User:Wbzornpstcc/sandbox

Royal Proclamation of 1763

Proclamation line[edit source]

New borders drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. At the outset, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 defined the jurisdictional limits of the occupied territories of North America. Explaining parts of the frontier expansion in North America, in Colonial America and especially Canada colony of New France, a diminutive new colony, the Province of Quebec was carved. The territory northeast of the St. John River on the Labrador coast was placed under the Newfoundland Colony.[8] The lands west of Quebec and west of a line running along the crest of the Allegheny Mountains became Indian territory, temporarily barred to settlement, to the great disappointment of the land speculators of Virginia and Pennsylvania, who had started the Seven Years' War to gain these territories.[9]

The proclamation created a boundary line (often called the proclamation line) between the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and American Indian lands (called the Indian Reserve) west of the Appalachian Mountains. The proclamation line was not intended to be a permanent boundary between the colonists and Aboriginal lands, but rather a temporary boundary which could be extended further west in an orderly, lawful manner.[10][11] It was also not designed as an uncrossable boundary; people could cross the line, just not settle past it.[12] Its contour was defined by the headwaters that formed the watershed along the Appalachians. All land with rivers that flowed into the Atlantic was designated for the colonial entities, while all the land with rivers that flowed into the Mississippi was reserved for the native Indian population. The proclamation outlawed the private purchase of Native American land, which had often created problems in the past. Instead, all future land purchases were to be made by Crown officials "at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians". Furthermore, British colonials were forbidden to settle on native lands, and colonial officials were forbidden to grant ground or lands without royal approval. The proclamation gave the Crown a monopoly on all future land purchases from American Indians.

British colonists and land speculators objected to the proclamation boundary since the British government had already assigned land grants to them. including the wealthy owners of the Ohio company who protested the line to the governor of Virginia, as they had plans for settling the land to grow business. Many settlements already existed beyond the proclamation line,[13] some of which had been temporarily evacuated during Pontiac's War, and there were many already granted land claims yet to be settled. For example, George Washington and his Virginia soldiers had been granted lands past the boundary. Prominent American colonials joined with the land speculators in Britain to lobby the government to move the line further west.[3][14]

The colonist's demands were met and the boundary line was adjusted in a series of treaties with the Native Americans.[15] The first two of these treaties were completed in 1768; the Treaty of Fort Stanwix adjusted the border with the Iroquois Confederacy in the Ohio Country and the Treaty of Hard Labour adjusted the border with the Cherokee in the Carolinas.[16][17] The Treaty of Hard Labour was followed by the Treaty of Lochaber in 1770, adjusting the border between Virginia and the Cherokee.[18] These agreements opened much of what is now Kentucky and West Virginia to British settlement.[19]. Although the land granted by the Virginian and North Carolinian government heavily favored the land companies, seeing as they had more wealthy backers than the poorer settlers who wanted to settle west to hopefully gain a fortune. quote 1 "shocked by what they considered to be Bouquet's precipitous and illegal action, members of the Ohio Company protested to the governor of Virginia and the House of Burgesses." (Papa, Eugene M. Del (1975). "The Royal Proclamation of 1763: Its Effect upon Virginia Land Companies". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 83 (4): 406–411. ISSN 0042-6636.)

quote 2 " Virginia and North Carolina's governments favored these enterprises and their wealthy backers over the potential free-for-all of thousands of smaller pioneers..." (Friend, Craig Thompson (2005). "Liberty Is Pioneering: An American Birthright". OAH Magazine of History. 19 (3): 16–20. ISSN 0882-228X.)