Properties of Empire by Ian Saxine

Author:Ian Saxine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036100 History / United States / State & Local / New England (ct, Ma, Me, Nh, Ri, Vt), HIS028000 History / Native American
Publisher: New York University Press

7 / Troubled Times, 1741–1752

Beginning in 1741, the dynamics encouraging influential Maine land speculators to view their own investments as tied to Indian land rights began to shift. Multiple factors accounted for this turn of events, but the most important was the arrival of William Shirley to replace Jonathan Belcher as governor of Massachusetts. A member of the Muscongus Company, an associate of Samuel Waldo, and a strident Francophobe, Shirley devoted his fifteen years (1741–56) in the governor’s chair to gaining wealth through land speculation and prestige by fighting the French. Previous Bay Colony governors had engaged in frontier land speculation, but never before had Massachusetts Indian policy been helmed by a man so personally invested in overriding Wabanaki land claims. The Muscongus Proprietors had already led the way among land companies in conducting their own diplomatic initiatives in 1720 and in 1735, provoking crises each time. With a Muscongus Proprietor now responsible for conducting Bay Colony relations with the Wabanakis, the land companies’ already strong influence over Massachusetts’s Indian policy rose to new heights. Unlike during the years immediately following Dummer’s Treaty, this influence would now more often work against Wabanaki land rights and the frontier détente in general.

As it had before 1741, the contest over landed property operated alongside ongoing negotiations over trade, religion, and occasional acts of violence between Wabanakis and colonists—usually involving livestock killings. Growing numbers of colonists in Maine (totaling perhaps twelve thousand) led to an uptick in those events.1 The machinations of imperial powers on both sides of the Atlantic also sent shockwaves across the region. The renewal of war between the British and French empires in North America temporarily brought violence back to the frontier, while hardening many colonists’ attitudes toward both Indians and absentee land speculators. Despite the turmoil, Wabanaki and Massachusetts leaders (Shirley notwithstanding) achieved notable success in resolving their differences unrelated to the question of landownership. Dummer’s Treaty still held significant weight as a foundation on which the two sides could negotiate. Not least, many speculators’ ongoing reliance on Indian land rights—at least in the abstract—and desire to avoid investment-destroying wars meant that the treaty still helped to bind Massachusetts to a reciprocal relationship with the Wabanakis, however troubled.

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