A second hard truth exposed by the 27th grievance—and its racist depiction of Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages”—has generated much less public discussion. In indicting the king for unleashing Indians on the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” the Declaration was not referring to a specific event but rather to the recent escalation of violence, which was caused by colonists invading Native lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In response, a confederation of Senecas, Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas, Cherokees, and other Native nations exercised a right of self-defense and attacked new colonial settlements. Although the Native nations had British support, they were acting on their own and not at the instigation of the Crown. Nonetheless, Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary drafter, hoped that by fanning the flames of settlers’ anti-Indian racism and implicating George III, he could ignite a general conflagration against the British in the West. In this way, the 27th grievance helped lay the foundation for an American nationalism that would demonize the continent’s indigenous people, especially when they resisted American aggressions.

Although the reference to the “merciless Indian savages” appealed to the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” Jefferson and others who signed the Declaration had their own reasons for detesting British policies relating to Native Americans and their lands. More than a decade earlier, in order to end a costly war to suppress an indigenous resistance movement led by the Ottawa war leader Pontiac, the king issued the Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous ownership of lands west of the Appalachian mountains’ crest and prevented colonists from settling there. At first glance, ordinary settlers might be expected to have been the proclamation’s major opponents. Some settlers did object, but the most potent source of opposition came from colonial elites, especially in Virginia and Pennsylvania, who had invested in companies with claims to lands west of the boundary set by the proclamation. Unless those lands could be legally settled, land companies could not gain secure title to their claims. Investors would be left with nothing but the debts they had incurred to bet on getting rich.

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In 1767, George Washington, one of the era’s most passionate land speculators, predicted that the proclamation “must fall … in a few years.” British imperial officials made some adjustments to the 1763 boundary, but despite Washington’s hopes, and those of other speculators such as Thomas Jefferson, British policy continued to restrict colonists’ perceived liberty to obtain indigenous lands. Colonists found the 1774 Quebec Act—one of the Intolerable Acts—particularly odious. Not only did the Quebec Act grant legal protection to Catholicism, a religion Protestants despised, but it extended Quebec’s boundary south to the Ohio River and blocked settlement in the Ohio Valley. At the First Continental Congress, Richard Lee, a delegate from Virginia, called the Quebec Act the “worst grievance” of them all. Two years later, when Virginia broke with Great Britain, its state constitution claimed lands west of the Mississippi River, thus nullifying the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act.