By Ed McCoy
Editor’s note: This is the first of two articles to recognize the 250th anniversary of Dunmore’s War, the 1774 conflict that culminated with the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10 of that year. This article summarizes some of the reasons that led up to the battle that was fought in what was then the four-year-old Botetourt County. The second article next week will examine the battle itself, the colonists involved and the aftermath that some historians credit as the first battle of the American Revolution.
The stage was set five decades before Dunmore’s War and its defining battle at the mouth of the Kanawha River where it meets the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, now West Virginia.
The river intersection was in Botetourt County in 1774, and on October 10 of that year – 250 years ago – Point Pleasant became the bloodiest encounter that colonists and Native Americans would have.
The Battle of Point Pleasant ended with victory for the militia units from Botetourt County and and the recently formed Fincastle County (now the Commonwealth of Kentucky), and it provided Virginia’s colonial governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the opportunity to officially extend the British controlled areas of the western and southern frontier to the Ohio River. That came with the Treaty of Camp Charlotte right after the Point Pleasant encounter. That agreement with some of the Native Americans made the Ohio River the dividing line between Native American and British territory. It was supposed to cool the conflicts with settlers in what had been considered the Natives’ territory since 1763.
But all of the Native American tribes did not subscribe to the new boundary.
The Treaty of Camp Charlotte was just the latest in a series of treaties that were supposed to divide the Native American grounds from those of the British colony. Among them was the 1722 treaty that was supposed to establish the Blue Ridge Mountains as the dividing line, leaving the Valley of Virginia to the Natives. But settlers ignored that line and began moving up the valley from Pennsylvania, even settling in what is now Botetourt County by the 1740s.
An incident in 1742 near the mouth of what is now the Maury River at the James River that left settlers and Natives dead resulted in another treaty that set the middle of the Appalachian Mountains as the dividing line, allowing more settlement in the Valley of Virginia.
As with previous and subsequent treaties, the colonial government failed to enforce the treaties’ provisions on settlers and land speculators.
The next significant treaty came at the end of the French and Indian War.
It was nearly a dozen years from the end of the French and Indian War until many of those living in the 13 colonies had enough of Great Britain’s “overreach.” Taxes, regulations, no representation in the British Parliament, required tax support for the Established Anglican Church of England and a condescending approach created “family” tensions between the Motherland and her American colonists. Near insurrection had already raised its head in other colonies, and in Virginia, Lord Dunmore was challenged by the growing sentiment that Virginians were not being treated as full British subjects.
The end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years War resulted in the 1763 Treaty of Paris when France gave up its claim to all the land east of the Mississippi River. Shortly after, Britain established a Proclamation Line that was supposed to prevent colonial settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains, in the hopes it would appease Native Americans and reduce the chances of another extended conflict.
There was a problem, though. The Treaty of Paris helped open the frontier to even more settlers who poured up the Valley of Virginia and across the Blue Ridge Mountains looking for opportunities and cheap land. They didn’t adhere to the line established by Britain as a western “border,” rather they continued to cross the Appalachian Mountains into what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. This created more conflicts between settlers and the Native Americans to the point that attacks on settlers became common.
In Virginia, land speculators, the gentry class and veterans of the French and Indian War took exception to the Proclamation Line because many had been promised land grants – from 50 to 5,000 acres – as part of their service during the war. Many of those grants were in the Kanawha River Valley and along the Ohio River. In a way, it was a sleight of hand, and a grievance that Lord Dunmore hoped to assuage with his frontier war in 1774.
There was much suspicion about Lord Dunmore’s motives leading up to the war’s major battle at Point Pleasant. Four months before the Battle at Point Pleasant, Lord Dunmore had dissolved the Virginia House of Burgesses because it had passed a resolution making June 1 a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer. That was in recognition of the day the Port of Boston was being closed by the British Parliament over perceived insurrection in that city.
On May 27, 87 members of the just-dissolved House of Burgesses met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and formed an “Association” to defend “the constitutional rights and liberty of British America” and proposed an annual “general congress” of the colonies, according to Jim Glanville’s historical look at The Fincastle Resolutions published in “The Smithfield Review” in 2010.
Three days later this new association issued a summons to all the members of the former House of Burgesses to attend a Virginia convention to be held on August 1 in Williamsburg. Glanville wrote, “The summons noted an oncoming ‘alarming crisis’ and said the convention would deal with matters of “lasting importance to all America.”
The former members of the House were instructed to meet with citizens of their respective communities to get a sense of what the counties desired. Generally, the committees that met under these instructions passed resolutions and sent them to the August convention with their representatives.
Since Botetourt County and Fincastle County leaders were well engaged with preparations for Lord Dunmore’s War, their committees did not send resolutions until early 1775. But those resolutions were stronger than many of the ones from the first 40 county committees to adopt language with grievances against the colonial government.
As these events were unfolding across Virginia and in other colonies, the militia units from Botetourt and Fincastle Counties were preparing for and beginning their marches to the predetermined meeting point at Point Pleasant where Lord Dunmore and his armed force were supposed to meet before battling the Native forces that were encamped across the Ohio River.
