Fort Detroit Archives - Journal of the American Revolution

Posted on August 29, 2024August 28, 2024

The Westmoreland Rangers and “The Suffering Fruntears”

Warfare during the American Revolution could be brutal; this brutality took on entirely new dimensions in the frontier, and could be devastating, unrelenting, and all-pervading. Threats came in many forms—isolation, starvation, exposure; labor took countless forms as well, demanding never-ending toil and dogged perseverance. Like many whose charge was to defend America’s back door, the […]

by Robert Guy

Posted on January 5, 2023January 30, 2023

The “Western Forts” of the 1783 Treaty of Paris

The Revolutionary War was formally ended by the Treaty of Paris in early 1783. Problems with compliance arose on both sides nearly immediately on several issues. One was the continued occupation by Great Britain of the so-called “Western Forts.” These forts should have reverted to American hands according to the terms of the Treaty. The […]

by Richard J. Werther

Posted on March 29, 2022March 31, 2022

Under the Banner of War: Frontier Militia and Uncontrolled Violence

In 1777, the third year of the American War for Independence, little had gone in the favor of the Patriots especially in the borderlands. They controlled Fort Pitt and several other outposts, but they were far from the main fighting; the region was considered a backwater theater. British governor of Detroit Henry Hamilton issued a […]

by Timothy C. Hemmis

Posted on October 28, 2020October 25, 2020

The Connolly Plot

During the Revolutionary War, Pittsburgh was a place of constant political and economic intrigue, double-dealing, subversion, back-stabbing, disloyalty, and treachery. One of the earliest and most jaw-droppingly ambitious plans to secure the city for the British came from the mind of Dr. John Connolly.[1] Word of his “plot” spread widely across the colonies in 1775 […]

by Eric Sterner

Posted on January 21, 2020January 20, 2020

The Lenape Origins of an Independent America: The Catalyst of Pontiac’s War, 1763–1765

In the wake of the Seven Years’ War in North America, the costly British triumph seemed complete. Thus, when a coda to the Seven Years’ War erupted in the interior of North America, it came as an unwelcome shock to the British Empire. War broke out anew, nominally led by the Ottawa chieftain Pontiac, who […]

by Kevin A. Conn

Posted on January 14, 2020

Betty Zane and the Siege of Fort Henry, September 1782

In 1774, as tensions between colonials and Native Americans living along the upper Ohio River grew, settlers either fled east of the mountains or forted up. During the summer, Maj. Angus McDonald of the Virginia militia marched over the Appalachians to Wheeling on the Ohio River and joined the locals like Ebenezer Zane, the town’s founder, […]

by Eric Sterner

Posted on December 17, 2019December 16, 2019

The Siege of Fort Laurens, 1778–1779

During the American Revolution, British-allied Native Americans raided American homesteads and settlements all along the Ohio Valley. As the war progressed, the increased frequency and ever-widening circle of Indian raids forced the Continental Congress and Army to respond. In 1778, a Congressional committee studied the matter and concluded that a defensive war “would not only […]

by Eric Sterner

Posted on December 18, 2018January 23, 2020

The Treaty of Fort Pitt, 1778: The First U.S.–American Indian Treaty

In June 1777, Henry Hamilton, the British lieutenant governor for Quebec and Superintendent for Indian Affairs at Detroit, held a council at Detroit with all who would attend. His goal was simple: mobilize the western Indian nations to attack Americans all along the Ohio frontier, just as the Six Nations were doing along the northern […]

by Eric Sterner

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