PERIOD THREE

IMPERIAL CRISIS AND COLONIAL RESISTANCE

(1764-1775)

The conflicts between Great Britain and its American colonies between 1764 and 1775 arose from the efforts of colonial leaders to protect local privileges from the invasion of imperial authorities to impose order on a region they had been created to govern. The issues behind these conflicts were not new ones. But the combined costs of the Seven Years’ War and the Indian War for Independence had strained the system of public finance to a breaking point. Consequently British leaders became all the more desperate to impose order while reducing expenses on a vastly enlarged, and chaotic region of the empire. The extraordinary outcome of the War could no longer be managed in the usual way of ignoring and permitting events to flow as they will.  Nor would “salutary neglect,” as Edmund Burke termed permitting colonial assemblies to set tax rates and collect revenues, since in that case the power to tax rises from the consent of the governed rather than the collective will of the House of Commons.

The Stamp Act crisis of 1765-1766, as in Pontiac’s War, arose when colonial governmental practices that had been for some time understood as rights were suddenly challenged by reforms imposed in the name of British sovereignty.  But in neither case did the violence of those who resisted rise to the level of a revolution intended to destroy imperial authority.  Rather Indian and colonial resistance both were aimed at gaining a readjustment in the way the empire functioned, so that those who lived on its edges could acknowledge it as both legitimate and tolerable.

The policies of Secretary of State, William Pitt, had reversed the early string of defeats to France and encouraged the Americans, to view themselves, not so much as colonial subjects of a sovereign British authority, but as partners in a great British adventure. Nonetheless, his policies proved to be extraordinarily expensive. Grenville, the best fiscal technician of his day, was forced to the conclusion that the finances required to administer and defend the expanded empire had to be found in the colonies. After all, the colonies now enjoyed prosperity and security as a result of Britain’s winning the war. Therefore, they should assume the responsibility for the greater costs of imperial administration. Evidently it was forgotten that the colonies, especially Virginia, paid dearly in money and blood as well.

Many of the inhabitants of the American colonies rejected the idea as unthinkable because the metropolis had never before attempted to impose such burdens on them. The timing of the Stamp Act was also incompatible with the deep recession in which the northern colonial governments found themselves at the same time the heavy debts incurred during the war had to be paid off. Since unemployment was very high many such sailors, artisans, and laborers cancelled the act by intimidating tax collectors into resigning their offices. The result was a collapse of trade between the colonies and Britain; customhouses and courts likewise shut their doors since they could not operate legally without stamped paper. Most affected  in Great Britain were the merchants who were dependent upon the trade and the collection of debts . In March 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act as unenforceable and passed a Declaratory Act that, nonetheless, reaffirmed the unlimited sovereignty of Great Britain over the colonies. At this time American colonists saw themselves as partners in the empire and would continue to do so until the mid-1770s. For this reason the postwar demands of the Townshend Acts (1767-1770) and the Tea Crisis (1773) proved so disheartening to the eastern colonists. But even then

revolution was no more  in the minds of British subjects on the American side of the Atlantic than it was in the mother country. Only with the bloodshed in the outbreak of civil war in Massachusetts in the spring of 1775 did colonial leaders begin to consider the possibility that their status as British American colonists was to end. A entire year of bloodshed was required to convince members of the Continental Congress that a declaration of independence was unavoidable.

Perhaps tens of thousands of families entered the region of the Forks of the Ohio during the period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. During that time it became clear that frontier settlements were incompatible with Indian occupation in the area. Mutual hating of one another was inflamed by hostilities exchanged by both peoples. The violent competition for the territories was restrained only for a while by British governmental forces.  During the late 1760s and early 1770s it proved incapable of resolving conflicts and failed to establish an orderly and effective system for western growth. Ironically, individual colonies weakened in their power as officials in London sought to create a unified Indian policy for the western lands. Conflicts between personal land interests and public service on the part of officials (e.g. Johnson, Croghan, McKee) appointed to enforce that policy diluted it. As the crisis intensified  in North American port towns, imperial authorities focused more on directing resources in the east and less on ex- penses and conflict resolution in the west. Consequently,  as the frontier population increased, the power of the British government decreased.

The collapse of British authority occurred first at the Forks of the Ohio.  In November of 1772, following the withdrawal of troops from Fort Chartres in the Illinois Country, the garrison demolished and withdrew from Fort Pitt, leaving no direct military supervision of the west. The already weakened principles of mediation and accommodation between Euroamerican settlers and the Ohio Indians were no longer there to protect the latter. Chaos reigned in the region as the conflict over the right to control the region between Virginia and Pennsylvania arose. Given that the British ministry had failed to impose some order on western development, in the early 1770s a vast speculative enterprise, the Walpole Company, sought and had approved by the Board of Trade (over the objections of Hillsborough) the creation of the largest western colony, Vandalia, which would embrace 20,000,000 acres on the southern bank of the Ohio.

Numerous adventurers, including some charlatans, sought to exploit the vacuum authority in the Ohio River Valley. Invalid Indian grants (especially the Iroquois) made to individual settlers and traders were converted into real estate and sold off in lots with imperial or colonial authorization George Croghan’s success at Pittsburgh prompted a group of Virginians to take similar action.  Former governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie had promised land to Virginia soldiers in the Seven Years’ War and and after the War to provincial officers throughout the colonies. George Washington was enlisted to pursue these claims for the soldiers of the First Virginia Regiment, and, in the process, personally amassed a large speculative stake in soldiers’ bounties. His friend, William Crawford, also located choice lands for him down the Ohio river. Subsequently, the new

governor of Virginia, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, offered to patent 200,000 acres on behalf of the soldiers and in 1772 enlisted Crawford to survey lands on the Monongahela and the Great Kanawha. Dunmore’s claims overlapped with Washington’s and Croghan’s lands.  The following year Dunmore commissioned Thomas Bullitt to survey lands farther down the Ohio, lands opposite the Scioto River which had been included in the Fort Stanwix purchase.

In the region of the Forks of the Ohio, Dunmore’s surveys challenged Pennsylvania’s assumed charter rights, risking a civil war.  By implication his aggressive actions disregarded official policy regarding the Walpole Company. Not surprisingly, his blatant opportunism was repeated by aspiring small landholders, who organized exploratory survey parties in increasing numbers or simply claimed lands on the backcountries Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina.  In particular, new settlers moved west to the Ohio, building settlements from Pittsburgh to Wheeling by the spring of 1774, while Virginians were surveying and making land claims along the Greenbriar and Great Kanawha rivers. Late in 1773, Major-General Frederick Haldimand predicted that the new settlers were certain to irritate the Indians to the point of violence and because the settlements would be “so far removed from all influence of laws, will soon be the asylum of the lawless.”  Both ugly predictions were fulfilled.

For the settlers in the west, the eventual creation of the new American nation was the result, not simply of political conflict between the British and the colonial Americans or the working out of Revolutionary ideals, but their ability to exploit the eventual failure of the forty year effort to subject the Ohio Country to imperial control. The keystone of the new attitudes of the settlers toward land and the peoples of the Ohio Valley was the belief that liberty was the organizing principle of the frontier. That belief in liberty subsequently became equally strong in the minds of the eastern colonists who saw in the imperial chastisement of Boston the unlimited power that colonial radicals had warned against as early as 1765.

 In Virginia the House of Burgess pass a resolution on May 24, 1774, calling for a day of prayer and fasting to express solidarity with their fellow colonists in Massachusetts. Governor Dunmore expressed outrage over what he believed to be an affront to the king and immediately dissolved the House. The members adjourned to the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and reconstituted themselves as a Convention and voted to invite Virginia’s “Sister Colonies” to meet in a Continental Congress to consider “such Measures as shall be judged most effectual for the Common Rights and Liberty of British America.”

Dunmore’s private interests in the western lands were veiled in his attempt to defuse colonial opposition in Virginia to the crown and the Parliament and redirected Virginians’ attention to the longstanding concerns they held regarding the Indian threat on the frontier. He ordered the militia regiments of western Virginia to prepare to defend the frontier and called for twenty-four hundred volunteers to launch a campaign against the Shawnee Indians in the Ohio Valley. He trumped up the occasion for what later was called Lord Dunmore’s War, appealing to what his supporters  (chiefly Dr. John Connolly) reported from Pittsburgh, blaming the killing of three traders on the Shawnees ( the actual murderers were Cherokee). This “war” against the Shawnee was designed to justify his claim to the area by right of conquest. It would clear the way for Virginia to extend its jurisdiction over the lower Ohio Valley, since the Proclamation of 1763 had been already changed in 1768 at Fort Stanwix to include the region. The whole endeavor was a huge land-grab on Dunmore’s part.  As he and Andrew Lewis led the two divisions of Virginia militia toward the Ohio Country, Dunmore went to Pittsburgh, allowed Lewis’ troops to fight the Shawnees at Point Pleasant (October 10, 1774), and only later rejoined Lewis at Camp Charlotte where the Indian chiefs sued for peace.  At the same time, the delegates of the First Continental Congress were meeting in Philadelphia.  Dunmore’s intention was to connect the interest of the land-speculating gentry in securing the Ohio lands with the Indian hatred of most Virginians, in order to redirect attention from the protests of the Continental Congress and cultivate support for himself and the British government. The governor was well aware that Virginians were aggravated with the latter in part over the restrictions imposed on western settlement. By his diversionary tactic of attacking the Shawnees, he hoped to gain personal adulation and good will for the empire.  Of course, Dunmore had launched an unauthorized war of conquest; his purported ends seemed to him to justify the means. Given those ends, he believed the risk of censure or dismissal justified. In this sense, not because he fought in it, it was “Dunmore’s War.”

Had he not been so arrogant, Dunmore might well have succeeded. The terms of peace with the Shawnee created a strong illusion of conquest among the gentry in Virginia, who celebrated Dunmore as a hero when he returned to Williamsburg. Thus when the new Virginia Convention assembled in March, 1775, a formal resolution praised Dunmore for his” truly noble, wise and spirited Conduct on the late Expedition against our Indian Enemy.” However, in April several events occurred that showed that Dunmore’s motives were tainted.  On the 18^th Dunmore declared his intent to invalidate, on purely technical grounds, Washington’s title to forty-five thousand acres of land on the Ohio that he had patented within the Virginia Regiment’s claim.  On the 21^st Dunmore sought to bring the capital, Williamsburg, and thus Virginia, under his complete control by ordering all gunpowder removed from the town’s magazine and placed on board the Royal Navy’s station ship H.M.S. Fowey. What made his order all the more galling was that it was issued at the same time rumors of a slave conspiracy (Virginians’ greatest fear) were repeated up and down the James River. Colonial leaders (e.g. Patrick Henry) sought to convince Dunmore to return the powder.  On April 28 the news arrived that formations of Massachusetts militia had clashed with British troops outside of Boston nine days earlier in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The collapse of British authority in North American was occurring everywhere up and down the east coast.  Few would there may have realized that the collapse of that authority had begun nearly a year earlier in Pittsburgh when the garrison demolished and abandoned Fort Pitt at the Forks of the Ohio. Just as widespread access to western land became one of its cornerstones, liberty was first declared as the ruling principle in the making of the new American nation.

Note: A more extensive study of this period with bibliography is available upon request. Contact us for further information and costs at frontier@pa.net or (724) 538-8818.  Interpreters and storytellers at the frontier living history center at Providence Plantation provide accurate portrayals of those persons on the Upper Ohio Valley frontier who first experienced the impact of failed British policy in managing the region, the chaos, fraud, and lawlessness that followed the collapse of authority, and yet the determination of settlers to pursue the land and liberty for themselves that would make America on the frontier.