Treaty of Fort Stanwix with Iroquois

On October 22, 1784, United States commissioners Arthur Lee, Richard Butler, and Oliver Wolcott concluded the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with representatives of the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix in New York. The treaty demanded large land cessions in western New York and the Ohio country after the Revolutionary War. Federal negotiators treated the agreement as proof that the United States, not Great Britain, now held sovereignty in the trans-Appalachian interior.

The treaty intensified a constitutional and diplomatic problem created by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which had transferred territory to the United States without Native consent. Congress wanted to secure western lands for settlement and revenue, while many Haudenosaunee leaders rejected the legitimacy of terms imposed after an alliance with Britain. The agreement therefore revealed how quickly the new republic claimed national power in Indian affairs even under the weak Articles of Confederation.

The Fort Stanwix treaty fed directly into later western policy under the Confederation, including land sales and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The treaty's coercive land cessions also helped set the stage for continuing frontier war in the Old Northwest during the 1780s and 1790s.