Properties of Empire

Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier

Ian Saxine

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479832125
• eBook ISBN: 9781479820061
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

A fascinating history of a contested frontier, where struggles over landownership brought Native Americans and English colonists together

Properties of Empire shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain's empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights.

As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians' unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.

Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian "sales" of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

1 / Networks of Property and Belonging: Land Use in the Seventeenth Century

Over the course of the seventeenth century, divisions within Massachusetts society over the legitimacy of various claims to landownership became closely entwined with questions over the place of Indian land rights within the English imperial system. That process cannot be understood without examining the distinct Wabanaki and English ideas about land use and property, each shaped by their respective environments, culture, and political structure, around the time of sustained contact between them after 1600. For both Wabanakis and English people, the early seventeenth century was a time of wrenching transformation. As a result, present-day New England was the site of an encounter between multiple systems of property entering a period of instability.

The Land

More than just a stage, the land itself was an actor in the unfolding drama. Both Indians and colonists had to adapt their strategies for survival in modern Maine. Farmers struggled with rocky, acidic soil and short growing seasons, but water proved as important as the soil in shaping life in the region. Waterways provided essential sources of food and the quickest transportation routes for all residents until after the American Revolution. North and east of Casco Bay (beyond today’s Portland), New England’s smooth coastline becomes dotted with hundreds of islands creating countless harbors, bays, and inlets. Several large rivers—the Saco, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot—slice their way across the landscape before spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. When long winters depleted food stores and hunting failed, many residents depended on fish and clams during the lean months of early spring. As the seventeenth century progressed, winters grew harsher, while all seasons grew less predictable as part of a trend known as the Little Ice Age. The difficulty of agriculture and unpredictability of other food sources meant the region could not support large numbers of people year-round. As a result, both absolute numbers and population density remained low in the region throughout the colonial era. Before a series of epidemics drove down their numbers, perhaps 10,000 Indians lived within the boundaries of present-day Maine in 1600. The region’s total human population did not reach 10,000 again until around 1730.1 Practicing more intensive agriculture and bringing livestock allowed the colonists to feed more people per acre than the Wabanakis, but eighteenth-century Maine’s largest town—Falmouth (now Portland)—could only feed itself with supply ships from Boston by the 1730s. With 2,400 inhabitants in 1749, Falmouth was not large even by the standards of colonial America, but its residents nevertheless suffered periodic food shortages the surrounding communities could not alleviate.2 Writing for a Massachusetts audience in 1715, a minister from the town of York tried to brag about his neighbors’ Spartan lifestyle, claiming “we in the Borders of the Country are glad of Barley Cakes,” in contrast to his readers’ “White Bread.”3

English newcomers called themselves “settlers,” the language revealing their intent to tame a landscape that was—even apart from how they viewed its Wabanaki inhabitants—wild. They failed. Moose, bears, and other large animals remained common well into the eighteenth century.4 When winter abated, clouds of insects rose up to torment the unprepared. Certain times of year were bad enough that colonial authorities scheduled repairs on Maine’s Fort Richmond around them during the 1740s.5 Travel remained difficult after over a century of British occupation. Boston attorney Daniel Farnum learned for himself just how unsettled the Maine frontier remained in 1750. Tasked with collecting evidence for a sensational murder trial that took place near the coastal hamlet of Wiscasset, Farnum spent a week in February 1750 carrying out his task. To gather evidence and notify witnesses in the several hardscrabble communities on Casco Bay’s northern coastline, Farnum had to travel by open whaleboat in the “exceeding cold.”6

The landscape in question that Indians and colonists called home remained sparsely populated and—in terms of human settlement—lightly touched. Most homes were small. Aside from a handful of meetinghouses and a few chapels Wabanaki Catholic converts put up, the only sizeable structures in the region were forts. The two-story, box-shaped block houses studding the colonial towns on the frontier served as grim testimony that questions of land use, even among small numbers of people, frequently turned violent.

Community in the Dawnland

Before Europeans arrived, the people and the land shared a name: “Wabanaki” meant people of the “land of the dawn,” or “Dawnland.”7 This shared name captured how the people thought about their relationship to where they lived. In eighteenth-century conferences with colonial leaders, Wabanaki speakers said they “belonged” to rivers or stretches of land.8 In contrast, early modern English people “belonged” to towns or other human communities rather than to the land itself.9 To belong to a place—or person—implies a relationship, and the early modern English usage of the term to describe a person’s residence in those terms was no accident, reflecting the web of privileges and obligations bound up in town life.10 The Wabanaki claims to belong to land or rivers stemmed from their view that their community privileges and obligations extended beyond the human occupants. Like other Eastern Algonquian speakers, the Wabanakis often described the land as “Wlôgan”: the Common Pot.11

The “common pot” metaphor captured the Wabanaki worldview, which recognized they shared the land with other animals and people. As a result, the Wabanakis managed available resources in cooperation with animals and otherworldly beings rather than wielding dominion over them, as European Christians believed their God had directed them to do in the Book of Genesis.12 Instead, the Wabanakis lived in what scholars call an “animate” world, in which in which people, animals, and even some nonliving things had a spirit or force, and they were conscious of sharing a network of relations with humans and others. Wabanakis told stories of an earlier mythical age when humans and animals had similar characteristics. Individuals who were adept at tapping into spiritual power could still blur these distinctions, such as a war chief who could escape foes by transforming into a fish and swimming to safety.13 Tales about Gluskap, a mythic figure who served as an ideal for Wabanaki men, emphasized the importance of conserving game and fish for future generations.14 Numerous stories warned about resource hoarding and selfishness.15

The Wabanaki belief system reflected their lived reality of sharing an ecosystem with limited resources. Wabanakis pursued a seasonally varied subsistence strategy refined over time to make the most of their environment. Some groups practiced maize horticulture, which had spread from the Southwest and had reached the Saco River by 1400, and the St. John River by 1690. Despite this, a short growing season made the plant an unreliable staple east of the Kennebec, and the poor soil in many locations encouraged the Wabanakis to rely on diverse food sources.16 Before 1600, most evidence of maize production north of the Saco exists at inland village sites, while coastal residents exploited marine resources.17 With the exception of some larger villages in the south, which could number up to a thousand inhabitants, Dawnland residents spent much of the year in family bands of between fifteen to twenty-five people, living in easily constructed wood and bark homes called wigwams suited to their mobile subsistence strategy.18 During the winter, family bands hunted moose and deer inland, using snowshoes to pursue their prey. In spring and autumn, Families gathered in larger villages for spring planting and harvest in autumn, with some southern villages growing beans and squash along with corn. In between planting, weeding, and harvesting, the people traveled to gather wild plants, nuts, and berries, catch fish and shellfish in the rivers and seacoast, and take seabirds and seals where available.19

Rooted in these environmental and religious realities, Wabanaki concepts of property emphasized relationships bound by reciprocity and mutual obligation. Control of resources was intimately tied together with social relations. Family bands headed by a male hunter served as the basic economic and social unit. These bands grouped into lineages claiming a shared male ancestor, with fluid membership shifting due to marriages, changes in subsistence patterns, or political disagreements. Gatherings of multiple lineages into one or more villages formed what Europeans labeled a “tribe.”20 These tribes were in a state of flux during the early and mid-seventeenth century, as epidemics and wars with rival nations sparked migrations and consolidations in response (discussed in chapter 2). Dawnland residents did not fully coalesce into the political alignments discussed in this book until after 1650, in a sense mirroring events in the British Isles, where England and Scotland finally formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.

Although the precise size and structure of political groupings changed over time, the Wabanakis were a consensus-based society. Leaders, called sagamores, ruled through example and exhortation rather than coercion. European observers from the earliest years of contact until the late eighteenth century from Casco Bay to the St. Lawrence River agreed on this fact.21 “Their Sagamors are no Kings,” Captain Christopher Levett wrote of Casco Bay Indians he met in 1623, “for I can see no Government or Law amongst them but Club Law: and they call all Masters of Shippes Saga-more, or any other man, they see have a commaund of men.”22 Joseph Aubery, a Jesuit missionary who lived among the Wabanakis of Meductic and Odanak, reported in 1710: “Nothing of great importance is discussed or decided except . . . in a numerous Council. The notables—that is to say, the elders—and the captains of war-parties assemble. A speaker rises in their midst, and pronounces a discourse. If he perorate aptly, eloquently, or cleverly, he wins his cause; if timidly, hesitatingly, inelegantly, his cause is lost.”23

A consensus-based society did not mean the Wabanakis lacked social distinctions. Several seventeenth-century European observers noted sagamores and other “principal men and young women” distinguished themselves by certain dress and manners.24 Individuals wielded different amounts of personal power derived from their performance as providers, speakers, shamans, or warriors. Wabanakis did not seek power to dominate but rather to achieve prestige and independence. Like property, power depended on the acknowledgment of others. Wabanakis associated the two by honoring those who gave rather than amassed wealth. Both Wabanaki men and women had to demonstrate power throughout their lives. Dawnland residents recognized differences based on age, gender, and ability.25 Women and men performed distinct yet complementary tasks, with men hunting and women preparing and storing meat, men clearing the fields and women planting corn. Unlike Iroquoian-speaking Indians in the American Northeast, most Wabanaki women lacked formal political power. Wives, sisters, and daughters of powerful men did enjoy higher status, however.26 Wabanaki women had a say in community decisions, to which their participation in complementary patterns of gender-specific labor entitled them. The indirect (and, to Europeans, often invisible) nature of Wabanaki women’s influence meant that clashing ideas of gender roles did not complicate Wabanaki relations with Europeans to the degree that occurred in many other parts of the Americas.27

With few exceptions, only adult men who had reached full status as successful hunters—indicating they held both earthly and spiritual power—contributed to decision-making in formal councils.28 These councils deliberated on how to conduct trade, diplomacy, and war. When negotiating with Europeans, sagamores frequently interrupted proceedings to confer with their councils. Sometimes large numbers of people assembled for important treaties. When one Massachusetts land speculator met with Penobscot leaders in 1735, he counted sixty-four men, “with a considerable Number of Squaws and Children” gathered for the talk. If wives and children accompanied all the men, then more than three hundred Indians, or almost half of the Penobscots, had shown up for the conference.29 For sagamores, bringing large numbers of people to a treaty gave proof that they indeed spoke for numerous followers. It also meant that if new topics arose during discussions that the village had not authorized their leaders to act upon, they could more quickly be consulted.

Wabanaki decisions about use and distribution of land occurred in this context of consensus and reciprocity. Although scholars agree the Wabanakis—like other Native Americans—exercised control over distinct territories, little evidence survives indicating how Wabanakis determined which individuals and groups could use which land before 1600.30 Early European observers, busy sizing Wabanakis up as potential trading partners, allies, or enemies, devoted little attention to the matter. Most later, better-documented conversations between Wabanakis and British colonists focused on questions of political identity of Indian landholders rather than distinguishing which Penobscots or Kennebecs used a particular place.

However obscure the details, surviving evidence proves the Wabanakis recognized distinct use rights for different groups of people. After meeting with a Massachusetts commission in 1753, some Kennebecs promised, “We will inform the Relations and Friends to the Owners of these Lands what has been said.”31 Judging from seventeenth-century agreements with English colonists, these rights included access to hunting and fishing in certain areas.32 Wabanakis articulated these claims to residents of Brunswick during the early eighteenth century. In 1737 prominent residents there wrote to the Massachusetts General Court to complain locals “conversant among the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Wabanaki Glossary
• Names, Places, and Dates
• Introduction: Power and Property
• 1. Networks of Property and Belonging: Land Use in the Seventeenth Century
• 2. Dawnland Encounters, 1600–1713
• 3. Land Claims, 1713–1722
• 4. Breaking—and Making—the Peace, 1722–1727
• 5. In Defiance of the Proprietors, 1727–1735
• 6. The Rightful Owners Thereof, 1735–1741
• 7. Troubled Times, 1741–1752
• 8. Contrary to Their Own Laws, 1749–1755
• Conclusion. Treaties Buried and Lost: Indigenous Rights and Colonial Property since 1755
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author