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Lot 60: George Clinton Signed Document 1746

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:1,080.00 USD Estimated At:1,800.00 - 2,400.00 USD
Lot   60: George Clinton Signed Document 1746
<b>Autographs</b><hr><b>Royal Orders For Indian Agent Sir William Johnson In King George’s War!</b>

<b>GEORGE CLINTON, Orders For Sir William Johnson, the Royal Official Among the Iroquois Indians, On His Way to Enlist Them To Fight Against The French in Canada.</b>
Document Signed, as Royal Governor, 1 page, 8” x 12.3”, New York, October 3, 1746. To Sir WILLIAM JOHNSON (1715-1774). Choice Very Fine; this handsome document, with its 3” by 1” signature, is just a tad aged. Here Clinton instructs Johnson at the beginning of King George’s War. “Pursuant to the Orders I have given you to attend a meeting at Onondaga Castle this winter, I assure you that whatever expenses you are at on that account shall be allowed you.”

Small wars can be just as nasty as big one - just look at King George’s War. Here the French and their Indian allies raided along New England and New York, taking scalps and slaughtering settlers. Then Colonel Johnson - a Mohawk Valley Indian trader and commissary of New York for Indian affairs - enlisted the Iroquois to reply in kind, which lead to the French retaliatory raids on Saratoga and Albany. When the dust settled in 1748 at Aix-la-Chapelle, it was all for nothing: the peace restored to each power what it had possessed before the war. The colonists had won a great victory which, without their knowledge or consent, had been quietly handed back to the enemy from whom it had been wrested - and so King George’s War became one of the many remote causes that led the colonists in later years to conclude that American affairs must be managed in America and not by a corps of diplomats three thousand miles across the sea. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, however, marked the end of the conflict; this document signifies the beginning. It finds Johnson on his way to the capital of the Iroquois Confederation, Onondaga Castle, to organize war parties of the Indians, and send them to harass the French settlements in Canada.