From November 1794 to October 1795, President George Washington’s administration brokered three separate treaties with Britain, Spain, and the Confederated Tribes of the Ohio Country. Besides establishing America’s place on the global stage, these treaties served to fundamentally alter the fortunes of the nation’s western frontier. Since the era of the Seven Years War, the primary obstacles to western expansion and the region’s overall economic health centered around the lack of access to the Mississippi River, foreign soldiers operating in disputed territory, and hostile relations with Native nations throughout the western backcountry. In that single, eleven-month period, President Washington’s diplomats addressed and resolved each of these problematic situations. As a result, the American West experienced an age of unprecedented growth and expansion that set the stage for future dreams of its own “Manifest Destiny.”
No Gateway to the West
Since the earliest days of settlement in the Ohio River valley, the region had been one of unrealized potential. Although it was rich in natural resources, it had been considered limited by the realities of contemporary geopolitics. When British settlers first began moving into Western Pennsylvania, they were immediately stymied by hostile economic competition with the agents of New France. Despite the region being claimed by Britain’s allies, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, that reality rarely manifested as a benefit. In their highly competitive villages, the Iroquoian subjects of the Ohio Country often favored trade terms set forth by Quebec, and the “Covenant Chain” that bonded the British and Iroquois was superficial at best. At the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756, the previously unspoken alliance between the Ohioans and King Louis became official, and the Ohio River valley swiftly transformed from a trade zone to a war zone in spectacular fashion.
Although the French were defeated in 1763, the war revealed one of the most glaring obstacles to Britain’s financial exploitation of the west—they were not alone. France’s prior control of the Ohio Country was a major step in a vast plan to control the whole of the American frontier. With its occupation of the region, France had unified it into a pre-existing sector of influence that included the St. Lawrence River valley, Great Lakes, Illinois Country, and Louisiana. To be truly realized, Britain’s fortunes in the west required an accessible outlet for the raw materials that it harvested there. When France connected its continent-wide network, it linked the Mississippi River, Ohio River, and Great Lakes in a way that effectively blocked any of Britain’s potential future growth. Without controlling those rivers and their treasured outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, Britain was forced to lug its wares over the Appalachian Mountains to the major cities of the coast. This cumbersome and expensive system was profitable, but not nearly as much as simply shipping them west and south along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.