in his Works (Bigelow ed.), iii. 260-86.

2 See Channing, United States, iii. 122, for bibliography of the Regulator movement.

whilst many of the Regulators became loyalists, and others emigrated beyond the mountains to escape their oppressors.

Internal conditions in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas were exceptional; but in all the colonies there was more or less western or agrarian discontent, which in some instances gave the final push toward independence; in others wrested reforms from the gentry; and in New England, aggravated by post-war conditions, bioke out in Shays's rebellion (pp. 208– 22). That the newly settled regions were on the whole more radical than the seaboard was appreciated by the Privy Council, which on several occasions instructed royal governors to refuse representation in the colonial assemblies to western settlements (p. 158).

Of all the well-meaning English officials who were forced into contact with colonial affairs, Lord Shelburne alone had studied the Western problem. Gifted like Chatham with a statesman's imagination, visions of the future would occasionally flash across his mind; but unlike Chatham, he had no power to project a vision beyond a state paper. In 1767 he worked out in detail a new plan for the West,1 favouring the immediate establishment of new colonies beyond the Appalachians (p. 69) provided the Indians could be induced to cede the land. Shelburne knew it was impossible to stop westward expansion; he would therefore use it to the end of a greater Empire. Diffusion of population, he believed, would not only extend the market for British manufactures, but postpone the day when the colonists would find the Acts of Trade intolerable. His policy was the logical development of that momentous decision in 1762, to retain Canada and the West, instead of Guadeloupe.

Lack of money was the main obstacle to carrying out the Plan of 1764, and it made any such scheme of western de

1 Alvord, Mississippi Valley, i. 343-58; Illinois Historical Collections, xi. 536.

velopment as Shelburne's out of the question. The Treasury begrudged the ten to twelve thousand pounds a year that Johnson and Stuart were spending. New western colonies would have had to draw on imperial funds for the support of their civil governments, as Georgia and Nova Scotia and the Floridas were still doing. Nothing substantial could be got from the promoters of new colonial projects,1 and the execution of most of them would have precipitated an Indian war Proceeds of the Townshend and other customs duties in the Colonies were earmarked for existing civil lists. Shelburne proposed to raise an American fund from quit-rents on land. But it was becoming more and more difficult to collect quitrents from the older colonies; 2 Westerners would never have paid them. Moreover, the West had been a disappointment from the mercantile viewpoint. English fur imports fell off instead of increasing with the conquest of Canada. This was partly due to the French and Spanish, who illicitly traded with the Illinois country from New Orleans and St. Louis; but it was mainly due to geography. English fur-trading firms, using Fort Pitt (Pittsburg) as a base, sent truck down the Ohio and up into the Illinois; but rather than transport their fur packs up stream, and across the mountains to Philadelphia, they found it much more easy and profitable to float them down stream to the great peltry market at New Orleans. Few of these furs found their way from New Orleans into Great Britain, a fact outrageous to mercantilism. As early as 1768 important people were saying that the West would never be of any use to England until Louisiana were annexed to it. If war had broken out with Spain in 1771 over the Falkland Islands question, the conquest of Louisiana would have been its main object. It was undoubtedly true that the Western problem could never be settled in its

1 See below, p. 69, n. The Vandalia Company, however, was willing to support the entire charges of civil government in its territory.

2 B. W. Bond, Quit-Rent System in American Colonies (Yale Univ. Press, 1919).