The Royal Proclamation Reserves the Western Lands

Eight months after the Treaty of Paris, King George III issued a proclamation, on the advice of his Privy Council, to organise what Britain had just acquired. It created four new governments: Quebec, East Florida, West Florida and Grenada. It annexed Cape Breton and the Island of St. John's to Nova Scotia, extended Georgia's boundary to the lands between the Altamaha and St. Mary's rivers, and directed the governors to grant land without fee to reduced officers and disbanded soldiers of the late war, from 5,000 acres for a field officer down to 50 acres for a private.

The proclamation also dealt with the interior. Declaring it "just and reasonable" that the Indian nations under British protection should not be disturbed in lands not ceded to or purchased by the Crown, it reserved those lands as their hunting grounds. Governors were forbidden, for the present and until further notice, to grant warrants of survey or patents beyond the bounds of their governments, subjects were forbidden to settle on the reserved lands, and settlers already there were ordered to leave. Private purchases of Indian land were banned; any sale was to be made only to the Crown, at a public meeting of the Indians called by the governor. The Department of State's history of the period connects the measure to the rebellion on the frontier that followed the war, and Britain's wish to create a western Indian reserve.

For many colonists the order closed land they had expected to settle or already claimed. The State Department's account describes the proclamation as largely ineffective in preventing western settlement, and as having angered both settlers and politically influential investors in western land speculation. The text itself presents the restriction as temporary, but it was the first of several measures made in London in the next dozen years, with the taxes soon to follow, that colonists read as decisions about their affairs taken without them. The quarrel over who governed the West, and who could tax, runs through the road to independence and to the Constitution.