Читать книгу West Virginia - Otis K. Rice - Страница 11

The Response to Revolution. Satisfaction with the intervention of Lord Dunmore in land affairs and the victory at Point Pleasant did not divert the attention of western Virginians from events in Boston and Philadelphia in 1774. On November 5, before they returned home from the campaign, officers and soldiers in Dunmore's War issued the Fort Gower Resolves. They coupled professions of loyalty to King George III and confidence in Lord Dunmore with a declaration that “the love of liberty, and attachment to the real interests and just rights of America outweigh[ed] every other consideration.” They pledged exertion of every power within them “for the defense of American liberty.”¹ Adam Stephen, who probably convened the men at Fort Gower, declared that “before I would submit my life, liberty, and property to the arbitrary disposal of a corrupt, venal aristocracy,…I would set myself down with a few hundred friends upon some rich and healthy spot, six hundred miles to the westward, and there form a settlement, which, in a short time would command attention and respect.”²

Professions of support for the American cause from westerners, who had their own interests, were no idle boasts. Richard Henry Lee asserted that he could raise six thousand men from the counties of Hampshire, Berkeley, Frederick, Dunmore (now Shenandoah), Augusta, and Botetourt alone. These men had developed “amazing hardihood” from years spent in the woods and such “dexterity” with the Kentucky rifle that they scorned any target within two hundred yards and larger than an orange.³

Westerners reacted angrily to reports in April 1775 that Dunmore had removed the powder from the Williamsburg magazine to a British vessel at anchor in the James River. A thousand men from the frontier counties gathered at Fredericksburg to march against the governor, but George Washington dissuaded them from their course.

When the Continental Congress, on June 14, 1775, called upon Virginia to raise two of the ten companies of riflemen for service in Boston, westerners again demonstrated enthusiasm for the American cause. Upon the advice of Horatio Gates, Washington named two veterans of Dunmore's War, Hugh Stephenson of Berkeley County and Daniel Morgan of Frederick County, to command the companies. The two captains filled their companies within a week, mostly with young men equipped with rifles, tomahawks, scalping knives, and other accoutrements. Morgan left Winchester on July 15, and Stephenson set out from Shepherdstown two days later. Eager to arrive in Cambridge first, and knowing that their simultaneous arrival would give more credit to Stephenson, who outranked him, Morgan ignored an agreement to join Stephenson at Frederick, Maryland, and hastened on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he arrived on August 6, five days ahead of Stephenson.

Although there were instances of disloyalty and disaffection during the war, West Virginians generally answered the call of their country with promptness and even enthusiasm. They participated in nearly every major battle, including Quebec, Saratoga, Cowpens, and Kings Mountain. Among the officers who achieved military distinction were Major Generals Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, Brigadier General Adam Stephen, and Captains Hugh Stephenson and William Darke.

Indian Relations. The greatest immediate danger to West Virginia residents lay in the possibility that western Indians might join the British. Peace with western tribes, envisioned in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, no longer served British interests. In February 1775 Lord Dunmore instructed John Connolly to make the Indians allies. Connolly obtained pledges of friendship from the Delaware and a few of the Mingo chiefs. About a month later Dunmore ordered the disbanding of garrisons at Forts Dunmore, Fincastle, and Blair and the evacuation of the posts.

The defenseless frontiersmen appealed to both the Continental Congress and Virginia authorities for protection. On August 7 the Virginia Convention ordered Captain John Neville and a hundred men from Winchester to Fort Dunmore, now hastily renamed Fort Pitt. Already it had named a commission consisting of Thomas Walker, Andrew Lewis, James Wood, John Walker, and Adam Stephen to confer with tribal chiefs and seek their neutrality. Wood visited the Indian villages at great personal risk and arranged a conference at Fort Pitt in September.

The Treaty of Pittsburgh was essentially a victory for Virginia Indian diplomacy. The Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, Seneca, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and Ottawa recognized the Ohio River as the new Indian boundary and pledged neutrality in the war between England and the colonies. The tribes generally honored their pledges during the first two years of the war. Their neutrality and the occupation of Fort Pitt by colonial forces encouraged an uninterrupted advance of settlement into the transmontane parts of West Virginia until 1777. Under cover of the strong forts along the Ohio River and dozens of small private forts, trans-Allegheny settlers actually found themselves in a better defensive position in 1777 than they had been at the beginning of the war.

Loyalism on the Upper Ohio. The first major threat to settlers on the upper Ohio was a Loyalist move known as “Connolly's Plot.” After he abandoned Fort Dunmore, John Connolly joined the governor aboard a British man-of-war off Yorktown. There he proposed to Dunmore a plan to cut the colonies in two by capturing Fort Pitt with a force of British and Indians, which he would assemble at Detroit. He believed that many settlers, whom he would woo with generous land grants, would join him. Should the plan fail, he proposed to destroy Fort Pitt and Fort Fincastle and rejoin Dunmore at Alexandria. Dunmore referred Connolly to General Thomas Gage, the commander of British forces in America, who also found his plan attractive.

When his route from Boston, where he talked with Gage, to Detroit was cut off by the American capture of Montreal, Connolly disguised himself and set out by way of Virginia and Maryland. John Gibson, a Pittsburgh trader to whom he had confided his intentions, alerted the West Augusta Committee of Safety. Authorities arrested Connolly and a companion as they passed through Hagerstown, Maryland, and their plan, with its danger to the backcountry, ended in failure.

In 1777, when most of the Indians joined the British, Loyalism flared anew on the upper Ohio. Several frontier leaders, among them Alexander McKee, Simon Girty, and Matthew Elliott, espoused the British cause and went to Detroit. Colonel Zackwell Morgan of Monongalia County and five hundred men were needed to quell disturbances in northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Indians Join the British. Amid reports that Henry Hamilton, the commandant at Detroit, was exerting pressure upon the Indians to join the British, Virginia took steps as early as 1776 to defend her trans-Allegheny settlements. In the summer of that year Matthew Arbuckle constructed Fort Randolph, a stockade with blockhouses and cabins, to replace Fort Blair, which marauding Indians had burned the previous summer. Arbuckle and his men remained at the post as its garrison. Virginia authorities also placed militiamen at several private forts in the Greenbrier and Monongahela valleys and assigned scouts to keep watch along well-used Indian trails.

Despite all precautions, small bands of Indians terrorized isolated settlements throughout the backcountry beginning in the autumn of 1776. Congress favored a policy of restraint, lest decisive action provoke a general Indian war, but it yielded to the urging of Virginia authorities to the extent of sending Brigadier General Edward Hand to Fort Pitt on June 1, 1777, with orders to coordinate all defense measures on the upper Ohio.

British military strategy for 1777 increased the danger to frontier settlements. The general design called for expeditions from Canada, Oswego, and New York, led by John Burgoyne, Barry St. Leger, and William Howe, respectively, to converge on the Hudson Valley and cut off New England from the remainder of the country. In June Hamilton convened a council of tribal chiefs northwest of the Ohio River for the purpose of enticing them to join the British and engage in diversionary attacks on the trans-Allegheny frontier.

Hamilton won pledges of support from Chippewa and Ottawa chiefs and a few of the Mingo and Wyandot, and other tribes began to waver in their neutrality. Nonhelema, a sister of Cornstalk and a friend of the whites, informed Matthew Arbuckle on July 25 that the Shawnee had called off a visit to Fort Randolph when they heard of the council at Detroit. Four days later David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, reported to Hand that all the Indians northwest of the Ohio, except the Delaware, were likely to join the British.

Indian Attacks of 1777. When missionaries and others informed him that the Indians were preparing an attack against some undisclosed target in early August, Hand ordered Colonel David Shepherd, the lieutenant of Ohio County, to take charge of Fort Henry (formerly Fort Fincastle), which had no regular garrison, and to assemble there all militia companies between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers. Eleven companies answered Shepherd's call. The end of August came, without an attack, and Shepherd sent nine of the companies home, leaving only two, under Captains Samuel Mason and Joseph Ogle, with about sixty men, at Fort Henry.

On the night of August 31, about two hundred watchful Wyandot and Mingo, accompanied by a few Delaware and Shawnee, crossed the Ohio River and concealed themselves in a cornfield near Fort Henry. The next morning at about sunrise, six Indians fired upon Andrew Zane, John Boyd, Samuel Tomlinson, and a Negro, who were seeking horses for Dr. James McMechen for his departure to the Monongahela Valley. They killed Boyd, but they allowed Tomlinson and the Negro to escape in order that they might lure others outside the fort. Zane allegedly escaped by leaping over a cliff seventy feet high.

The Indian strategy worked perfectly. Mason left the fort with fourteen men in search of the Indians. Suddenly scores of Indians, instead of the few he had anticipated, fell upon him and his party. Hearing their cries, Ogle rushed to their aid with twelve more men. Of the twenty-six men, who were outnumbered about eight to one, only three, including Mason and Ogle, escaped death. The Indians then besieged the fort for three days and three nights, but its thirty-three defenders stood their ground. After burning about twenty-five houses outside the fort and destroying horses and cattle, the attackers withdrew, leaving most of the people homeless and without food or clothing.

Meanwhile, Hamilton dispatched fifteen bands of Indians from Detroit. Within six months they presented him with 73 prisoners and 129 scalps. They made forays against settlements as much as 150 miles east of the Ohio River, attacking within sight of such defenses as Van Bibber's Fort in the Greenbrier area, Van Meter's Fort on Short Creek, and Coon's Fort on the West Fork of the Monongahela. Scores of families fled eastward, and even the garrison at Fort Henry threatened to leave. One of the most audacious moves of the Indians occurred at McMechen's Narrows, about midway between Moundsville and Wheeling, on September 26, when they ambushed a scouting party under Captain William Foreman and killed him and twenty of his men.

Hand had hoped to forestall the bloody events of the fall and winter of 1777 by sending an expedition into the Indian country. Only Hampshire County met its quota of men, and Hand, with far less than the two thousand he requested, postponed further action until spring. The only protection he could offer lay in the posting of 150 militiamen in each of the Ohio River counties during the winter.

Mounting Perils. An incident at Fort Randolph added to the tenseness on the frontiers. In November 1777 Cornstalk, with two companions, visited the fort and informed Matthew Arbuckle that the Shawnee had decided to join the British and that he had been unable to dissuade them. Fearing that Cornstalk came for some ulterior purpose, Arbuckle detained him until he could obtain instructions from General Hand, On November 9 Elinipsico, Cornstalk's son, came in search of his father, but he, too, was held. When two hunters from the fort were killed the following day, the enraged militiamen demanded retribution, and in spite of Arbuckle's efforts to restrain them, they killed Cornstalk, Elinipsico, and their companions.

An attack on Fort Randolph on May 16, 1778, was probably not a specific retaliation for the death of Cornstalk. More likely, it was part of a general offensive by British and Indians, which included assaults upon such scattered places as Boonesboro in Kentucky, Fort Stanwix and Oriskany in the Mohawk Valley, and the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. About three hundred Indians, mostly Wyandot and Mingo, demanded the surrender of the fort, but Captain William McKee, who was in charge during Arbuckle's temporary absence, refused to capitulate or to send men outside the stockade. After a frustrating day, in which they killed livestock that ran loose, the Indians announced that they came as friends. McKee directed Nonhelema to read them a proclamation of Governor Patrick Henry, which also expressed a desire for peace. The Indians feigned satisfaction and promised to return to their lands across the Ohio.

When the Indians began to move up the Kanawha, McKee sent John Pryor and Philip Hammond, disguised as Indians, to warn the Greenbrier settlements. Exposed families hastily took refuge at Fort Donnally, which the Indians attacked about dawn the next morning. Dick Pointer, a slave of Andrew Donnally, the owner of the fort, and Hammond, who were on watch, sounded the alarm and prevented the attackers from entering by placing their weight against filled water barrels that had been rolled against the door. The Indians kept up their attack throughout most of the day, but in the midafternoon Matthew Arbuckle and Samuel Lewis arrived from Camp Union with thirty-six men and dispersed the Indians.⁴

Critical shortages of gunpowder, medicines, and other supplies frequently threatened frontier defenses. As early as July 1776 Captain George Gibson and Lieutenant William Linn undertook a mission to New Orleans, where Spanish officials permitted them to purchase twelve thousand pounds of powder, but insisted that the transaction be conducted in a manner to preserve the illusion of Spanish neutrality. Gibson remained in New Orleans in deference to their wishes, and Linn, with fifty-three men, returned to Fort Pitt in May 1777 with the valuable cargo. About nine thousand pounds of powder, landed at Fort Henry, enabled that post to withstand the assault in September 1777.

In the summer of 1778 Governor Henry dispatched David Rogers and about forty men from the Monongahela Valley to New Orleans on additional “Business of Importance” to Virginia and her western settlers. On October 4, 1779, as he was returning up the Ohio River with powder, medicines, and other supplies, Indians led by Simon Girty attacked his party. They killed Rogers and seized the five bateaux carrying his cargo.

George Rogers Clark and the West. During the winter of 1777-1778 George Rogers Clark convinced Virginia authorities that an expedition into the Illinois country could weaken British control over the western Indians, enable Americans to make greater use of the Mississippi River, and enhance Virginia's claims to the Northwest. On June 26, 1778, Clark left Fort Massac, ten miles below the falls of the Ohio, with 175 seasoned riflemen, about 150 of whom were from the Monongahela Valley.

Proceeding overland rather than by the more commonly traveled rivers, Clark surprised the British at Kaskaskia on July 4 and forced their surrender. He repeated his success at Cahokia. Father Gibault, a priest at Kaskaskia, carried the news of Clark's victories to Vincennes and accepted its surrender. The French habitants, pleased by reports of an alliance between the United States and France, gave Clark support, and even a few Indian tribes responded to his bravado and distribution of gifts.

In October Governor Hamilton, with five hundred men, recaptured Vincennes, but heavy rains prevented his moving against the other posts. Rather than risk their loss, the indomitable Clark set out with 172 men for Vincennes. Traveling in rain and icy streams, he reached the post at about dusk on February 23, 1779. Caught completely off guard, Hamilton surrendered, with the thirty-three men who remained with him, after a night of fighting. Clark sent all of them to Williamsburg as prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, in June the Board of War directed Lachlan Mcintosh, who had succeeded Hand as commandant at Fort Pitt, to move against Detroit, the key to British power in the West, with 3,000 regulars and not more than 2,500 Virginia militiamen. Many Virginians strongly opposed the plan, partly because they believed that Clark would be able to capture Detroit but also because they feared that reduction of that stronghold by Continental forces might jeopardize Virginia's claim to territory northwest of the Ohio River.

After many delays, Mcintosh began his march in October 1778. He paused at the mouth of Beaver Creek to build a large defense, which he named Fort Mcintosh. In November, with twelve hundred men, he pressed on to the Tuscarawas River in the land of the Delaware and built Fort Laurens. Expiration of militia terms and inadequate supplies, however, nullified the effectiveness of Fort Laurens, and it was reduced to the necessity of obtaining food from the Delaware. The expedition proved almost entirely fruitless.

Clark's successes, the alliance with France, and bold moves against the Iroquois by General Daniel Brodhead, who replaced Mcintosh at Fort Pitt, raised American prestige with the Indians to its greatest height since the beginning of the war. In the fall of 1779 delegations of Wyandot and some Shawnee visited Fort Pitt with a view to negotiating peace. Yet American strength was illusory, as letters captured by the Girtys from David Rogers clearly revealed. The Wyandot soon renewed their friendship with the British, and in February 1781 the Delaware joined them. With the defection of the Delaware, American influence over the western tribes plunged to its nadir.

Fearing an attack by the Delaware, Brodhead, with an army of three hundred men, destroyed the tribal towns of Coshocton and Lichtenau. Although his men killed fifteen warriors and took twenty prisoners and much plunder, they refused to engage in further chastisement of the Indians, and Brodhead had to return to Wheeling.

The shift of the main theater of war to the southern states after 1780 seriously affected trans-Allegheny defenses. Military needs along the seaboard of Virginia, for instance, prevented the establishment of a post at Kellys Creek, about midway between Point Pleasant and the Greenbrier settlements. They may also have been responsible for the abandonment of Fort Randolph in 1779 and its subsequent burning by the Indians.

Preparations by Clark for an expedition against Detroit in the summer of 1781 may have spared the trans-Allegheny region even greater dangers from the British and Indians. Clark proposed to attack Detroit with two thousand men, but militiamen from Berkeley, Frederick, Hampshire, Ohio, and Monongalia counties were generally unwilling to leave their homes and families exposed in order to deliver a blow against Detroit. Clark was able to assemble only four hundred men at Wheeling. Even then he suffered so many desertions that he left without waiting for another hundred Westmoreland men under Archibald Lochry. His plan completely collapsed when he learned that Indians led by Alexander McKee and Joseph Brant had attacked Lochry below the mouth of the Miami River and killed or captured every member of his force.

War Weariness in the Eastern Panhandle. Clark's inability to recruit a force for an assault upon Detroit indicated a war weariness, often mistaken for loyalism, that swept over parts of West Virginia during the closing years of the war. Repeated requisitions for beef, grain, and livestock, payment for their goods in depreciating paper currency, and the sacrifice of their menfolk undermined the enthusiasm with which many frontier residents had entered the war. Virginia authorities experienced increasing difficulty in procuring goods on credit and in many cases even with cash in hand.

Disaffection reached its greatest intensity in 1780 and 1781 east of the Alleghenies and centered in Hampshire County Angered by the arrival of a tax collector, John Claypool and five or six of his friends announced that they would provide no more beef, clothes, or men, and then obtained whiskey and drank to the health of King George III. Armed with warrants for Claypool and his associates, the sheriff and about fifty men set out to arrest the troublemakers. Claypool, meanwhile, had gathered sixty or seventy men of his own and prepared to resist arrest. In the face of this unexpected defiance, the sheriff accepted Claypool's promise to turn himself over to authorities later.

Armed resistance, largely to taxes and levies, flared up in other parts of Hampshire County. An attack upon militiamen at the mill of John Brake, a member of the insurgents, rumors that Claypool was gathering a thousand men in the Lost River area, and the fears that the lives and fortunes of supporters of the American cause were in jeopardy led to an appeal by Colonel Elias Poston, on May 22, 1781, for three hundred men from Frederick County to quell the disturbances. He pointed out that Claypool had so many friends and relatives that it would be impossible to form an army against him in Hampshire County.

Daniel Morgan, with four companies of infantrymen and other recruits, arrived in Hampshire County and dispersed the rioters. Several rebel leaders fled over the mountains, but Claypool and others sought pardons from the governor. They based their defense upon their isolation and ignorance of events outside their area, the effectiveness of the propaganda of British agents, and their conviction that the taxes and levies upon them were unduly burdensome. Claypool himself elicited considerable sympathy. Peter Hog pointed out that he had five sons who were connected with some of the most ardent supporters of the American cause in the South Branch area and that his prosecution would alienate many patriots. Others attested to his honesty, peaceableness, and good intentions. Morgan pointed out that he was the father of fourteen children, most of them small and dependent upon him. The governor pardoned Claypool and nearly all of his associates, and many of them served faithfully in American armies.

The End of the War. Some of the bloodiest episodes of the war west of the Alleghenies occurred after the battle of Yorktown on October 19, 1781. In retaliation for an attack upon settlements in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in February 1782, Colonel David Williamson led an expedition of about one hundred militiamen against the village of Gnadenhutten, where some of the guilty persons were visiting friendly Moravian Indians. The irate militia, with only eighteen dissenting, agreed to kill every Indian present, friendly or hostile. The following morning they slaughtered about one hundred, including men, women, and children, who had spent the night singing and praying, and destroyed their unharvested crops.

General William Irvine, the successor to Brodhead at Fort Pitt, expected massive reprisals for the atrocity at Gnadenhutten. To forestall additional attacks, which by then extended as far as the Tygart Valley and Greenbrier areas, he dispatched about five hundred mounted men under Colonel William Crawford to the Wyandot town of Sandusky. Crawford found the town deserted, but on June 4 he encountered a large body of Wyandot, and a battle ensued. The arrival of reinforcements for the Indians threw the militia into a panic, and it scattered in wild disorder. About three hundred reached home safely. Most of the others, including Crawford, were captured. Crawford was put to death by slow roasting.

On September 10 about two hundred Wyandot, Delaware, and British, led by Joseph Brant, laid siege to Fort Henry. John Linn, a scout, had discovered their approach and warned residents of the area, who hurriedly took shelter in the fort. Linn's warning did not allow time to remove all the military stores from the house of Ebenezer Zane, which stood about forty yards away. Some of the men were deployed there, with the result that the Indians were subjected to a hazardous crossfire.

During the attack, the Indians suddenly perceived what seemed a singular stroke of fortune. A small boat moving up the Ohio and laden with cannonballs and other supplies for Fort Pitt put ashore at Wheeling. The Indians promptly captured the boat and its cargo. Thereupon they fashioned a cannon by hollowing out a log and filled it with cannonballs. They aimed their new weapon at Fort Henry and fired. Much to their astonishment, the only casualties were Indians.

The defenders of Fort Henry also had problems. Gunpowder was running low, and none of the men could be spared to go to Zane's house, where supplies were ample. At this critical juncture, according to legend, Zane's sister, Elizabeth, or Betty, volunteered to obtain the powder. Braving the enemy fire, she ran to the house and obtained the precious gunpowder. Then, to the amazement of the already disbelieving Indians, she dashed back to the fort. Her feat enabled the fort to withstand the attack. After three days of failure, the frustrated Indians gave up the siege, and about half of their warriors retired across the Ohio.⁵

The remainder of the Indians, numbering about a hundred, moved northward to Rice's Fort at Bethany. Normally the little post gave protection to about a dozen families, but at the time of the assault there were only six defenders. The Indians killed one of them at the outset. The remaining five, in what was one of the most remarkable encounters in the annals of frontier warfare, held out against their attackers for twelve hours and killed several Indians without the loss of any additional men. Despairing of any success, the Indians withdrew.

The sieges of Fort Henry and Rice's Fort, which followed closely the disastrous battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, marked the last large-scale attacks upon the West Virginia frontier during the Revolutionary War. A few weeks later Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander in chief, instructed officers at all of Britain's western posts to desist from further moves against the Americans. After six years of frightful warfare, peace returned. Yet it was a peace on paper only, and more than a decade of strife lay ahead before the Indian menace to West Virginia settlements was entirely removed.

¹John E. Robbins, “The Fort Gower Resolves, November 5,1774,” in Thomas H. Smith, ed., Ohio in the American Revolution, Ohio American Revolution Bicentennial Conference Series, no. 1 (Columbus, 1976), 21-26.

²Quoted in Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 85.

³Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 19-20.

⁴Many of those who had sought shelter at the fort supported Dick Pointer in 1795, when he appealed to the Virginia General Assembly that he “in the decline of life shall be at public expense liberated, and enjoy by the bounty of the legislature that freedom he has long sighed for.” Greenbrier County Legislative Petition, November 12, 1795, Virginia State Library, Richmond.

⁵There are no contemporary accounts of the alleged action of Betty Zane in the defense of Fott Henry. The first stories appeared years later under circumstances that raise doubts about thew reliability, but they cannot be dismissed summarily.