His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis

they had dominated the region for several centuries. But they would lose, not because they were wrong, but because they were, or soon would be, outnumbered. (Later on, during his presidency, he would attempt to guarantee tribal control over Indian enclaves, his effort to make a moral statement amidst a relentlessly realistic diagnosis of the demographic facts.) And if the strategists in London chose to block this manifest destiny, they were either stupid, not understanding what the French and Indian War had won, or sinister, plotting to reserve the bounty of the American interior for themselves, all the while confining the colonists to the Atlantic coastline. 28
    Washington’s most grandiose western venture, called the Mississippi Land Company, was launched in 1763, the very year of George III’s proclamation. Fifty investors requested proprietary control over 2.5 million acres on both sides of the Ohio River. In 1765 the company retained a London agent to lobby the Privy Council and Parliament on behalf of their proposal, which envisioned nothing less than the creation of a feudal kingdom in the Ohio Valley with the settlers as serfs and the owners as lords. The British ministry not only rejected the proposal, claiming such a grant would violate treaties recently signed with the Iroquois and Cherokee, but then, in 1770, approved a similar request for 2.5 million acres by a group of English investors to create a whole new colony called Vandalia in the same region. Washington wrote off his investment as a loss in 1772, eventually describing the experience as clear evidence of the British government’s “malignant disposition towards Americans.” 29
    His singular triumph, in fact the result of multiple efforts over thirteen years of complex negotiations, was largely a product of his status as a veteran of the French and Indian War. In 1754, during the darkest days of the war, Governor Dinwiddie had issued a proclamation making available 200,000 acres of “bounty land” on the east side of the Ohio River to Virginians who answered the call. Moreover, the infamous Proclamation of 1763 had included one vaguely worded provision, granting 5,000 acres apiece to former officers who had served the cause. (The location of the land was never made clear.) Washington was relentless in pressing his claims according to these two proclamations. He organized the veterans of the Virginia Regiment and led the political fight in Williamsburg for patents on plots of land bordering the Ohio and Great Kanawha Rivers in what are now southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, and northwestern West Virginia. In the fall of 1770 he personally led an exploratory surveying expedition to the Ohio and Great Kanawha, and the following year commissioned William Crawford, another veteran of the regiment, to complete the survey. He devised a scheme, eventually abandoned, to transport immigrants from Germany as indentured servants who would settle his own plots and thereby deter poachers. When that idea fizzled, he gave orders to purchase ten white servants, four of them convicts in the Baltimore jail, to occupy his land on the Great Kanawha. The total domain he claimed for himself, all choice bottomland, exceeded twenty thousand acres. 30
    There were two sour notes. The first came from several veterans, who believed that Washington’s land was too choice, meaning that he had reserved the most fertile acreage bordering the rivers for himself and relegated the other claimants to less valuable plots. Washington effectively admitted the accusation was true, later acknowledging that he had taken “the cream of the country.” But when one disgruntled veteran confronted him with the charge, it provoked a thunderous rebuke: “As I am not accustomed to receive such from any Man, nor would have taken the same language from you personally. . . . All my concerns is that I ever engag’d in behalf of so ungrateful & dirty a fellow as you are.” As Washington