In 1791, Timothy Pickering, U.S. Indian agent, recited to the Seneca named Cornplanter a false history of European self-sufficiency and Native hunger in early America, in which Indians hungered because they hunted and non-Natives flourished by eating the abundant yields of their farms. Pickering hoped that his interpretation of the past would persuade Cornplanter and other Indians to change their methods of food production and conform to the U.S. government’s new policy, known then as the “Plan of Civilization.” The time had come, Pickering argued, for Indians to “adopt some of the ways of the white people. Instead of depending on hunting,” he urged, “let your children be instructed in farming, raising of cattle, Sheep and hogs.” Federal officials created this strategy to alter Native cattle-raising, agriculture, pricing, and eating habits in order to legitimize the government’s landgrabs.¹ Their choices signaled a transition from a food policy of diplomatic exchange and aid distributions to one that succeeded in changing Native food systems, and a transition from a weak federal Indian policy to one that sought greater power in the country’s Native American foreign affairs. The 1790s witnessed the rise of American victual imperialism.

The U.S. government could not take large amounts of Native land until Indians lost the power to fight hunger themselves. During the 1780s and 1790s, U.S. Indian commissioners had copied generous British diplomacy because they feared Native hunger. As the federal government gained an advantage over the states, U.S. officials tried to decrease the cost of such practices by telling Native Americans about alternative ways to prevent hunger: by producing crops, meat, and dairy. The Plan of Civilization relied upon the idea that Indians who adopted American notions of proper husbandry could become usefully independent, and could use less land to do so.²

A few problems delayed the plan’s implementation. First, non-Native officials misunderstood Indian appetites and remained uncertain about the extent to which starvation was truly a problem. Second, Indians already grew crops; Americans’ destruction of corn bushels during the Revolutionary and Western Confederacy Wars provided evidence of extensive Native farming. Although it was hard for U.S. officials to accept Indian agricultural methods, it was equally difficult to convince Indians to farm when Native women already did so. Finally, several groups—Western Confederacy Indians, some Creeks, and some Iroquois—refused American officials’ offers to implement the plan in their villages. Ultimately, the federal government managed to push the policy through because some factions of Creeks, Buffalo Creek Senecas, Genesee Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas proved willing to collaborate with U.S. officials.³ Once officials had changed the ways that Indians prevented hunger, the government could step in to convince Indians that it could prevent Native hunger more efficiently than Indians.

By the mid-1810s the Plan of Civilization’s promoters had succeeded in decreasing food aid and distributing provisions that physically sickened Native Americans. The scheme, rather than preventing Indian hunger by transforming Indians into husbandmen, instead ate up Indians’ territory while killing Indians. The Plan of Civilization was a federal land and food policy that pervaded interactions between Indians and federal Indian agents, and it shows how ideas about hunger prevention served as both a diplomatic tool and a weapon from the 1780s to the 1810s.

Victual imperialism in the new United States was slightly different from the victual imperialism that free black colonists encountered in Nova Scotia, underscoring the necessity of insisting on precise definitions for the term across time and space.⁴ In Nova Scotia the local courts were effective, and centralized government was not. White Loyalists exercised what little power they had by stopping black colonists from getting land rather than by taking it from them. They emphasized concomitant laws that created controls on black people’s food access. Diplomacy between white and black colonists did not exist because diplomacy requires some balance of power, and in Canada white colonists claimed the majority of power. In the United States, by contrast, victual imperialism consisted of the institutionalization of a centralized, federal food policy—built on the introduction of plowing, cattle ranching, and then price-fixing food laws—that facilitated sales and seizures of Native American territory.

American victual imperialism worked alongside the Native and non-Native diplomacy that continued into the 1810s. Victual imperialism and food diplomacy both mischaracterized Native hunger while encouraging select groups of Indians to collaborate with non-Native officials to implement and enforce changes in the food system. Once this process was underway, victual imperialism replaced food diplomacy, and Native Americans lost this particular battle.

Although various eighteenth-century authors had written about attempts to “civilize” Indians throughout the colonial and postwar period, it was only in the late 1780s and early 1790s that various men connected this project to the prevention of Native hunger. They suggested making changes to crop production, hunting customs, and education; their ideas formed the basis for the federal government’s Plan of Civilization. Samuel Kirkland, a white Christian missionary, had lived with and preached to Iroquois and Stockbridge Indians in various villages since the 1760s. He received funding from the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, and direction from its board in Boston.⁵

Descriptions of Iroquois hunger permeate the journal entries that Kirkland penned in the late 1780s. In early April 1789, Oneidas and Tuscaroras had been fasting and praying “on account of the scarcity of provisions.” Later that month others told him that they were considering dispersing for the year so that shared foodstuffs stretched further. That May, he recorded a meeting with “an aged Indian” who worried that “God is angry with us Indians. We are reduced to extremity. Never was such a time with us Indians. We are very hungry and almost starved.… My family have not tasted any bread, or meat, for many days; nothing but herbs and sometimes small fish. I am so weak I can’t hoe my corn.”⁶ The year 1789 had been a year of hunger and near famine, but mentions of hunger had long featured in Natives’ interactions with non-Natives. The Iroquois were dealing with this period of scarcity in familiar, useful ways: by overstating their hunger and refusing to hoe corn in order to receive more food aid, by imbuing fasts with religious meaning, by dispersing to avoid overstressing grain reserves, and by turning to fishing and gathering.

A reform of Indian behavior would address these problems of hunger, Kirkland thought, and so he eagerly reported instances when Native Americans asked for or approved of his changes. In December 1789 he spoke to Seneca chief Big Tree (Karontowanen, sometimes called Great Tree—possibly the same man whose suicide Anthony Wayne later tried to exploit) and Captain Isaac (Tolaghdowane). Kirkland intended to gradually remove “Your wandering manner of life, your strong attachments to the customs of the Fathers, & your prejudices against the white people in general.” He believed that Indians could become good Christians by embracing his ideas about civility and permanent settlement in a fixed location. Like other critics, Kirkland wanted Indians to become more sedentary, which would in turn promote the sort of productive farming he envisioned while also reducing conflict between Natives and non-Natives. That year he described Buffalo Creek and Genesee Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas asking him “to make provision for the education of some of their youths.” These Indians had asked Kirkland to adopt Native children “into [his] family” and teach them “the english language, to read & write the same.” He noted that “The other kind of schooling” needed to take place “in their respective Villages.”⁷

That other schooling—instruction in non-Native agricultural methods—soon became clear. In 1791 Kirkland wrote down his ideas and requested funding from Scotland. He envisioned a school “in the vicinity of Oneida” near a non-Native village. He hoped to admit two Seneca children, one or two Oneidas, and one Onondaga and Cayuga. White children would matriculate alongside Indians. They would all learn history, law, government, arithmetic, and to read and write English and Indian languages. The curriculum also included instruction in “the art of husbandry” but failed to distinguish this husbandry from extant Native agriculture. The editor of Kirkland’s journals observes that Kirkland intended children to cultivate plots near the school, and that each Indian village would also gain a resident farmer. Once Indians established agriculture suitable to non-Native standards in their villages, women would go to workhouses to learn to read and write and then would take courses in domestic economy, spinning, and weaving.⁸ Kirkland’s plan rested on the school’s proximity to non-Natives, on teaching academic knowledge alongside practical skills, on changing Native gender roles, and on removing Indian children from villages.

There are reasons to be skeptical of Kirkland’s assessment of Native hunger and his ideas about ameliorating it. For one thing, he seemed ignorant of the fact that Native Americans already knew history, and had their own methods of recording the past. For another, he was not self-sufficient, so he was the wrong person to change Indian agriculture by example. His itinerant preaching contradicted his model of a more settled life, and at various points in his diaries he admitted depending on Indians for food. In January 1785 he lived “almost intirely on strawberries, with now & then a little fish” while preaching to Stockbridge Indians. His Christian spirit flagged “for want of sustenance.” Stockbridge Indians shared food with him, but it was not enough; the Indians consequently “consented to release me till the latter part of the summer, by which time they expected the fruits of the Earth would enable them to afford me some little subsistence.” Four years later, in 1789, he confessed the pressing necessity of making “some improvements in husbandry & cultivation so as to raise my own provisions in the vicinity of Oneida, or I shall remain under embarrassed circumstances during my whole life.”⁹ Kirkland’s “embarrass[ment]” may have been a simple description of his financial situation, but his inability to grow the crops he urged other men to plant probably made him into an awkward figure of uselessness. It is also possible that Kirkland’s hunger—which he was less capable than Indians of enduring—made the Iroquois and Stockbridges doubt his ability to prevent theirs.

This was victual imperialism in action; it was a plan to reform Indian husbandry while taking Indian land. The preacher not only passed messages between and translated for the Iroquois and the U.S. government; he also funded his school from the donations of land speculators. After the Revolution Kirkland’s missionary zeal gave way to his own financial concerns—not least of which involved acquiring a tract of Oneida land, which he subsequently expanded by aiding other speculators and Massachusetts and New York state officials (who also sought cessions). Ultimately, Kirkland’s school succeeded, but not in the form intended. New York governor George Clinton authorized the school’s charter in January 1793. The schoolhouse burned down, and though another one was rebuilt around 1794, the Society in Scotland refused to fund it. The repaired school became Hamilton College, which educated white pupils, not Indian ones.¹⁰ Kirkland’s attempts at reforming Native crop production and education, consequently, did not enjoy widespread success.

Other men were ready with alternative suggestions for changing Indian husbandry while eyeing Indian land. Timothy Pickering also penned ideas for “the means of introducing the art of husbandry, and civilization, among our Indian neighbours” in 1791. Samuel Kirkland had corresponded with Pickering about his idea for a school, and they agreed on some points but not others. Both men thought that proper male husbandmen should cease hunting and ranging and farm in one place, while women should no longer farm. Like other American officials both Pickering and Kirkland planned to stop women’s agricultural labor by encouraging them to become spinners and weavers. Pickering believed that Kirkland’s approach could succeed in teaching “Indian youths” to farm, but unlike Kirkland he worried about what would happen when those men returned “to their own country” and, in his words, reverted into “mere Savages.”¹¹

“The remedy Seemed obvious” to Pickering. He proposed leaving children in their villages, educating them with just a little “reading, writing and arithmetic,” and allowing them to “practically learn the art of husbandry” through instruction by non-Native teachers who would reside among them. He proposed, as further encouragement, sending “a cow, a yoke of oxen, a plough, a cart, and the other proper instruments of husbandry” to three separate Iroquois locations. Pickering even drew up a budget for the U.S. government to consider.¹² His approach preempted backsliding, did not require removing children from villages, and defined non-Native husbandry through a detailed discussion of domesticated animals, meat and dairy production, and plow agriculture.

This focus on cattle and plows revealed some of the contradictions of proposals for this initiative. People voiced conflicting ideas about corn, wheat, and beef during this time period. In Virginia, planters shifted their focus from tobacco to wheat production, which in turn demanded the plow, but further south the loamy soils were so poor that until the mid-nineteenth century even Anglo-American farmers eschewed plows. Some people simply became uninterested in owning land altogether, particularly in certain regions of Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee. Indians may have preferred to grow and eat corn, and indeed some non-Native writers (from Benjamin Franklin to doctor Benjamin Rush to poet Joel Barlow) championed it. Other Americans, however, would come to believe that wheat was a cheaper, more elevated, and nutritious grain than maize.¹³

Plow and wheat agriculture required more farmland—not less, as Pickering claimed—than the hoe and corn agriculture on which Indians had previously relied. Iroquois hoe use produced crop yields that surpassed non-Native ones, and it kept soils healthier for longer. Cattle presented another problem: American breeders remained insecure about their cattle, which seemed wilder and bonier than well-bred British cattle.¹⁴ Pickering, who assumed that enthusiasm for the plan would spread from village to village, ignored the practical considerations necessary to ensure successful implementation.

And then there was the problem of Pickering’s perception of Native hunger. By summer of 1791 he was arguing that his version of the plan was a good one because he mistakenly assumed that Indians’ requests for provisions stemmed from useless, insatiable appetites rather than adherence to established diplomatic practices. When pitching his plan to Indians, he emphasized the potential abundance of Indian food production. In a conversation with Cornplanter, Pickering championed the superiority of American husbandry, describing a society in which each man played a specialized role. Farmers farmed, but they were the endpoint of a long system that enabled them to do so. Smiths forged “plough-irons, hoes, axes, scythes, and all other iron tools” that made it easier (he thought) to plow fields. Carpenters built “houses and barns” for storing food, in addition to “ploughs, carts, and other things … for the use of the farmers.” With these types of aid farmers raised “abundance of cattle and corn, wheat and other grain,” which in turn let them feed “thousands of families” as well as their own. If they adopted this system, Pickering implied, Indians would not need to ask the Americans for rations because they would raise their own surplus. Even at a time when Pickering was heavily involved in conducting Indian diplomacy, he did not understand that Indians asked for food because they expected rather than needed it. The people to whom Pickering reported trusted his assessment of the situation; Secretary of War Henry Knox, who approved of Pickering’s scheme, convinced George Washington to follow Pickering’s recommendations.¹⁵

Some Iroquois did seem amenable to receiving the animals and undertaking the farming reforms that were integral to the Plan of Civilization—probably because they already farmed and owned domesticated animals. Seneca leaders Big Tree and Captain Isaac, who in 1789 heard Kirkland’s description of his school, said that they would “submit wholly” to Kirkland in the matter of its location. In 1791 Big Tree and some other Senecas (Half Town and Cornplanter) asked at a meeting if federal officials would “teach us to plough and to Grind Corn,” and offered “to Send nine Seneka boys to be under your care for education.” Part of this request was posture; Indians already ground corn (though it is unclear whether Big Tree was referring specifically to men, in which case they might indeed have needed to learn to grind corn). Plow agriculture would have been less widespread. George Washington agreed conditionally to the application. He delegated Secretary of War Henry Knox to say that the U.S. preferred to keep Indian children in Native villages, and would send “one or two Sober men to reside in your Nation, with proper implements of husbandry.” In March 1792 the U.S. Senate agreed to devote $1,500 for “clothing, domestic animals and implements of husbandry, and for encouraging useful artificers to reside” in the villages of the Six Nations. By 1796 that annuity had grown to $4,500.¹⁶

Efforts further south mirrored those in New York and Pennsylvania; officials described the Plan of Civilization, and some Indians voiced assent (though perhaps not enthusiasm). The 1790 federal Treaty of New York with Creeks led by Scots-Creek Alexander McGillivray offered the opportunity to promote the idealized version of non-Native husbandry to the Creeks under McGillivray’s influence. This treaty—which confirmed a land cession Creeks had made at the 1783 Treaty of Augusta, returned land ceded in 1785 at Galphinton, and transferred what remained of Creek territory from Georgia to federal jurisdiction—offered U.S. officials the leverage to promote a shift in Indian food-production methods. In return for good behavior the U.S. proposed to adjudicate future land sales (as they did at Colerain) and to “furnish gratuitously … useful domestic animals, and implements of husbandry.” This gift would ensure that “the Creek nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators.” Timothy Pickering phrased it differently in a letter to George Washington, in which he suggested that these presents would change Creeks “from hunters to husbandmen.”¹⁷

Some Creeks—such as the “New Order” Creeks who already owned cattle—would have appreciated such valuable domesticated animals. Calves and cows cost approximately ten dollars, and beef steers sold at two and a half dollars per year for every year the animal had lived. Bacon sold for around thirty cents per pound.¹⁸ Here too, however, U.S. officials directed their “civilizing” hunger-prevention efforts at Creeks who already raised cattle, perhaps having stolen them during the Revolutionary War.

By portraying the farm implements and animals as presents, treaty negotiators could claim to be stopping Native hunger, practicing diplomacy, and pursuing their civilization agenda. The Treaty of New York stated, “No citizen or inhabitant of the United States shall attempt to hunt or destroy the game on the Creek lands.” The government, by restating its interest in stopping non-Native incursions, committed to record federal recognition and protection of Creek-owned land. Although this stipulation had appeared on other treaties, it had proved difficult to enforce; back in the 1750s Creeks had complained about non-Natives who deliberately overhunted deer in and near Creek territory, which kept Creeks from profiting from deerskins.¹⁹ In 1790, U.S. officials connected drought to crop failure, attacks and murders against white invaders, victual warfare against the horses and cattle that accompanied them, and famine—sometimes more imagined than real. Their efforts to secure animals for Indians must be read as preemption against imagined Indian hunger and its violent consequences.

Cherokees also encouraged Americans’ hopes that Indians would “become” husbandmen, and it was not coincidental that observers connected Native willingness with Native want. In January 1792 a group of Chickamauga Cherokees “surprized” Henry Knox “with a vizit.”²⁰ They reminded him of the terms of the 1791 Treaty of Holston and said they had come to claim “the annual allowance of Goods.” The Cherokees also requested “some ploughs and othe[r] implements of husbandry, as mentioned in the treaty.” In 1794 a group of Cherokees comprising “three old Fellows and a Squaw” approached a fort and begged for food. Observers said they were “almost starv’d with hunger” and fed them. The Chickamaugas’ 1792 visit may have startled Knox, given their previous British loyalties—but Dragging Canoe’s death had changed the face of affairs. The 1794 travelers may have been starving, or they may have been using a hunger metaphor that non-Native observers misinterpreted. By reaffirming treaties, asking for plows, and playing on American perceptions of Native hunger, Cherokees managed to get Americans to distribute trade goods, farm implements, and food aid. In 1796 George Washington sent a talk to the Cherokees that made clear the additional—and by then standard—expectation that Native women would become spinners and weavers if they wanted to receive such distributions.²¹

Not all Indians rushed to implement the U.S. Plan of Civilization; it met with resistance from Indians who had a stable relationship with the federal government and from hostile groups too. The Seneca named Cornplanter was one of the first to point out the inconsistencies in the Americans’ policy. Cornplanter had fought for the British in the American Revolution but had been working with the Americans since then. In the same speech that reminded listeners of George Washington’s reputation as a “town-destroyer,” Cornplanter described the current state of Indian villages. “The Game which the Great Spirit Sent into our country for us to eat, is going from among us,” he observed in a December 1790 message to Washington. Although he claimed that the Senecas believed that the Great Spirit “intended, that we Should till the ground with the plough,” Cornplanter wondered whether the Americans “mean to leave us and our children any land to till.”²²

In his reply to Cornplanter, Washington promised “that all the lands Secured to you by the [1784] treaty of Fort Stanwix … are yours … only your own acts can convey them away.” He liked Cornplanter’s focus “on the Subject of tilling the ground” and pledged that “the United States will be happy to afford you every assistance.”²³ At least at this point, Washington’s Indian policy assumed that Indians could and should deal with hunger themselves but needed new strategies to do so.

At this moment, however, Native Americans remained skeptical of the federal government’s stance on land cessions. During the same meeting where Cornplanter said that Senecas were invested in plow agriculture, he also asked for a return of land that the Six Nations had ceded to the United States at the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix (the Six Nations had refused to ratify the cession once they returned home, but the government acted as if the cession were valid). Washington refused Cornplanter’s request. Other members of the Six Nations showed even less enthusiasm for plows and domesticated animals. Samuel Kirkland sighed at Oneidas’ and Tuscaroras’ “cool reception to the benevolence & generosity of Congress.” They “cared nothing for oxen, or plows.” By contrast, even though Cornplanter had expressed concern, his “attachment and fidelity … could be relied upon,” both in 1791 and 1792. From his seat on the New York-Pennsylvania border, Cornplanter continued to listen to the Americans because Iroquois factionalism made him less willing to ally with Mohawk Joseph Brant and the Seneca Red Jacket.²⁴

Joseph Brant continued to distrust the U.S. government, and he mocked the Plan of Civilization; he was familiar with the longer history of American barbarities like the Sullivan Campaign. From Grand River he monitored goings-on in the United States while continuing to influence the British under the lieutenant governorship of John Graves Simcoe in Upper Canada. Although Brant assured Americans that he would negotiate with them, in his interactions with other Indians he made it clear that he would not. In 1792 he ridiculed George Washington’s invitation to Philadelphia, “particularly” the part related “to planting & Sowing.” This offer “was not important” to Brant, “for he already knew how to plough & to Sow.” Brant also refused to travel to Philadelphia for fear that “the hostile Indians … would See and blame him.” His influence over the Western Confederacy Indians had waned before this time because of Western Indians’ longstanding suspicions of the Iroquois. Many Americans did not place much faith in Brant’s ability to negotiate with the Western Indians: Anthony Wayne said that Brant was “too late, to render us any service with the hostile Indians.”²⁵ It is uncertain what the Americans made of Brant’s critique of the government’s Indian food policy.

To say that the Western Confederacy offered a lukewarm reaction to U.S. proposals would be putting it generously. In March 1791 George Washington sent a talk to the Miami and Wabash tribes, indicating the Americans’ desire to make the Indians “understand the cultivation of the earth” and to teach them “how much better it is … to have comfortable houses, and to have plenty to eat and drink … than to be exposed to all the calamities belonging to a Savage life.” In this assessment Indians lived in a catastrophic state of impermanence and want. Secretary of War Henry Knox sent a speech the following year to Chippewas, Delawares, Miamis, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Wyandots, “and all Other tribes residing to the Southward of the lakes east of the Mississipi, and to the Northward of the River Ohio.” The Americans invited them to Philadelphia, where the United States sought “the opportunity of imparting to you, all the blessings of civilized life.” Such largesse included the chance “to cultivate the earth, and raise corn … oxen, sheep and other domestic animals, to build comfortable houses, and to educate your children, so as ever to dwell upon the land.” Washington’s message conveyed a threat in case the Indians refused his invitation: if they chose to reject the way of life he offered, he warned, “your doom must be Sealed forever.”²⁶ The United States issued threats even when it was incapable of making good on them; the Western Indians would defeat Arthur St. Clair later in 1791.

The Western Confederacy rejected the plan. “The great spirit” gave them “land and fill[ed] it with abundance of wild creatures,” the Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippewas, Delawares, and Munsees said.²⁷ They did not want to become husbandmen because the Great Spirit had provided them with animals that ensured not only a subsistence but an abundance. They also continued to enjoy eating British provisions, which helped support them through the Western Confederacy War. Later, in 1793, the Shawnees would refuse on behalf of the confederacy to negotiate a new boundary with the Americans at Sandusky. Anthony Wayne met those Indians in battle one last time at Fallen Timbers in 1794—and his victory and the subsequent Treaty of Greenville in 1795 changed the face of affairs.

The Treaty of Greenville, in combination with mid-1790s treaties between the United States and Great Britain and the United States and Spain, enabled the government to adopt a less compromising Indian food policy from a position of greater strength.²⁸ During the 1790s and early 1800s, Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois collaborators helped U.S. Indian agents turn the ploughshares of agriculture into the sword of victual imperialism. Officials, in response to Indian claims about hunger, expanded their victual imperialism to include the introduction of fixed prices for foodstuffs. Because Native Americans approved of this price-fixing, the U.S. government was also able to standardize methods of distributing provisions, and to begin thinking about ways to cut down on the quantities of food they dispensed. By the 1810s these changes had reduced Indian land holdings, circumscribed the amount of food aid given to Indians (who were portrayed as increasingly hungry), and turned such food aid into a weapon that destroyed Native bodies.

U.S. officials could not promote the Plan of Civilization without help from Native collaborators, who advised them on everything from land cessions to Indian tastes—sometimes to the detriment of other Indians. Hendrick Aupaumut aided the Americans in 1793 by telling them about Native food preferences, but his efforts were likelier more useful to Americans than they were to Native Americans. It was Aupaumut who suggested that the Americans save money by substituting flour instead of corn “every fourth day” of provisions distributions to the Iroquois. There is some evidence that increased wheat consumption was tied to increased risk of anemia—though, of course, late-eighteenth-century eaters would not have put it in quite those terms.²⁹

Other Indians facilitated land sales. The U.S. government arranged the Treaty of New York through the cooperation of Alexander McGillivray. It was because of McGillivray that Creeks received “a Number of Ploughs & other implements of husbandry” from James Seagrove. For his part McGillivray secured a spot as a brigadier general in the United States army, as well as the right to import tax-free goods through Pensacola, Florida. Although the practice of making side deals persisted, the men making them fall into and out of the records. Alexander McGillivray died in 1793. By that point in time, Cornplanter had fallen from power, and Dragging Canoe was also dead.³⁰ New partnerships would form as a result of Benjamin Hawkins’s work with southern Indians.

In A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, first published in 1848 by the Georgia Historical Society, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins described his approach to the Plan of Civilization and his method of forging collaborative ties with Native Americans. Hawkins’s travels to Indian towns to provide instruction in plow use resembled Samuel Kirkland’s methods earlier in the decade. Like Pickering, he did not want to send Indian children to faraway schools, and he expanded on both Pickering’s and Kirkland’s ideas by constructing a model farm. He also distributed provisions. One striking difference between the southern arm of the Plan of Civilization and its northern counterpart was the order in which Hawkins hoped to “convert” Indians: he focused on women first and men second. He theorized that if he could convince women to spin they would grow independent of their husbands, thus forcing Native men to farm to reestablish their wives’ dependence on them. Hawkins needed to balance Indian practices, government wishes to reduce the cost of gifted trade goods and provisions, and the maintenance of peace between non-Natives and Natives. Hawkins occupied an ambivalent position from his post in Indian country: he was an elite white American, but he also understood Creek customs better than other officials because of his commitment to living with Indians.³¹

A “well cultivated and planted” fruit and vegetable garden; an orchard of peach trees; plans to fence his fields; residence among the Lower Creeks on his own farm; his distributions of provisions when he deemed it suitable: these were the actions and possessions that Benjamin Hawkins used to bolster his authority. He wanted to use his farm “to introduce a regular husbandry to serve as a model and stimulus, for the neighboring towns who crowd the public shops here.”³² Hawkins set up his farm in a location where he believed the Creeks seemed most likely to seek trade goods and gifts of food in lieu of growing provisions for themselves. He hoped that his garden’s bounty would champion farming to the Indians he perceived as idle. His efforts had a better chance of succeeding than Kirkland’s in part because Hawkins could, by growing his own food, also play the role of a generous host.

It is almost certain that Hawkins, like so many before him, labored under the mistaken belief that hungry Indians depended on him. These convictions existed in tension with Hawkins’s realization that the Creeks were good at feeding themselves. He had gained experience in Indian diplomacy at the Treaty of Colerain, where he became familiar with contemporary assessments of Indians’ appetites. Creeks made an exception in allowing Hawkins to become self-sufficient. Usually when they allotted garden plots to the non-Natives who lived among them, Creeks controlled the amount of food residents could grow because they expected men to purchase most of their produce from Creek women.³³ It is possible Hawkins did not know about this limitation.

Sometime in 1798 or 1799, it became clear that the plan to farm by example was not winning many followers. Writing in the third person, Hawkins stated his doubts “of succeeding here in establishing a regular husbandry.” If his approach did not gain adherents, Hawkins decided that he would move his farm away from the town, “and aid the villages where success seems to be infallible.”³⁴ Previous experience had taught him not to hope for immediate victory in altering Indian farming, but he also wrote a backup strategy that would fudge the number of converts by providing aid only to the villages that already seemed amenable to Hawkins’s methods. His tactics also borrowed from Pickering’s ideas, which provided for the presence of American Indian agents in Native villages as a stopgap against young men relapsing back into hunting habits and, more significantly, as a preventative against famine.

There was no need to implement his backup plan because he found Indians who were willing to work with him. He related varying success in the thirty-seven Creek towns he charted on the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, as well as among the Cherokees. He bestowed the most praise on Natives who used plows, raised cattle, and enslaved Africans. The Creek called the Bird Tail King, who had mocked the Georgians at Colerain, lived at Hitchetee, where he resided on a plantation “well fenced, and cultivated with the plough.” Hawkins spent a day with the Bird Tail King in the spring of 1799, bringing “a plough completely fixed” and showing him “how to use it.” Hawkins reported that the Bird Tail King preferred the plow “over the slow and laborious hand hoe.” His description of a Creek man’s opinion about hoe efficacy transferred responsibility for agriculture into male hands. Hawkins seemed happy to see that the Bird Tail King’s family had “more than doubled their crop of corn and potatoes.” They “begin to know how to turn their corn to account, by giving it to their hogs,” he wrote. Hawkins also reported that some of the Cherokees “old and young appear to be happy” about the growth of their farms, “vegetables to be had in plenty … bacon, colewarts, and turnips, at several houses,” and an increase in “their stock of hogs and cattle.”³⁵

Not only did Hawkins demonstrate his eagerness to live among the Indians and serve as a visual example of how to farm; he also traveled to various villages and made sure that Indians used American plows properly, produced corn to feed their animals rather than themselves, and grew abundant provisions that Hawkins deemed suitable for Natives. It is interesting to note that some of these crops could not be eaten. Hawkins reported offering Creeks “cotton and flax seed” to plant in 1797.³⁶ His reforms reveal the conflicting ideas that undergirded U.S. victual imperialism: assumptions that Indians would grow edible crops, and expectations that Indians would produce cash crops instead of grains.

It must be remembered that there was little reason for Indians to worry about what Americans thought of their food production, and so there were limits to the extent to which Native Americans proved willing to collaborate. Creeks and Cherokees continued raising domesticated animals in ways that suited them. One Creek chief, Toolk-au-bat-che Haujo, owned five hundred cattle, but “although apparently very indigent,” observed Hawkins, “he never sells any.” Instead, Toolk-au-bat-che Haujo offered “proofs of unbounded hospitality; he seldom kills less than two large beeves a fortnight, for his friends and acquaintances” despite the fact that “The town is on the decline … badly fenced … [and] the land is much exhausted with continued culture.” Although the town’s soils suffered from depletion, Toolk-au-bat-che Haujo refused to sell cattle for cash, as Hawkins and others encouraged him to do, and Hawkins made no mention of manure fertilization. Toolk-au-bat-che Haujo slaughtered domesticated animals as prestige gifts to obtain and maintain the loyalty of other Indians. In other towns Hawkins critiqued Indian animal usage for different reasons. In describing a village below “Coo-sau-dee,” Hawkins lamented the fact that the Indians kept no cattle and only owned “a few hogs and horses.” Their pig raising did not meet with his approval either; they used to possess “the largest and best breed of hogs in the nation, but have lost them by carelessness or inattention,” he wrote.³⁷

While some southern Indians annoyed U.S. officials by raising livestock in irregular ways, others worried observers by refusing to plant crops as regularly as their non-Native counterparts. Hawkins described the Cussetas, by then the largest village of the Lower Creeks, who “associate, more than any other Indians, with their white neighbors.” These Indians, according to Hawkins, “know not the season for planting, or if they do, they never avail themselves of what they know, as they always plant a month too late.” They became “fond of visiting” the whites nearby, and their young Indians “are more rude, more inclined to be tricky, and more difficult to govern, than those who do not associate with them.” Other Indians continued to ask for provisions. Creek women came to Hawkins to ask for corn and salt. They also crept onto Hawkins’s fields to steal vegetables such as cabbage.³⁸ Even Lower Creeks, who had in the past enjoyed peaceful relationships with U.S. agents and the country’s inhabitants, proved reluctant to adopt the Plan of Civilization in its entirety. Creeks who lived near whites seemed disinclined to farm, and such nearness, according to Hawkins, bred rudeness, unruliness, and discontent.

In addition to trying to “reform” Indian agriculture and animal use, Hawkins made two other significant changes. First, he began to fix prices for food and regulate its sale in response to the Indians who asked him to do so. By 1799 he had set the costs of Indian-produced bacon, beef, butter, capons, cheese, corn, eggs, field peas, fowls, ground peas, hickory nut oil, pork, potatoes, and pumpkins. Whereas before his residency “there was no market for provisions,” and “The wants of the traders were few,” he had established “a regular market” and instituted a system of “weights and measures.”³⁹ In 1807, he prohibited white traders living in town from trading livestock, because their prices interfered with Indians’ profits. Hawkins observed that Indians themselves had little regard for conventional pricing. He complained that Creeks priced cattle high because they had been “accustomed to sell fowls, bacon, and beef at Pensacola, at an extravagant price” and now expected “the same” at home, “making no allowance for the expense of carriage or between the war and peace price of provisions.” Creeks charged lower prices for pork and corn than merchants in Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia around the same time period, and they charged more than the market price for summer butter.⁴⁰

On the one hand, Hawkins’s price-fixing initiatives were more indicative of early modern and colonial moral economies—and thus of continuity—than of a major transformation in Indian country. When prices favored Creeks, Native women who grew, raised, and prepared most of these foodstuffs, and who competed with the garden produce sold by enslaved Creeks, likely appreciated the fact that Hawkins made it easier for them to sell their food.⁴¹ On the other hand, there was change here too in Indians’ desires to be able to intervene more decisively in price-fixing choices. When prices seemed unusual, the autonomous act of deciding costs probably mattered more to Indians than profits.

The second major change that Hawkins introduced in the south was a continuation of Anthony Wayne’s reform of U.S. food diplomacy at Greenville, which had set a precedent for limiting food aid. Hawkins subsequently reduced alcohol distributions at treaties, cut gifts of trade goods, and insisted upon the use of rations as payment for services rendered. Indian advisors had urged U.S. officials to regulate alcohol use at treaties. In 1793, for instance, Hendrick Aupaumut claimed that “a dram after each council” would suffice, because if attendees reached the point of demanding rum by the cask it would not do to refuse them—but the consequences would be dangerous. At a 1797 meeting with unidentified southern Indians (probably Cherokees), Hawkins described receiving an application from the Indians that he “indulge them with a little whiskey.” Hawkins “answered no, not one drop till the business they convened on was completely adjusted.” He reported that “after some hesitation, the chiefs agreed that this decision was just” on account of the injuries “done them when in a state of drunkenness.”⁴²

Anthony Wayne had acted similarly at the Treaty of Greenville, and Little Turtle would echo this sentiment in 1802, when he asked President Thomas Jefferson to prohibit the sale of liquor not only in Indian camps at treaties but also in their towns. Hawkins gave flaxseed and cotton to the Creeks in lieu of giving away presents. He observed that Indians seemed skeptical about the decrease in gift giving. In 1801 he bragged that the Creeks, who used to be “the most numerous, proud, haughty and ill behaved Indians in the agency South of Ohio,” changed their ways when he limited them to one thousand rations a year. These he apportioned “only to use on public business and at the request of the agent.” Although “This regulation” of distributing rations as payment “was disliked at first,” by 1801 a Creek chief “going to the frontiers will come 20 or 30 miles to me to know if I have any commands which he can execute to get an order for provisions.”⁴³

Changes to pricing and diplomacy helped to create a paradoxical food policy that characterized Indians as simultaneously self-sufficient, needy, and violent. These Indians could agree with Hawkins that drinking alcohol was a mistake, which theoretically paved the way to greater independence from the United States. They also, however, continued to steal “hogs, beef and horses” after being denied presents.⁴⁴ But whereas during the 1780s and 1790s the U.S. government had responded to such contradictions by practicing generous diplomacy, its stance on Indian affairs shifted between the late 1790s and early 1810s.

These efforts constituted an entering wedge that, in the late 1790s, the U.S. government used to reduce their food aid to Indians. In 1796 the Americans moved into Niagara, announcing as they did so that they would stop feeding the Indians who traveled there. This move to reduce provisions distributions affected Indians from Creek country to Iroquois territory. In 1796 Timothy Pickering wrote to his successor as secretary of war—James McHenry—and suggested that American generosity had to end. “While the Indian war continued at the westward, and a British war was apprehended,” he explained, “the Government was unceasing in its endeavours to Secure the friendship of the Six Nations.” Treaties “were held and liberal Supplies furnished.” “Now,” however, “circumstances are so changed as to render a restriction of Such Supplies both proper and practicable.” Pickering encouraged McHenry to confine his budget to the annuity advanced to the Indians. From these funds, blacksmiths would receive money to forge plows and shoe horses, and officials would pay schoolmasters to teach and enforce the art of American-style husbandry. “Provisions and cloathing,” Pickering cautioned, should be “issued very Sparingly.” Although he admitted that no one would be able to enact these changes immediately, the Americans could “curtail” the supplies “more and more, until the expenditures come nearly to the fixed annuity.”⁴⁵

These trends conformed to broader developments in U.S. policy. Correspondence in the late 1790s reveals the War Department critiquing military commanders for holding talks with Indians (which resulted in “great and unnecessary expenditures of the public provisions”). In May 1800 the U.S. government moved to standardize the distribution of foodstuffs to Indians. A representative from the Ways and Means Committee observed to the House of Representatives that the prices for rations had risen in previous years. Budget makers struggled to track these costs. Different military posts recorded their distributions of provisions for Indians inside the accounts with “the usual supply of army provisions”; no separate account of Indian rations existed. The committee suggested the need for separate accounts so the government would “know how much money is expended in this manner.”⁴⁶ Rations for Indians were to come from military budgets, but they were to be kept distinct from budgets for soldiers—and they were to be distributed by nonmilitary men. This was the triumph of a commodity-exchange economy. The Americans succeeded where Jeffery Amherst and Frederick Haldimand had failed. The feasts, the gifts of animals, the providing of food on the way to treaties, and even the military rations distributed in larger quantities to Indians than they were to non-Natives became subservient to rations as payment. This was the endgame of Indians’ fight against hunger on their own terms.

The first two decades of the 1800s witnessed pan-Indian movements led by the Shawnees Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, further fractures in Creek country that led to the Red Stick war, and the War of 1812, which revived U.S.-British antagonism. Indian portrayals of their hunger varied widely during this period. During the early 1800s, Indians whom Benjamin Hawkins had convinced to farm began selling their surplus produce at the prices he had fixed, rather than depositing it for communal crop storage. In July 1805, a Creek called Hopoie Mico blamed Hawkins for the death of two Native girls. “You know this enemy called hunger,” he said, and chastised Hawkins for his inability “to save many of our little ones from being murdered” by it.⁴⁷ Hawkins was not yet himself an opponent of the Creeks, but the Creeks were fighting a proxy war against the personified adversary that Hawkins’s policies had helped to create.

Creeks were hungry—some were even dying of starvation—but they also continued to ignore and embrace hunger in symbolic acts. In 1811 Tecumseh had appeared in Creek towns to rally Indians to war against the Americans. In August 1812—one month after the beginning of the War of 1812—unidentified Indians (likely Red Sticks) committed victual warfare. They “Murdered a young man[,] … Burnt Several Cabins,” and began “Collecting their Cattle … to drive to the Nation.” It was no mistake that Tenskwatawa called for a total eschewal of non-Native foodstuffs among Iroquois, Chickamauga, Creek, Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee followers. Alcohol, bread, and the meat of domesticated animals became anathema, as did tools forged in the American style, such as plows. Tenskwatawa, like the Delaware prophet Neolin before him, wanted Indians to return to a diet of beans, corn, maple sugar, and deer meat—the diet of a semisedentary, hunting people.⁴⁸

These calls did not stop Creeks from eating cattle, but they ate them only when necessary. In addition to stealing cattle, the Red Sticks also started “to destroy the cattle, hogs, fowls, implements of husbandry” and to throw “hoes and axes into the rivers.”⁴⁹ Indians sometimes wrecked non-Native foodstuffs, sometimes stole them, and sometimes made it difficult to continue producing them. Supposedly hungry Creeks killed and ate non-Native sources of meat and broke the non-Native tools used to produce crops and prevent hunger. By the 1810s Red Stick Creeks implied that Indians should share hunger with each other in victual warfare against American victual imperialism and its Native collaborators.

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, federal Indian policy transformed food aid into a tool of destruction. Americans halted their attempts to reduce food distributions during the conflict—some 5,257 Indians received provisions at American posts in 1814, for example, and a Chippewa speaking for Chippewa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Seneca, and Wyandot Indians in 1815 could still request “plenty of food” and receive it—but this response became unusual. Benjamin Hawkins reported Creek complaints that the U.S. government had withheld their annual annuity payments in 1812, 1813, and 1814. More significant still was that in 1817, Creeks whose annuities had been reinstated and who received provisions had to pay for their provisions using part of that annuity.⁵⁰ The United States had begun to charge for food aid and to use it in a way that encouraged Indian indebtedness. After the War of 1812 the government finally managed to quantify and standardize the amount of food required to placate Indian allies.

Some American officials even hoped that such provisions would wreak havoc on Native bodies. In 1815 Benjamin Stickney, Indian agent at Fort Wayne, wrote to the secretary of war and described the “observations” he “had the opportunity of making.” Stickney had discovered “that three or four months’ full feeding on meat and bread, even without ardent spirit, will bring on disease, and, in six or eight months, great mortality.” Stickney joined Edinburgh doctor William Robertson, American Benjamin Rush, Mahican Hendrick Aupaumut, and other commentators on Native health, but the aims had changed. Stickney wanted to sicken Indians rather than keep them healthy. He paused long enough to wonder whether it would “be considered a proper mode of warfare” to encourage this growth of disease. But he did not ponder the question for long, because the costs compensated for his moral reservations: “more Indians might be killed with the expense of $100,000 in this way, than $1,000,000 expended in the support of armies to go against them,” he concluded. Even without the destructive effects of alcohol, the writer could tell that wheat and meat had deleterious effects on Indians. By 1822 Stickney was a subagent to the Ottawas and earned $500 per year. His appointment, significantly, had been made by the War Department—rather than by the president or by one of the more knowledgeable superintendents of Indian Affairs.⁵¹

Stickney was a minor official in the overall structure of the U.S. government. There does not seem to be correspondence confirming that significant politicians and military strategists took his suggestions seriously. It is, however, instructive that Stickney felt comfortable making these suggestions, because they indicated how far the victual imperialistic aspects of the Plan of Civilization could be pushed. The answer to the question of whether Stickney’s strategy counted as warfare was irrelevant. Federal Indian agents did not need to offer Indians food that killed them off because they had become powerful enough to lie about Indian hunger and to take land in other ways. At the same time that the U.S. government began to deemphasize food diplomacy and to distribute foodstuffs that fostered disease, it acquired Native ground.

Landgrabs may have started as individual state actions, but they gradually became federal policy that hungrily consumed Indian land. The states acquired territory, to be sure. The Creeks knew Governor Blount of Georgia as Fusse Mico, or the Dirt King. The Cherokees called him the Dirt Captain. But representatives for the United States won land cessions from Indians at Fort Stanwix in 1784, Fort McIntosh in 1785, Galphinton in 1785, Hopewell in 1785, Fort Finney in 1786, Shoulderborne in 1786, Fort Harmar in 1789, New York in 1790, Holston in 1791, Greenville in 1795, Colerain in 1796, Big Tree in 1797, Fort Wilkinson in 1802, Fort Wayne in 1803, Washington in 1805, and at the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814.⁵²

Although this was a period of sweeping policy changes, these decades were also characterized by continuity in the form of Indian resistance. In an 1805 speech to a Christian missionary at Buffalo Creek, the Seneca Red Jacket offered his interpretation of early American history.

There was a time when our forefathers owned this great island.… The Great Spirit had made it for the use of Indians. He had created the buffalo, the deer, and other animals for food. He had made the bear and the beaver.… He had scattered them over the country, and taught us how to take them. He had caused the earth to produce corn for bread.… But an evil day came upon us. Your forefathers crossed the great water, and landed on this island. Their numbers were small. They found friends and not enemies.… We gave them corn and meat, they gave us poison (alluding, it is supposed to ardent spirits) in return.… Yet we did not fear them. We took them to be friends. They called us brothers. We believed them, and gave them a larger seat. At length their numbers had greatly increased. They wanted more land; they wanted our country.… Wars took place. Indians were hired to fight against Indians, and many of our people were destroyed. They also brought strong liquor amongst us. It was strong and powerful, and has slain thousands.⁵³

The history that Red Jacket narrated stood in sharp contrast to the one that Timothy Pickering recited to Cornplanter in 1791 and may even explain why Red Jacket was so critical of Pickering’s recitation at the time.⁵⁴ Pickering’s Englishmen were self-sufficient husbandmen who fed starving Indians. Red Jacket’s Indians were self-sufficient hunters and farmers who offered food to starving English even when those invaders asked for land. The man who heard this speech assumed that the poison to which Red Jacket referred was liquor—he glossed poison with the parenthetical phrase “alluding, it is supposed to ardent spirits”—but Red Jacket mentioned “strong liquor” as a separate commodity a few lines later.⁵⁵ It seems likelier that Red Jacket was describing actual poison, which early English colonists employed against Indians. Colonists, and then white American inhabitants, reciprocated food gifts with poison, land hunger, and eventually war.

By the 1810s the U.S. government had won power over Indians by engaging in victual imperialism—specifically, by implementing the Plan of Civilization: a federal food policy that reduced Indian hunting, encouraged cattle ranching, fixed prices, interfered with grain production, reworked gender roles, and reduced food aid. These methods reveal the unrelenting, daily erosion of Indian food sovereignty, which occurred alongside American landgrabs. It was this interference with Native food systems that facilitated Indian land losses.

Some of these customs were more transferable than others. U.S. Indian agents were not the only people to practice victual imperialism by fixing prices for food, and Native Americans were not the only people to lose the fight against hunger because they lost the authority to fight hunger themselves. When black colonists left Nova Scotia, ideas about food laws and hunger prevention traveled with them to Africa. The process of colonization in Nova Scotia sent people across the ocean to Sierra Leone with collective ideas about the new, less compromising iteration of British food aid, and about the type of victual imperialism people practiced by institutionalizing colonial laws. Strategies for confronting hunger changed again in Africa. It was access to food that would shape black Loyalists’ relationships with white leaders in Sierra Leone, it was hunger prevention that would foster their sense of political identity, and it was food laws that would ultimately create conflict with Africans and spark a food riot with drastic results.