The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (13 page)

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When George Grenville took over from Bute in spring 1763, he was not about to reopen this question. There is no evidence that he thought anything but that royal troops ought to be stationed in America. He was in most ways a conventional English politician, though perhaps shrewder and more ambitious than most. He was well connected politically -- his brother Richard, Earl Temple, had been a force in English politics for years; the two brothers, in fact, were the outstanding representatives of a thriving English political family whose power had extended from several constituencies to Parliament for a generation.

George Grenville, born in 1712, entered Parliament in 1741 to remain there until his death in 1770. Three years after his election to Commons he was asked to join a ministry and did so -- perhaps evidence of his ability as well as his connections. Grenville took office again in the great Newcastle-Pitt coalition which fought the Seven Years War to its great victories. His brother was also in this government, but resigned in October 1761 with Pitt, when Pitt failed to persuade the Crown and Parliament to make war on Spain. Grenville at this point served as Secretary of State for the Northern Department and then as first lord of the Admiralty. He was very much in Bute's camp.

When Bute left office, Grenville took over at the Treasury and as the king's first minister. He was an experienced politician facing problems his experience only partially prepared him for. Within England, the first signs of a movement to reform Commons were about to appear. Neither Grenville nor anyone else could have made Commons a more representative institution in 1763; and in any case the "signs" could be read in several ways. The London mob threatened with its riots and upheavals, though it was only half-conscious of what it wanted at any given time. To Grenville and the ministry the mob simply seemed riotous and irresponsible, the scum of society out to do all the mischief it could. John Wilkes, publicist, politician, rake, was just becoming the darling of the mob, who sensed in him a power which might be bent toward reform of representative institutions which were in fact unrepresentative. To the south there was upheaval of another sort in the socalled Cider Counties -- named after their chief production -- where men were bitterly unhappy over the tax on cider.
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Wilkes, the mob, and cider seemed small-time stuff to Grenville, who had other things on his mind throughout most of his ministry.
The

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American West continued to present difficulties, for simply deciding to keep troops there did not solve urgent problems of disposition of lands and relations with Indians. What was to be done with the lands acquired from France raised issues which had beset imperial and local officials alike for years. The facts were clear: land-hungry Americans were moving into the area in defiance of Indians and of the superintendents who sought to prevent them from forcibly taking Indian lands. Land companies competed in London and colonial capitals for grants which they hoped would give exclusive ownership and rights of sale. The Indians were restive and regarded these acquisitive whites with understandable distaste.
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Among the white Americans no group was more aggressive or greedy than the Virginians. On the basis of seventeenth-century charters the colony still claimed the, entire region above the Ohio River. Small groups and lonely individuals from Virginia had edged into the region twenty years before the Seven Years War, and others followed, especially after the area was secured by the great victories of 1758. The most ambitious of the Virginians gathered together in 1747 and formed the Ohio Company; two years later, this group -- they were planters and included young George Washington and a handful of Lees -- received a royal charter conferring upon them 200,000 acres south of present-day Pittsburgh. This charter pleased them and seemed to open the door to large profits through speculation. War and a reluctance on the part of squatters to pay for something that might be taken for nothing frustrated the Ohio Company's noble desires to make money. Moreover, other Americans entered the region determined to use its resources, among them fur traders from Pennsylvania who had rather different ideas about ownership of the wilderness. The French and their Indian allies also interfered with the Virginians' designs by sending in traders and poisoning the minds of the Indians against the English. War, of course, restricted the activities of men on all sides.
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When the French were finally eliminated, the squatters edged back in -- and beyond -- the old limits. Colonel Henry Bouquet, who shared the hatred of most westerners for Indians, nevertheless tried to restrain white expansion. Bouquet acted not out of altruism but out of a sense

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that there would be trouble as the American whites moved into the lands Indians regarded as their own. Bouquet got the support of the Indian superintendents, William Johnson in the North and John Stuart in the South, both of whom reported to the Board of Trade on white encroachments upon Indian lands.
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The Board of Trade was not unmoved by such information. It had in fact acted over a year earlier in a fruitless effort to stop illegal appropriation of Indian lands. In December 1761 it had taken control of land out of the hands of colonial governors, forbidding them the right to grant lands even within the colonies should these grants interfere with Indian rights. All applications for lands were to be sent to the Board by the governors; the Board, three thousand miles away, would make the decisions about who got land and who did not.
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These measures were not successful in staying the settlement of the West, especially after the French had been removed. By the early spring of 1763 the Board and the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, who had formal control of colonial affairs, agreed that action, probably in the form of a royal proclamation, should be taken to reserve the newly acquired West for the Indians.
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The Indians, ignorant of the existence of such grand contrivances as the Board of Trade and secretaries of state, knew nothing of these benign intentions. They did know, however, that General Jeffrey Amherst, who was recalled in 1763, had stopped catering to them -- had stopped trying to bribe them would put it more accurately -- by the old practice of giving presents, blankets, cloth, trinkets, and tools. They knew too that, despite the army's efforts, white settlers were seeping over their lands and that white traders continued to defraud them in the primitive commerce of the West. By May 1763 the Indians had had enough and, under Chief Pontiac, the brilliant leader of the Ottawa, rose in a bloody rebellion. By July they had cut to pieces frontier settlements in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and captured all British military posts west of Fort Pitt except Detroit. Fort Pitt itself endured desperate days and was relieved by Colonel Bouquet only after a hard fight at Bushy Run. Bouquet did not depend solely on his regulars and their muskets but seems to have resorted to trying to spread smallpox

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among the Indians. The Indian superintendents, Johnson and Stuart, used more conventional -- and more successful -- techniques: bribes to detach most of the Iroquois from Pontiac and to persuade the southern tribes to remain neutral.
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News of this upheaval, named Pontiac's Rebellion after its great leader, strengthened official resolve in Britain to clamp down on the American westward movement. For years warnings had issued from American and knowledgeable English officials that the colonies were going to blunder into an Indian war. Now it had happened, and official action could no longer be postponed. But there was delay: not until October 7, 1763, did Grenville's ministry issue the proclamation closing the West between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River to white occupation. The proclamation also established three new colonies -- Quebec, East Florida, and West Florida -- carved out from the French settlements of the St. Lawrence Valley and from areas formerly claimed by Spain and ceded to Britain in the peace ending the Seven Years War.
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The proclamation did not end Pontiac's Rebellion; the grinding efforts of British troops and American militia did that, though fighting continued until the end of 1764. The proclamation did not end the white man's movement into the West either. British troops occasionally tried to bar emigration and succeeded only in earning the enmity of settlers, fur traders, and speculators in land. The Virginians, for example, who had settled in the Kanawha Valley almost twenty years before, and who were driven out by the rebellious Indians, insisted on going back to their farms. According to the terms of the proclamation, they could not, and British troop commanders tried to keep them out. These farmers and hundreds of other pioneers were bitterly resentful, and in late 1764 and early 1765 hundreds made their way over the mountains to the Kanawha. Other like-minded men and women, now contemptuous of British troops who had failed to protect the frontier, decided to flout the proclamation. The result was a steady migration into western Virginia, Maryland, southwestern Pennsylvania, and then northwestern Pennsylvania.
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As defined by Grenville's ministry, most other problems -- more familiar to the ministry -- can be reduced to one word: money. This is surely an over-simplification, yet the need for money played a part in every

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important decision made by Grenville regarding the colonies -- and for that matter by the ministries that followed up to 1776.