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Show 34 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT penalty of 10 shillings an acre on anyone who purchased or leased land from Indians.2 Other regulations attempted to ban the use of liquor in trade by licensing traders and excluding from the trade those who continued to supply it. Great Britain came to realize that by leaving control over Indian relations, including negotiations over lands, to the individual Colonies, it had permitted major grievances to develop between the races, and that, if difficulties were to be avoided in the future, it must take from the Colonies some of their power. The Imperial Government therefore appointed William Johnson in 1755 and John Stuart in 1762 as superintendents of departments of Indian affairs for the northern and southern tribes respectively, and gave them authority to protect the Indians from the exactions of traders and land speculators. But the frontier was a huge area, vastly extended by the Treaty of 1763, and too extensive for the two agents, even with their great prestige, to control. The Imperial Government's next step was to issue the Proclamation of 1763, whereby the Indian country, that is, the area west of an arbitrary line drawn down the crest of the Appalachians, was closed to settlement. All negotiations for land therein were forbidden, and settlers who had penetrated there before the issuance of the proclamation were to be removed. The proclamation is instructive concerning the reasons for this prohibition:3 . . . Great frauds and abuses have been committed in the purchasing lands of the Indians, to the great prejudice of our interest, and to the great dissatisfaction of the said Indians; in order, therefore, to prevent such irregularities for the future . . . we do ... strictly enjoin and require, that no private person do presume to make any purchase from the said Indians of any lands reserved to the said Indians . . .; but that if at any time any of the said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said lands, the same shall be purchased only for us, in our name, at some public meeting or assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that purpose by the Governor or commander in chief of our colony respectively within which they shall lie. . . . Thus Great Britain finally established her basic policy toward the Indians: white settlement was to be barred from the clearly defined Indian country; squatters already there were to be removed; trade with the natives was to be controlled by licensing and by punishing illicit activities; negotiations for surrender or cession of land were to be conducted by government agents; and administration of Indian affairs was to be placed in the hands of the agents appointed by the Board of Trade and subject to its jurisdiction. Subsequently the United States was to adopt a similar policy. Continued friction over the royal order and the heavy cost of administering the Indian trade led the British to abandon the trade restrictions in 1768 and to turn control back to the Colonies on the understanding that they would enact firmer controls over the trade than they had previously adopted. No such legislation was enacted and conditions drifted from bad to worse. Finally, almost in desperation, Britain made another change: with the Quebec Act of 1774, she stripped the region north of the Ohio and west of the Appalachians from the Colonies whose charters gave them land there and added it to the Colony of Quebec. Because of the nature of the Quebec Government, it was expected that the necessary control over land and Indian matters, which the proclamation had not accomplished, would now be achieved. This decision to resume control over land and Indian affairs came too late, however, and only succeeded in exacerbating relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies.4 * W. W. Hening, The Statutes at Large of Virginia (13 vols.; various places, 1823), I, 467; III, 465." 3 Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History (New York, 1944), p. 46. 4 On Indian policy I have relied on Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Tears: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts 1790-1834 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); J. P. Kinney, A Continent Lost- A Civilization Won (Baltimore, 1937); and Marshall Harris, Origins of the Land Tenure System in the United States (Ames, Iowa, 1953). |