The Treaty That Ignored America's First Allies

The Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783 formally ended the Revolutionary War between Britain and the United States. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Cherokee, the Oneida, the Tuscarora, and every other Native nation that had participated in the conflict as combatants or allies were not mentioned in the treaty and were not represented at the negotiations. Britain ceded to the United States all territory east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes, including land that had been guaranteed to Native nations by treaty. This episode presents the documents that record what happened next.

The Treaty of Paris was negotiated by American commissioners Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay on behalf of the United States, and by British representatives on behalf of the Crown. The negotiations addressed the boundary between the United States and British North America, the treatment of Loyalists, the repayment of pre-war debts, and the rights of American fishermen in Canadian waters. They did not address the status of Native nations, their land rights, or the treaty obligations Britain had incurred with its Indian allies.

The boundary line drawn in the treaty extended to the Mississippi River. Much of the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was Native land. The Proclamation of 1763 had reserved it. The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix had confirmed the eastern boundary. Neither document was mentioned in the 1783 treaty. Britain had ceded territory it did not control and had not cleared with the nations who occupied it.

In September 1784, Six Nations representatives began arriving at Fort Stanwix, then largely in ruins. Temporary structures were built. Federal commissioners arrived in October. The negotiations produced the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, signed October 22, 1784. It was the first treaty between the United States and Native nations. It required the Six Nations to cede large tracts of land and established new boundaries.

The Six Nations council later refused to ratify the treaty. The delegates who had signed it, they argued, lacked the authority to agree to its terms. The land cessions it required were enormous. The Americans had conducted the negotiations with a strong military presence and treated the Haudenosaunee as a conquered nation rather than as parties to a negotiated agreement. The United States ratified the treaty regardless. The land described in it was subsequently surveyed, sold, and settled.

The Oneida and Tuscarora had fought for the American cause. Article 6 of the Fort Stanwix treaty promised to secure their lands. By 1846, the Oneida in New York held fewer than one hundred acres of their original territory. State-level land transactions, conducted in violation of the federal treaty framework, had reduced their holdings across fifty years of post-war settlement.

The Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga had fought for Britain. The treaty gave them nothing. The British government compensated Joseph Brant and Mohawk followers with land on the Grand River in Canada. The territory they had held in New York was gone. The Cherokee, under pressure from American expansion from the east and south, signed the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785 and the Treaty of Holston in 1791. Each one ceded more land. Dragging Canoe continued fighting until his death in 1792.