Opening the Gateway--Dunmore's War
Virginia, we conceive, can claim this Country [Kentucky] with the
greatest justice and propriety, its within the Limits of their Charter.
They Fought and bled for it. And had it not been for the memorable
Battle, at the Great Kanaway those vast regions had yet continued
inaccessable.
--The Harrodsburg Petition.
June 7-15, 1776.
It was fortunate for the Watauga settlers that the Indians and the
whites were on the most peaceful terms with each other at the time the
Watauga Valley was shown, by the running of the boundary line, to lie
within the Indian reservation. With true American self-reliance, the
settlers met together for deliberation and counsel, and deputed James
Robertson and John Been, as stated by Tennessee's first historian, "to
treat with their landlords, and agree upon articles of accomodation and
friendship. The attempt succeeded. For though the Indians refused to
give up the land gratuitously, they consented, for a stipulated amount
of merchandise, muskets, and other articles of convenience, to lease all
the country on the waters of the Watauga." [129] In addition to the land
thus leased for ten years, several other tracts were purchased from the
Indians by Jacob Brown, who reoccupied his former location on the
Nolichucky.
In taking this daring step, the Watauga settlers moved into the
spotlight of national history. For the inevitable consequence of leasing
the territory was the organization of a form of government for the
infant settlement. Through his familiarity with the North Carolina type
of "association," in which the settlers had organized for the purpose of
"regulating" abuses, and his acquaintance with the contents of the
"Impartial Relation," in which Husband fully expounded the principles
and practices of this association, Robertson was peculiarly fitted for
leadership in organizing this new government. The convention at which
Articles of Association, unfortunately lost, were drawn up, is
noteworthy as the first governmental assemblage of free-born American
citizens ever held west of the Alleghanies. The government then
established was the first free and independent government, democratic in
spirit, representative in form, ever organized upon the American
continent. In describing this mimic republic, the royal Governor of
Virginia says: "They appointed magistrates, and framed laws for their
present occasion, and to all intents and purposes, erected themselves
into, though an inconsiderable, yet a separate State." [130] The most
daring spirit in this little state was the young John Sevier, of French
Huguenot family (originally spelled Xavier), born in Augusta County,
Virginia, on September 23, 1745. It was from Millerstown in Shenandoah
County where he was living the uneventful life of a small farmer, that
he emigrated (December, 1773) to the Watauga region. With his arrival
there begins one of the most fascinating and romantic careers recorded
in the varied and stirring annals of the Old Southwest. In this daring
and impetuous young fellow, fair-haired, blue-eyed, magnetic,
debonair--of powerful build, splendid proportions, and athletic
skill--we hold the gallant exemplar of the truly heroic life of the
border. The story of his life, thrilling in the extreme, is rich in all
the multi-colored elements which impart romance to the arduous struggle
of American civilization in the opening years of the republic.
The creative impulses in the Watauga commonwealth are hinted at by
Dunmore, who observes, in the letter above quoted, that Watauga "sets a
dangerous example to the people America, of forming governments distinct
from and independent of his Majesty's authority." It is true that the
experiment was somewhat limited. The organization of the Watauga
association, which constituted a temporary expedient to meet a crisis in
the affairs of a frontier community cut off by forest wilderness and
mountain barriers from the reach of the arm of royal or provincial
government, is not to be compared with the revolutionary assemblage at
Boonesborough, May 23, 1775, or with the extraordinary demands for
independence in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, during the same
month. Nevertheless the Watauga settlers defied both North Carolina and
the Crown, by adopting the laws of Virginia and by ignoring Governor
Josiah Martin's proclamation (March 26, 1774) "requiring the said
settlers immediately to retire from the Indian Territories." [131]
Moreover, Watauga really was the parent of a series of mimic republics
in the Old Southwest, gradually tending toward higher forms of
organization, with a larger measure of individual liberty. Watauga,
Transylvania, Cumberland, Franklin represent the evolving political
genius of a free people under the creative leadership of three
constructive minds--James Robertson, John Sevier, and Richard Henderson.
Indeed, Watauga furnished to Judge Henderson precisely the "dangerous
example" of which Dunmore prophetically speaks. [132]
Immediately upon his return in 1771 from the extended exploration of
Kentucky, Daniel Boone as already noted was engaged as secret agent, to
treat with the Cherokees for the lease or purchase of the
trans-Alleghany region, on behalf of Judge Henderson and his associates.
Embroiled in the exciting issues of the Regulation and absorbed by his
confining duties as colonial judge, Henderson was unable to put his bold
design into execution until after the expiration of the court itself
which ceased to exist in 1773. Disregarding the royal proclamation of
1763 and Locke's Fundamental Constitutions for the Carolinas, which
forbade private parties to purchase lands from the Indians, Judge
Henderson applied to the highest judicial authorities in England to know
if there was any law in existence forbidding purchase of lands from the
Indian tribes. Lord Mansfield gave Judge Henderson the "sanction of his
great authority in favor of the purchase." [133] Lord Chancellor Camden
and Mr. Yorke had officially advised the King in 1757, in regard to the
petition of the East Indian Company, "that in respect to such
territories as have been, or shall be acquired by treaty or grant from
the Great Mogul, or any of the Indian princes or governments, your
Majesty's letters patent are not necessary; the property of the soil
vesting in the company by the Indian grant subject only to your
Majesties right of sovereignty over the settlements, as English
settlements, and over the inhabitants, as English subjects, who carry
with them your Majesties laws wherever they form colonies, and receive
your Majesties protection by virtue of your royal charters." [134] This
opinion, with virtually no change, was rendered in regard to the Indian
tribes of North America by the same two authorities, certainly as early
as 1769; [135] and a true copy, made in London, April 1, 1772, was
transmitted to Judge Henderson. [136] Armed with the legal opinions
received from England, Judge Henderson was fully persuaded that there
was no legal bar whatsoever to his seeking to acquire by purchase from
the Cherokees the vast domain of the trans-Alleghany. [137] A golden
dream of empire, with its promise of an independent republic in the form
of a proprietary colony, casts him under the spell of its alluring
glamour.
In the meantime, the restless Boone, impatient over the delay in the
consummation of Judge Henderson's plans, resolved to establish himself
in Kentucky upon his own responsibility. Heedless of the question of
title and the certain hazards incident to invading the territory of
hostile savages, Boone designated a rendezvous in Powell's Valley where
he and his party of five families were to be met by a band under the
leadership of his connections, the Bryans, and another company led by
Captain William Russell, a daring pioneer of the Clinch Valley. A small
detachment of Boone's party was fiercely attacked by Shawanoes in
Powell's Valley on October 10, 1773, and almost all were killed,
including sons of Boone and Russell, and young John and Richard
Mendenhall of Guilford County, North Carolina. As the result of this
bloody repulse, Boone's attempt to settle in Kentucky at this time was
definitely abandoned. His failure to effect a settlement in Kentucky was
due to that characteristic disregard of the territorial rights of the
Indians which was all too common among the borderers of that period.
This failure was portentous of the coming storm. The reign of the Long
Hunters was over. Dawning upon the horizon was the day of stern
adventurers, fixed in the desperate and lawless resolve to invade the
trans-Alleghany country and to battle savagely with the red man for its
possession. More successful than Boone was the McAfee party, five in
number, from Botetourt County, Virginia, who between May 10th and
September 1, 1773, safely accomplished a journey through Kentucky and
carefully marked well-chosen sites for future location. [138] An ominous
incident of the time was the veiled warning which Cornstalk, the great
Shawanoe chieftain, gave to Captain Thomas Bullitt, head of a party of
royal surveyors, sent out by Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia.
Cornstalk at Chillicothe, June 7, 1773, warned Bullitt concerning the
encroachments of the whites, "designed to deprive us," he said, "of the
hunting of the country, as usual ... the hunting we stand in need of to
buy our clothing." During the preceding summer, George Rogers Clark, an
aggressive young Virginian, with a small party, had descended the Ohio
as low as Fish Creek, where he built a cabin; and in this region for
many months various parties of surveyors were busily engaged in locating
and surveying lands covered by military grants. Most significant of the
ruthless determination of the pioneers to occupy by force the Kentucky
area was the action of the large party from Monongahela, some forty in
number, led by Captain James Harrod, who penetrated to the present
Miller County, where in June, 1774, they made improvements and actually
laid out a town.
A significant, secretly conducted movement, of which historians have
taken but little account, was now in progress under the manipulation of
Virginia's royal governor. As early as 1770 Dr. John Connolly proposed
the establishment of an extensive colony south of the Ohio; and the
design of securing such territory from the Indians found lodgment in the
mind of Lord Dunmore. But this design was for the moment thwarted when
on October 28, 1773, an order was issued from the Privy Council chamber
in Whitehall granting an immense territory, including all of the present
West Virginia and the land alienated to Virginia by Donelson's agreement
with the Cherokees (1772), to a company including Thomas Walpole, Samuel
Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, and others. This new colony, to be named
"Vandalia," seemed assured. A clash between Dunmore and the royal
authorities was imminent; for Virginia under her sea-to-sea charter
claimed the vast middle region of the continent, extending without known
limit to west and northwest. Moreover, Dunmore was interested in great
land speculations on his own account; and while overtly vindicating
Virginia's claim to the trans-Alleghany by despatching parties of
surveyors to the western wilderness to locate and survey lands covered
by military grants, he with the collusion of certain members of the
"Honourable Board," his council, as charged by Washington, was more than
"lukewarm," secretly restricting as rigorously as he dared the extent
and number of the soldiers' allotments. According to the famous Virginia
Remonstrance, he was in league with "men of great influence in some of
the neighboring states" to secure, under cover of purchases from the
Indians, large tracts of country between the Ohio and the Mississippi.
[139] In shaping his plans Dunmore had the shrewd legal counsel of
Patrick Henry, who was equally intent upon making for himself a private
purchase from the Cherokees. It was Henry's legal opinion that the
Indiana purchase from the Six Nations by the Pennsylvania traders at
Fort Stanwix (November 5, 1768) was valid; and that purchase by private
individuals from the Indians gave full and ample title. [140] In
consequence of these facts, William Murray, in behalf of himself and his
associates of the Illinois Land Company, and on the strength of the
Camden-Yorke decision, purchased two large tracts, on the Illinois and
Ohio respectively, from the Illinois Indians (July 5, 1773); and in
order to win the support of Dunmore, who was ambitious to make a fortune
in land speculation, organized a second company, the Wabash (Ouabache)
Land Company, with the governor as the chief share-holder. In response
to Murray's petition on behalf of the Illinois Land Company, Dunmore
(May, 1774) recommended it to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the
Colonies, and urged that it be granted; and in a later letter he
disingenuously disclaimed any personal interest in the Illinois
speculation.
The party of surveyors sent out under the direction of Colonel William
Preston, on the request of Washington and other leading eastern men, in
1774 located lands covered by military grants on the Ohio and in the
Kentucky area for prominent Virginians, including Washington, Patrick
Henry, William Byrd, William Preston, Arthur Campbell, William Fleming,
and Andrew Lewis, among others, and also a large tract for Dr. Connolly.
Certain of these grants fell within the Vandalia area; and in his reply
(September 10, 1774) to Dunmore's letter, Lord Dartmouth sternly
censured Dunmore for allowing these grants, and accused the white
settlers of having brought on, by such unwarrantable aggressions, the
war then raging with the Indians. This charge lay at the door of Dunmore
himself; and there is strong evidence that Dunmore personally fomented
the war, ostensibly in support of Virginia's charter rights, but
actually in order to further his own speculative designs. [141]
Dunmore's agent, Dr. Connolly, heading a party posing as Virginia
militia, fired without provocation upon a delegation of Shawanoe chiefs
assembled at Fort Pitt (January, 1774). Taking advantage of the alarming
situation created by the conflict of the claims of Virginia and
Pennsylvania, Connolly, inspired by Dunmore without doubt, then issued
an incendiary circular (April 21, 1774), declaring a state of war to
exist. Just two weeks before the Battle of the Great Kanawha, Patrick
Henry categorically stated, in conversation with Thomas Wharton:
that he was at Williamsburg with Ld. D. when Dr. Conolly first came
there, that Conolly is a chatty, sensible man, and informed Ld. Dunmore
of the extreme richness of the lands which lay on both sides of the
Ohio; that the prohibitory orders which had been sent him relative to
the land on the hither side (or Vandalia) had caused him to turn his
thoughts to the opposite shore, and that as his Lordship was determined
to settle his family in America he was really pursueing this war, in
order to obtain by purchase or treaty from the natives a tract of
territory on that side; he then told me that he was convinced from every
authority that the law knew, that a purchase from the natives was as
full and ample a title as could be obtained, that they had Lord Camden
and Mr. York's opinion on that head, which opinion with some others that
Ld. Dunmore had consulted, and with the knowledge Conolly had given him
of the quality of the country and his determined resolution to settle
his family on this continent, were the real motives or springs of the
present expedition. [142]
At this very time, Patrick Henry, in conjunction with William Byrd 3d
and others, was negotiating for a private purchase of lands from the
Cherokees; and when Wharton, after answering Henry's inquiry as to where
he might buy Indian goods, remarked: "It's not possible you mean to
enter the Indian trade at this period," Henry laughingly replied: "The
wish-world is my hobby horse." "From whence I conclude," adds Wharton,
"he has some prospect of making a purchase of the natives, but where I
know not."
The war, thus promulgated, we believe, at Dunmore's secret instigation
and heralded by a series of ghastly atrocities, came on apace. After the
inhuman murder of the family of Logan, the Indian chieftain, by one
Greathouse and his drunken companions (April 30th), Logan, who contrary
to romantic views was a black-hearted and vengeful savage, harried the
Tennessee and Virginia borders, burning and slaughtering. Unable to
arouse the Cherokees, owing to the opposition of Atta-kulla-kulla, Logan
as late as July 21st said in a letter to the whites: "The Indians are
not angry, only myself," and not until then did Dunmore begin to give
full execution to his warlike plans. The best woodsmen of the border,
Daniel Boone and the German scout Michael Stoner, having been despatched
on July 27th by Colonel William Preston to warn the surveyors of the
trans-Alleghany, made a remarkable journey on foot of eight hundred
miles in sixty-one days. Harrod's company at Harrodsburg, a company of
surveyors at Fontainebleau, Floyd's party on the Kentucky, and the
surveyors at Mann's Lick, thus warned, hurried in to the settlements and
were saved. Meanwhile, Dunmore, in command of the Virginia forces,
invaded territory guaranteed to the Indians by the royal proclamation of
1763 and recently (1774) added to the province of Quebec, a fact of
which he was not aware, conducted a vigorous campaign, and fortified
Camp Charlotte, near Old Chillicothe. Andrew Lewis, however, in charge
of the other division of Dunmore's army, was the one destined to bear
the real brunt and burden of the campaign. His division, recruited from
the very flower of the pioneers of the Old Southwest, was the most
representative body of borderers of this region that up to this time had
assembled to measure strength with the red men. It was an army of the
true stalwarts of the frontier, with fringed leggings and hunting-capes,
rifles and powder-horns, hunting-knives and tomahawks.
The Battle of the Great Kanawha, at Point Pleasant, was fought on
October 10, 1774, between Lewis's force, eleven hundred strong, and the
Indians, under Cornstalk, somewhat inferior in numbers. It was a
desultory action, over a greatly extended front and in very brushy
country between Crooked Creek and the Ohio. Throughout the long day, the
Indians fought with rare craft and stubborn bravery--loudly cursing the
white men, cleverly picking off their leaders, and derisively inquiring,
in regard to the absence of the fifes: "Where are your whistles now?"
Slowly retreating, they sought to draw the whites into an ambuscade and
at a favorable moment to "drive the Long Knives like bullocks into the
river." No marked success was achieved on either side until near sunset,
when a flank movement directed by young Isaac Shelby alarmed the
Indians, who mistook this party for the expected reinforcement under
Christian, and retired across the Ohio. In the morning the whites were
amazed to discover that the Indians, who the preceding day so splendidly
heeded the echoing call of Cornstalk, "Be strong! Be strong!", had quit
the battle-field and left the victory with the whites. [143]
The peace negotiated by Dunmore was durable. The governor had
accomplished his purpose, defied the authority of the crown, and
vindicated the claim of Virginia, to the enthusiastic satisfaction of
the backwoodsmen. While tendering their thanks to him and avowing their
allegiance to George III, at the close of the campaign, the borderers
proclaimed their resolution to exert all their powers "for the defense
of American liberty, and for the support of her just rights and
privileges, not in any precipitous, riotous or tumultuous manner, but
when regularly called forth by the unanimous voice of our countrymen."
Dunmore's War is epochal, in that it procured for the nonce a state of
peace with the Indians, which made possible the advance of Judge
Henderson over the Transylvania Trail in 1775, and, through his
establishment of the Transylvania Fort at Boonesborough, the ultimate
acquisition by the American Confederation of the imperial domain of the
trans-Alleghany. [144]