THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE REVOLUTION IN THE THEIR EFFECT ON THE GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. JULIETTE SESSIONS. [In 1903 the Ohio Society, Sons of the Revolution offered a prize of $100 for the best essay which might be submitted upon the subject heading this article. Miss Sessions, a member of the teaching corps of The Columbus High School entered the contest and was awarded the prize. The essay is herewith made public for the first time through the courtesy of the awarding committee. — EDITOR.] The American Revolution was, unquestionably, in its chief movements a struggle for independence, but, on the other hand, it was a war of conquest. While the colonists, truer to the English ideals than George III. and his friends, were fighting for the principles of English liberty, some of their number were at the same time taking from England a territory more than equal to their own and subduing the land and its savage inhabitants, This conquered territory, extending from the heigths of the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, has as its center the Ohio Valley, and the events that took place there during the war make most of the story of this first conquest of the United States. At the close of the French and Indian War, while the outcome of Pontiac's conspiracy was still uncertain, a royal proclamation was issued which defined the policy of the English government with regard to the lands just acquired from France. After arranging for governments for Quebec and for West and East Florida, the proclamation declares it "to be our royal will and pleasure that no governor or commander-in-chief of our colonies, or plantations in America, do presume for the present to grant warrants of survey or pass patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers that fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or Northwest; or upon any lands whatever which have not been ceded or purchased by us," etc.1 The first object of this proclamation was, undoubtedly, to pacify the Indians by assurances that their hunting grounds were not to be invaded by settlers. Another object probably was to maintain the Mississippi Valley a wilderness for hunters and traders, where business would languish as advancing colonists cleared the land and exterminated game. From several sources it would appear, also, that the proclamation reveals the intention of the English government to annul the "from sea to sea" clauses of the colonial charters, and keep the settlements along the seaboard. So thinks a writer in the "Annual Register for 1763. The same restrictive policy is revealed in the refusal, in 1765, to grant permission to plant a colony in the Illinois country, Dr. Franklin finding four objections made to the plan: (1) The distance would render such a colony of little use to England; (2) The distance would render it difficult to defend and govern the colony; (3) Such a colony might, in time, become troublesome and prejudicial to the British government; (4) There were no people to spare in either England or the other colonies, to settle a new colony. When also, in 1772, the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations made a report upon the petition of the so-called Walpole Company for a grant of land south of the Ohio, on which to establish a new government, they found that to grant the petition would be to abandon established principles. The "confining of the western extent of settlements to such a distance from the sea coast as that those settlements should lie within reach of the trade and commerce of this kingdom . . . and also of the exercise of that authority and jurisdiction which was conceived to be necessary for the preservation of the colonies in duesubordination to and dependence upon the Mother country" were declared to be the two capital objects of the proclamation of 1763.3 The refusal of the Lords of Trade was made, too, right 3 'Annual Register 1763. Hinsdale, p. 124. Poole, p. 687 in Chap. IX, Vol. VI, Narrative and Critical History of America. in the face of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768, by which Sir William Johnson had secured from the Iroquois a cession to the British crown of the very lands that the petitioners asked for and which the crown would be perfectly free to grant out if the proclamation were only to protect the Indians. Washington, however, and other Americans looked upon it as only a temporary expedient which would lapse when the Indians were ready to give up their lands.* But whatever the motives of the British government, the prohibition came as a real and immediate grievance to the colonists along the frontier. They had already, as Burke says, "topped the Alleghany Mountains," from which they beheld "before them an immense plain, one vast level meadow; a square of five hundred miles." Just as the men of the seaports refused to use the stamps of 1765, and on principle evaded the provisions of the Townsend Acts, so the frontiersmen went forward into the new land, spying it out, building hunters' lodges and occupying in defiance of the proclamation. While they did not grow into "the hordes of English Tartars," which Burke pictures, they became a sturdy power and rose in instant sympathy with their brothers of the coast lands. Their frontier settlements were all south of the Ohio, the strength of the Iroquois and Algonquins of the lakes making an effectual barrier to the hunting grounds of the north. Into the western parts of Virginia the most considerable advance was made by Virginians and Pennsylvanians and groups of cabins were dotted all the way from Fort Pitt to the Kanawha before the Revolution began. In 1769 the first settlements were made. about the head waters of the Tennessee in the Watauga Valley and Daniel Boone explored East Kentucky the same year. The restrictive quality of England's land policy culminated in the Quebec Act in 1774, which made the territory north of the Ohio part of the Province of Quebec, thus disposing of any charter rights the colonies might later assert. The further statements of the act that the Catholic faith and the old French law should be established and that the latter was the only kind of government proper for a colony, placed the Quebec Act among 'Butterfield's Washington-Crawford Letters 3, quoted by Hinsdale. the chief grievances of the Colonies and it is mentioned in the Declaration of Rights, of October, 1774, in the Articles of Association and again, though in veiled terms, in the Declaration of Independence. As late as 1782 Madison in a report says. "The Quebec Act was one of the multiplied causes of our opposition and finally of Revolution." But what the colonists complained of was not so much the destruction of their charter rights to the territory as the extension of arbitrary government and religion. The charters were brought forth in the peace negotiations of 1782 and 1783 to support the American claims, but our right to receive the land west of the mountains was plainly a right of conquest. Before going into the events of the war it will be well to review the situation at its opening. Fort Pitt, at the head of the Ohio Valley, was in the hands of the Americans; Detroit and other lake posts, in the hands of the British. In the northern side of the Ohio Valley there were practically no English settlements. On the Mississippi, at Kaskaskia and Cohokia, and at Vincennes on the Wabash were French communities now under English control. In Eastern Ohio a few Moravian Missionaries lived with Christian Indians in the Tuscarawas Valley. With a few such exceptions the control of the red-man was undisturbed from Fort Pitt to the Mississippi. Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis and the Wabash tribes bordered on the Ohio, while Wyandots and others lived north of them along the Erie watershed. Indian territories were always vaguely bounded and overlapping, but the country directly south of the Ohio was not claimed by any one tribe. It was a rich hunting ground, a great buffalo pasture, and was used in common by tribes to the north and south. The southern side, of the valley of the Tennessee river was the home of the Cherokee tribes, who during the Revolution and long after made precarious the life of the pioneers of Tennessee and Kentucky. On the west side of the Mississippi, a little above the mouth of the Ohio, stood the SpanishFrench town of St. Louis, and further south on the east side was Natchez, in control of the English. Poole, p. 715. In all the years of the war the Indians, with the exception of tribes temporarily subdued, were on the side of the British. The reasons are many and plain to see. In the first place, the tribes of the Mississippi Valley had been for generations the allies of the French and with the French had passed under English influence. Second, the Proclamation of 1763 had convinced them that the English intentions were friendly to them. Third, the English and the French of Canada came into the Indian country only as hunters and traders, while the Americans all the way from the Green Mountains to King's Mountain were pushing into their hunting grounds to settle and despoil. And last, and perhaps most potent of all, the English adopted the plan of enlisting these savage warriors in their behalf and sending forth the scalping knife and tomahawk against the frontier settlements. "The American used savage allies sometimes, also, but knew the horrors of savage warfare too well to employ them extensively." The undertakings of the British in the Ohio Valley were to send expeditions of Indians and white rangers from Detroit southward with these purposes in view; to secure and hold the Illinois country, to attack and drive settlers out of the Kentucky country and to cut off communication by the Ohio between Fort Pitt and New Orleans. On the southern side of the valley the Indians were incited against the whites of Tennessee and Kentucky in the hope of destroying settlements and also to prevent any aid going from the mountaineers to the men of the coast. The work of the Americans in the valley was threefold. First, some few operations, conducted by militia or continental forces, from Fort Pitt; second, a steady battling against the Indian allies of England by the backwoodsmen of Kentucky, Tennessee and Western Virginia; third, the campaigns of George Rogers Clark, who was backed by Virginia and the backwoodsmen, which secured the Illinois country, kept the Ohio under American control and seriously threatened Detroit. * Roosevelt I, p. 276-280. Hinsdale, p. 149. 'Winsor, p. 87. |