“Pretty Well Paid for Their Villainy!!!” Bribes and Coercion in the Treaty of 1838

In 1838, the U.S. government and Ogden Land Company conspired to relieve the Seneca Nation of Indians in New York state of their remaining four reservations. Despite significant religious and cultural pressure on chiefs and other Seneca signatories to reject any and all further land sales, a number of them signed. In the aftermath, the Seneca and white reformers complained bitterly not only about the effects of the treaty, but also about the way it had been carried out. The land company had spared no expense in achieving their aims. Company agents had bribed chiefs with money and alcohol, tracked them down while on hunting trips, conducted treaty business in taverns, and flaunted the custom and procedure of both the Seneca and the federal government. Even more galling for the Seneca and their allies, these land company representatives were also federal employees: the same agents and commissioners who were tasked with stewarding governmental interests in the treaty process.

This paper explores the Seneca and reformers’ responses to the duplicity of federal men in obtaining chiefly approval for the treaty and land sale of 1838. Analyzing their responses to the procedural deviations of the treaty, it becomes clear that the treaty process had offended their moral-economic expectation of ‘fair dealing.’ The close working relationship of private enterprise and government agencies in securing removal, so salient for the political opposition to the treaty, has been largely downplayed in studies of the treaty period and in the history of Native expropriation as a whole. This paper suggests a need to more fully incorporate the economic dimension not in the aftermath, but at the point of expropriation.